Jon N. Hall

Jon N. Hall

  • November 30, 2022

    Citizenship and Intervening in Elections

    With the ongoing invasion over the last two years by millions of foreigners at our southern border, America has a much bigger election integrity problem than before Joe Biden became president. So, just how did California, Arizona, New Mexico and othe...

  • November 2, 2022

    Duty and Democracy

    What good is the government? As has been said over and over, the first duty of government is to protect the People. In fact, the Constitution was established to “provide for the common defense.” Since that quote comes from the very fir...

  • October 25, 2022

    A song for patriots

    One of the more disturbing recent developments in America is the toppling of statuary — i.e., the destruction of public art that celebrates our history and heroes.  It's a part of the left's ongoing War on the Past. Given t...

  • September 29, 2022

    Inflation, Shutdowns, and Trending Authoritarianism -- Yes, They Are Connected

    Inflation has been summed up as “too much money chasing too few goods.” Some contend that the recent uptick in price inflation is the result of an expansion of the money supply, and they date the start of that expansion back to the Sp...

  • September 5, 2022

    Quagmires in the Fed’s War on Inflation

    After the financial crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve used two policies to prop up the economy: zero percent interest rates and pumping newly-created money into the economy through quantitative easing (QE). Because of 40-year-high inflation, the Fe...

  • August 17, 2022

    Redefining ‘Recession’ for the Little People

    On July 28, the Commerce Department announced that in the second quarter U.S. gross domestic product shrank by 0.9%. If that number isn’t revised upwards, it will mean that 2022 has been a year of negative growth. Two back-to-back quarters of n...

  • July 19, 2022

    Will the Fed do the right thing on inflation?

    To fight inflation, the Federal Reserve has been raising the target on its federal funds rate.  The problem with the Fed raising the federal funds rate is that it affects other interest rates and could result in the federal government ...

  • June 29, 2022

    Cancel Culture for Serious People

    Today’s America is not a place for subtlety and nuance. Today’s youth seem especially incapable of handling fine distinctions. No interesting heterodox mix of positions will be tolerated; total conformity is required. Cleave to the party ...

  • June 22, 2022

    Inflation: Raise rates or sell assets

    In order to tamp down inflation, the Federal Reserve has started a program to raise its key interest rate target.  On June 15, the Fed raised the federal funds rate target by 75 basis points, the biggest such rate hike since 1994....

  • June 18, 2022

    Inflation: Negotiating with Reality

    Forecasters at Triple A (American Automobile Association, aka AAA) made a bunch of predictions for travel during the 2022 Memorial Day weekend. This writer has not been able to verify whether the final travel stats support their forecasts, but AAA pr...

  • May 25, 2022

    Helping the Greenies Understand Fossil Fuels

    Climate-change environmentalists worry that the Earth is too warm. They seem to think they know what the temperature of the planet should be. Those who do not share their certitude about what the correct temperature of the Earth is, call these folks ...

  • May 9, 2022

    Supply chains and the energy that fuels them

    America's disturbing supply chain problems aren't near to being fixed.  On the news we hear of store shelves not having baby formula. At the center of such breakdowns is trucking.  Everything but everything is transport...

  • April 21, 2022

    A chess champ opines on Putin

    When a situation gets complicated, such as in Putin's war on Ukraine, some analysts might observe that one side is playing chess while the other side is playing checkers.  If one really wants to emphasize how outmatched one side is, an ...

  • April 13, 2022

    The Power of One Man over a Slavish People

    The European Health Spa was a modest gym situated in Kansas City back in the old days. It was a preposterous name because the establishment was neither European nor healthy nor a spa; they didn’t even offer mud baths. In any event, between exer...

  • April 4, 2022

    What to do about what's really stoking inflation

    Back in the 1960s, if you were bored, at loose ends, or just wanted to clear your head, you might up and "go for a drive."  You'd fire up your turbocharged 15-miles-per-gallon muscle car and aimlessly tool around for a bit; yo...

  • March 23, 2022

    Children of the Corn and the Fraud of Renewable Energy

    In July of 2021, this writer took a little trip through rural Missouri. Besides visiting kinfolk whom I hadn’t seen for far too long, one purpose of my trip was simply to do something else, something different. You see, I’d become somethi...

  • March 9, 2022

    Biden’s War with Prices

    In his State of the Union Address on March 1, the president repeatedly used the word “price” and its synonym “cost.” What’s clear from his SOTU speech is that President Biden doesn’t really understand prices and pr...

  • March 2, 2022

    Working Folks and the Poodle of Congress

    In the old days, America’s working folks, the once great and sprawling middle class, had a strategy for “getting ahead” and achieving the American Dream. At the center of that strategy was saving their hard-won wages in commercial b...

  • February 15, 2022

    How Mike Pence Fell Short on January 6

    It’s easy to imagine that most Republican voters approved of former Vice President Mike Pence. They must have appreciated his loyalty to a president very different from himself. At times, Mike seemed the perfect V.P. But when it came to what wa...

  • February 8, 2022

    The 2022 Outlook for the U.S. Oil Industry

    In the media, speculation abounds over whether the price of a barrel of crude oil might soon top $100. The day that the U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude first traded above $100 was during the first day of trading in 2008. But on that Janu...

  • January 25, 2022

    The right price for a barrel of oil

    Is there such a thing as the "right price" for a barrel of crude oil?  Such a price would need to be optimal not only for producers but also for consumers as well.  Such a price would allow the oil companies to make prof...

  • January 15, 2022

    The Price of Recovery for U.S. Oil

    COVID-19 was brutal for the U.S. oil business. With the lockdowns of the economy, demand for oil and its products crashed. This writer calculated that in the first year of the pandemic, the U.S. consumed 2.4 million barrels of oil per day fewer than ...

  • December 29, 2021

    COVID-19 and the Profitability of U.S. Oil

    Donald Trump had to be the most fossil-fuel friendly U.S. president of recent times. When he became president, Trump quickly reversed Obama’s energy policies; the Keystone Pipeline was approved, imports from the Middle East were cut, and the pr...

  • November 1, 2021

    The Elusive Fairness of Taxes

    “One more thing, none of them want to pay taxes again… ever.” That’s Bruce Willis negotiating his terms to save the planet from an asteroid in Armageddon, a movie that made a ton of money, all of which was taxable. Altho...

  • October 27, 2021

    The Biden Regime Wants More Money

    In their huge reconciliation bill, the costliest in history, Democrats seek to raise taxes on both individuals and corporations and thereby undo the rate cuts in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Before Americans get on board with the Dems’ pl...

  • October 20, 2021

    Debt in the Time of Plague

    On August 11, President Joseph Robinette Biden spoke about his Build Back Better proposal, and he took the opportunity to allege this: “This isn’t going to be anything like my predecessor, whose unpaid tax cuts and other spending added ne...

  • October 6, 2021

    Capital Gains Tax Changes in the Reconciliation Bill

    Because Democrats are trying to incorporate the president’s American Families Plan into their $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, Americans should be happy that it’s having such a devil of a time getting through Congress. Biden’s ...

  • September 16, 2021

    Self-medicating for COVID with Cheap Drugs

    With the recent spate of “breakthrough cases,” we’re seeing the fully vaccinated getting infected with SARS-2, the novel coronavirus the world has been battling the last two years. Since the vaccines don’t always prevent infec...

  • September 12, 2021

    Lara Logan drops dynamite Fox News segment on Biden's sweeping vaccine mandates

    On Thursday, "President" Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. broke another of his promises by requiring vaccine mandates on most, but not all, American citizens.  The next day, Fox News aired a terrific seven-minute segment by Lara Logan ...

  • September 4, 2021

    Afghanistan and the Managerial Elite

    It will be interesting to see what Joe Biden has to say on the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks. Some believe that Biden rushed the withdrawal from Afghanistan so that he could claim on 9/11 that he had ended America’s longes...

  • August 26, 2021

    Righting the Ship of State through Extraordinary Measures

    There’s a cancer growing on the presidency. The president displays symptoms of delusion and even dementia, but it is unlikely that he will resign from office. The president is so addled that even if his family were to stage an intervention, he ...

  • August 18, 2021

    Inflation and the Reanimation of Dead Ideas

    The cover of the July-August edition of The New Republic features an interesting image of a well-known man whom one might not recognize unless one reads the blurb: “The Second Death of Milton Friedman.” On the opposite side of the cover, ...

  • August 3, 2021

    The New Normal in the Permanent Emergency

    Just when the authorities allow us to take off our masks, they demand that we put them back on. Americans might reasonably wonder if there will ever be a return to “normal.” But obey we must, lest we be in gross violation of the mandates ...

  • July 20, 2021

    Be careful whom you celebrate

    Back in April, I attended the interment of my aunt in Kearney, Missouri.  Now, I know what you're thinking: this must have something to do with Jesse James, the outlaw.  Well, as it happens, my aunt was being laid to rest in s...

  • June 29, 2021

    The Epistemology of Election Audits

    Republicans seem confident about their chances for taking back the U.S. House in the 2022 midterm elections. Some might even think that victory is a “done deal” because the electorate has finally gotten wise to what the Dems are really up...

