It�s September, and election season is under way. Marching to the tune of President Obama�s class-based political rhetoric, some candidates for Congress are campaigning on promises to raise taxes significantly on electorally safe targets. This year�s list of victims includes �the rich,� Wall Street and America�s oil companies. Those three groups are in Washington�s…
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Private saving and investment are the heart and soul of the dynamic market process. Together they provide and allocate the resources used to augment the economy�s productive capacity, generate sustained long-run economic growth, and thereby make possible a rising level of living. Economic crises interrupt this process by discouraging investors and causing them to…
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In 1998, the Pentagon budget was at a twenty-three year low at $361 billion (in constant 2010 dollars). For 2010, the DOD budget was $697 billion (also 2010 dollars, as are all the rest that follow). According to the analysis of the Project on Defense Alternatives, between 1998 and 2010 Congress appropriated to the…
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During the Great Depression, economist John Maynard Keynes recommended increasing federal government spending, financed by borrowing, to boost the U.S. economy. It didn�t matter how the new money was spent. If no better use could be found, Keynes suggested building pyramids. Keynes� theory that increased public spending would offset declines in consumer and business…
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The failed and bankrupt Los Angeles public school district is spending money like there’s no tomorrow�which for the students it’s failing to educate is unfortunately true. The school district, currently running a $640 million deficit, is spending $578 million�about $140,000 per student�on a new, 24-acre school in the middle of Los Angeles. At the…
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I pose this question seriously, not as a physiologist, but as an economic historian. I am provoked to raise the question by an advertisement that Amazon sent me recently, calling my attention a book titled Can Capitalism Survive? Creative Destruction and the Future of the Global Economy. Seeing this sales pitch, my immediate reaction…
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Regime uncertainty has gained increasing recognition as the current economic troubles have persisted with little or no improvement since the economy reached a cyclical trough early in 2009. As described in my 1997 paper, regime uncertainty pertains to “the likelihood that investors� private property rights in their capital and the income it yields will…
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Independent Institute Senior Fellow William F. Shughart II‘s new article, “We must cut taxes, curb spending and crimp regulations,” is being syndicated by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services to newspapers across the United States and Canada, including the Sacramento Bee, Lexington Herald-Leader, Standard Times (Bedford, MA), Bellingham Herald, Albany Times-Union, Guelph Mercury, Kitchener Record, etc. “The…
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Far from being an investment program, Social Security is a pay-as-you-go operation where new revenues are spent immediately and future entitlements are funded exclusively through the promise to tax workers in the future, many of whom haven�t even been born yet. It is taxation without representation in the most cynical sense. The program is…
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In my recent article in Investor’s Business Daily, I discuss the enormous harm from and hypocrisy of federal economic policies as they inhibit private entrepreneurship. The current era has been dubbed the “Information Age,� and well it is. Never before has so much information been available so broadly and on such a level of…
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