Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXVII

Another local government in California is contemplating bankruptcy. That’s hardly big news, though, since many California jurisdictions have been bled dry by greedy public sector unions and the city of Vallejo already has thrown in the towel. What is amazing, though, is that the government unions are trying to get the state to pass a [...]

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Get Government Out of the Education Business

There’s a controversy in Texas because the State Board of Education has mandated the inclusion of certain materials in textbooks. This has elicited howls of protests from the left, which generally has controlled how some issues are portrayed. Since I don’t want leftist propaganda being pushed on kids, I’m mildly sympathetic to the Texas educrats, [...]

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Obama Administration Trying to Rig Government Statistics for Ideological Purposes

The government’s so-called War on Poverty has been a dismal failure, largely because giving people money as a condition of being poor is a very good way of ensuring that some of them will choose to remain poor. But now the White House wants to make a bad situation even worse by concocting a new [...]

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The Worst Experience of My Boys’ Lives

I finally figured out why I had children. My oldest son came back from Austria last night, so I drafted him and my youngest sin (oops, I meant to write “son,” the error must somehow be a Freudian slip) into slave labor. They got to sop up the toxic mess left in the freezer and [...]

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Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXVI

Two cheers for House Republicans, who plan on offering an amendment to freeze the pay of federal bureaucrats. There are two reasons, though, why they don’t deserve three cheers. First, they should be proposing significant pay cuts, as nations such as Spain and Ireland have implemented. Second, they didn’t do anything to rein in excessive [...]

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The End of the World in 3 Minutes

I don’t know who did this, and I’m not sure what point they are trying to make, but it’s rather amusing and it also makes a good point about the idiocy of bailouts.

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The Worst Experience of My Entire Life

Pardon the deviation from commentary on political economy, but I have to tell this story – perhaps as a form of catharsis. As regular readers know, I got back from Europe Thursday afternoon. When I got to my house, I noticed a very unpleasant smell. Given that there was a cat box that hadn’t been [...]

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Fiscal Centralization Will Accelerate Europe’s Debt Crisis

David Ignatius continues his odd habit of drawing wrong conclusions from Europe’s fiscal crisis. In a previous post, we made fun of one of his columns because he said America needed a value-added tax to avoid a Greek-style crisis. Yet since Greece has a VAT, he was, for all intents and purposes, arguing that we [...]

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The Rent Seekers Strike Back

Apologies to Star Wars fans for the title, but it seemed very fitting considering the profound amoral mentality of the lobbyists who have launched a public relations campaign to defend earmarks. The key part of the story is excerpted below for your reading pleasure, but let’s focus on the “best” defense of earmarking. I’ve talked [...]

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Is Hillary Clinton Ignorant about Geography, Fiscal Policy, or Both?

Hillary Clinton recently opined that Brazil was a great role model for the idea of soaking the rich with higher tax rates. She didn’t really offer evidence for that specific assertion, but Politico reports that she did say that “”Brazil has the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere and guess what — they’re growing [...]

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Tax Freedom Day in the U.K. Video

The Taxpayers Alliance has a brief but compelling video, entitled “How long do you work for the tax man?,” which shows how an ordinary worker in the United Kingdom spends more than one-half his day laboring for government. “What will they tax next?” is still the best policy video to come out of the U.K., [...]

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The (Unintentional?) Use of Humor by Obama’s Economic Team

The Secretary of the Treasury is a comedian as well as a tax cheat. At least that’s the only rational interpretation of his recent statements in Europe, where he used the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do routine while pretending to tell the Europeans to be fiscally responsible. The Wall Street Journal, in keeping with the deadpan style of the [...]

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So Why Is Obama Considering another “Stimulus”?!?

Bigger government hurts growth by diverting resources from productive uses to political purposes. That’s common sense to most people. But it’s nice to find even academics at Harvard are confirming this relationship – and showing that having local politicians with seniority is bad for growth since it means even more wasteful spending. Excerpted below is [...]

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More Garbage-In-Garbage-Out from CBO

You don’t need to watch old Gunsmoke episodes if you want to travel into the past. Just read the latest Congressional Budget Office “research” claiming that Obama’s so-called stimulus “increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 1.8 million to 4.1 million.” CBO’s analysis is a throwback to the widely discredited Keynesian theory that assumes you can enrich [...]

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How Unions Screw Poor People Out of Jobs

Ever wonder why unions care so much about the minimum wage when almost all union members get paid above that level? The answer is simply, but sleazy. As Walter Williams explains, they want to protect their high-pay status by increasing the cost of lower-skilled workers. For all intents and purposes, they are pricing poor people [...]

