As discussed yesterday, the most important number in Obama’s budget is that the burden of government spending will be at least $2 trillion higher in 10 years if the President’s plan is enacted. But there are also some very unsightly warts in the revenue portion of the President’s budget. Americans for Tax Reform has a […]

President Obama, echoed by the establishment media, routinely trumpets Warren Buffett’s support for higher taxes. If this rich guy is willing to pay more, the story goes, then surely the rest of us peasants should just roll over and acquiesce to the President’s class-warfare tax policy. Well, one reason we shouldn’t surrender is that Buffett […]

Back in 2010, I crunched the numbers from the Congressional Budget Office and reported that the budget could be balanced in just 10 years if politicians exercised a modicum of fiscal discipline and limited annual spending increases to about 2 percent yearly. When CBO issued new numbers early last year, I repeated the exercise and […]

Perhaps the title of this post is a bit unfair since the International Monetary Fund is good on some issues, such as reducing subsidies. And some of the economists at the IMF even produce good research. But I can’t help but get agitated that this behemoth global bureaucracy wants more money when it has a […]

The German Chancellor and French President have put together a plan to boost growth. Sounds like a good goal, but what specifically are they proposing? Some of the obvious ideas include: Lowering tax rates to boost incentives for productive behavior. Reducing the burden of government spending to allow more efficient allocation of labor and capital. […]

I don’t blame the Democrats for wanting to seduce Republicans into a tax-increase trap. Indeed, I completely understand why some Democrats said their top political goal was getting the GOP to surrender the no-tax-hike position. I’m mystified, though, why some Republicans are willing to walk into such a trap. If you were playing chess against […]

In a recent column for the Wall Street Journal, I explained why Mitt Romney’s interest in a value-added tax is deeply troubling. One of my key points was that the VAT is a money machine for big government. But don’t believe me. Look at Japan, where the politicians see increases in the VAT as a […]

Austan Goolsbee, the former Chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, has a column in the Wall Street Journal that argues government spending isn’t too high. That’s obviously a silly assertion, as I explain here, here, and here, but I want to focus on what he wrote about tax revenues. Here’s the relevant passage […]

My Iowa caucus predictions from yesterday were hopelessly wrong, probably because I was picking with my heart rather than my head. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, Mitt Romney’s openness to a value-added tax makes him a dangerously flawed candidate, and I hoped Iowa voters shared my concern. In a column for today’s […]

Late last year, Spanish voters kicked out a socialist government and elected a new government led by the supposedly conservative People’s Party. Is that translating into smaller government and more freedom? Doesn’t look that way. It seems that Spanish right-of-center politicians are just as useless and statist as the faux conservatives in Germany, France, and […]