I feel like a pendulum this election season. Something will happen that makes me want to eviscerate Obama’s statist policies and I’ll write a foaming-at-the-mouth post warning that the President is turning America into Greece. But then Romney will do something odious and I’ll sound the warning sign with a we-don’t-need-another-big-spender-like-Bush post. Today, it’s Obama’s […]
read more...Even though I’ve already made clear that I am less-than-overwhelmed by the thought of Mitt Romney in the White House, I worry that people will become to think I’m a GOP toady. That’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time providing favorable analysis and commentary on the relative merits of the Ryan budget (particularly proposed […]
read more...I’ve been against the auto bailout from the very beginning because it was a corrupt payoff to lazy corporate fat-cats and an ossified union. And when folks on the left say the bailout is a success, I explain that any industry can be propped up with a sufficiently large injection of other people’s money. Now […]
read more...I don’t give the issue much attention on this blog, but I’m very interested in Social Security reform. I wrote my dissertation on Australia’s very successful system of personal retirement accounts, for instance, and I narrated this video on Social Security reform in the United States. So I was very interested to see that the […]
read more...The burden of federal spending in the United States was down to 18.2 percent of gross domestic product when Bill Clinton left office. But this progress didn’t last long. Thanks to George Bush’s reckless spending policies, the federal budget grew about twice as fast as the economy, jumping by nearly 90 percent in just eight […]
read more...In what will almost surely be the nastiest campaign ad of the political season, a pro-Obama super PAC basically accuses Mitt Romney and Bain Capital of causing a woman’s death. Viewers are supposed to hold Romney responsible because the woman’s husband lost his job, and the resulting lack of insurance prevented her from getting health […]
read more...I almost feel sorry for the ideologues and partisan hacks who feel obliged to defends Obama’s miserable economic performance. Keynesian spending policies and class-warfare tax policies have produced dismal economic performance, with unemployment stuck above 8 percent – even though the White House promised the joblessness rate by this point would be about 5.5 percent […]
read more...Can we finally all agree that Keynesian economics is a flop? The politicians in Washington flushed about $800 billion down the toilet and we got nothing in exchange except for anemic growth and lots of people out of work. Indeed, we’re getting to the point where the monthly employment reports from the Labor Department must […]
read more...Considering that every economic theory agrees that living standards and worker compensation are closely correlated with the amount of capital in an economy (this picture is a compelling illustration of the relationship), one would think that politicians – particularly those who say they want to improve wages – would be very anxious not to create […]
read more...As part of his campaign to expand the size and scope of the federal government (and to justify his advocacy of class-warfare taxation), President Obama has been asserting that all of us benefit from government spending. It’s why he now echoes Elizabeth Warren’s claim that entrepreneurs owe their success to government programs and activities. It’s […]
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