  • June 17, 2021

    Futurist limns out future of the Biden regime

    Tuesday night at LewRockwell, I read a terrific article that laid out a plausible near future for our declining nation, "The Three-Way Squeeze" by James Howard Kunstler.  Conservatives and libertarians really ought to read it...

  • June 16, 2021

    Bitcoin, Russian TV, and Devaluing the Dollar

    The confluence of the pandemic, gargantuan deficits, Democrat rule, and frenzied money creation by the Federal Reserve has gotten a lot of economic types and investors worried. There’s talk of inflation, hyperinflation, a stock market crash, an...

  • May 29, 2021

    The Golden Age of Exquisite Interest Rates

    At the end of the Second World War, America was the world’s sole superpower: we alone had the atom bomb. Although America lost more than 400,000 military personnel in the Big One, her civilian population had remained unscathed, unlike other nat...

  • May 16, 2021

    Liz Cheney's Big Lie

    On May 12, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming was voted out of her position as the chair of the House Republican Conference.  The next day, Cheney appeared on Fox News's Special Report for an interview with Bret Baier.  It was a revea...

  • April 19, 2021

    The Federal Reserve Should Not Finance Insane New Spending

    Since the onset of the pandemic, Congress has been spending more money than ever. The pandemic hit when it was already projected that in fiscal 2020 the federal budget deficit would once again top $1 trillion. On October 16, however, USA Facts report...

  • March 29, 2021

    The States Must Resist the Federal Takeover of Elections

    Although federal courts certainly played their part, the main malefactors in the sham that was the 2020 presidential election were “the several States.” Through their court mandates, their gubernatorial malfeasance, and, especially their ...

  • February 12, 2021

    GameStop and the 'financialization' of the economy

    The recent GameStop flap has made some Americans think the stock market might just be rigged.  It's also caused some to wonder about the relation between the financial sector and the overall economy, including the creative real economy ...

  • December 30, 2020

    Tainted Electors in Post-Legal America

    The American left has been working overtime to obfuscate the real issues at the heart of whether or not the 2020 presidential election is being stolen.  For instance, when Chris Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity & Infrastructu...

  • December 18, 2020

    The Institutionalization of Election Fraud

    Many Americans, including this writer, contend that the 2020 presidential election is being stolen. About 70 percent of Republicans and even some Democrats believe that such a theft is happening. But despite considerable evidence, they cannot prove t...

  • December 1, 2020

    Examining the Evidence for Democrats' 'No Evidence of Voter Fraud' Claim

    On November 14, the U.S. edition of The Guardian ran an article by Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe headlined "Republicans are playing with fire.  And we all risk getting burned."  Tribe claimed that there is ...

  • November 16, 2020

    The Direction of America is in the Hands of State Legislators

    Many Americans don’t seem to be fully apprised of how we elect the president of “these United States.” Some, including one Hillary Rodham Clinton, rail at the very idea of the Electoral College. Such people think the president shoul...

  • November 10, 2020

    Election deadlines in post-constitutional America

    In October of 2019, the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania enacted Act 77 of 2019. This extension to Pennsylvania's Election Code provided that all residents could avail themselves of "no excuse mail-in votin...

  • November 3, 2020

    The Cure for Pennsylvania’s Mail-in Ballots

    On October 23, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that mail-in ballots must be accepted regardless of whether or not the signatures on the ballots match those on file with the state. Also on the 23rd, the Washington Times ran an article by Stephen ...

  • October 21, 2020

    How to Win Back the House in 2020

    One of the worst set of choices the American electorate ever made was the 2018 midterm elections that gave the U.S. House of Representatives to the Democrats. Those decisions gave us “the Squad,” led by socialist Sandy O, a.k.a. AOC. In p...

  • October 5, 2020

    Proving a Negative and Vetting Mail-in Ballots

    Before getting into the problems associated with mail-in ballots, let's address a basic issue of thought.  The issue has to do with the old idea that "you can't prove a negative."  Anyone who's spent any time...

  • September 24, 2020

    Making Mail-in Ballots ‘Secure’

    Although more deeply at odds than at any time since the Civil War, both sides of our fractious nation’s political divide seem to agree on this: the 2020 federal elections are the most consequential of our lifetimes. Voters are being asked to de...

  • September 9, 2020

    Salvaging the 2020 Election

    The November election is shaping up to be a repeat of the one in 2000 when recounts of the presidential vote tally dragged on for five weeks. There’s even a new website called “The Recount.” But it’s not a recount that America...

  • September 2, 2020

    New York Had It Coming

    I used to love New York City. There was so much to do and see, but if one were from the heartland like me, one could be perfectly content to just walk the streets and look at architecture and people. One might seek out venues one had seen in the movi...

  • August 29, 2020

    Missouri professor makes mask joke, gets canceled

    On Friday, August 28, a central Missouri contact of mine alerted me to a podcast that I would surely never have paid any mind to, and that's because the thrust of it is sports at the main campus of the University of Missouri (UMC) in Columbia....

  • August 24, 2020

    Democrats 'Go Postal' over Mail-in Ballots

    Real Americans and self-respecting individuals everywhere despise queuing with a passion.  Standing in a slowly-moving queue, such as at the DMV, seems to them like a foretaste of Hell.  One might even say that being made to wait in line to...

  • August 15, 2020

    Is Kamala Harris black enough?

    On August 10, Forbes reported that a group of more than 100 prominent black men had written a letter to Joe Biden demanding that he pick a black woman as his running mate.  They warned that if Biden failed to comply, he would lose the elect...

  • August 12, 2020

    Mail-in Voting and the Future of American Democracy

    It’s been twenty years since the Bush-Gore election recount debacle in Florida with its chads, butterfly ballots, lawsuits, delay, and uncertainty. Since 2000, the World Trade Center has been replaced with a gleaming new tower, babies have been...

  • August 2, 2020

    Hakeem Jeffries Lies for a Living

    On Tuesday, July 28, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing featuring Attorney General William Barr. C-SPAN posted the video of the hearing at YouTube, and it lasts for four hours and fifty minutes. Despite the length of the hearing, the transc...

  • July 22, 2020

    How to Spank the Establishment Media

    It’s astounding how the establishment media allows known Democrat liars to continue spewing out their vicious falsehoods without challenge. Our legacy media has concluded, perhaps correctly, that Americans just aren’t concerned about seri...

  • July 12, 2020

    Violence to History the Mob Will Love

    The inescapable problem of “period pieces,” i.e. movies set in the past, is that much of the past has been lost. History is incomplete and some of it is highly debated. So, there will likely be a fair amount of invention in your average p...

  • June 24, 2020

    Resisting the Mob and Restoring Order

    In his 1970 Playboy interview, the celebrated writer Robert Graves floated a nifty idea on how we should bring up young people. Interviewer James McKinley asked Graves, “Are there any circumstances under which you would condone the use of drugs...

  • June 3, 2020

    Bob Johnson’s dreadful $14.7T proposal

    Monday evening on Fox News’ Special Report, Bret Baier interviewed Bob Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET), about a proposal that he had just made. It’s appropriate that Johnson came out with his idea on May Day, as i...

  • May 19, 2020

    Is Big Pharma Suppressing Hydroxychloroquine?

    In the May 14 edition of her Fox News show, Laura Ingraham interviewed Dr. Ivette Lozano, a Texas physician, who was having trouble with a pharmacy that had refused to fill her off-label prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) without submitting t...

  • May 7, 2020

    OAN reporter lets Giuliani open up on Biden

    The Deep State is the "administrative state," the federal bureaucracy; it's the permanent government, AKA "the swamp."  And when it comes to those who make up the Deep State, the "wheels of justice turn slowly...

  • May 5, 2020

    Was Trump right about disinfectants?

    On April 23 at the daily COVID-19 briefing, President Trump mused about the possible use of light and disinfectants to combat the virus (video).  The mainstream media immediately broke out in a viral epidemic of overreaction, alleging ...

  • April 30, 2020

    MIT polymath criticizes Dr. Fauci and our approach to COVID

    Shiva Ayyadurai is a polymath with multiple degrees from MIT, and he's an interesting guy.  Also, he's highly critical of Dr. Anthony Fauci, Big Pharma, and the approach we've been taking to dealing with COVID-19.  I t...

  • April 16, 2020

    Airlines and Disease in the New Normal

    The experts on TV have tackled a question occupying the minds of many anxious Americans worrying about their jobs: when will things get back to normal? If that means returning to the carefree days of just two months ago before the shutdown, the short...

  • April 3, 2020

    We Can Work and Chew Gum at the Same Time

    Inasmuch as most Americans in this time of national lockdown have not had to resort to cannibalism, we can conclude that significant portions of the workforce are still busy at work. I refer of course to the food industry, which encompasses quite a b...

  • March 24, 2020

    Steve Hilton and the need to restart the economy

    The federal government has done a terrific job of informing Americans how to avoid contracting and spreading COVID-19. If you don’t have the disease and you follow the feds’ guidelines, you should be able to avoid this bug. But folks need...

