Want a better football team? Then lower taxes.

Adam Smith was right.

Now might be a good time to get back to basics.

I’ve written many times about America’s looming fiscal collapse, and I’ve also pontificated about America’s costly and failed welfare state. I even have speculated about when America reaches a tipping point, with too many people riding in the wagon of government dependency (as illustrated bythese famous cartoons, which even have a Danish equivalent). If you read all my posts on these issues, I […]

Obamacare was put together by people who don’t understand economics. This is probably the understatement of the year since I could be referring to many features of the bad law. The higher tax burden on saving and investment, making an anti-growth tax system even worse. The exacerbation of the third-party payer problem, which is the […]

I’m a big fan of Chuck Asay’s political cartoons. My favorite is his nothing-left-to-steal masterpiece. And his tractor cartoon and his regime-uncertainty cartoon are brilliant indictments of Obamanomics. Here’s another classic. It shows the impact of the welfare state on incentives for work, self reliance, and independence. In six cartoon frames, he cleverly explains the economics […]

Back in 2011, I linked to a simple chart that illustrated how handouts and subsidies create very high implicit marginal tax rates for low-income people and explained how “generosity” from the government leads to a tar-paper effect that limits upward mobility. Earlier this year, I shared an amazing chart that specifically measured how the welfare […]

I’ve written periodically about the perverse incentives of the unemployment insurance system. Simply stated, there will be fewer jobs if the government subsidizes joblessness, and I even showed that this is a consensus position by citing the academic writings of left-leaning economists such as Larry Summers and Paul Krugman. The San Francisco Federal Reserve also […]

Even though there is a wealth of evidence for the Laffer Curve, statists and other big-government advocates routinely claim that incentives don’t matter. So I wonder how they’ll react to this new research showing that incentives have an impact on sexual choices. Here are some blurbs from The Economist. …if you are a poor African […]

Alan Blinder has a distinguished resume. He’s a professor at Princeton and he served as Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve. So I was interested to see he authored an attack on the flat tax – and I was happy after I read his column. Why? Well, because his arguments are rather weak. So anemic […]