As we now focus on the critical deliberations to respond to the impending fiscal “cliff”, I was struck by a letter to the editor by Mr. H. Paul Lasky of Spring Valley, New York, who wrote the Wall Street Journal in response to a letter from Sen. Charles Schumer in which the Senator chides the […]

They just don’t get it.  Or more accurately, it doesn’t meet their needs.  The political left and their fellow travelers cannot seem to grasp the logic and historical success of supply side economics, particularly as it relates to fiscal policy that gives priority to marginal tax rate cuts.  To supply side guru Art Laffer it’s […]

” The moral case for unions–protecting working families from exploitation–does not apply to public employment.”–Tim Pawlenty, Governor of Minnesota. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once said that “the enemy within is much more difficult to fight than the enemy without, and more dangerous to liberty”.  She had reference to the public sector unions, who […]

With my first essay in this “disaster” series, I thought one or two would be plenty.  Alas, the disasters just keep on coming.  Now we have Obama’s first proposed budget, and it simply takes your breath away. First, a dose of reality.  From a purely financial disaster standpoint, former Bush economic advisor Larry Lindsey put […]

Let’s be clear: we know where Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will take the country in tax policy–roll back the Bush tax rate cuts, restore the death tax, reverse the capital gains and dividend tax cuts, increase the cost of capital, thereby damaging investment, job creation, and prosperity.  It works every time.  It also works in reverse […]

This quote from Texas Republican Congressman Randy Neugebauer during the debate on the federal agriculture appropriation recently struck me as emblematic of an intractable systemic problem as well as the major reason his party is no longer in the majority: “When you step back and look at it, less than one-half of one penny of […]

For quite some time, Tom Friedman of the New York Times has been harping about the enormous subsidies that we are providing to our Middle Eastern Islamofascist and other enemies in the form of exorbitant oil prices that finance their worldwide terror activities and the armaments that are killing Americans in Iraq, not to mention […]

Kevin Hassett has an interesting take on U. S. consumption data compiled by professors at the Universities of California and Hawaii. It seems that total consumption increases dramatically with age, so that a 25-year old spends about $26K per annum and an 80-year old $40K. Why the big difference? Mostly because of government spending on […]

Allow me to repeat a quote I used in a previous issue (Are We on Europe’s Path?, August 2005) from Heritage Foundation economist William Beach: “A citizenry that reaches a certain tipping point in dependency on government runs the risk of evolving into a society that demands an ever-expanding government that caters to group self-interests […]

Who can doubt that the recent announcement that a Chicago bankruptcy judge allowed United Airlines to unload its unfunded pension liability on the federal government is potentially the break in the dam for the next crisis of moral hazard a la the savings and loan fiasco of the 1980s? Can a similar taxpayer bailout of […]