I wrote last week about how the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based international bureaucracy, has launched a new campaign to promote class-warfare tax policy. I’ve since learned that the OECD’s effort is even more objectionable than I first reported. For instance, the bureaucrats earlier this month organized a fancy three-day conference in […]

Much of the “stimulus” debate has revolved around macroeconomic issues. Obama squandered about $800 billion, supposedly to “jolt” the economy, but growth has been anemic and the employment situation has been miserable. But it’s equally instructive to look at the microeconomic impact. And that’s exactly what the folks at Reason TV did with this expose […]

I’ve been a relentless critic of Obama’s policies of redistributionism, class warfare, and cronyism, so I didn’t feel I had anything new to say after Obama gave what’s being called his “Teddy Roosevelt speech” in Kansas earlier this week. But David Harsanyi has an insightful column at Reason that is worth sharing. Here’s my favorite […]

By fighting for freedom in Washington, I’ve condemned myself to a life of frustration and aggravation. One of my many pet peeves is that so many people in DC believe that economic growth depends on consumer spending. Back in the early days of this blog, I wrote the following. Many people assume that consumer spending […]

Most people have a vague understanding that America has a huge long-run fiscal problem. They’re right, though they probably don’t realize the seriousness of that looming crisis. Here’s what you need to know: America’s fiscal crisis is actually a spending crisis, and that spending crisis is driven by entitlements. More specifically, the vast majority of […]

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 […]

One of my frustrating missions in life is to educate policy makers on the Laffer Curve. This means teaching folks on the left that tax policy affects incentives to earn and report taxable income. As such, I try to explain, this means it is wrong to assume a simplistic linear relationship between tax rates and […]

I’ve pointed out on several occasions that Herbert Hoover was a big-spending Keynesian. Heck, Hoover was pursuing failed Keynesian policies several years before Keynes produced his most well-known book, The General Theory. Hoover’s big spending was so pronounced that it generated this cartoon in 1932. Sadly, this cartoon applies just as well today. Except Bush […]

Politicians in Europe have spent decades creating a fiscal crisis by violating Mitchell’s Golden Rule and letting the government grow faster than the private sector. As a result, government is far too big today, and nations such as Greece are in the process of fiscal collapse. But that’s the good news – at least relatively […]

I’ve criticized the Congressional Budget Office for generating biased and inaccurate numbers. These are the clowns, after all, who say deficit spending stimulates the economy in the short run but they also rely on a model which seemingly predicts 100 percent tax rates maximize growth in the long run. About the only nice thing that […]