Regular readers know about Mitchell’s Golden Rule, which is the simple – but essential – notion that the burden of government spending shouldn’t grow faster than the private sector. Well, after reading this utterly depressing news about how the number of people riding in the wagon is growing faster than the number of people pulling […]
read more...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 […]
read more...In past posts, I’ve groused about food stamp abuse, including people using them to buy luxury coffee at Starbucks and to purchase steaks and lobster. I’ve complained about college kids scamming the program, the “Octo-Mom” mooching off the program, and the Obama Administration rewarding states that sign up more food stamp recipients. Well, the Obama White House is doubling […]
read more...To answer the question in the title, it means you need to read the fine print. This is because we have a president who thinks the government shouldn’t confiscate more than 20 percent of a company’s income, but he only gives that advice when he’s in Ghana. And the same president says it’s time to […]
read more...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 […]
read more...A couple of weeks ago, I debunked the myth that Obama is a fiscal conservative by showing how TARP masks his real record. I then followed up that post by showing that Obama is a traditional leftist who spends on social welfare programs, but also did a final post showing that Bush was similarly profligate. Now we […]
read more...The Obama campaign’s “Life of Julia” ad is a disturbing sign. It suggests that political strategists, pollsters, and campaign advisers must think that the people living off government are getting to the point where they can out-vote the people paying for government. If that’s true, America is doomed to become another Greece – which would […]
read more...The Labor Department just released its monthly employment report and the White House is probably not happy. There are several key bits of data in the report, such as the unemployment rate, net job creation, and employment-population ratio. At best, the results are mediocre. The unemployment rate generally gets the most attention, and that was […]
read more...The fiscal nightmare in Europe should be all the proof that’s needed about the dangers of wasteful spending and punitive tax rates. Unfortunately, if his proposals for bigger government and class-warfare tax policy are any indication, President Obama still seems to think those policies would be good for America. American states also are a laboratory, […]
read more...A financial columnist named Rex Nutting recently triggered a firestorm of controversy by claiming that Barack Obama is not a big spender. Here’s the chart he prepared, which certainly seems to indicate that Obama is a fiscal conservative. Not only that, it shows that Republicans generally are the big spenders, while Democrats are frugal with […]
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