  • March 18, 2020

    The Price Mechanism in Attending College

    In 2019, Maxine Waters (D-CA) ascended to the chair of the House Financial Services Committee. In April, Waters conducted a hearing for which she had assembled the heads of some of America’s largest banks. Waters asked these titans of finance: ...

  • February 25, 2020

    The Source of Bloomberg's Big Bucks

    As of November 2019, Democrat presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg was “the 12th richest person in the world, with a net worth estimated at $61.8 billion.” That quote came from this paragraph, which also gives one a sense of how quick...

  • February 14, 2020

    Social Security Reforms Progressives Will Resist

    On January 28, the Congressional Budget Office released “The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2020 to 2030,” and it projected annual trillion-dollar budget deficits for the entire decade. The largest expenditure of the federal government is f...

  • January 21, 2020

    Steve Hilton and the NeverTrumps' big mistake

    Conservatives may not know what exactly to think about Steve Hilton's big idea, "positive populism," but there's a lot for conservatives to like in Hilton's Sunday-night program on Fox News, The Next Revolution.  ...

  • January 16, 2020

    Money and Debt without Limits

    On March 1 of 2019, the federal government bumped into its debt limit. Congress did not reset its self-imposed limit for several months. That forced Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to use “extraordinary measures” to keep the government ...

  • December 31, 2019

    Can America ‘Afford’ Another Recession?

    It’s now history: the federal deficit for fiscal 2019 was -$984 billion. That’s an increase from the previous year of $205B, or 26 percent. And this increase in the deficit happened, mind you, despite an increase in revenue of 4 percent. ...

  • November 26, 2019

    David Horowitz reminds us of our founding

    On Monday, November 25, FrontPage Mag ran "Horowitz Video: How America is a Christian Idea."  It's a couple of videos of the great David Horowitz, author of Radical Son.  The first video is a short clip from the long...

  • November 21, 2019

    Correcting Voters' Mistakes

    Californians must no longer have recourse to the recall election. If Golden Staters still have the recall, surely they’d be using it to oust their useless mayors who have allowed their once-beautiful cities to degenerate into filth and ruin. Th...

  • October 31, 2019

    Property, Obamacare, and Liz Warren's Wealth Tax

    If one believes in government, even if only that it’s a “necessary evil,” then it’s rational to believe in taxes. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. observed that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized societ...

  • October 16, 2019

    When Does Serial Lying Become Disqualifying, Liz?

    Right now, the three leading candidates for the Democrat presidential nomination are all septuagenarians.  On Election Day next year, Bernie Sanders will be 79, Joe Biden will be 78, and Liz Warren will be 71.  It may be over for ...

  • October 2, 2019

    Warren's Money Grab: A Tax on Net Worth

    Democratic presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren is trying to get your vote by promising to confiscate money from an exceedingly small group of Americans and then give their money to other Americans. Warren’s money grab is an asset ta...

  • September 10, 2019

    The 'moderates' in the Democrat field

    An 18-year-old college freshman and the graduate student teaching assistant in her Women's Studies class are talking politics as they enter the campus coffee shop, and they have this exchange: FRESHMAN: What exactly is "socialis...

  • August 15, 2019

    Does Sovereign Debt Matter?

    If America ever does have a full-blown “debt crisis,” whereby the weight of the accumulated deficits that Congress has run since 1960 finally come crashing down on us, it might be enough to make more Americans adopt the tragic view of lif...

  • July 30, 2019

    Bailouts for Pensions -- ‘Through No Fault of Their Own’

    On July 18, former House Speaker John Boehner and former Rep. Joe Crowley appeared together on “Fox Business” to talk with Neil Cavuto about America’s failing multiemployer pension plans (video). Boehner said there are ten million f...

  • July 20, 2019

    Trump’s ‘Accidental’ Win on the Citizenship Question

    Whether by accident or by design, President Trump has alighted upon the exact right solution for ascertaining the truest enumeration of American citizens. Not only that, but his workaround solution should have been done regardless of the recent opini...

  • July 13, 2019

    A Most Singular Woman

    What would be the criteria for deciding the “Voice of the Century”? Perhaps one criterion would be the voice that said the most important things, such as “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds,” ...

  • July 2, 2019

    How to Twist Numbers to Make Obama Better on Economy than Trump

    "The Dow," shorthand for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is usually what people are talking about when they refer to "the market" — i.e., the stock market.  The DJIA, the symbol for the Dow, seems to be cited mor...

  • June 22, 2019

    Congress Is Dysfunctional, So Send in the Cavalry

    Due to the 2018 midterm elections, America no longer has a functional Congress. About the only things getting done in Congress, such as judicial confirmations, are happening in the Senate and don’t require the House. The House, now controlled b...

  • June 13, 2019

    Roy Moore and What Political Parties Should Be

    In 2017, Roy Moore donned a cowboy hat, brandished a pistol, mounted his horse named “Sassy” (or was it “his camel named Clyde”?), and rode off into the sunset, I mean rode off to his local polling station where he would most ...

  • June 4, 2019

    Big Money for Big Government: the MMT Debate Continues

    Are there any constraints on the power of the federal government to create money? Not the paper and metal money that we lug around in our pockets, but the digital money, the money that exists only as ones and zeros on the electronic storage devices o...

  • June 4, 2019

    Windmills versus nuclear energy

    Don't let HBO's acclaimed five-part series Chernobyl (HBO, IMDb, Wikipedia) demonize all nuclear power in your mind.  It made this kid eager to read Mac MacDowell's important June 3 article here at Ameri...

  • May 23, 2019

    Variations on a Speech for the Ages

    If one searches the Web for videos of the “St. Crispin’s Day Speech” from Shakespeare’s Henry V, one will find that there are a lot of folks, including girls and even one boy on his third birthday who’ve had their rendit...

  • May 8, 2019

    How Congress 'Extends the Life' of Social Security

    On April 22, the trustees for Social Security issued their annual reports, and the situation for the huge transfer program is unsustainable, the same as it’s been for years. The government tells us yet again that the program is running out of m...

  • April 23, 2019

    Would Stronger Parties Produce Better Candidates?

    On March 22, the New York Post ran a fine article by Jonah Goldberg that mainly dealt with the Electoral College. Those who are offended by how America elects her presidents would do well to read Goldberg’s concise piece, as it has some good in...

  • April 11, 2019

    Preparing for 2020 in Our So-called ‘Democracy’

    Democrats have rather different concerns about the integrity of our elections than do Republicans. The perennial concern of Democrats is “voter suppression.” The Dems allege that their folks are not being allowed to vote. Recently, the lo...

  • March 23, 2019

    A Powerful Film Defies the History Books

    O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention. Sorry about the plagiarism there, but I needed a snappy opening for this movie review. No matter, I’m not likely to be sued, whoever the author might be. And there...

  • March 12, 2019

    Transfer Payments and Touching the 'Third Rail'

    Most of the federal government’s spending is for programs lumped together under the term “transfer payments.” Nowadays, that term seems to be preferred to that of “entitlements,” which comes bogged down with theory. But ...

  • February 27, 2019

    Truth or Lie: Social Security Doesn’t Add to the Debt

    Congress, the branch of government that controls the purse strings and that is therefore responsible for the national debt, passed yet another milestone the other day when the debt blew past $22 Trillion. That’s a 14-digit liability that the Am...

  • February 9, 2019

    The Hijacking of a Presidential Election

    In January of 2017, the Federal Election Commission reported that in the 2016 general election Mrs. Clinton received 65,853,516 votes and Mr. Trump received 62,984,825 votes. Clinton therefore beat Trump by 2,868,691 popular votes. President Trump...

  • January 26, 2019

    After Lehman's Collapse: A Decade of Delay

    Now that the 2018 midterms are over, folks can address the elephant in the room. If one tuned into Fox Business midday on January 7, one heard legendary corporate raider Carl Icahn dilate on the dimensions of the pachyderm, which he pegged at $250 tr...

  • January 10, 2019

    Democrats Now Share Responsibility for the 2019 Deficit

    On January 3, the new Congress was sworn in.  The House of Representatives is now under Democratic control, and Nancy Pelosi is once again speaker.  One of the first things the new House did was to pass rules changes tha...

  • December 27, 2018

    Ambiguity and American Jurisprudence

    On December 14, Judge Reed O’Connor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled that ObamaCare is unconstitutional, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had twice ruled that the ACA is constitutional. What’s cha...

  • December 12, 2018

    The Tyranny of the Judiciary and What to Do about It

    Almost from Day One of his presidency, Donald Trump has been stymied by judges on lower federal courts issuing restraining orders to stop his executive orders and bring his agenda to a screeching halt. On November 10, National Review ran...

  • November 27, 2018

    The Federal Deficit under 'Divided Government'

    The Government Accountability Office publishes a financial audit every November. The 2018 audit just came out and it’s titled: “Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s Fiscal Years 2018 and 2017 Schedules of Federal Debt.” One can find...

