If the Obama-GOP Budget Deal Is a Kiss-Your-Sister Agreement, Claudia Schiffer Ain’t My Sibling

Press reports indicate that there is a tentative agreement between Republicans and Democrats to trim $33 billion of spending for the remainder of the current fiscal year. Here are a few blurbs from a story in The Hill. A source familiar with the talks said members of the Senate and House Appropriations panels are working [...]

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Obama, Libya, and the Late-Night Comics

I don’t have any strong feelings about the Libya situation. I don’t think we should be there, but I also won’t shed any tears if a cruise missile lands on Qaddafi (I still remember Pan Am 103). But I do appreciate clever political humor. Here are Jay Leno’s jabs. President Obama addressed the nation on [...]

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Jeffrey Sachs and the Fictional “Race to the Bottom” Caused by Tax Competition

Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University is a big booster of the discredited notion that foreign aid is a cure-all for poverty in the developing world, but he is now branching out and saying silly things about policy in other areas. In a column for the Financial Times, he complains that tax competition is forcing governments [...]

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Republicans and the Suicidal Impulse

Yesterday, I analyzed how the GOP should fight the budget battle, but I may have made a big mistake. I assumed the Republican leadership actually wanted to do the right thing. I thought they learned the right lessons from the disastrous Bush years, and that the GOP no longer would be handmaidens for big government. [...]

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Budget Battle Update: It’s About Preparing for the Inevitable Fight, not Forcing a Shutdown

Welcome Instapundit readers (and everyone else, of course). I have a very depressing update to this post, which you can read here. ============================================== According to news reports, Democrats and Republicans are unlikely to reach any sort of budget agreement before April 8, when a short-term spending bill for the current fiscal year expires. Barring some [...]

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Since the NEA Likes to Screw Taxpayers, this Joke Is Funny on Several Levels

A dedicated union official from the National Education Association was attending a convention in Las Vegas and decided to check out the local brothels. When he got to the first one, he asked the Madam, “Is this a union house?” “No,” she replied, “I’m sorry it isn’t.” “Well, if I pay you $100, what cut [...]

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Why General Electric’s Non-Existent Tax Bill Is Both Good News and Bad News

General Electric has received a lot of unwelcome attention for paying zero federal income tax in 2010, even though it reported $5.1 billion in U.S. profits. This is a good news-bad news situation. The good news is that GE’s clever tax planning deprived the government of revenue. And I’m in favor of just about anything [...]

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In One Chart, Everything You Wanted to Know about the Relationship Between Good Policy and Economic Prosperity

Okay, the title’s an exaggeration, but this chart is rather revealing. It shows how per-capita GDP has changed between 1980 and 2008 in Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela. As you can see, Chile used to be the poorest of the three countries and now it is comparatively rich. Argentina has enjoyed a bit of growth. Venezuela, [...]

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Can Anybody Read This and Not Despise the IRS?

My previous post looked at the federal government’s troubling decision to investigate, persecute, prosecute, and ultimately imprison a random home-loan borrower named Charlie Engle for the crime of mortgage fraud. Citing a column on the legal fallout from the financial crisis in the New York Times, I noted that it was rather odd that the [...]

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If This Story Doesn’t Turn You into a Libertarian, You’re a Hopeless Statist

Joe Nocera has a must-read story in the New York Times about how the legal fallout from the financial crisis. His basic theme is that the government let all the bigwigs get away with their crimes, but then has a fascinating discussion about how the government targeted an inconsequential mortgage borrower. I’m not sure I [...]

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Some Good Political Jokes

Found this joke in my inbox this morning. As with many of these jokes, it gets reworked with each new occupant of the White House. In the past, I’ve seen versions with both Bush and Clinton. Enjoy. Obama goes on a State visit to Israel.  While he is on a tour of Jerusalem, he has [...]

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A Great Day in the Life of Dan Mitchell

It’s time for a completely narcissistic post. I went down to Richmond today to play in the year’s first softball tournament. The conditions were miserable, with the temperature in the 40s. The first couple of games were rather depressing. Even when I made decent contact, I hit the ball right at fielders. But then, in [...]

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Republicans Are Even Stupider than I Thought

I posted yesterday about the stunning political incompetence of Republican Senators, who reportedly are willing to give Obama an increase in the debt limit in exchange for a vote (yes, just a vote) on a balanced budget amendment. As I explained, there is no way they can get the necessary two-thirds support to approve an [...]

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The Stupid Party Strikes Again: Republicans May Raise Debt Limit in Exchange for Symbolic BBA Vote

The old joke in Washington is that Democrats are the evil party and Republicans are the stupid party (which is why you should guard your wallet and freedom whenever you hear talk of “bipartisanship”). The GOP definitely is doing what it can to prove that at least one side of that joke is true. Republicans [...]

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Yet Another Scheme to Fleece (and Monitor) Americans: A Tax on “Miles Driven”

I commented yesterday about the silly idea, being promoted by a few politicians, to impose a tax on toilet paper. That post mostly was an opportunity to have some fun mocking greedy government because even a dour pessimist like me doesn’t expect that idea to get very far. But there’s a new tax idea that [...]

