All Posts Tagged With: "government spending"

Why the Titanic Is Sinking

The Declaration of Gratitude would destroy the assumption that government spending harms no one.

23Nov2011 | James L. Payne | 18 comments | Continued

What Congress Is Fighting Over

Here’s what the growth in federal spending would look like with and without the ten-year $1.2 trillion “cut” to be trigged by the supercommittee’s failure. HT: Nick Gillespie

21Nov2011 | Sheldon Richman | 33 comments | Continued

Dangerous Political Naifs

Being well past the age of 50 and having spent nearly all my adult life as an academic economist, I seize the privilege of doing what so many other economists of my age and rank do—namely, offer unsolicited speculations about what is right and what is wrong with modern economics. First, something that is right. [...]

26Oct2011 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 10 comments | Continued

Taxation Is the Lifeblood of the State

The cliffhanger debate over whether or not to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling threw U.S. fiscal policy into brighter relief than it has been in recent memory. Suddenly people were calling for significant cuts in government spending in the face of a rapidly growing national debt. As often happens, calls for cuts in government [...]

26Oct2011 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 4 comments | Continued

The Infrastructure Delusion: Getting Nowhere Faster

Infrastructure does not an economy make. Highways and railroads, airports and seaports, communications towers and fiber-optic cables are essential for the flow of commerce, but it is the people, goods, and information moving over and through this infrastructure that are the heart of an economy. Overinvestment in roads, bridges, and airports means underinvestment in the [...]

26Oct2011 | Richard W. Fulmer | 12 comments | Continued

Missing Samuel Tilden

If you’re under 50 you probably don’t remember when telephone “numbers” weren’t all numbers. From the 1920s until the mid-1960s most phone “numbers” began with two letters corresponding to certain digits on a common telephone dial. KL7-1234, for example, was read as “Klondike 7-1234.” My family’s number was TI3-8597. The letters were meant to honor [...]

26Oct2011 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | Continued

Progressive Intolerance

Television pundits increasingly express an attitude that is at once arrogant and ignorant: The people who oppose Keynesian economics—specifically an increase in government deficit spending to create jobs and jumpstart the economy—are the same kind of people who also believe that the earth is only several thousand years old (rather than 4.5 billion), that evolution [...]

26Oct2011 | Sheldon Richman | 7 comments | Continued

More Government Action Needed for Job Recovery?

Would it come as a shock to hear one of the best-known apologists for government intervention in the economy admitting that it hasn’t worked (so far)? This is exactly what Nobel Prize-winning economist and uber-Keynesian Paul Krugman does in a New York Times column, stating, “[W]e are not now and have never been on the [...]

26Oct2011 | Tyler Watts | 1 comment | Continued

Elizabeth Warren’s Non Sequitur

Boiled down, Warren’s argument is that since everyone has paid taxes to provide services without which wealthy people couldn’t have made their money, they should pay more. How does that follow?

23Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 82 comments | Continued

Growing Government Ensures “National Greatness”?

There is widespread belief among politicians, public officials, and pundits that if government doesn’t give us the seeds, nothing will grow. A friend of mine served on our city’s legislative council for eight years. During that time he often heard—in defense of tax-funded business incentives—“If we don’t do something, nothing will happen.” The same belief [...]

21Sep2011 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 6 comments | Continued

Depression, War, and Recovery

Keynesians find comfort in rising macroeconomic aggregates while ignoring how flesh-and-blood people actually live.

9Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 25 comments | Continued

The Struggle to Limit Government: A Modern Political History

Today’s most crucial policy battles are about federal spending and the scope of government power. Cato Institute scholar John Samples reminds us in this book that those battles have their origins in the Progressive era, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Early in the twentieth century Herbert Croly (cofounder of The New Republic) argued [...]

24Aug2011 | Greg Kaza | 0 comments | Continued

Affording It All

People who don’t understand—or who don’t care about—economics say funny things. Well, they would be funny if they weren’t so damaging when translated into government policy. Take Lawrence O’Donnell, host of MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. He must be a smart guy. He’s articulate. He’s been an adviser to a senator of some [...]

24Aug2011 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued

Paul Krugman: We Need to Be Attacked by Aliens

It is widely publicized by now that Paul Krugman, Nobel-Prize-winning economist and all-around smart fellow, said that an attack by aliens would do wonders for the economy because the government would have to engage in massive spending to repel the threat. This is just a variation on the old “War War II Ended the Depression” [...]

16Aug2011 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

Washington’s Idea of Budget Cutting

HT: John Stossel

13Aug2011 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

The Debt Sky

Some pundits wonder if the economy can “weather the budget cuts” (sic).

5Aug2011 | Sheldon Richman | 18 comments | Continued

Taxation Is Still Robbery

It is sad that most self-styled lovers of humanity embrace a money-raising system grounded in the threat of physical force – violence — against people who themselves have not used force.

15Jul2011 | Sheldon Richman | 28 comments | Continued
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