  • November 13, 2018

    Ambiguity, the Chevron Doctrine, Kavanaugh, and 'Birthright Citizenship'

    Though it may be the envy of the free world, America’s legal system is not perfect. One of the reasons for its imperfection is that our laws are written with imperfect language. And what are laws if not language? Judicial review was established...

  • November 2, 2018

    The 'Right' to Birthright Citizenship

    On October 30, Axios posted “Exclusive: Trump targeting birthright citizenship with executive order.” The post included a one-minute-eight-second video of Jonathan Swan interviewing President Trump about using an executive order to end bi...

  • October 25, 2018

    The 'Limitless' Capacity of Government to Create Money

    In 2007, while working for Procter & Gamble, fashion model Gisele Bündchen, wife of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, insisted on being paid in euros rather than U.S. dollars.  Since Ms. Bündchen was the highest paid m...

  • October 13, 2018

    The Midterms after Kavanaugh

    Senate hearings are rarely "must-see TV" for this kid. Such hearings are often tedious and can serve as an excuse for senators to showboat in their bids for the presidency. The moral preening of some senators can be downright nauseating. ...

  • September 21, 2018

    The Fiscal Lunacy of Electing Democrats to Congress

    On Sep. 7, Barack Obama waded into the midterm elections fray with a speech at the University of Illinois, proclaiming that the good economy we're currently enjoying actually started under him.  According to Obama, Trump inher...

  • September 7, 2018

    McCain, Bipartisanship, and the 'Congress Problem'

    John McCain's funeral at the National Cathedral brings to mind an admonition some will have heard in the cinematic recreation of a memorial at St. Paul's Cathedral in London for T.E. Lawrence: "Well, nil nisi bonum" – ...

  • August 14, 2018

    Election Integrity in Kansas and Beyond

    The uproar over President Trump's putative "capitulation" to Putin in Helsinki and the "hack" of the 2016 election by the Russians has a message for anyone willing to hear it, and it is this: sixteen years after the ...

  • August 1, 2018

    The Election that Creates the Most Problems

    Except for one, all elected officials in America are "state-specific" – that is, they work in or for a state.  America's one elected official that is not state-specific is the president; voters in all...

  • July 9, 2018

    The West Since the Cold War

    Since the liberation of Europe’s Soviet Bloc in 1989 and the demise in 1991 of the Soviet Union itself, the West has become so pathetic that one might be forgiven for having a little wistful nostalgia for the Cold War era. At least back then, t...

  • June 28, 2018

    On the Financial 'Wisdom' of Attending Today's Colleges

    If one wants prices to rise, get the government involved.  If you doubt that, then explain the roaring inflation in health care and college, where government is deeply entrenched.  For years, government has thrown money at higher ...

  • June 21, 2018

    The Cost of College: Beating the System

    On Oct. 14 last year at Steyn Online, Mr. Steyn ran a diverting little article on the 20-year-old flick “Good Will Hunting.” Not having screened the film, I probably wouldn’t have read the piece were it not for a tip from a reader; ...

  • June 11, 2018

    A Pound of Flesh at the Speed of Justice

    Americans are told they have the greatest system of justice system in the whole wide world. We’re told this, of course, by lawyers. Well, America should have the greatest system of justice on the planet if price has anything to do with it. The ...

  • May 7, 2018

    ‘Private’ Projects with Taxpayer Bailouts

    When states, counties, cities, and other governmental entities need money, they can levy taxes or they can sell bonds, namely “municipal bonds.” One of the attractions of muni bonds is that they are often tax exempt and are seen as less r...

  • April 21, 2018

    A Really Bad Idea: Taxing Internet Commerce

    On April 17, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc.; the decision is due in June.  The case deals with e-commerce, specifically the taxing of sales done over the internet.  South Dakotans...

  • April 12, 2018

    NeverTrumps and Fox News

    Although the truly florid lunacy concerning the Trump presidency is confined to the political left, we can't forget the other breed of anti-Trumpism on the political right: the #NeverTrump movement.  These folks are the conser...

  • March 30, 2018

    Delinquent Debt in America: To Forgive or Not to Forgive

    Back in the 1800s in Great Britain, those who couldn't pay back their loans would be sent to "the workhouse," AKA debtors' prison, where they would be forced to work off their arrearage – i.e., their delinquent debt....

  • March 1, 2018

    The Dollar: Lionel Shriver on Ruin

    Could the U.S. dollar ever be ruined?  Other currencies, like the German mark in the 1920s, have been ruined, so why not the dollar? Recently, I wrote a book review of The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, a novel by Li...

  • February 12, 2018

    How a Rich Nation Becomes a Poor Nation

    Whenever Congress has its predictable little spats over raising the debt ceiling so it can avoid triggering yet another government shutdown, some members raise the disquieting prospect of “default.” Defaulting on the national debt...

  • February 1, 2018

    The Real Issue in Government Shutdowns

    Before “Cryin’ Chuck” Schumer caved, the most recent skirmish over the federal government shutting down was about an issue that is entirely unrelated to keeping it open. But that’s usually the case. In 2013, the shutdown was a...

  • January 24, 2018

    How to Prevent a Roy Moore-Doug Jones SNAFU

    What should conservatives conclude from the recent special election that sent Doug Jones, a Democrat in all things, to the U.S. Senate to represent Alabama, one of the reddest of red states? One takeaway should be that Alabamians haven...

  • January 10, 2018

    The Trump Tax Cuts and the Obamacare Mandate 'Repeal'

    The new tax bill is now law; it's on the books; it's an addition to the U.S. Code.  But unfortunately, the new law doesn't have a very catchy title.  Its original title was the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017,...

  • January 7, 2018

    Helping the New Tax Law to Pay Off

    Democrats wail about the new tax law.  The ever nuanced Nancy Pelosi even calls it "Armageddon" (short video).  Rather than taking less from taxpayers, the Dems say tax cuts are "giveaways" to the rich.  But if our ...

  • December 28, 2017

    Book to Film: Live by Night

    Unaware that it had been made into a movie, I recently read a fairly recent novel and then discovered that its film adaptation was playing on Cinemax.  The novel was Live by Night by Dennis Lehane, and Lehane's fellow Bos...

  • December 16, 2017

    Tax Cuts: The Case for Gradualism

    The “Prince of Darkness,” a.k.a. Bob Novak, the late columnist, once opined that: “God put the Republican Party on earth to cut taxes. If they don't do that, they have no useful function.” Pat Buchanan, another “righ...

  • December 7, 2017

    Unless Changed, the Tax Bill Should Die

    Since the financial crisis of 2008, the federal government has been borrowing and spending money like there’s no tomorrow. In November, I reported about the new rollover regime we just entered, in which the feds will be refinancing the debt run...

  • November 29, 2017

    Tax Reform: History Lessons for the Middle Class

    On the 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, CBS News’ "MoneyWatch" ran “How would you feel about a 94% tax rate?” William T. Zumwalt reported: In April 1942, just a few short months after the attack, President...

  • November 24, 2017

    The Looming Debt Rollover Regime

    The economy has been humming since the election a year ago. GDP growth has hit 3 percent in back-to-back quarters, unemployment is way down, the stock market averages are at all-time highs, wages are growing, consumer confidence is up, and sales of n...

  • November 15, 2017

    The Moore Affair Is in the Hands of Alabama

    The allegations of sexual improprieties with minors against GOP senatorial nominee Roy Moore have created tumult in Republicans circles. Several sitting U.S. senators have opined that Mr. Moore is unfit to serve. We’ve even heard some wonder wh...

  • November 9, 2017

    Middle-Class Tax Cuts, Deficits, and the Business Cycle

    D.C. is all abuzz about tax reform, the first such legislation since 1986. Republicans want to reform the federal income tax, both personal (i.e. individual) and corporate. After failing to pass a repeal of ObamaCare, some think that tax reform is a ...

  • October 23, 2017

    The Big Mistake in Obamacare Replacement Plans

    When Democrats were peddling ObamaCare to an unsuspecting America, they told us that the price of health insurance would go down by thousands of dollars. But the opposite happened, and it continues to happen. The way that real insurance works is that...

  • October 16, 2017

    The Escalating Costs of Higher Edumacation

    On October 8, the Kansas City Star ran an editorial on its website that appeared in print the next day under the headline “Lower college costs or face extinction.” Though its byline was the Kansas City Star Editorial Board, you might...

  • October 10, 2017

    Repairing the U.S. Senate

    With the Graham-Cassidy healthcare bill to repeal Obamacare flaming out, not even getting a vote, one might wonder whether it was a lousy bill or if something else were amiss. As the bill seemed like pretty decent legislation, its failure to get a vo...

  • October 2, 2017

    The Purpose of Political Parties

    On Sep. 25, the Washington Post ran “The Democratic Party’s nomination process isn’t democratic enough” by Ronald A. Klain. Mr. Klain has an impressive list of jobs and accomplishments. Kevin Spacey portrayed Klain in the HBO ...

  • September 24, 2017

    Graham-Cassidy would pass if we had a Republican Congress

    With the Graham-Cassidy bill to partially repeal Obamacare and reconfigure government health care, the Republican Congress has an opportunity to do what they promised and prove to voters they're not totally dysfunctional.  As many have said,...

