Politicians need less control over our money, not more.

They keep scoring on their own goal.

The United States is supposed to be enjoying a recovery. Indeed, we’re now supposedly in the fifth year of an expanding economy. Many Americans must wonder why it doesn’t feel that way. In part, that’s because growth has been very anemic. Indeed, this is the weakest recovery since the Great Depression. But it’s also because the […]

It’s sometimes difficult to make fun of Keynesian economics. But this isn’t because Keynesian theory is airtight. It’s easy, after all, to mock a school of thought that is predicated on the notion that you can make yourself richer by taking money from your right pocket and putting it in your left pocket. The problem […]

There’s an ongoing debate about Keynesian economics, stimulus spending, and various versions of fiscal austerity, and regular readers know I do everything possible to explain that you can promote added prosperity by reducing the burden of government spending. Simply stated, we get more jobs, output, and growth when resources are allocated by competitive markets. But when resources are allocated […]

Are there any fact checkers at the New York Times? Since they’ve allowed some glaring mistakes by Paul Krugman (see here and here), I guess the answer is no. But some mistakes are worse than others. Consider a recent column by David Stuckler of Oxford and Sanjay Basu of Stanford. Entitled “How Austerity Kills,” it […]

President Bush imposed a so-called stimulus plan in 2008 and President Obama imposed an even  bigger “stimulus” in 2009. Based upon the economy’s performance over the past five-plus years, those plans didn’t work. Japan has spent the past 20-plus years imposing one Keynesian scheme after another, and the net effect is economic stagnation and record […]

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 […]

Good fiscal policy doesn’t require heavy lifting. Governments simply need to limit the burden of government spending. The key variable is making sure spending doesn’t consume ever-larger shares of economic output. In other words, follow Mitchell’s Golden Rule. It’s possible for a nation to have a large public sector and be fiscally stable. Growth won’t […]

I’ve explained on many occasions that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was bad news for the economy. And the same can be said of Herbert Hoover’s policies, since he also expanded the burden of federal spending, raised tax rates, and increased government intervention. So when I was specifically asked to take part in a symposium on […]