As a veteran, or one might say refugee, of the Texas banking crisis of the 1980s as CEO of a Houston bank holding company, I can identify with the issues raised by the collapse of the Silicon Valley and Signature Banks and the response by the regulatory agencies. I won’t attempt to analyze the technicalities […]
The Texas Budget: A Once in a Lifetime Event
Everywhere one stops to discuss the Texas legislative session now well underway in Austin, the conversation almost immediately turns to the state’s enormous projected budget surplus and what to do with it. The Texas Taxpayers and Research Association (TTARA) has called it “a once in history cash bonanza” and it’s hard to find a better […]
From the Great Society to the Entitlement Society
Elsewhere in this edition I have commented on Amity Shlaes’s book, Great Society: A New History, and reflected on the degree to which the over-confidence, ambitions, and hubris of the public sector elite of the 1960s produced the most massive transformation of America in history, even more so than the New Deal in size and […]
Year End Potpourri
I don’t normally publish in December, but the rush of events and the fact that I missed a few opportunities during my flood displacement this fall encouraged me to break with custom and briefly comment on a few items. **In early November we passed the 100th anniversary of the final takeover by the Bolsheviks of […]
A Deal Trump Should Like
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame is touting the idea of a “universal basic income”, the notion that every citizen should be paid some fixed subsistence on an annual basis, and he has been joined in this thinking, for various reasons, by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. In commenting on […]
Growth is the Only Answer
President Obama presented his 2015 budget proposal this week. To briefly summarize, The Wall Street Journal called it “the back to Pelosi budget” and Congressman Paul Ryan called it a “campaign brochure”, which is to say the same thing. A return to annual economic growth in the 3-4% range is the only way out of […]
The Ultimate Tyranny II
Speaking at the commencement ceremony at Ohio State University before the IRS scandal broke in May, President Obama cautioned the graduates to reject the voices “that warn that tyranny is always just around the corner”, that “suggest that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we […]
The Ultimate Tyranny
The power to tax involves the power to destroy.—Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, McCullough vs. Maryland, 1819. In the act of appropriating taxes there is perhaps no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice.—James Madison, Federalist No. 10 Of […]
The Big Corporate Sell Out
One of my pet peeves is the often unprincipled posture of the large corporate community on matters of public policy. At the risk of over-generalizing, it is often totally self-interested and lacking in courage. A good example is the letter sent by the Business Roundtable, signed by 150 of its members, expressing its approval of […]
The “Cliff” Deal
What can I say that hasn’t already been over-hyped ad nausea? This was a bad deal, one I suppose was necessitated by the alternative, a much worse deal, and I’m not referring to the “over the cliff” alternative. And the final insult was the load of crony capitalist corporate welfare tacked on. But whoever thinks […]