  • September 19, 2017

    Melancholia: Rethinking a Movie

    Thinking that I would soon have to trade in my DVR and thus lose all my recorded movies I decided to watch one that I had recorded more than three years ago but hadn’t seen: Melancholia (2011) by the Danish writer-director Lars von Trier. As I ...

  • September 8, 2017

    What's Up for Obamacare This Fall?

    On August 22, the Washington Times ran "Senate health panel announces hearings on Obamacare markets" by Tom Howell, Jr., who quoted health committee chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander: "While there are a number of issues with the American h...

  • August 30, 2017

    Fox News and the 'Both Sides' Issue

    For at least the last nine years, Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel has been telling us that “journalism in America is dead.” During Obama’s first campaign, Sean was a lone voice warning anyone who would listen about what Obama a...

  • August 23, 2017

    Oliver Stone and Confederate Monuments

    Some conservatives may have issues with Hollywood director Oliver Stone. But in the wake of the recent horror in Charlottesville and the uproar over Confederate statues, I’m reminded of the segment in his 2017 The Putin Interviews when Stone ve...

  • August 17, 2017

    Health Care: Is It Time to Replace the Majority Leader?

    On July 30 on "Fox News Sunday" (video and transcript), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said this: [T]he Affordable Care Act is something… that said no free riders. Everybody has to have insurance, so that if your neighbor...

  • August 2, 2017

    Top GOP Strategist Wants to 'Tax the Rich'

    One reason one might suspect that the good ol’ U.S.A. has devolved into something a little different than what the Founders had in mind is taxation. Since the advent of the current federal income tax in 1913, more and more of our money is being...

  • July 26, 2017

    Medicaid: The Snag in Obamacare Repeal

    One of the big concerns of Republican holdouts in Senate legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare is Medicaid. Many rural and low-income Americans depend on the program. But Medicaid is a huge expense; it’s the feds’ fourth largest out...

  • July 21, 2017

    Paul Krugman Explains Obamacare

    On July 10, the failing New York Times ran “Three Legs Good, No Legs Bad” by Paul Krugman who asserted that the reason “Republicans can’t come up with a non-disastrous alternative to Obamacare [is] because you can’t chan...

  • July 18, 2017

    Fixing Medicaid and the Obamacare Subsidy Program

    On July 5, the Cato Institute ran “The Uninspiring Medicaid Debate” by Michael Tanner, whose big concern is Medicaid’s sustainability. He’s a numbers guy, and the numbers don’t look good for Medicaid, even without ObamaC...

  • July 15, 2017

    The Next Revolution: New Fox News series starts out with a bang

    One of the reasons U.S. health care is so expensive is out-and-out corruption.  On July 9, Steve Hilton's new program on Fox News, The Next Revolution, ran "Swamp Watch: Health care and pharmaceuticals" (video), the first in a seri...

  • June 28, 2017

    Slouching Toward Health Care Reform

    The deadliest structural collapse in American history prior to 9/11 occurred right here in Kansas City at the Hyatt Regency in 1981 when two suspended walkways fell onto a tea dance in the hotel lobby, killing 114 and injuring 216. Emergency physicia...

  • June 21, 2017

    Business Tax Reform First

    For most folks, it is the little taxes that bite the most, not the big tax: the federal personal income tax. Hotelier Leona Helmsley once said, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” That’s not quite true, as ...

  • June 8, 2017

    Pulling the Plug on Health Care Reform

    At some of the raucous town hall meetings this year, indignant constituents would tell their representatives that if it weren’t for ObamaCare they’d be dead. Actually, if it weren’t for modern medicine they’d be dead; ObamaCar...

  • June 1, 2017

    Universal Health Care with a Conservative Twist

    On multiple occasions recently, Charles Krauthammer has observed that since the passing of Obamacare, a consensus has emerged in America that government should guarantee that all Americans be covered by health insurance. Obamacare, however, doesn...

  • May 20, 2017

    Just a Guy and His Chick Flicks

    Although my drinking buddies may find it pathetic, I nonetheless admit to having a taste for chick flicks. But because certain attendees of my health club, especially the ruffians who hang around the bench press machine, will suspect me of having cer...

  • May 2, 2017

    The Democrats and Dystopian Debt

    Enjoy the next five months while you can, because America will soon be entering a “brave new world” in which our fiscal chickens will be coming home to roost. On Oct. 1, 2017 we begin fiscal 2018, and it’ll mark the 10-year annivers...

  • April 21, 2017

    The Alternative to ‘Alternative Taxes’

    Ninety-one percent is a “fascist tax rate,” period. And it happened to be the top marginal rate for the federal personal income tax right here in America until the mid-1960s. True, no one actually paid 91 percent. But to avoid paying stat...

  • April 11, 2017

    ‘Net worth sweep’ and Obamacare’s endless bailouts

    One Obamacare bailout folks are familiar with is for "risk corridors."  Those bailouts involve direct payments to insurance companies that suffer losses in the Obamacare exchanges.  A less well known bailout is "Net Worth Swe...

  • April 9, 2017

    The ‘Free Market’ and Universal Health Care

    With ObamaCare, Democrats destroyed the market for private health insurance and then supplanted it with what they had the chutzpah to call “the Marketplace.” The people whom ObamaCare hurt the most were those who had been buying health in...

  • March 30, 2017

    No Exceptions: ‘Radical’ Tax Reform

    Now that Congress has postponed repealing and replacing ObamaCare, they’re moving on to tax reform. Let’s hope they can get their act together, because tax reform is one of the keys to revitalizing the economy. The IRS tells us that in 20...

  • March 22, 2017

    Obamacare: Snatching a ‘Win’ from Repeal Defeat

    Speaker Ryan’s approach to repealing and replacing ObamaCare is said to be “three-pronged.” This seems a muddled conception, because the second prong doesn’t involve Congress. Rather, it involves Secretary of Health and Human ...

  • March 14, 2017

    Two Tweaks for ‘Ryancare’

    The structure and character of the federal government is largely the creation of Democrats. From Woodrow Wilson to FDR to LBJ to Barack Hussein Obama, every time progressive Democrats seize the presidency and Congress, they expand the size and scope ...

  • March 1, 2017

    Obamacare in Limbo: Repeal or Let Die

    At Hot Air, we read that on Jan. 4 President-elect Trump tweeted: “Republicans must be careful… that the Dems own the failed ObamaCare disaster.” On Jan. 11, Business Insider quoted Trump thus: “They own it right now. So the ...

  • February 10, 2017

    The Real Tax Unfairness

    The individual income tax is the largest source of revenue to the largest operation on Earth: the U.S. federal government. In fiscal 2015, the individual income tax alone brought in $1,540,802 million, or just over $1.54T, to the feds. To confirm tha...

  • February 2, 2017

    Tax Cuts for Those Paying at 2.6%

    Since Inauguration Day, conservatives might be heartened and even jazzed about what’s been coming out of D.C. But now that Republicans own D.C., isn’t it time to start training our critical lights on the GOP to help make them even better?...

  • January 26, 2017

    Obamacare: Disentangling the Private from the Public

    By enacting ObamaCare, Democrats changed America’s entire healthcare system. With their brazen hubris on full display, the Dems took what had been working well for decades and interwove it with what had never existed. That is, they took private...

  • January 18, 2017

    Obamacare Tax Woes for Non-taxpayers

    One of the more vexing features of ObamaCare is that compliance is enforced by our beloved IRS. Rumor has it that some 16,000 new IRS agents were hired just to enforce compliance with the new law. The new agents make sure we’re insured, and if ...

  • January 10, 2017

    Cyber-Security: There’s No Disputin’ that Old Vlad Putin

    Recently we’ve heard a lot of loose talk about how the November election was “hacked” by the Russians. If one Googles “election,” “hack,” and “Russians” without quotation marks, one is liable to g...

  • December 29, 2016

    Making Good on the Promise to Repeal Obamacare

    One thing Democrats think they know is this: once the federal government has “given” an entitlement to the citizenry, it can never be taken back. Dems think the arc of history goes in one direction only: toward bigger and bigger governmen...

  • December 10, 2016

    Cutting the Spending, Goosing the Economy

    While driving down the interstate on Nov. 17, I turned on my AM radio and tuned in to Glenn Beck. “The Beckmeister” was interviewing former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK). I didn’t hear the beginning, but here’s the rush trans...

  • December 3, 2016

    The never-ending story of election recounts

    Jill Stein, the Green Party’s nominee for president, has succeeded in getting Wisconsin to recount the votes in the recently concluded election.  She’s also seeking a recount in Michigan and Pennsylvania.  Her motives and chance...

  • November 18, 2016

    Trump’s Reaganesque Approach to Business

    One of President-elect Trump’s better ideas is to ease regulation, especially the regulatory burden on business. Some of the regulations that bedevil business are woven into the corporate income tax. Besides easing those tax-related regulations...

