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 […]

It’s not something I should admit since I work at a think tank, which is based on the idea that substantive analysis can impact public policy, but I sometimes think humor and anecdotes are very effective in helping people understand issues. On the topic of unemployment insurance, for instance, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn […]

I periodically mock the crazy statists of California. The state is almost surely doomed to suffer a Greek-style fiscal chaos. The only unknown is whether Illinois will beat the Golden State into default. The politicians in Sacramento impose very high taxes to fund a bloated bureaucracy that oversees a bunch of politically correct nonsense. But […]

I try to be self aware, so I realize that I have the fiscal version of Tourette’s. Regardless of the question that is asked, I’m tempted to blurt out that the answer is to reduce the burden of government spending. But sometimes that’s exactly the right prescription, particularly for an economy weighed down by a […]

I’m part of a just-posted online Debate Club sponsored by U.S. News & World Report which asks “Is the United States a Nation of ‘Makers and Takers?’” My contribution to the discussion is basically a reworked version of what I wrote last week about Romney and the infamous 47 percent remark, so there’s no need […]

I realize it’s wrong, but I can’t help cheering for France’s socialist president. Francois Hollande seems determined to raise every tax, expand every program, and augment every bit of red tape that afflicts the French economy. I fully expect this to end poorly, but at the risk of admitting that I’m chauvinistically concerned first and […]

In my travels through Europe, I often wind up debating whether policy is better in the United States or Europe. I generally try to explain that this is the wrong comparison, both because Europe is not a monolithic bloc and also because most individual nations have both good policies and bad policies. But sometimes you […]

I wrote a celebratory post last November about the dramatic difference between Americans and Europeans. There truly is American exceptionalism in that Europeans are much more likely to think it is government’s responsibility to provide the basics of life. Another poll in 2010 showed Americans, by a 20-percentage point margin, want smaller government and lower […]

It’s not often that I read something by Paul Krugman and think, “Good point, I hope he’s correct.” After all, I had to correct Krugman’s inaccurate analysis of Estonia, and also point out the errors in what he wrote about the United Kingdom. And I also noted mistakes he made when writing about Canada and […]

I wrote last year about the way in which welfare programs lead to very high implicit marginal tax rates on low-income people. More specifically, they lose handouts when they earn income. As such, it is not very advantageous for them to climb the economic ladder because hard work is comparatively unrewarding. Thanks to the American […]