Lenore Skenazy has a column in today’s Wall Street Journal on the topic of whether it should be a criminal offense to leave your kids in a car, even if just for a few minutes. Here’s how she describes the issue. One mother is hauled off to the police station. Another is clapped in handcuffs. […]
read more...What’s the most absurd “health” expenditure by government? There are lots of potential responses, including $240 million for penis pumps. Or how about the fact that Obamacare allows taxpayer-subsidized viagra for sex offenders? But another potential answer is cosmetic surgery for “droopy eyelids.” Here are some of the details from a Miami Herald report. Aging […]
read more...I periodically compare the actions of brainless politicians and bureaucrats in both the United States and the United Kingdom. One of the most bizarre examples I cited was from England. It showed how a local government decided to install the most pointless sign in the history of the world. Our British friends are famous for […]
read more...The Obama Administration is proposing to once again put the economy at risk by subsidizing banks to give mortgages to people with poor credit, even though we’re still dealing with the economic and fiscal damage caused by the last episode of government housing subsidies!
read more...Taxpayers all across America send lots of money to Washington, DC, in part because we’re supposed to believe that redistribution is a legitimate and desirable function of the federal government. But this is a very perverse form of redistribution. All that money going to Washington helps subsidize a network of overpaid bureaucrats, fat-cat lobbyists, corrupt […]
read more...Back in 2010, I shared parts of a Dave Barry column that mocked the government for bizarre examples of stupid law enforcement. Barry was specifically making fun of OSHA bureaucrats for fining a company for the horrible transgression of saving a worker when a trench collapsed. But there are many other examples of law enforcement […]
read more...As an economist with a boring personality (sorry to be redundant), I sometimes focus on numbers. And when contemplating the cost of regulation and red tape, there are some numbers that should frighten all of us. Americans spend 8.8 billion hours every year filling out government forms. The economy-wide cost of regulation is now $1.75 […]
read more...I’ve written before about the heavy costs of regulation, including these rather sobering statistics. Or, to be more accurate, here are some staggering numbers. Americans spend 8.8 billion hours every year filling out government forms. The economy-wide cost of regulation is now $1.75 trillion. For every bureaucrat at a regulatory agency, 100 jobs are destroyed […]
read more...There have been lots of studies showing that there’s no benefit to job training programs. People who sign up with these government schemes are not more likely to either get jobs or to earn more money. Heck, even the New York Times was forced to acknowledge that these programs are a costly failure. To really […]
read more...President Obama recently got himself in a bit of hot water with his “you didn’t build that” remark, which trivialized the hard work of entrepreneurs. But he is right – in a perverse way – about government playing a big role in the life of small businesses. Thanks to a maze of regulations, the government […]
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