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 [...]

Why are California Republicans Permitting Eminent Domain Abuse?

Partisan politics shouldn’t stand in the way of protecting private property rights.   Unfortunately in California, Republicans are siding with bureaucracy, Big Government and eminent domain abuse.

In an effort to close the state’s budget gap, Governor Brown has proposed eliminating California’s 400+ redevelopment agencies.  Redevelopment in California is a $1.7 billion, state-subsidized boondoggle.

Sadly, only one Republican [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

BIG NEWS: Federal Court Halts Shocking Property Rights Abuse

You really have to see this one to believe it:

The video above was just released by the Institute for Justice. It begins with an elderly woman lamenting:
When my son came back from Kuwait he couldn’t believe it.  He said, “Mom, what’s going on?” And I said, well they want to get rid of us and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

One Chart that Tells You Everything You Need to Know about State and Local Government Pay

The showdown in Wisconsin has generated competing claims about whether state and local government bureaucrats are paid too much or paid too little compared to their private sector counterparts.
The data on total compensation clearly show a big advantage for state and local bureaucrats, largely because of lavish benefits (which is the problem that  Governor Walker [...]

Spending Restraint Works: Examples from Around the World

America faces a fiscal crisis. The burden of federal spending has doubled during the Bush-Obama years, a $2 trillion increase in just 10 years. But that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Because of demographic changes and poorly designed entitlement programs, the federal budget is going to consume larger and larger shares of America’s [...]

Obama’s Budget Means the Burden of Government Spending Will be $2 Trillion Higher in Ten Years

Fiscal policy wonks (like me, I’m forced to admit) sometimes miss the forest because we focus too much on individual trees.
So while I think my posts on the spending and revenue sides of Obama’s new budget contained lots of useful information, I didn’t pay any attention to the elephant in the room (I’m really going [...]

To Fix the Budget, Bring Back Reagan…or Even Clinton

President Obama unveiled his fiscal year 2012 budget today, and there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that there’s no major initiative such as the so-called stimulus scheme or the government-run healthcare proposal. The bad news, though, is that government is far too big and Obama’s budget does nothing to address this [...]

Obama the Born-Again Budget Cutter?!?

Chalk up another victory – at least on the rhetorical level – for the Tea Party.

President Obama will release his fiscal year 2012 budget Monday and he’s apparently become a born-again fiscal conservative. Here are some excerpts from a Washington Post story.
President Obama will respond to a Republican push for a drastic reduction in government [...]

The Free Frontier

All of my life I wanted to be an astronaut. I starting working in the Miami Planetarium at age 13; studied aeronautics and engineering and propulsion systems, and was stopped only by a 20/25 left eye during an exam for the US Air Force Academy. But space exploration has always been my primary passion.
Here is [...]

Four Reasons Why Big Government Is Bad Government

A new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity gives four reasons why big government is bad fiscal policy.

I particularly like the explanation of how government spending undermines growth by diverting labor and capital from the productive sector of the economy.
Some cynics, though, say that it is futile to make arguments for good policy. [...]

Minneapolis Fed Data Compares Reaganomics and Obamanomics

Ronald Reagan would have been 100 years old on February 6, so let’s celebrate his life by comparing the success of his pro-market policies with the failure of Barack Obama’s policies (which are basically a continuation of George W. Bush’s policies, so this is not a partisan jab).
The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has a [...]

New CBO Numbers Re-Confirm that Balancing the Budget Is Simple with Modest Fiscal Restraint

Many of the politicians in Washington, including President Obama during his State-of-the-Union address, piously tell us that there is no way to balance the budget without tax increases. Trying to get rid of red ink without higher taxes, they tell us, would require “savage” and “draconian” budget cuts.
I would like to slash the budget and [...]

European Central Bank Studies Show Spending Restraint Is Key to Controlling Red Ink

I’m not a big fan of central banks, and I definitely don’t like multilateral bureaucracies, so I almost feel guilty about publicizing two recent studies published by the European Central Bank. But when such an institution puts out research that unambiguously makes the case for smaller government, it’s time to sit up and take notice. [...]

Which European Nation Will Be the Next Debt Domino…or Will It Be the United States?

Thanks to decades of reckless spending by European welfare states, the newspapers are filled with headlines about debt, default, contagion, and bankruptcy.
We know that Greece and Ireland already have received direct bailouts, and other European welfare states are getting indirect bailouts from the European Central Bank, which is vying with the Federal Reserve in a [...]

Republican Sellout Watch

Grousing about the GOP’s timidity in the battle against big government will probably become an ongoing theme over the next few months, and  let’s start with two items that don’t bode well for fiscal discipline.

First, it appears that Republicans didn’t really mean it when they promised to cut $100 billion of so-called discretionary spending as [...]

Five Lessons from Ireland

The news is going from bad to worse for Ireland. The Irish Independent is reporting that the Swiss Central Bank no longer will accept Irish government bonds as collateral. The story also notes that one of the world’s largest bond firms, PIMCO, is no longer purchasing debt issued by the Irish government.
And this is happening [...]

Supply Side Obama? Trust but Verify

The past is not always a prologue to the future. But looking at some of the big winners and losers of 2010 does provide some strong hints of a positive 2011.
The biggest winner last year was the Tea Party, which shellacked President Obama in the election. Mr. Obama becomes the biggest loser. And the economy [...]

Five Things We Should Worry about in 2011

The mid-term elections were a rejection of President Obama’s big-government agenda, but those results don’t necessarily mean better policy. We should not forget, after all, that Democrats rammed through Obamacare even after losing the special election to replace Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts (much to my dismay, my prediction from last January was correct).

Similarly, GOP control [...]

The Hijacking of Conservatism by Big Government Progressives

Hey conservatives, are you there?
No I don’t mean you Republicans…I mean those of you who are lovers of liberty! I mean those of you who defend the Constitution, not just when it protects them but when it protects someone they don’t like. I know you’re out there. You may be a Libertarian or an independent, [...]

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