I’ve run across very few good cartoons about Keynesian economics. If my aging memory is correct, I’ve only posted two of them. But at least they’re both very good. We have one involving Obama, sharks, and a lifeboat, and another one involving an overburdened jockey. Now we have a third cartoon to add to the […]

Remember back in 2009, when President Obama and his team told us that we needed to squander $800 billion on a so-called stimulus package. The crowd in Washington was quite confident that Keynesian spending was going to save the day, even though similar efforts had failed for Hoover and Roosevelt in the 1930s, for Japan […]

It seems that any argument about the economy eventually boils down to the core issue of whether government spending acts as a stimulus or whether it is – in the words of Thomas Sowell – a sedative that undermines prosperity. So when Robert Reich and I went on Erin Burnett’s CNN show to discuss Obama’s […]

Writing in yesterday’s Washington Post, former Obama economist Larry Summers put forth the strange hypothesis that more red ink would improve the federal government’s long-run fiscal position. This sounds like an excuse for more Keynesian spending as part of another so-called stimulus plan, but Summers claims to have a much more modest goal of prudent […]

Most of my work on government stimulus focuses on economic theory and evidence. But every so often it’s a good idea to remind ourselves of the ridiculous ways that government wastes money. Here are some details from a boondoggle in West Virginia. Nobody told Hurricane librarian Rebecca Elliot that the $22,600 Internet router in the […]

With both France and Greece deciding to jump out of the left-wing frying pan into the even-more-left-wing fire, European fiscal policy has become quite a controversial topic. But I find this debate and discussion rather tedious and unrewarding, largely because it pits advocates of Keynesian spending (the so-called “growth” camp) against supporters of higher taxes […]

There’s an old saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. This certainly is a good description of Keynesians, who relentlessly push more government spending as some sort of magic potion for the economy – notwithstanding a record of failure. The latest example is Larry Summers, the former […]

President Obama imposed a big-spending faux stimulus program on the economy back in 2009, claiming that the government needed to squander about $800 billion to keep the unemployment rate from rising above 8 percent. How did that work out? One possible description is that the so-called stimulus became a festering pile of manure. About three […]

Demonstrating that he’s probably not a fan of Mitchell’s Golden Rule, Paul Krugman recently asserted that fiscal austerity has failed in the United Kingdom. Citing Keynesian theory and weak economics numbers, he warned about “the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion” and says that the British government made a mistake when it decided […]

People often ask why I put so much political humor on this site. The easy answer is that I like a good joke. But I also find that some cartoons and jokes do a very good job of helping people understand economics. I’ve always liked this cartoon, for instance, because it cleverly illustrates the impact […]