Our politicians have placed any number of barriers in the way of prosperity, and one of the most costly has been the Dodd-Frank financial reforms (DF). Congress passed this 2,300-page law in 2010. It has since spawned a massive new regulatory environment with an impact reaching far beyond the nation’s $1.1 trillion financial services industry.
Writing in The Orange County Register, the distinguished urbanologist Joel Kotkin notes that many conservatives are now “waging a war on middle-class America” through their support for trendy progressive “smart growth” policies. Such policies are the stock in trade of an urban planning movement that has been in power for about a quarter-century now, promoted by certain business interests (aka rent-seekers) in a coalition with elitist progressive politicians and upper-class and aspiring-upper-class cultural snobs.
Featured · Government · Politics · Taxes
It seems that when Chief Justice John Marshall was preparing the opinion for McCulloch v. Maryland he tapped into an eternal truth. “The power to tax is the power to destroy,” he wrote on behalf of a unanimous Supreme Court. Those words are no less true in 2014 than they were in 1819. Taxation appropriates money from one person or group of people in order to give it to others. There is no way to escape taxes. But there is a way to make taxes somewhat fairer. One way is to make taxes flatter and expand the tax base.
A new book by French economist Thomas Piketty on “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” has recently caused a major stir on the opinion pages of newspapers and magazines. Piketty has resurrected from the ash heap of history Karl Marx’s claim that capitalism inescapably leads to a worsening unequal distribution of wealth with dangerous consequences for human society.
Today, more than any time, arguably, since the Great Depression, the prospects for improved housing outcomes are dimming for both the American middle and working classes. Not only is ownership dropping to twenty-year lows, there is a growing gap between the amount of new housing being built and the growth of demand.
President Obama paints pretty pictures with flowery pro-growth and populist rhetoric. But the results are consistently the opposite of his promises.
Achieving and sustaining such economic growth should be the central focus of national economic policy, for it would solve every problem that plagues and threatens us today.
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · Featured · Politics
At the end of 2013, after serving five years, Barack Obama is a complete failure as President, by his own standards, as reflected in his own words.
Economics · Featured · Liberty · Politics · Random
With all the talk of America’s forgotten middle class, it’s worth taking time as we begin a new year to consider that the country’s seeming obsession with wealth and inequality may instead be turning the U. S. into a country with only two classes: the governed and the governing.
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · Featured · Politics
So-called Progressives like to talk in code words, because they know if they told the American people what they were really thinking, they would never get elected.
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · Featured · Health Care · Politics
Earlier this month, President Obama tried to change the subject from Obamacare by pitching some rhetoric on “equality” to rally his Far Left base. Not much thoughtful or helpful is[…]
Economics · Featured · Liberty · Regulation
Inequality is his middle name.
Economics · Featured · Politics · Random
President Obama’s speech yesterday on inequality is being lauded as one of the best of his life, by people who paid attention to it. It’s a sad speech to read, in some sense, since it contains within it the promise of a presidency that we never saw come to fruition – the sort of policy effort that might have been launched to bipartisan success in the first year of his presidency, instead of his effort on Obamacare.
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · Featured · Random
Ninety years ago, on November 15, 1923, the Great German Inflation came to an end when the monetary printing presses were finally shut down, and the economic havoc came to an end. Its lessons are worth remembering.
Budgets/Taxes · Featured · Politics
This is a true Tea Party agenda that should be the Republican agenda, and the true American Kennedy Democrat agenda.
It hardly needs to be said that today’s liberals and conservatives loath one another, nor that the nation is as sharply divided politically as in the days before the Civil War.
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · Liberty · Politics
“Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and[…]
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · Health Care · Politics
[First posted at Forbes.] Steve Moore begins his brilliant new book, Who’s the Fairest of Them All? The Truth About Opportunity, Taxes and Wealth In America, quoting President Obama saying: We’ve sought[…]
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · Politics
[First posted at Forbes.] Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon note in their underappreciated work, It’s Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years, that in[…]
Education · Health Care · Politics
[Published at Investors Business Daily, September 26] When we talk about recipients of entitlements, we are typically referring to either of two kinds of Americans: the poor and the elderly.[…]
NEWS: The Heartlander
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