  • November 8, 2016

    Divided or Undivided Government: That Is the Question

    Some Americans believe that "divided government" is the way to go.  They believe it's healthy to have Congress and the president each controlled by people from different political parties.  Divided government, they theorize, c...

  • November 1, 2016

    You’re Never Gonna Get the Smell Out

    As America nears the end of the Obama times, one wonders how such a person could ever have become the Leader of the Free World. Americans haven’t been this divided since the Vietnam War. Obama deserves much of the credit for this sad state of a...

  • October 24, 2016

    Immigration and ‘far-right’ rhetoric

    On Sept. 22, Time magazine ran “European Politics Are Swinging to the Right” by Simon Shuster (it ran Oct. 3 in wood pulp).  The article is a nice little roundup about the emergence of new political parties in Europe and their r...

  • October 14, 2016

    Hey, Millennials, Do Deficits Matter?

    Progressives have said that “deficits don’t matter.” Even a few conservatives have said as much. Some, however, like Speaker Paul Ryan, worry that the sharp recent rise in the national debt could lead to a “debt crisis,”...

  • October 6, 2016

    Getting the Government We Deserve

    From time to time one hears various formulations of this sometimes misattributed quote by Joseph de Maistre: “Every nation gets the government it deserves.” If that’s so, it is especially true in the case of democracies, because in ...

  • September 28, 2016

    Millennials and the Obama Legacy

    In his 2008 campaign for president, candidate Obama said that the debt run up by President Bush was “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic” and that Bush ran up the debt all “by his lonesome” (short video). Despite presi...

  • September 18, 2016

    Does America Have an ‘Official’ Morality?

    Former Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is a socialist. So were Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and a host of other charming fellows. But Sanders makes a distinction, he stresses that he’s a “democratic socialist....

  • September 1, 2016

    The Resurrection of Congress

    America makes much too much of the presidency. We have these epic-long campaigns that cost billions of dollars and still we end up with people we don’t trust. Other democratic nations can be so speedy at getting new heads of state that it...

  • August 23, 2016

    Voting Technology in 2016

    Americans are getting only the amount and kind of “democracy” that the professional politicians (i.e. the establishment, the “insiders”) want us to have. When it comes to democracy, we Americans just aren’t getting the e...

  • August 15, 2016

    Did 'Private' Choices Give Us These Nominees?

    On August 2, the Kansas City Star ran "Public pays for the private political choices of each party" by Dave Helling.  His main point is that taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for primary elections.  He bases that on his contenti...

  • August 6, 2016

    ‘Permission’ to Vote for Trump

    From March 8 up to the national conventions, I wrote eleven articles dealing with primaries, conventions, delegates, and stuff like that there. All but one ran at American Thinker. My positions on these matters, however, seem to be minority opinions,...

  • August 1, 2016

    Members Only: the Right to ‘Private’ Associations

    The Constitution guarantees freedom of assembly, which flows from the “right of the people peaceably to assemble” clause of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has interpreted that clause to affirm the freedom of association. Inherent ...

  • July 13, 2016

    America Needs ‘Open’ Conventions

    Some Republicans are calling for an “open” convention in Cleveland whereby the delegates could nominate anyone. Part of the resistance to this movement might be optics: appearances. You see, national party nomination conventions are suppo...

  • July 8, 2016

    Are Political Parties ‘Private’?

    Are U.S. political parties “private” organizations, or are they public? The answer to that question may be at the heart of what is wrong with American politics, and there doesn’t seem to be an agreed-upon answer to it. Some say that...

  • June 22, 2016

    Delegates to Both Conventions Need to Start Over from Scratch

    Americans may flatter themselves that they aren’t susceptible to putting much faith in a mere politician. But one sees a lot of emotion at our campaign rallies. And at national conventions, one can see actual fervor for a party’s nominee....

  • June 15, 2016

    GOP Delegates Are ‘Free’ to Choose Whomever

    May 29 on CNN, Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal confessed that he wanted Donald Trump to be “the biggest loser in presidential history,” and: It’s important that Donald Trump, and what he represents, this kind of ethnic...

  • June 10, 2016

    The ‘Rigged System’ and the F.B.I. Primary

    May 7 on The Greg Gutfeld Show, Greg asked Democrat strategist Jessica Tarlov, “What do you think about Hillary?” “I think she’s perfect,” Tarlov purred. One might hazard from this that Miss Jessica is a “true beli...

  • June 1, 2016

    What’s Wrong with Europe

    The ancient Romans were building major infrastructure in Europe more than two millennia ago. Those Roman engineers were pretty serious dudes, as their aqueducts and other structures still stand. The birth of civilization in Europe goes back at least ...

  • May 20, 2016

    Time and the Pelosi-Reid-Obama Debt

    On April 25 at the Media Research Center, Tom Blumer reported on President Obama’s recent trip to England. At a town hall in London, Obama was asked: “After eight years, what would you say you want your legacy to be?” After som...

  • May 15, 2016

    Redemption after the Apocalypse: A Deconstructive Exegesis of Mad Max: Fury Road

    People often ask me for spiritual advice. One might suppose that I’d be flattered, but it’s actually a bit of a drag, especially in public restrooms. Even so, I always grab my petitioner’s hand, look him squarely in the eye, and tel...

  • May 2, 2016

    Promethean Delegates Unbound: the ‘Nuclear Option’

    Why does America have such a screwy “system” for electing party nominees to run for the office of president? There’s only one instance of the word “primary” and its related forms in the Constitution: the 24th Amendment. ...

  • April 21, 2016

    The Most Important Republicans in 2016

    The 2016 primary campaigns should serve as a major civics lesson for those Americans concerned about their democracy. Because of the unusual length of these primary contests, Americans are beginning to better appreciate the complex byzantine structur...

  • April 9, 2016

    Delegates to the Rescue in the Year of the Outsider

    Republicans will hold their presidential nominating convention July 18-21, and Democrats will hold theirs July 25-28. Consider this: what if both conventions nominate someone who hadn’t run in the primaries and caucuses? Perhaps Hillary gets in...

  • April 1, 2016

    Nullifying the Republican Primaries

    On Super Tuesday II, not to be confused with Taco Tuesday, I dutifully trekked over to a nearby church to vote in the Missouri presidential primary, despite it being the Ides of March. It wasn’t surprising to see that Missouri had yet again cha...

  • March 23, 2016

    Inequality in the Personal Income Tax

    The Individual Income Tax is still the largest source of revenue to the federal government; in fiscal 2014 it accounted for 40 percent of all federal revenue. But huge swaths of Americans don’t pay personal income taxes. In fact, Congress treat...

  • March 9, 2016

    Hillary wants more of your money

    On March 3, CNBC.com ran “Top 1% would see $78,000 tax hike under Hillary” by Robert Frank.  Mrs. Clinton seems to be trying to “out-Bernie” Bernie Sanders; she’s now going all-out progressive: The top 1 percen...

  • March 8, 2016

    Lurching Towards a Contested Convention

    One of the reasons that electing a U.S. president is such a big deal is because once sworn in, there’s little likelihood that he/she could ever be removed from office. Oh, if a president were, let’s say, caught in the Lincoln Bedroom in b...

  • February 23, 2016

    The ‘Unchecked Power’ to Tax

    Should government be allowed to tax everything? Should elected officials have the power and the latitude to tax every transaction, every activity, every nonactivity, and every single little thing in our brief little lives? As it is, government alr...

  • February 11, 2016

    The Ignored Campaign Issue: the Deficit

    The largest financial operation in the known universe is the United States federal government. For fiscal 2009, that operation ran a budget deficit of -$1.412T, the all-time record. That’s debt at more than -$3.868B a day, more than -$161M an h...

  • February 2, 2016

    The ‘Right Stuff’ for the Presidency

    An old joke I heard during my brief time in the opera business went something like this: There are four types of tenors: leggiero, lyric, spinto, and heldentenor. The leggiero tenor has no balls. The lyric tenor has one ball. The spinto tenor has two...

  • January 20, 2016

    Getting ‘Medieval’ on the Top 400 Taxpayers

    On Dec. 29, the New York Times ran “For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions” by Noam Scheiber and Patricia Cohen. The article’s blurb was: “The very richest are able to quietly shape tax policy that w...

  • January 11, 2016

    Dearth of 'systematic thinking' dooms debate

    MSNBC host Chris Matthews recently asked Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: “What’s the difference between a socialist and a Democrat?”  Clinton hemmed and hawed and groped for a response.  Finally, Matthews ...

  • January 7, 2016

    Tax Advice for GOP Presidential Candidates

    Presidential candidates have been trotting out their ideas on taxes. One doesn’t need to spend much time analyzing Democrat ideas, as they like the current system and just want to tax the wealthy more. Where we find some interesting ideas about...

  • December 30, 2015

    The Nanny State and Adipose Rex

    In sterner eras, certain choices and behaviors were regarded as Deadly Sins. Two of those fatal transgressions were Gluttony and Sloth. Nowadays it might be difficult to get up a quorum to decide on whether Gluttony and Sloth are even undesirable, mu...

