I looked yesterday at the spending side of Obama’s budget and found some good news and bad news. The good news was the absence of any big new initiative to expand the burden of government. That’s a welcome relief since the past couple of years have featured budget busting proposals such as the so-called stimulus […]

Chalk up another victory – at least on the rhetorical level – for the Tea Party. President Obama will release his fiscal year 2012 budget tomorrow and he’s apparently become a born-again fiscal conservative. Here are some excerpts from a Washington Post story. President Obama will respond to a Republican push for a drastic reduction […]

Proponents of higher taxes are fond of claiming that Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase was a big success because of budget surpluses that began in 1998. That’s certainly a plausible hypothesis, and I’m already on record arguing that Clinton’s economic record was much better than Bush’s performance. But this specific assertion it is not supported […]

I didn’t watch President Obama’s interview with Bill O’Reilly a couple of days ago, and that’s probably a good thing since I probably would have suffered a stroke if I actually heard Obama state, “I didn’t raise taxes once.” This was such an absurd display of mendacity that even the left-leaning PolitiFact people had no […]

I don’t know if this commercial was broadcast nationally, but I saw it in northern Virginia. A very smart, anti-politician message. The worst commercial (this is a no-brainer) was from Chrysler. Not because the advertising was bad, but because the company is mooching from the taxpayers.

Grousing about the GOP’s timidity in the battle against big government will probably become an ongoing theme over the next few months, and  let’s start with two items that don’t bode well for fiscal discipline. First, it appears that Republicans didn’t really mean it when they promised to cut $100 billion of so-called discretionary spending […]

The Oregon Ducks will compete for the national championship early next month, so they’ve had a good season. Unfortunately, Oregon’s government isn’t doing nearly so well. Politicians approved a big tax hike on those bad, evil rich people in 2009, and Oregon’s spite-filled voters approved that measure earlier this year. So how’s is Oregon’s class-warfare […]

I debated a couple of pro-tax increase folks on the Diane Rehm show Monday. If you have a spare 51 minutes and want to hear me spar with Alice Rivlin and David Walker on National Public Radio, you can listen to the discussion by clicking this link. Feedback actually is much appreciated. Let me know […]

In his latest Bloomberg column, Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute notes that research from places such as Harvard and the International Monetary Fund confirms that spending restraint is the way to successfully reduce red ink – and it’s also the way to improve economic performance. The antidote to fiscal crisis is fiscal consolidation… […]

Much to my surprise, Senate Republicans held firm earlier today and blocked President Obama’s soak-the-rich proposal to raise tax rates next year on investors, entrepreneurs, and small business owners. I fully expected that GOPers would fold on this issue several months ago because Democrats were using the class-warfare argument that Republicans were holding the middle class […]