A Victory for the Laffer Curve, a Defeat for England’s Economy

A new study from the Adam Smith Institute in the United Kingdom provides overwhelming evidence that class-warfare tax policy is grossly misguided and self-destructive. The authors examine the likely impact of the 10-percentage point increase in the top income tax rate, which was imposed as an election-year stunt by former  Gordon Brown and then kept [...]

‘Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?’

Ronald Reagan’s poignant question to then President Jimmy Carter during a debate in 1980 clinched the presidential election. Carter presided over one of the worst economies. The economy had tanked and inflation had skyrocketed. Additionally, Iranian radicals had held 52 Americans hostage for almost a year. But that’s nothing compared to our nation’s economic malaise [...]

Hatch-Lee Balanced Budget Amendment Is a Win for America

On Mar. 31, Senators Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee introduced a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) to make it a constitutional requirement for Washington, D.C., to end our deficit spending and culture of debt. And our national grassroots organization, Pass the Balanced Budget Amendment, is working with them to compel lawmakers to approve this change to [...]

Why You Should Care About The National Debt Ceiling

With the Federal government scheduled to shut down on April 8, Congress is not only debating where to spend trillions of dollars in the next fiscal year, but also whether to raise the roof, i.e. the debt ceiling.  The debt ceiling simply represents a cap on the total debt the U.S. government can hold, and [...]

English Riots, Faux Austerity, and Krugman’s Fairy Tale

London was just hit by heavy riots as part of a protest against the “deep” and “savage” budget cuts of the Cameron government. This is not the first time the U.K. has endured riots. The welfare lobby, bureaucrats, and other recipients of taxpayer largesse are becoming increasingly agitated that their gravy train may be derailed.

The [...]

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

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 new development, this could mean a shutdown of the non-essential parts of the government.
This makes both sides very nervous. Democrats don’t want the spending [...]

What Are Republicans Thinking?!?

I posted yesterday at International Liberty 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 [...]

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. This [...]

Family Feud: Do Republicans Need A Therapist?

In the wake of the passage of a continuing resolution (C.R.) by the House and the Senate, that will keep the federal government running for another three weeks, Republican leaders and fiscally conservative members of Congress appear to be not getting along.
A group of 54 House Republicans voted against this latest C.R., which cut $6 [...]

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 additional [...]

Speaker Boehner needs to show America What Real Leadership Is

Americans delivered the House a record 63 Republican seats to ensure that the peoples’ voices would be heard.  And, while the voters thought their message was clear and received, now, it seems, the real battle ensues.

While Congress continues to kick the budget and debt can down the road and passes continuing resolutions to thwart a government shutdown, the Democrat [...]

Poll Confirms America’s Entitlement Culture…Even Among Tea Partiers

The anti-government “throw-the-bums-out” crowds have had their chance to speak out on how to curtail the deficit and what to do with those hated entitlements that are the antithesis of the America they pine for. A recent WSJ/NBC News poll provided a glimpse of just how dependent on big government entitlements Americans have become–even [...]

Want to Bring Down the Debt? Let’s Defund ObamaCare

America’s unsustainable $14 trillion debt will cripple our nation if we do not stop the spending.  The Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats appear to be unable to garner the strength to curb the debt problem.  One need look no further than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s plea earlier this week to save federal funds for [...]

Tax Increases Will Lead to More Spending, Not Lower Deficits

There’s a significant debate now taking place in Washington – largely behind closed doors, but sometimes covered by the media – on whether fiscal conservatives should maintain a rigid no-tax-increase position. One side of the debate features Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, which is the organization that maintains the no-tax increase pledge. The [...]

Barack Obama and Harry Reid Are AWOL in the Fight for Fiscal Responsibility

In the past 10 years, the burden of federal spending has skyrocketed, more than doubling from$1.86 trillion in 2001 to an estimated $3.82 trillion this year.

President Bush deserves a lot of the blame thanks to the no-bureaucrat-left-behind bill that bloated the Department of Education, the corrupt farm bills, the pork-filled transportation bills, the new prescription [...]

Obama and Democrats Play Smoke and Mirrors With the Budget

The numbers being floated around by President Obama and Congressional Democrats during this year’s budget battle are all spin and sleight of hand. Not that this should surprise anyone – the President has a history of using smoke and mirrors – especially when it comes to taxpayer dollars.

Last year’s Democrat-controlled Congress failed to pass a [...]

Are We Broke Yet?: Michael Moore, Rachel Maddow, NYT Say No. Reality Begs to Differ.

“The nation is not broke, my friends,” opines guerilla filmmaker and amateur accountant Michael Moore. “Wisconsin is not broke. Saying that the country is broke is repeating a Big Lie.”
Relax, America, it turns out that all that talk about local, state, and federal government being broke is just total B.S. or, as The New York Times puts [...]

Republicans Are Right to Cut the IRS Budget

One of my many frustrations of working in Washington is dealing with perpetual-motion-machine assertions. The classic example is Keynesian economics, which is based on the notion that you magically create additional economic activity by having the government spend money instead of allowing the private sector to decide how it gets spent (in an especially bizarre [...]

Kathleen Sebelius Admits The Obamacare Books Were COOKED

They screamed, they begged, cajoled but everyone called them liars.  Ever since the outline of the Obamacare began to be circulated people pointed out that the $500 billion dollars of Medicare savings were being double counted in the cost estimates.

Yesterday the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee heard testimony from Health and Human Services [...]

Raising the Debt Limit: It Just Makes Sense. Not.

Some say the world will end in fire and some say in ice.
But in Washington, a lot of people say it will end if we don’t continually raise the debt ceiling.
The statutory debt limit, or debt ceiling, represents the maximum amount of debt the federal government can carry at any given time. The limit was [...]

Senate Passes Two-week GOP Budget Measure

From the Associated Press:

The Senate on Wednesday sent President Barack Obama a Republican-drafted bill to trim $4 billion from the budget, completing hastily processed legislation aimed at keeping partisan budget divisions from causing a government shutdown.
The Senate cleared the measure by an overwhelming 91-9 vote that gives the GOP an early but modest victory in [...]

GOP Wins First Skirmish in Budget Fight, but Shutdown Battle Still Looms

A large number of Democrats voted with Republicans in the House yesterday to pass a two-week spending bill that includes $4 billion in cuts compared to what Obama requested.

This is a modest victory for the GOP since they can truthfully claim that they are on target to impose the equivalent of $100 billion of cuts [...]

GAO Identifies $100 BIL. Savings by Cutting Specific Duplicated & Wasteful Programs

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), issued it first annual report on reducing or eliminating duplication, overlap, or fragmentation in government spending (embedded below).  This particular report identifies areas where adjustments would generate tens of billions of savings, and the GAO did not even examine the entire federal government.
Within and across these missions, this report touches [...]

The Value-Added Tax Must Be Stopped-Unless We Want America to Become Greece

Sooner or later, there will be a giant battle in Washington over the value-added tax. The people who want bigger government (and the people who are willing to surrender to big government) understand that a new source of tax revenue is needed to turn the United States into a European-style social welfare state. But that’s [...]

Defunding Obama’s Union Led Regulatory Army

You might recall that with great fanfare and the slobberingly positive coverage by the Old Media, President Obama made Reagan-like and claimed that he thought it was time to get rid of the regulations strangling American business. Since that time he’s met with businesses and pretended to suddenly be a pro-business, pro-economic growth president. His [...]

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