Germany no longer is the economic engine in Europe.

Is Portugal having second thoughts on legalization?

Why do these nations have higher debt levels? The reason is simple and predictable.

Back in 2010, I shared a remarkable graph comparing the predictions of economists to what actually happened. Not surprisingly, the two lines don’t exactly overlap, which explains the old joke that economists have correctly predicted nine of the last five recessions. It’s not that economists are totally useless. It’s just that they don’t do a […]

Back in mid-2010, I wrote that Portugal was going to exacerbate its fiscal problems by raising taxes. Needless to say, I was right. Not that this required any special insight. After all, no nation has ever taxed its way to prosperity. We’re now at the end of 2012 and Portugal is still saddled with a […]

There aren’t many fiscal policy role models in Europe. Switzerland surely is at the top of the list. The burden of government spending is modest by European standards, in part because of a very good spending cap that prevents politicians from overspending when revenues are buoyant. Tax rates also are reasonable. The central government’s tax […]

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 […]

With the exception of a few top-notch thinkers such as Pierre Bessard and Allister Heath, there are very few people in Europe who can intelligently analyze public policy, particularly with regard to fiscal issues. I don’t know if Fredrik Erixon of the Brussels-based European Centre for International Political Economy is even close to being in […]

Yesterday, I took aim at a truly pathetic human being who lives as an “adult baby.” But what got me upset was not his lifestyle, but rather the fact that he was mooching off the taxpayers thanks to the dumb bureaucrats at the Social Security Administration, who granted him “disability’ status, which means he gets […]

Thanks to decades of reckless spending by European welfare states, the newspapers are filled with headlines about debt, default, contagion, and bankruptcy. We know that Greece and Ireland already have received direct bailouts, and other European welfare states are getting indirect bailouts from the European Central Bank, which is vying with the Federal Reserve in […]