Fiscal Policy

The Transportation “Fiscal Cliff”

by Laurence M. Vance July 3, 2014

Every few months in Washington, D.C., there is some perceived crisis that headlines newspapers for a few weeks before fading away or being overcome by the next crisis. They are generally crises of the government’s own making and are due to its reckless spending and continued operation of unconstitutional agencies and programs. This time it is the transportation “fiscal cliff.” The ...

Lysander Spooner on the National Debt

by Sheldon Richman January 1, 2014

Once again, last autumn we were inundated with dire warnings about what would befall the American people and the world economy if Congress did not raise the debt ceiling — or, as I call it, the debt sky, because apparently the sky’s the limit. As he has each time this issue has come up, Barack Obama emphasized that increasing the ...

The Keynes Disaster

by Gregory Bresiger October 31, 2013

The government and the private sector should start spending more to turn the economy around. That’s what a former Obama administration official, speaking to a recent UBS adviser conference, said in making no apologies for the administration’s poor performance since 2009. Indeed, he said that Barack Obama had “saved” the country from a depression in 2009. He also called ...

TGIF: Default Circus — er, Crisis — Averted?

by Sheldon Richman October 18, 2013

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken Even the sagacious Mencken might be amazed by what’s happening these days. Wherever we look, there are hobgoblins. The latest is — insert

The Libertarian Angle: What Shutdown?

by Future of Freedom Foundation October 7, 2013

Jacob Hornberger and Sheldon Richman discuss the government shutdown that is anything but. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly.

Digging Out

by Richard W. Fulmer October 1, 2013

Pundits are full of advice about how and how not to pull the country out of its financial morass. Rebuild infrastructure or cut spending, increase deficit spending or reduce the debt, raise or lower taxes, regulate or deregulate, implement a new industrial policy or get government out of the economy, open the monetary floodgates or end the Fed’s easy-money ...

What Sequestration Should Really Look Like

by Laurence M. Vance March 12, 2013

It’s official: sequestration has begun. Barack Obama has formally signed an order to put into effect the across-the-board government spending cuts known as “sequestration.” After failing to broker a deal at a meeting between Democratic (Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi) and Republican (John Boehner and Mitch McConnell) House and Senate leaders, the president told journalists, “Not everyone will ...

TGIF: Sequestration and the Chimera of the Informed Voter

by Sheldon Richman March 1, 2013

I spent too much time and effort this week trying to figure out the budget implications of sequestration. This made me wonder how many, well, normal people would be willing to do that. If the answer is “not many,” then in what sense can we talk about the “informed voter”? And if the “informed voter” is a chimera, how ...

The American People Need Real Spending Cuts

by Sheldon Richman February 20, 2013

President Obama and other so-called progressives insist that the American people are not overly dependent on government. They also predict dire consequences if the automatic budget “cuts” known as sequestration take place March 1. Both claims cannot be true. If modest across-the-board “cuts” — mainly cuts in the rate of growth — in military and domestic spending pose a threat ...

Is Today’s Argentina Tomorrow’s America?

by Michael Tennant February 15, 2013

Americans wondering what to expect as their government piles on more debt and refuses to cut spending do not need to look any further than Argentina. A nation once among the most prosperous in the world is now deeply in debt, hemorrhaging cash, and trying to inflate its way out of the mess it has created. This inflation, naturally, ...

Pork-Barrel Spending: The History of Lipsticking Pigs

by Wendy McElroy January 17, 2013

A December 15, 2012, headline in the New York Post declared, “Obama Sandy Aid Bill Filled with Holiday Goodies Unrelated to Storm Damage.” The announced purpose of the $60.4 billion bill was to provide disaster aid to East Coast individuals and communities devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Instead, the bill was so laden with unrelated and politically inspired handouts ...

The Plunder Continues

by Tim Kelly January 11, 2013

It was clear the fix was in the moment the term “fiscal cliff” was coined to describe the series of spending cuts and tax increases that were set to kick in on January 1, 2013. The American people were told in 2011 that the debt ceiling needed to be raised again to avert an outright default on the national debt. ...