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, […]

Putting Republicans in charge is never a guarantee of good public policy. It was during the Bush years, for instance, that the nation was saddled with a prescription drug entitlement. The GOPers in the White House and on Capitol Hill also recklessly increased the burden of government spending. And they expanded the “affordable lending requirements” […]

I’ve done a couple of posts comparing Reaganomics and Obamanomics, mostly based on data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve on employment and economic output. I even did a TV interview on the subject, which generated some comments on my taste in clothing, and also cited a Richard Rahn column that got Paul Krugman and Ezra […]

Tax competition, as I have explained to the point of being a nuisance, is an important restraint on the greed of the political class. Simply stated, politicians are less like to over-tax and over-spend if they know that geese with the golden eggs can fly across the border. This is mostly an issue in the […]

Two days ago, I explained that tax increases are bad policy. More specifically, I warned that giving more money to government exacerbates fiscal problems because politicians respond to the expectation of more revenue by spending more than otherwise would be the case. And since they usually over-estimate how much revenue a tax hike will generate, […]

When I read the story from England about needing photo ID to buy teaspoons, I thought British bureaucrats built an insurmountable lead in the U.S. vs. U.K. contest for stupidest government action. But I should have had more faith in the hare-brained politicians of Illinois. When they’re not busy driving businesses from the state with […]

I’ve written before about whether California is the Greece of America, in part because of crazy policies such as overpaid bureaucrats and expensive forms of political correctness, And we all know that California has one of the nation’s greediest governments, imposing confiscatory tax rates on a shrinking pool of productive citizens. So it is hardly […]

Over and over again, I tell people to ignore whether politicians have a D or an R after their names. That’s because Democrats sometimes do the right thing and Republicans often do the wrong thing. My latest example of Republicans doing the wrong thing come from Florida, where GOP politicians decided that free markets should […]

I’ve had several reasons to mock California in the past couple of years (see here, here, here, and here). But I never thought state politicians would be crazy enough to impose harsh regulations on babysitting. Filling out a time card for your babysitter sounds absurd, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg in a […]

The Beacon Hill Institute in Massachusetts has just released a very good – but very depressing study. The research finds that costs have jumped under Romneycare, but that’s not surprising. After all, politicians always underestimate the cost of new entitlements. The important revelation in this new research is the degree to which the system has […]