I’ve criticized the Congressional Budget Office for generating biased and inaccurate numbers. These are the clowns, after all, who say deficit spending stimulates the economy in the short run but they also rely on a model which seemingly predicts 100 percent tax rates maximize growth in the long run. About the only nice thing that […]

Professor Allan Meltzer of Carnegie Mellon University has a must-read column in today’s Wall Street Journal, beginning with what should be an obvious statement. Those who heaped high praise on Keynesian policies have grown silent as government spending has failed to bring an economic recovery. Except for a few diehards who want still more government […]

I’m going to be in New York City next week to join with Richard Epstein as we participate in an Intelligence Squared debate against Mark Zandi and Cecilia Rouse. I’m looking forward to this event because Richard Epstein is a rock star for freedom. It also gave me an opportunity to pontificate on growth issues […]

Life is difficult when you’re a cranky libertarian. President Obama’s latest stimulus scam was just rejected by the Senate, so I went online to read about this rare bit of good news. But my cheerful mood was undermined by a reprehensible bit of bias by the folks at Reuters. Read the first paragraph of the […]

The folks at U.S. News & World Report have posted an online debate on the never-ending topic: “Does Stimulus Spending Work?“ You know my thoughts on the topic, including my thumbs-down to Obama’s latest stimulus scheme, so it won’t surprise you to know that I think Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center beat her […]

As part of his latest “stimulus” scam, President Obama argues that the federal government should spend more money on infrastructure. Yet there is widespread evidence that politicians use such projects to squander money – often in exchange for contributions from contractors and construction unions. There’s a very unfortunate example of this phenomenon in my backyard. […]

Thomas Sowell just completed a three-part “Back to the Future” series, looking at a couple of fiscal policy issues. His unifying theme is how the political class fails (perhaps deliberately) to learn from mistakes. In Part I, he decimates President Obama’s new stimulus scheme. Once we get past the glowing rhetoric, what is the president […]

I recently posted four charts eviscerating Obama’s record on jobs. My Cato colleague, Caleb Brown, has a good complement to those charts. He’s put together a short video looking at how government spending and regulation undermine job creation. Caleb says he will be doing more excellent videos like this, which is very encouraging since there […]

President Obama will be unveiling another “jobs plan” tomorrow night, though Democrats are being careful not to call it stimulus after the failure of the $800 billion package from 2008. But just as a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, bigger government is not good for the economy, regardless of how it […]