This article appeared in Forbes.

I’m in Slovenia where I just finished indoctrinating educating a bunch of students on the importance of Mitchell’s Golden Rule as a means of restraining the burden of government spending. And I emphasized that the fiscal problem in Europe is the size of government, not the fact that nations are having a hard time borrowing […]

If you live in America and believe in free markets and small government, it’s easy to get depressed. We suffered through eight years of wasteful spending and misguided intervention under Bush, and now we’re enduring four years of additional spending and red tape under Obama. Moreover, it’s not clear things will get any better in […]

I feel like a pendulum this election season. Something will happen that makes me want to eviscerate Obama’s statist policies and I’ll write a foaming-at-the-mouth post warning that the President is turning America into Greece. But then Romney will do something odious and I’ll sound the warning sign with a we-don’t-need-another-big-spender-like-Bush post. Today, it’s Obama’s […]

I don’t give the issue much attention on this blog, but I’m very interested in Social Security reform. I wrote my dissertation on Australia’s very successful system of personal retirement accounts, for instance, and I narrated this video on Social Security reform in the United States. So I was very interested to see that the […]

While I disagree with statists, I sometimes admire their discipline. They are very good at staying “on message.” I am 100 percent confident, for instance, that they intend big tax hikes on the middle class, even though they would piously swear an oath to the contrary. Indeed, I suspect more than 90 percent of them […]

Two days ago, I explained that tax increases are bad policy. More specifically, I warned that giving more money to government exacerbates fiscal problems because politicians respond to the expectation of more revenue by spending more than otherwise would be the case. And since they usually over-estimate how much revenue a tax hike will generate, […]

What would you do if you saw somebody standing at the top of a skyscraper, about to jump? Would you avert your eyes in horror? Would you watch in dismay as they plummeted to the ground? These are similar to the thoughts that are going through my mind as I watch Republicans begin the process […]

I’m periodically asked about proposals to impose “small” taxes on transactions. There are a couple of versions of this idea. In some cases, such proposals are designed to tax every economic transaction and supposedly generate enough money to replace all other taxes. In recent years, though, I’m usually asked about levying a “Tobin Tax,” which […]

I’m baffled by stupid Republicans (sorry to be redundant). Some GOPers have agreed to put taxes on the table. Not surprisingly, Democrats are praising them for this preemptive surrender, patting these Republicans on the head for being good little lapdogs. (The Democrats are also high-fiving each other since they openly admit that tricking Republicans into […]