The Most Important Thing to Understand about Biden’s New Budget

President Biden has released his 2024 budget, which mostly recycles the tax-and-spend proposals that he failed to achieve as part of his original “Build Back Better” plan. It is not easy figuring out his worst policy. Is it one of the proposed tax increases, such as the higher corporate tax rate or the increased burden […]

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Biden’s Deficit Malarkey

Back in May, I pointed out that it is absurd for Joe Biden to claim credit for lower deficits. This Reason video elaborates, noting that red ink is (temporarily) falling solely because the orgy of pandemic spending is ending. Serious budget people, regardless of their ideology, know this is true. Almost everything Biden has done […]

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Biden Wants America to be #1…in a Bad Way

Based on research from the Congressional Budget Office, I’ve shared estimates of the potential economic damage from the fiscal plan Joe Biden unveiled last year. But now he has a new budget. So what if we simply focus on the tax portion of that plan and ignore all the new spending? The Tax Foundation has […]

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Debunking Biden’s Absurd “Cut the Deficit” Claim

After almost 16 months in office, what is President Biden’s track record on fiscal policy? The good news is that his big tax-and-spend plan to “build back better” has not been approved by Congress (and fingers crossed that it stays that way). The bad news is that he has done other things, such as getting […]

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Biden’s Farcical Tax Plan

I’ve already written that massive spending increases for various bureaucracies is the most offensive part of Biden’s new budget. But I explicitly noted that these huge budgetary increases (well above the rate of inflation, unlike what’s happening to incomes for American families) were not the most economically harmful feature of Biden’s plan. That dubious honor […]

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The Failure of Bidenomics, Part V

Our series on the failure of Bidenomics has touched on four topics. Biden’s subsidy agenda will lead to higher prices and economic inefficiency. Biden’s inflation policy is mocked even by senior Democratic economists. Biden’s so-called Buy America policy hurts taxpayers and means fewer jobs. Biden’s statist agenda means families lose as prices rise faster than […]

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The Failure of Bidenomics, Part IV

As part of my ongoing efforts to show that free enterprise produces better results than statism, I often use data on per-capita economic output – especially when comparing nations over long periods of time. And I’ll sometimes build upon those numbers by comparing consumption levels in different nations. But what if we’re looking at one […]

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The Two Most Important Things to Understand about Biden’s Budget

The fight over President Biden’s budget, the so-called Build Back Better plan, has revolved around very important issues. The adverse impact of expanding the welfare state, particularly the per-child handouts. The anti-growth effect of higher tax rates on work, entrepreneurship, saving, and investment. For today’s column, let’s zoom out and look at two charts that […]

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Updated Estimate: The Economic Effect of Biden’s Fiscal Agenda

Earlier this year, extrapolating from a study by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Robert O’Quinn (former Chief Economist at the Department of Labor) and I authored a study on the economic impact of Biden’s fiscal plan. The results are not pretty. Lost jobs, lost wages, lower living standards, and lost competitiveness. But those estimates were […]

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The Economic Damage of Biden’s Fiscal Agenda

President Biden’s fiscal agenda of higher taxes and bigger government is not a recipe for prosperity. How much will it hurt the economy? Last month, I shared the results of a new study I wrote with Robert O’Quinn for the Club for Growth Foundation. We based our results on a wide range of economic research, […]

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Measuring the Economic Damage of the Biden Fiscal Plan

More than 12 years ago, I shared this video containing lots of data and research on the negative relationship between government spending and economic performance. Since then, I’ve share numerous additional studies showing that bigger government dampens growth, mostly from scholars in academia. Now it’s time for me to directly contribute to this debate. In […]

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The Absurdly Named Inflation Reduction Act

I don’t like shoveling more money at a corrupt IRS, hurting jobs with higher taxes on “book income,” price controls on prescription drugs, or green-energy pork. But, as explained in this video clip, the insult added to injury is that the resuscitated “Build Back Better” is being sold as the “Inflation Reduction Act.” If a […]

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The Three Stooges of Big Government

The 21st century has been bad news for America’s taxpayers. Every president (George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden) has been a big spender. We obviously can’t give Biden a final grade since he has at least two more years in office (though his performance so far has been dismal – and […]

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How to Solve America’s Worsening Fiscal Mess

America’s fiscal future is very grim, largely because of an ever-expanding burden of entitlement spending. To see the magnitude of the problem, let’s peruse the Budget and Economic Outlook, which was released yesterday by the Congressional Budget Office has some. Most people are focusing on how deficits are going to climb from $1 trillion to […]

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Bigger Government Means Less Prosperity

When I first started writing this daily column, the Congressional Budget Office was infamous for dodgy economics. In the short run, CBO believed in the very simplistic Keynesian notion that a bigger burden of government spending somehow stimulated the economy. The bureaucracy was infamous for reflexively claiming that job losses were actually job gains. In […]

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A “Libertarian Moment” for the United States?

Is the United States becoming more libertarian? In terms of social tolerance, there are reasons for optimism. The legal harassment of drug users is declining. Legal harassment of gay people has virtually disappeared. But when looking at economic issues, there are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic. There is relentless pressure to increase tax rates. […]

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What Should Be Done about Media Bias?

I recently wrote about academic bias. Today, let’s analyze whether there is a similar problem with journalists. And we’ll start with this video from Prager U. Just as with the column on academic bias, we’ll start by looking at evidence about whether members of the press actually do lean to the left. Since I’ve shared […]

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Hopes and Fears for 2022

It’s an annual tradition (2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, etc) to list a handful of things that I hope might happen in the upcoming year, as well as the things I fear may happen. Sadly, since I understand the economics of “public choice” (something Thomas Jefferson also implicitly understood) it’s always easier to envision the latter […]

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