The Unbroken Window

Sorry to have been so silent on the recent Buffet Tax dustup. There’s lots to say but I am otherwise distracted. Here, David Henderson captures exactly why I am apoplectic about it, ignoring for the time being what anyone thinks about rates, justice, fairness – the fact of the matter is, there is an utter [...]

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Here’s a short but sweet one. Can we pass and enforce legislation that requires every piece of legislation to state clearly how long it is supposed to last, what its objectives are, what guidelines will be used for measuring whether these objectives have been met, and criteria for penalizing stakeholders when or if the program [...]

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Warren Meyer helps answer our dear technocrats’ question: In an idealized Platonic technocratic world that many Lefists still insist on believing we actually live in, trustworthy and knowledgeable agents of the state would work up such a list and we could fund it, happy we have made a good financial decision.  But we don’t live in that world, as [...]

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A loyal follower links to this story: Natural gas drilling spreads STD among ‘womenfolk’ Yes, I am sure that the rough women of Pennsylvania mount the drilling rigs to get their groove on. Lord knows what they did before the rigs arrived. Now of course our dearly elected representative did not mean that. But let’s [...]

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You didn’t think I was actually going to write about food, did you? In today’s news, we learn that several municipal governments have decided to stop using the services of Standard & Poors (S&P). Why do municipalities rely on S&P services? Well, beyond the obvious need to have their “sovereign” debt issues rated, some municipalities [...]

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I didn’t and don’t really care to comment on the debt ceiling and spending fiasco. The fact that I would even have to defend a doubling of federal spending in less than a decade or an increase in spending of over $1 trillion since President Bush left office as “large and perhaps unwarranted” is shocking. [...]

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But will the progressives and greenies also support it? In the 2008 bank bailout bill there was a rider tucked into it to support a plug-in hybrid vehicle tax credit. Now I am sure all of my readers are keenly aware of how this prescient act of government saved the financial sector and turned the [...]

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The following bar chart demonstrates the spending levels of the various federal agencies between 2006 and last year. Over that time, federal expenditures increased from $2.66 trillion to $3.72 trillion, an increase of over 40%. During this time period, prices rose by about 8% and population rose by about 3.5%, so in real per capita [...]

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Reflect upon the dire budget situations across Europe and the inability of even the worst off countries to commit to serious policy changes. Reflect upon the fact that the United States is unable to even propose a budget, much less pass one, that takes a stab at the deficit and long-run entitlement conundrum. Now ask [...]

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For some reason, I never noticed that New York State also recently passed a property tax cap. That means absolutely nothing to me. In fact, I think it might possibly make things worse. Is the cap supposed to persuade localities and school districts to spend less? That will never happen, and here is one reason [...]

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