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 […]

Here’s a very good new video from the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, in which he explains why lower tax rates and fewer loopholes are the keys to a simple, fair, and competitive tax system. Very well done. Given my video on the flat tax, as well as my video on the global flat […]

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 […]

I’m normally disappointed when religious figures comment on economics, particularly since they often turn the individual call to charity into a blank check for government-coerced redistribution. This runs contrary to individual choice, free will, and morality. So I’m delighted that Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, writing for  L’Osservatore Romano, the quasi-official newspaper of the Vatican,  persuasively explains […]

I enjoy mocking the French every so often, including posts about the nation’s absurd fiscal policy, its protesting government workers, its oddball laws against meanness, its penchant for high taxes, and its shallow attempts to redefine success. Sometimes, I even criticize the French when they move policy in the right direction. But it’s worth pointing […]

Warren Buffett’s at it again. He has a column in the New York Times complaining that he has been coddled by the tax code and that “rich” people should pay higher taxes. My first instinct is to send Buffett the website where people can voluntarily pay extra money to the federal government. I’ve made this […]

Allen Meltzer, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University, writes today in the Wall Street Journal about the Fed’s worrisome announcement that it will continue the easy-money policy of artificially low interest rates. Professor Meltzer’s key point (at least to me) is that the economy is weak because of too much government intervention and too much […]

If Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama are neck-and-neck competitors in the contest to be the public face of incompetent statism in America, then the competition in Europe is between Herman van Rompuy and Olga Stefou. But since I’ve already crowned Ms. Stefou as the Queen of Greece, then Mr Rompuy (a.k.a., President of the Euorpean Council) […]

Politicians last night announced the framework of a deal to increase the debt limit. In addition to authorizing about $900 billion more red ink right away, it would require immediate budget cuts of more than $900 billion, though “immediate” means over 10 years and “budget cuts” means spending still goes up (but not as fast […]