  • December 9, 2015

    Bailouts for Private Pension Funds

    For forty years it was illegal to cut certain pension benefits. That changed last December when the Kline-Miller Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 was slipped into a must-pass omnibus spending bill, which Pres. Obama signed in order to keep th...

  • November 25, 2015

    Husband of Hillary Clinton receives curious award from curious source

    On Monday, Nov. 23, in Lawrence, Kansas, a curious thing happened: the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics awarded its 2015 Dole Leadership Prize to none other than...former president Bill Clinton.  At the institute's website, we read: ...

  • November 16, 2015

    Europe's Loss

    Just over a century ago, the nations of Europe were the Masters of the Universe. Europe’s far-flung empires girded the globe. Europe had the biggest, the best, and the most of everything. Then everything went to hell. The relatively peaceful ce...

  • November 9, 2015

    Europe Cannot Begin Again

    Some of Europe’s current invaders drop by the Greek island of Lesbos before continuing on to Germany and Sweden, where the welfare benefits are more to their liking. But where the heck is Lesbos? It’s in the Aegean Sea, right, but where? ...

  • November 2, 2015

    Amending the Constitution to Defend Citizenship

    Politicians across the political spectrum want to amend the Constitution. Donald Trump wants an amendment to clarify the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment. Hillary Clinton wants an amendment to override the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citi...

  • October 25, 2015

    Is Ryan really right for the speakership?

    Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) appears poised to become the next speaker of the U.S. House; an election is expected this coming week.  I’ve always liked Paul Ryan and dutifully voted for him in 2012, but I’ve been reading some dis...

  • October 19, 2015

    Are We Really Stuck with ObamaCare?

    On September 15, former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius spoke in Kansas City at the annual luncheon of the Health Care Foundation of Greater Kansas City (website). The speech didn’t seem to get much attention, so I called ...

  • October 7, 2015

    Prices, Schizoid Americans, and the 'Knowledge Problem'

    In Nora Ephron’s romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle (1993), 8-year-old Jonah Baldwin is considering taking a commercial flight from Seattle to New York and asks his girlfriend Jessica: “How much would it cost to go?” Jessica answe...

  • September 26, 2015

    The 'Growth Fairy' and the Federal Deficit

    In August, the Congressional Budget Office projected a $426B federal deficit for fiscal 2015, which ends on September 30. Since the record deficit of $1,412B in 2009, there’s been about a trillion dollars of improvement on the budget -- and alm...

  • September 10, 2015

    'Undocumented Americans' and the Nation's Data

    What does becoming an American citizen entail? One thing it entails is getting a social security card. But a “regular” American -- one born to another American -- might find it difficult to get that document if she were born at home or in...

  • September 1, 2015

    Anchor this!

    Becoming an American is a bit like becoming a vampire; new vampires are created by old vampires.  As with vampires, American citizenship requires an infusion of blood, but not from a bite – from an umbilical cord.  There are exception...

  • August 26, 2015

    Taxes, Trump, and Shifting the Economy out of Neutral

    With the “across-the-board” tax cuts that came during the George W. Bush administration, every American who paid income taxes got a tax rate cut. Compare that with the “fiscal cliff” rate changes under Obama that raised tax ra...

  • August 22, 2015

    Not your father's 14th Amendment

    On August 19, two excellent, must-read articles ran on the Net that are sorely needed correctives to a common misunderstanding about the 14th Amendment.  Unfortunately, this mistake is made even by certain legal professionals who should know bet...

  • August 15, 2015

    Christie Gets Grilled by Greta: Acquits Himself Well

    Thursday on "On the Record" (7 p.m. ET on Fox News), New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie got grilled by Greta van Susteren and together they showed how it’s done. Do yourself a favor and watch the video: “Christie: Clinton hasn't...

  • August 13, 2015

    Why Is Health Insurance So Expensive?

    If insurance actuaries could predict with certainty that every year every house in Kansas would be destroyed by a tornado, how much would a Kansan be charged to insure his house against tornado damage? If you think his yearly premiums would be equal ...

  • July 29, 2015

    The President Invokes 'Logic' over the Iran Deal

    At the president’s press conference after the nuclear deal with Iran was struck, CBS News correspondent Major Garrett asked President Obama about American hostages still held by Iran: “Can you tell the country, sir, why you are content, w...

  • July 23, 2015

    Selecting a Nominee: Why Not Laura?

    Democrats are obsessed with firsts, as in first African-American president, first female president, first gay president, first transgendered president, etc. How about first non-American president? How about a foreigner like the U.K.’s Daniel Ha...

  • July 14, 2015

    The Price of Health Insurance and the Tenth Amendment

    The more policyholders file claims, the more pressure there is for insurance companies to raise the price of premiums. Insurance companies cope with such pressure with several tactics. They can raise the premiums of those who file claims, and they ca...

  • July 3, 2015

    Incoherence, Thy Name Is ObamaCare

    In “Pimento,” the ninth episode of "Better Call Saul", AMC’s new series about an unethical lawyer, trial lawyer Chuck McGill heatedly accuses his shyster brother Jimmy of not being “a real lawyer.” Chuck then e...

  • June 26, 2015

    What Exactly Is an 'Entitlement'?

    Control the language and you control the debate. Who said that? George Orwell? Saul Alinsky? Karl Marx? Groucho Marx? Me? Anyway, I was reminded of the importance of language by a comment to a recent article of mine from one “Mike 3/505.”...

  • June 18, 2015

    Subsidies and the Price of Health Insurance

    Back in 2010 when ObamaCare was enacted, the Pelosi-Reid Congress was running its second trillion-dollar deficit, with two more still to come. So just when they were borrowing money like never before, Democrats passed the biggest entitlement in decad...

  • June 3, 2015

    The Income Taxes of the Bottom Half

    In 2014, an unmarried American with a total income of $10,155 under age 25 and eligible only for the “standard deduction” would have had a taxable income of $5, and thereby owed the federal government the grand total of $1.  One...

  • May 17, 2015

    Flat Tax Fantasies

    Back in the halcyon days of yore, before the advent of Big Government, tax collection was one of the main places where the individual bumped up against the “powers that be.” In that distant past, tax collectors were called “publican...

  • May 5, 2015

    The Rubio Tax Plan Asks for Grief

    In March, Republican presidential candidate Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Mike Lee unveiled a tax reform plan that’s gotten mixed reviews. While there’s praise for their ideas on taxes for business, the reception for their proposed chan...

  • April 25, 2015

    The 'Total Cost' to the Individual of ObamaCare

    America’s total annual spending on healthcare hit $2T around 2005 and is now around $3T. In “It's time to get mad about the outrageous cost of health care” in the Nov. 2014 issue of Consumer Reports, we read that “if our $...

  • April 10, 2015

    Liars in High Places

    Americans are queer for liars. We just love them. If that were not so, then we wouldn’t constantly be electing the most mendacious candidates to the highest political offices. And when we discover that we’ve been lied to by some squalid p...

  • March 31, 2015

    Accuracy in the Information Age

    One variation on a pithy observation that’s been attributed to several people, including Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Jefferson, and others, goes like this: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on it...

  • March 18, 2015

    Changing Your Vote on ObamaCare

    On March 4 the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in King v. Burwell. Although we probably won’t know the verdict until June, the Washington Post reported that if “the court follows its normal pattern, it will vote on the outcome at the j...

  • March 4, 2015

    The Fate of ObamaCare: Let the People Decide It

    For 225 years, America somehow, against all odds, had miraculously managed to limp along without ObamaCare. But if the Supreme Court sides with the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell, Democrats will commence telling the American people that the Court...

  • February 24, 2015

    ObamaCare at the Crossroads

    On March 4, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell. On Fox News recently, George Will opined that King is the most important case the Court will hear this year. The issue at hand is the legality of the IRS regulation that Obama...

  • February 12, 2015

    Universal Healthcare: Who Really Pays?

    Proponents of “universal healthcare” often assert that healthcare is a right. If so, then healthcare is a rather different kind of right than those of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. We get those unalienable rights from our C...

  • February 1, 2015

    A 'Level Playing Field' for the Super Bowl

    Given the serious and seemingly intractable problems facing America, one of the more shameful spectacles in recent years has been the congressional hearings on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional sports. Congress has more urgent bu...

  • January 22, 2015

    The 'Obama Debt' in Context

    On the day that President Obama took office in 2009, the Debt Held by the Public was $6.3T. On January 2, 2015 that debt was in excess of $13T. So during the first six years of the Obama presidency the hard debt of the federal government more than do...

  • January 12, 2015

    The Power of Hypotheticals

    Hypotheticals are “what if” questions, as in: What if such and such were in fact the case? Some people have difficulty when entertaining hypotheticals. Whether that’s due to bad seed, inbreeding, hypoxia during childbirth, poor nutr...

  • December 27, 2014

    H&R Block, Your Taxes, and ObamaCare

    On December 9, business reporter Mark Davis posted an article up on the website of the Kansas City Star headlined “About 25 percent of H&R Block customers will ‘confront’ the Affordable Care Act”; the next day it appeared ...

