All Posts Tagged With: "Obama"
Cash for Clunkers Was a Loser
President Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program, inspired by the Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act, ended August 25, 2009. As I drove through a major shopping area that day, I passed a large and highly successful Toyota dealer. Just past the sparkling showroom and sparsely populated lot of new cars, “clunkers” sat in a [...]
18Nov2009 | Bruce Yandle | 1 comment | ContinuedArt Needs No State Subsidies
It’s feeding time again, and artists and cultural groups are lining up at the trough. The bailout package approved by Congress in February threw another $50 million at the arts. For the better part of the past year, music impresario Quincy Jones beseeched Barack Obama to add a secretary of arts to his cabinet. In [...]
23Oct2009 | Bruce Edward Walker | 1 comment | ContinuedStealth Expansion of Government Power
The government of the United States spent the year debating major new undertakings, ranging from health care to climate change to energy development to tax reform. Yet a far more fundamental shift, in the form of a rapid and pervasive expansion of government power over the private sector of the economy, has been going on [...]
23Oct2009 | Murray Weidenbaum | 0 comments | ContinuedOld, 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 [...]
The “I Hate the Poor” Act of 2009
So I was shaving the other day, and the man on the morning talk radio show was on a roll. Cash for Clunkers was being temporarily shut down, or so declared the PR flack in the Department of Waste that administers the program, and Talk Show Guy thought this taught great lessons. “This was a good program! [...]
23Oct2009 | Christopher Westley | 4 comments | ContinuedGovernment Motors
Government Motors
by Michael Heberling
Michael Heberling (mheber01@baker.edu) is president of the Baker College Center for Graduate Studies in Flint, Michigan.
If Washington owns it, it just can’t keep its hands off.
—Senator Lamar Alexander
Twenty-five years ago President Reagan told auto workers in Orion, Michigan, “You’ve demonstrated when the chips are down, what people can do working together freely, [...]
If You Really Love Volunteers, Mr. Obama . . .
Barack Obama gave volunteerism a big boost early this year, visiting service centers on Martin Luther King Day, greeting volunteers, and working alongside them. “Everybody’s got to be involved,” he said. “If we’re waiting for somebody else to do something, it never gets done. We’re going to have to take responsibility, all of us.”
These are [...]
Arrogance
It’s crazy for a group of mere mortals to try to design 15 percent of the U.S. economy. It’s even crazier to do it in a few months.
Yet that is what some members of Congress presumed to do. They intended, as the New York Times put it, “to reinvent the nation’s health care system.”
Let that [...]
The Real Meaning of Privilege
“They live in an expensive mansion, fly first-class to foreign countries, and eat at the finest restaurants. They send their kids to private schools. They’re so privileged.” How often have you heard some variant of the lines above? I’d bet it’s a lot. Yet, typically, the word “privileged” is inaccurate. We certainly all know or [...]
23Sep2009 | David R. Henderson | 6 comments | ContinuedTransforming America: The Bush-Obama Stimulus Programs
George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s “stimulus” programs will permanently transform the American economy. The market-based system that has produced unprecedented prosperity relies on profit and loss, which rewards individuals and firms that add value to the economy and penalizes those that detract value. The various stimulus programs undermine that system.
My discussion will focus on [...]
What is Seen and What is Unseen: Government “Job Creation”
How can Obama and his economic advisers know what kinds of jobs will position our economy to “lead the world” in the long term? Indeed, how can we expect anyone to know what kinds of jobs will be able to offer such a guarantee of wealth and security, considering the enormous complexity of our world?
10Jun2009 | Larissa Price | 2 comments | ContinuedIn Praise of Tax Havens
According to stereotypes, tax havens are little islands in the Caribbean, and indeed that’s true of some of the world’s premiere offshore centers. But to be more accurate, a tax haven is any jurisdiction that satisfies two criteria: First, its tax laws are attractive to global investors and entrepreneurs, and second, it protects its fiscal sovereignty by choosing not to enforce the bad tax laws of other nations, at least when they are trying to tax economic activity outside their borders. This means, of course, that individuals and businesses from high-tax nations have the option of using those jurisdictions as havens against excessive taxation.
10Jun2009 | Daniel Mitchell | 2 comments | Continued-
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Book Reviews
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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
