Hopefully we’re all disgusted when insiders rig the system to rip off taxpayers. And I suspect you’re not surprised to know that the worst examples come from California, which is in a race with Illinois to see which state can become the Greece of America. Well, the Golden State has a new über-bureaucrat. Here are […]
read more...It’s never a good idea to display weakness during negotiations. Your opponent will sense your fear and up his demands. That’s certainly what we’re seeing in Washington. The cartoon at this link captures the GOP’s wobbly attitude on taxes, and this interview is about the ever-increasing demands of the Obama Administration. It’s rather galling, by […]
read more...The politicians claim that they are negotiating about how best to reduce the deficit. That irks me because our fiscal problem is excessive government spending. Red ink is merely a symptom of that underlying problem. But that’s a rhetorical gripe. My bigger concern is that politicians are prevaricating. They’re really talking about higher taxes in […]
read more...Obama’s main goal in the fiscal cliff negotiations is to impose a class-warfare tax hike. He presumably thinks this will give the government more money to spend, but recent evidence from the United Kingdom suggests that he won’t get nearly as much money as he thinks. Why? Because there’s this thing called the Laffer Curve. […]
read more...Earlier this year, I explained that tax revenues would soon climb above their long-run average of 18 percent of GDP, even if the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were made permanent. In other words, the nation’s fiscal challenge is entirely the result of a rising burden of government spending. Even though the data on tax […]
read more...If done well, an image can say a thousand words. The Heritage Foundation shows us what Obama has in mind when he talks about a “balanced” plan. This chart, while horrifying and visually powerful, actually understates the case against Obama. The President is not proposing to cut spending by $400 billion. He’s only proposing to […]
read more...Washington frustrates me. The entire town is based on legalized corruption as an unworthy elite figure out new ways of accumulating unearned wealth by skimming money from the nation’s producers. But one thing that especially irks me is the way people focus on the trees and forget about the forest. Politicians and journalists are now […]
read more...Being a thoughtful and kind person, I offered some advice last year to Barack Obama. I cited some powerful IRS data from the 1980s to demonstrate that there is not a simplistic linear relationship between tax rates and tax revenue. In other words, just as a restaurant owner knows that a 20-percent increase in prices […]
read more...Eugene Robinson is one of the group-think columnists at the Washington Post. Like E.J. Dionne, he is an utterly predictable proponent of big government. So it won’t surprise you to know that he wants taxes to go up and he’s a big fan of Obama’s class-warfare agenda. He’s also a very partisan Democrat and wants […]
read more...I shared an astounding chart last month showing that tax increases account for 90 percent of the so-called “austerity” in Europe. The author of the chart, Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center, calls this “private sector austerity” and she correctly argues that her home continent is in desperate need of some austerity on the […]
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