With many European nations already in the midst of a fiscal crisis caused by excessive government, and with most other industrialized nations heading down the same path thanks to aging populations and poorly designed entitlement programs, this would be a good time for supposed experts to propose ways to rein in the welfare state. But […]

When we think of Julia, the mythical moocher created by the Obama campaign, our first instinct is probably to grab our wallets and purses. After all, she symbolizes the entitlement mindset, as illustrated by this Ramirez cartoon. But let’s think of this from Julia’s perspective and speculate about what it will mean for her life. […]

I’ve spent a lot of time debunking class-warfare tax policy, and I’ve certainly explained ’til I’m blue in the face that big government facilitates a pernicious form of corruption that enriches powerful and well-connected insiders. But I haven’t spent much time addressing the topic of income inequality, which is connected to those two other issues. […]

Remember Julia, the mythical moocher created by the Obama campaign to show the joys of government dependency? As illustrated by this Ramirez cartoon, Julia symbolizes the entitlement mentality. Unfortunately, there are many real-life Julias. I wrote a couple of years ago about Olga, a Greek woman who petulantly believed that government was responsible for her […]

Here are some odious details from the UK-based Sun. Danny Creamer, 21, and Gina Allan, 18, spend each day watching their 47in flatscreen TV and smoking 40 cigarettes between them in their comfy two-bedroom flat. It is all funded by the taxpayer, yet the couple say they deserve sympathy because they are “trapped”. Does this […]

If you don’t want to be depressed, you should stop reading right now. You probably know that we’ve been suffering because of a rising burden of government spending. And you probably understand that much of the problem is the relentless growth of redistribution and transfer programs. But you probably don’t realize how far America has […]

What’s more realistic: A unicorn, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or a successful government program? This isn’t a trick question. Even though I’ve presented both theoretical and empirical arguments against government spending, that doesn’t mean every government program is a failure. I suppose the answer depends on the definition of success. Government roads do enable […]

Three years ago, I put together a “Moocher Index” that measured the degree to which non-poor people in a state were benefiting from redistribution programs. As you can see if you click on the nearby table, Vermont was the worst state, followed by Mississippi, Maine, New York, and Massachusetts. I confessed that my Moocher Index […]

In large part because of an excessive burden of government, the American economy is suffering European-style stagnation, with even the Washington Post now confessing that growth far below the long-run trend. This helps explain why job creation has been so dismal in recent years, with more than twenty million Americans out of work, underemployed, or […]

I’ve written and pontificated about the problem of government-created dependency and how the welfare state traps people in poverty. I also shared this dramatic chart showing how redistribution programs create shockingly high implicit marginal tax rates for those with modest incomes. But when a liberal writer for the New York Times basically comes to the […]