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Greetings from Macedonia (and reflections on my new transsexual friend)

Having spoken earlier today in Skopje, I’m finally done with the Free Market Road Show and get to head back to the United States tomorrow. I suppose the highlight of the entire Road Show was getting to know Professor Deirdre McCloskey, who took part in four of the seven conferences. Deirdre is a first-rate economist, [...]

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Send Mayor Daley to Jamaica…and Without a Gun to Defend Himself

Is there anything more despicable than a politician with personal (taxpayer-financed!) security guards who wants to prevent other people from having the right of self defense? Mayor Daley of Chicago is a good example of this strange species (scientific name: hypocratus sleazious). The priceless John Lott looks at the evidence from Jamaica to show the [...]

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Great Moments in Government

Any guesses how many bureaucrats took how many years to concoct this recipe?

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The United States of Greece

Americans should not get too smug about the troubles in Europe because the Bush-Obama policies of wasteful spending are bringing us down the same path. The latest evidence comes from a well-researched article about personal income in USA Today showing that the share from private paychecks fell to a record low and the share from [...]

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Too Little and Too Late for Europe, Part II

When even the New York Times is writing articles about the collapse of the European welfare state, you know that the political establishment is finally recognizing the writing on the wall. Recognizing a problem and solving a problem, however, are two different things. They need to use an axe on their budgets, but the examples [...]

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Greetings from Montenegro

Different city, different country, but the same speech on the Free Market Road Show. So let’s instead focus on what’s nice about Montenegro. The scenery is pleasant, if you know what I mean, but this nation also has some attractive policies. It has the world’s lowest flat tax, with a rate of just 9 percent [...]

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Too Little and Too Late for Europe, Part I

Governments that tax work and subsidize sloth are committing a form of slow-motion suicide, and the Greek fiscal crisis is the canary in the coal mine of this phenomenon. Interestingly, some European governments are trying to halt the downward slide, though I suspect that most of them will fail to take the necessary steps. But [...]

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The Evil of Lookism

Just when you thought leftism couldn’t get any weirder, there’s a column in the Washington Post advocating a government ban on discrimination against ugly people. If you read the article, there actually is a lot of research showing that attractive people have a big advantage over unattractive people (and Greg Mankiw has written about the [...]

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Brazil’s President Is Wiser than Obama

Every so often, perhaps inadvertently, a collectivist says something very smart. In the case of Lula da Silva, Brazil’s socialist president, he made the common-sense observation that you can’t redistribute without first producing. He didn’t quite realize what he was saying, one imagines, since he presumably would have realized that capitalism is a superior system [...]

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Republican Wins Hawaii Special Election

It may not mean much since the Democratic vote was divided by two candidates, and it is offset by the loss in the Pennsylvania special election, but it must rankle Obama that the GOP won his childhood congressional seat after 20 years of Democratic control. We will see this November whether this is a trend [...]

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Greetings from Hungary

A conference in Hungary was the most recent event on the Free Market Road Show. I tried to do something different at this event, focusing mostly on the Laffer Curve as I explained how European governments will fail if they try to fix the over-spending problem by raising taxes. But regular readers of this blog have [...]

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Killing Jobs with Class Warfare Corporate Taxation

Richard Rahn’s Washington Times column makes several key points about corporate taxation, including the fact that excessive taxation of capital (the corporate income tax being just one example) is extremely foolish such taxes impose the most damage – per dollar collected – when compared with other forms of revenue. To add injury to injury, the [...]

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Obamacare Means IRS Nightmare for Small Business

We’ve looked at this issue before, but this new CNN article fleshes out the awful IRS rules in the new healthcare bill: The massive expansion of requirements for businesses to file 1099 tax forms that was hidden in the 2,409-page health reform bill took many by surprise when it came to light last month. …The [...]

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Greetings from Serbia

I don’t really have much to say about the conference in Belgrade. I’ve been giving the same speech over and over again. Each audience is hearing it for the first time, but I’m boring myself. Like many cities in former communist nations, Belgrade is a bit run down, but the Danube is an impressive river, and [...]

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Is the FairTax Political Poison?

I have a question for my friends who support a national sales tax. First, some background. Beginning with the defeat of Woody Jenkins in his Louisiana Senate race back in the 1990s, various versions of the national sales tax have caused political headaches for GOP candidates. Even candidates from conservative states, such as Sen. DeMint in [...]

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