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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I appeared on CNBC yesterday to talk about the “fiscal cliff” and the potential impact on economic performance. You won’t be surprised to learn that I’m mostly concerned with how the issue gets resolved. Yes, there is some temporary uncertainty that is probably making markets skittish, but I’m much more worried about Obama bullying the […]

President Obama and other statists in Washington want a big class-warfare tax hike. They claim the additional revenue is necessary to reduce red ink. But their ideological crusade is based on some blatant distortions. They tell us that tax increases are necessary, but even CBO data shows that the budget can be balanced in just […]