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I’m Shocked, Shocked, that Obama Wasn’t Telling the Truth about the Cost of Obamacare

This won’t surprise anyone with a pulse, but Obama, Reid, Pelosi, et al, were disingenuous about the costs of Obamacare. The Congressional Budget Office has released revised numbers and government-run healthcare will cost 8.6 percent more than what was projected in last year’s forecast. This doubtlessly is just the first of many “re-estimates” that will [...]

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A Pun Contest to Describe a Tax on Toilet Paper?

The greed of the political class is boundless. They have figured out how to tax just about everything, including a tax on tanning salons to finance Obamacare. But for sheer ingenuity (in the philosophically perverted sense), I must tip my proverbial hat to the politicians who want to tax toilet paper. Here’s a blurb from [...]

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Jay Leno on Obama’s Libyan Adventure

This one-liner from Leno’s monologue is a pretty good summary of where things stand in North Africa. According to Newsweek, 73 percent of Americans can’t say why we fought the Cold War. This sounds bad until you consider that no one in the White House can tell us why we’re fighting the Libya war. Depending [...]

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Walter Williams, Freedom Fighter

I’ve been fortunate to know Walter Williams ever since I began my Ph.D. studies at George Mason University in the mid-1980s. He is a very good economist, but his real value is as a public intellectual. He also has a remarkable personal story, which he tells in his new autobiography, Up from the Projects. I’ve [...]

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Fair Tax vs. the IRS: Debating in Favor of the National Sales Tax

While watching my interview with Dambisa Moyo, I noticed C-Span has an easy-to-use archive system that shows all previous appearances. This was an opportunity for some narcissistic reminiscing, beginning with my first appearance in 1990 (which I shared with a friend, who laughed at my “Justin Bieber haircut”). But I was especially pleased to find [...]

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Are Republicans Winning the Budget Battle but Losing the Budget War?

Among advocates of limited government, there is growing unease about the fiscal fight in Washington. This is not because anything bad has happened. Indeed, Democrats thus far have been acquiescing – at least on a temporary basis – to conservative demands for $61 billion of spending cuts over the rest of the current fiscal year. [...]

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Do You Want to Attend a Private Screening of Atlas Shrugged?

This post is only useful for those of you who live in the Washington area. But if you do, click on this link to find out how to attend a screening of Atlas Shrugged tomorrow afternoon at the Heritage Foundation. I got a chance to see the movie at a Cato event in California. As [...]

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This Cartoon Summarizes the Corrupt Insider-Dealing that Governor Walker (and others) Are Trying to Fix

This great cartoon I saw at The Corner is a very good summary of what the public-sector “collective bargaining” issue is all about. In private sector labor disputes, unions and management both have ample incentives to protect their respective interests. With government labor negotiations, by contrast, that natural system of checks and balances doesn’t exist. [...]

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End the Fed: More than Just a Bumper Sticker Slogan?

To put it mildly, the Federal Reserve has a dismal track record. It bears significant responsibility for almost every major economic upheaval of the past 100 years, including the Great Depression, the 1970s stagflation, and the recent financial crisis. Perhaps the most damning statistic is that the dollar has lost 95 percent of its value [...]

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British Business Writer Explains: Thanks to Tax Competition and Tax Havens, the Greed of the Political Class Is Being Constrained

Regular readers know that I’m a big fan of tax competition because politicians are less likely to misbehave if the potential victims of plunder have the ability to escape across borders. Here is an excerpt from a superb article by Allister Heath, one of the U.K.’s best writers on economic and business issues. In a [...]

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My Interview with Dambisa Moyo Has Been Posted

I wasn’t able to figure out how to embed the video on this site, but just click on this link and you can watch the program. It’s been many years since I was on the other side of an interview table, so it was an interesting experience. And Dambisa made the process very easy. Your [...]

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Since When Does the United Nations Rather than Congress Get to Declare War for the United States?

I’m not a foreign policy expert, so perhaps I’m missing something, but a quick glance at the Constitution reveals that Congress has the power to declare war, as specified in Article I, Section VIII. Nobody else has that power, not even the President. Notwithstanding this clear language, the United States may (or may not, depending [...]

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I’ll Be on C-Span this Weekend, Interviewing Dambisa Moyo

I’m not sure watching me on TV is the best way of spending a Saturday night, but watching Dambisa Moyo is much more understandable. She’s the author of How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – and the Stark Choices Ahead. Lots of interesting talk about policy, demographics, and culture. I agree [...]

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The “McDonald’s Test” for Budget Cutting

I thought my post about budget cuts earlier today, mocking the biased language of the Washington Post, was clever. But I’m definitely an amateur blogger. Check out these posts, at Powerline Blog and Arizona Economics. These guys put me to shame with very clever calculations and great visuals. Check them both out.

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Bush Was Not a Conservative

There’s an interesting debate in the blogosphere about whether President George W. Bush was a conservative (here’s a good summary of the discussion, along with lots of links, though I especially like this analysis since it cites my work.). I’ve already explained that Bush was a statist rather than a conservative, and you can find [...]

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