by Dan Mitchell | Dec 7, 2010 | Big Government, Blogs, Taxation
Compared to ideal policy, the deal announced last night between congressional Republicans and President Obama is terrible. Compared to what I expected to happen, the deal announced last night is pretty good. In other words, grading this package depends on your...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 4, 2010 | Blogs, Economics, Taxation
Much to my surprise, Senate Republicans held firm earlier today and blocked President Obama’s soak-the-rich proposal to raise tax rates next year on investors, entrepreneurs, and small business owners. I fully expected that GOPers would fold on this issue several...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 3, 2010 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced this morning that the unemployment rate jumped to 9.8 percent last month. As you can see from the chart, the White House claimed that if we enacted the so-called stimulus, the unemployment rate today would be about 7 percent....
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 1, 2010 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending, Taxation
The Chairmen of President Obama’s Fiscal Commission have a new draft proposal that is filled, according to Reuters, with “sharp spending and benefit cuts.” That’s music to my ears, so I quickly flipped to the back of the report in hopes of finding hard numbers showing...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 20, 2010 | Bailouts, Blogs
The President wants us to believe that the recent IPO for General Motors was a smashing success. And it was…if you believe that it’s a good idea to lose money (the direct cost of the bailout) and make the economy less efficient by misallocating resources (the indirect...