I don’t like wasteful government spending, but it really adds insult to injury when politicians use my tax dollars for political propaganda. A nauseating example of this practice are the highway signs highlighting how projects are funded by the so-called stimulus. In my young and reckless days, they would have been ideal targets for vandalism. […]

I seem to have touched a raw nerve with my post earlier today comparing Reagan and Obama on how well the economy performed coming out of recession. Both Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman have denounced my analysis (actually, they denounced me approving of Richard Rahn’s analysis, but that’s a trivial detail). Krugman responded by asserting that […]

Both Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama entered office during periods of economic misery. But they adopted dramatically different solutions. Reagan reduced the burden of government and Obama increased the burden of government. So which approach worked best? In his Washington Times column, Richard Rahn compares the economy’s “recovery” performance under both Presidents. As you can […]

In a column in today’s New York Post, I mock White House unemployment calculations and then explain why companies are not anxious to hire more workers. The White House last year released a supposedly scientific analysis that claimed to show that adopting the “stimulus” bill would cut unemployment. Indeed, the report specifically estimated that the […]

The White House is claiming that the so-called stimulus created between 2.5 million and 3.6 million jobs even though total employment has dropped by more than 2.3 million since Obama took office. The Administration justifies this legerdemain by asserting that the economy actually would have lost about 5 million jobs without the new government spending. […]

Much of the economic debate in Washington revolves around the silly Keynesian notion that politicians can stimulate an economy by borrowing money from the private sector and using the funds to make government bigger. That didn’t work for Hoover and Roosevelt during the 1930s, Japan during the 1990s, Bush in 2008, or Obama last year […]

The statists in Congress are enamored with Keynesian big government policies and profligate spending as a means of “stimulus.”  But while they travel the country to tout so-called “stimulus success,” the public displays a far better understanding of the underlying economics.  Not only does a plurality find that the stimulus bill actually hurt – rather […]

Nancy Pelosi is being appropriately mocked for her strange assertion that subsidizing unemployment is a great way to “stimulate” the economy, but keep in mind that this she is just mindlessly regurgitating standard Keynesian theory. Here are two videos. The first is Pelosi’s ramblings and the second is my analysis of Keynesian economics. I hope […]

That’s the title of Richard Rahn’s new column in the Washington Times, which discusses the delusional Keynesian policy being advocated – in America and around the world – by the current administration. As Richard explains, the evidence is overwhelming that government spending does not promote prosperity. In the face of the unprecedented congressional spending binge, […]

President Bush was a big spender, but President Obama is taking profligacy to the next level. In his first year in office, Obama pushed through a pork-filled “stimulus” that was supposed to increase jobs and prosperity (at least according to the discredited Keynesian theory). Instead, the economy has been weak and unemployment increased. In his […]