spending

Today bigger, supremely powerful global governments are justified by environmental claims.

Cutting taxes — as opposed to restraining the growth in future tax increases or swapping a reduction in property taxes for an increase in the state sales tax — appears to be a nearly insurmountable obstacle.

Mediocrity has become normalized and institutionalized.

If only I had a dime for every time I have heard the claim America needs to spend more money on education.

John Nothdurft and Donny Kendal present episode #92 of the In The Tank Podcast. Today’s podcast features work from the John Locke Foundation, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, and the Cato Institute.

A U.S. Department of Education study conducted at the end of Obama’s tenure finds what has been obvious for the past decades: substantial federal spending alongside strict regulation helps schools improve not one iota.

In this episode of The Heartland Institute’s weekly Budget & Tax News podcast, managing editor and research fellow Jesse Hathaway talks with Mercatus Center at George Mason University Spending and Budget Initiative program manager Adam Michel about a new study on which he collaborated, about how the U.S. tax code is holding back the nation’s prosperity-building power, and how common-sense tax reforms could unleash the nation’s economic beast and make America great again.

In this episode of the weekly Budget & Tax News podcast, managing editor and research fellow Jesse Hathaway talks with Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions criminal justice fellow Daniel Dye about criminal justice reform, debunking some of the myths around this new idea.

Many energy-producing states are currently struggling in the wake of falling oil and natural gas prices. Thousands of people are losing their livelihoods in the energy sector, and lower severance tax payments are projected to produce numerous state budget shortfalls, which could end up reducing state spending on social programs.

Eighty years go, on February 4, 1936, one of the most influential books of the last one hundred years was published, British economist, John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. With it was born what has become known as Keynesian Economics.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has often talked about his desire for the United States to emulate the socialist welfare states of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden by providing free college and health care and expanding Social Security. Sanders also wants to ban oil, natural gas, and coal production on lands owned by the federal government, and he has called for a ban on hydraulic fracturing, which has dramatically increased production of oil and natural gas in the United States.

President Barack Obama delivered his final State of the Union address on January 12, 2016, and devoted most of the time to defending his “legacy” of bigger and more intrusive government, with an emphasis on the other aspects of personal and social life he wished could come under the blanket of more political paternalism, if only there was enough time before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

The decades-old legislation that prevented American producers from exporting oil is officially overturned—despite previous presidential threats to veto a bill to lift the oil export ban. That’s good policy. However, to get the support of “reluctant Democrats,” The Economist reports: “an additional five years of tax credits for wind and solar power” was part of the package. That’s bad energy policy.