All Posts Tagged With: "government spending"
The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
If you were to believe spokesmen for the Obama regime and its allied pseudo-economists, there is no tradeoff between the size of government and our standard of living. On the contrary, they would like people to believe that the bigger the government gets, the more it can “stimulate” the economy and solve all sorts of [...]
18Nov2009 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedProfit is Bad for Your Health?
Many self-styled healthcare “reformers” favor a “public” (read: government) insurance option. The advantage of the government plan, President Obama said, is that “there wouldn’t be a profit motive involved.” Some supporters hoped the public option would be a step toward a single-payer government-run system in which the profit motive would disappear entirely from healthcare decisions.
Suspicion [...]
Old, Bold Futility
In economic analysis and policy formulation, profundity is not to be confused with complexity. And simple logic is not the same as simplicity. Reliance in thought and communication on shortcut slogans and mottos yields not solution but fiasco.
With employment slumping, many would have us believe in a simplistic “bold economic recovery program.” With vast public-works [...]
Keynes’s Ghost
The multiplier argument is founded on two key assumptions that turn out to be false. First is the notion that savings are not spent but rather are withdrawn from the expenditure stream. The multiplier’s second incorrect premise is that government expenditures are “autonomous”; that is, government spending does not depend on current income.
9Jun2009 | James C. W. Ahiakpor | 3 comments | ContinuedTwo Cheers for Transparency
If citizens knew more about how their governments really worked and what they spent other people’s money on, it would not only make for better-informed citizens but for better (and hopefully less) government at the same time.
That’s the theory behind a growing movement spearheaded by think tanks from coast to coast and in Canada. It’s [...]
The Return of Keynesianism
Keynesian economics is an account of economywide employment that rather too simply alleges that economic health and growth—and, hence, the number of jobs—declines with decreases in “aggregate demand” and improves with increases in “aggregate demand.” No need to bother with questions about how well individual markets are working; no need to worry that the money supply might be growing too fast and causing individual prices to be out of whack—no! The economy is really much simpler, said Keynes, than those silly classical economists, such as Adam Smith, made it out to be.
21May2009 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | ContinuedMr. Obama, Tear Down This Wall!
All of us should worry, if not panic, when we remember that the walls keeping others out also keep us in.
21May2009 | Becky Akers | 60 comments | ContinuedThe Trouble with Keynes
Keynesian theory implies an inherent instability in market economies. Thus the theory cannot possibly explain how a healthy market economy functions—how the market process allows one kind of activity to be traded off against the other.
1Apr2009 | Roger W. Garrison | 2 comments | ContinuedHow Bad Can it Get?
In August the Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF) in Washington state released its State of Labor 2008 (the Report), which warns of several perils emanating from the growth of government-sector collective bargaining and offers suggestions for ameliorating them. (The Report is available in PDF here .) I predict these perils will soon be much more severe [...]
20Jan2009 | Charles W. Baird | 0 comments | ContinuedThe New Deal and the State and Local Governments
Until the twentieth century the average American in peacetime had little contact with the federal government, except for the post office, and the federal government’s policies and actions affected most people only indirectly—for example, through land-disposition policies or the tariff’s effect on commodity prices. State and local governments provided nearly all the government services the [...]
1Mar2008 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedMadison’s Veto Sets a Precedent
Burton Folsom, Jr. is the Charles Kline Professor in History and Management at Hillsdale College. His book The Myth of the Robber Barons is in its fifth edition.
Today, when a president looks at a spending bill that has passed Congress, he typically asks, “How will this help my party gain votes?” and “What interest groups [...]
Something Besides Money Growth Causes Inflation? It Just Ain’t So!
Howard Baetjer, Jr. is a lecturer in economics at Towson University.
Some economic phenomena can result from a variety of causes. A temporary increase in unemployment, for example, might be caused by a sudden, disruptive change in production technology, or in trade patterns, or in labor or tax laws; or it could be caused by natural [...]
Europe: Still a Laggard Economy
There have been increasing signs of optimism from European economy watchers. After some years in the doldrums, with slow growth and rising unemployment, things appear to be looking up: labor markets are more efficient; growth was good for 2006; and the euro is doing well against the dollar after years of weakness following its inception [...]
1Mar2007 | Norman Barry | 0 comments | ContinuedLeviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution
By Michael D. Tanner Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
1Mar2007 | agardner | 0 comments | ContinuedConstitution Day
On September 17, 1787, 39 men signed the U.S. Constitution. Each year since 2004 we have celebrated Constitution Day as a result of legislation, fathered by Senator Robert Byrd, that requires federal agencies and every school that receives federal funds, including universities, to have some kind of program on the Constitution. I cannot think of [...]
1Nov2006 | Walter E.Williams | 3 comments | ContinuedKeynesian Economics and Constitutional Government
Last month 650 economists called for an increase in the federal minimum wage, saying it was the responsibility of the government to “improve the well-being of low-wage workers” by mandating the terms under which people may be employed. Among these economists were five recipients of the Nobel Prize in economics. One of them was Lawrence [...]
1Nov2006 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedJohn Maynard Keynes: The Damage Still Done by a Defunct Economist
Seventy years ago, on February 4, 1936, the English economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) published what soon became his most famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Few books, in so short a time, have gained such wide influence and generated so destructive an impact on public policy. What Keynes succeeded in [...]
1May2006 | Richard M. Ebeling | 32 comments | Continued-
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