  • December 2, 2014

    A 'Perspicacious' Reading of ObamaCare

    It’s amusing to hear Democrats squawk about the possibility that their grand scheme for taking over the American healthcare system could be knocked down by the Supreme Court because of a strict reading of ObamaCare when President Obama, Democra...

  • November 17, 2014

    ObamaCare: 'If the Wine Is Sour, Throw It Out'

    On November 7, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would hear the case of King v. Burwell, one of the four cases challenging the IRS rule that ObamaCare subsidies can be given to policyholders who have bought health insurance through exchanges e...

  • November 3, 2014

    Too Late Smart

    In the movie western Will Penny (1968), Charlton Heston’s title character, an ageing cowboy, is thrown together with a young woman who has taken possession of the crude cabin he is to occupy while watching over the far reaches of his employer...

  • October 28, 2014

    ObamaCare and the Language of Law

    On Sept. 30, Judge Ronald A. White of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma delivered his decision in Pruitt v. Burwell, the third of four related cases to have received a judgment. The four cases challenge the IRS ruling that ...

  • October 14, 2014

    Will Ambiguity Save ObamaCare?

    Laws in these United States need to be unambiguous. But in one of the most problematic pieces of legislation ever foisted on the American people, the issue may well be whether Congress can be unambiguous for even five words. In the recent ObamaCar...

  • October 2, 2014

    Democrats and Inflation

    One of the jobs of the Federal Reserve is to insure that inflation doesn’t get out of control and become hyperinflation. With regular old inflation your money is worth less, but with hyperinflation your money is worthless. Inflation is defin...

  • September 5, 2014

    A Conversation with Cato the Eldest

    Michael Booth’s nom de Net is Cato the Eldest, and until recently he ran a terrific website he called Cato’s Domain. Cato’s is still up, and if you’re curious why he’s no longer updating it, read the last post. Mr. Booth...

  • September 2, 2014

    One Little Change for the Federal Reserve

    Many Americans distrust the Federal Reserve. At Tea Party rallies back in 2009, one would even see placards urging that we “End the Fed.” But can Congress just summarily end the Federal Reserve? In November 2013, Forbes ran “100 Yea...

  • August 24, 2014

    Cinema for Christians and Similar Souls

    Call me paranoid, but I have a sneaking suspicion that there are religionists, perhaps even Christians, lurking around this here website.  So I’d like to recommend some recent movies that have at least a smidgeon of religion in them. ...

  • August 2, 2014

    Taxes and Property in the 'Real' America

    Disturbing as it is, the IRS scandal should be throwing a light on a larger issue than the targeting of conservative groups. Lois Lerner, you see, was head of the Exempt Organizations department at the IRS; she was in charge of deciding which nonprof...

  • July 26, 2014

    Complexity and Finding the Right Path

    In June 2011 at American Thinker, I wrote a blog to alert folks to an HBO special: Bobby Fischer Against the World. The reason I thought AT readers might like the film is because of its historical and political elements. Also, it dealt with Fischer t...

  • July 9, 2014

    Quicker Relief from Our Bad Choices

    On the federal level, undesirable elected officials are removed from office by other elected officials, not by the People. The process for removal is either impeachment or expulsion, depending on the office. For the People to get rid of an undesirabl...

  • June 27, 2014

    Restoring Constitutional Government

    One of the big virtues of the American system is that it allows itself to be changed. But changing our system, i.e. amending the Constitution, requires a supermajority of three-quarters of the states. That’s a bigger supermajority than what...

  • June 2, 2014

    Taxes: There's Always Room at the Top

    There are a few Americans, a precious few, who have incomes that get into the ten digits. And those ten digits don’t include any on the right side of the decimal point. That means there are Americans with yearly incomes that top a billion bucks...

  • May 20, 2014

    The Road to Taxpayer Rights

    The first federal individual income tax in America debuted during the Civil War with the Revenue Act of 1861. That act provided for a single tax rate of 3 percent levied on incomes above $800. After the war, the income tax was repealed and the feds r...

  • May 5, 2014

    <em>Hobby Lobby</em> and the Fall Campaigns

    By “rewriting” ObamaCare in NFIB v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court created a strange new twist on federal taxation: they imposed a surtax on the poor. The Court did that by redefining the penalty (for not having health insurance) as a tax. U...

  • April 26, 2014

    Navigating the Income Tax in the 'Offseason'

    One of the more aggravating things about our federal individual income tax system is that it has made us all into dreary little tax accountants, and unpaid dreary little tax accountants at that. It’s bad enough that we must put on our green eye...

  • April 15, 2014

    How to Control the IRS

    Americans despise and fear the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS has been discriminating against, and has even persecuted, conservative groups. The IRS will soon be policing ObamaCare compliance with thousands of new agents.The IRS is no longer just ...

  • April 2, 2014

    Backwards Missouri Persecutes the Ailing

    On the Sunday March 30 front page of the Kansas City Star there was a fine article by Don Bradley headlined “Prescription for a change?” The online version of the article appeared the day before with this headline: “Marijuana raid i...

  • March 18, 2014

    Rules and Rule Makers

    Rules are devised so that at each new juncture in life we won’t have to think through everything all over again. Usually, there’s little need to consider the ramifications of each new decision. So we just plug in the rule and get on with ...

  • March 5, 2014

    Law, Logic, and the Tendency to Overcomplicate

    In duly enacted laws, bureaucratic regulations, judicial rulings, contracts, international treaties, technical manuals, specifications, product disclaimers, and many other areas, language should be clear, precise, and devoid of ambiguity. In such are...

  • February 17, 2014

    Putting Social Security on Solid Footing

    If you lend yourself money, should you charge interest on the loan?  It would depend on how badly you need the interest income, wouldn't it?  If you were desperate for cash, you'd pay yourself a hefty interest rate.  Aft...

  • February 2, 2014

    A Dog in the Manger on Football's Big Day

    My hometown team, the Kansas City Chiefs, flirted with "greatness" this year. Through the first nine games of the season, the Chiefs were on top; they alone were undefeated. Then the team fell apart, winning but two more games in the regular season, ...

  • January 17, 2014

    Paul Krugman, Vanquished

    It is always satisfying when one sees an insufferable jerk get his just comeuppance. And when the jerk is a bully who thinks he's always right and all others, save his acolytes, are not only "always wrong" but "knaves and fools" as well, then it is e...

  • January 7, 2014

    If You Like Your ObamaCare, You Can Keep Your ObamaCare

    Twenty years ago while discussing HillaryCare, a college professor friend informed me that Mrs. Clinton's comprehensive plan to overhaul America's health care system would work just fine because the federal government would require everyone to buy he...

  • December 19, 2013

    The Trust Fund Mirage

    Americans have long been led to believe that Social Security is a rock-solid system. But from very early on, Social Security had to be regularly modified to remain financially viable. At its inception, the system had a combined employer-employee tax ...

  • December 15, 2013

    Manliness and the Knockout Game

    In the Midwest Voices series in the Kansas City Star on Dec. 14, Justin Dyer writes a guest column headlined "'Manly' behavior is often out of line" that looks at the "knockout game." Dyer relieves himself of some opinions which are politically incor...

  • December 5, 2013

    Targeting the Low-Information Voter

    On Nov. 18, Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts delivered a floor speech with the ominous title "The Retirement Crisis": There is a $6.6 trillion gap between what Americans under 65 are currently saving and what they will need to mai...

  • November 25, 2013

    Teacher tenure issue may aid Christie

    In the Nov. 24 wood pulp edition of the Kansas City Star, columnist Steve Rose writes about Governor Chris Christie's efforts to rein in teacher tenure in New Jersey. Christie is a very astute politician. So, if he, a likely presidential aspirant,...

  • November 21, 2013

    The Rhetoric of ObamaCare

    Except for diehard, "true believer" progressives, it has finally begun to dawn on Americans that ObamaCare was sold to us under false pretenses. But the selling of ObamaCare was accomplished not only with lies. It also relied on the clever use of rhe...

  • November 2, 2013

    One Second After

    Back in July, I wrote an article that examined the post-apocalyptic genre in fiction and in film. In that piece, I committed (at least) one sin in that I mentioned a book that I had not read. Having just corrected that failing, I'm here to tell you t...

  • October 15, 2013

    Banging the Drum for Default

    There's been so much malarkey meted out by the media about the budget C.R., the government shutdown, and the debt ceiling that the average American can easily lose sight of the real issue, which is the federal debt.  Even certain honest, tr...

  • October 10, 2013

    ObamaCare's Original Sin

    Democrats tell us that ObamaCare is "the law of the land," and that the Supreme Court declared it constitutional, and that we should get used to it -- it's here to stay. Actually, the Court found ObamaCare unconstitutional on two counts, but let it p...

  • October 3, 2013

    The Democrats vs. Electoral Reform

    Norman Ornstein of American Enterprise Institute recently wrote an article lamenting the recent Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder that struck down a part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). Ornstein bemoans the usual: voter suppressi...

  • September 21, 2013

    Making America Exceptional Again

    On September 11, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Russian President Vladimir Putin headlined "A Plea for Caution From Russia." The op-ed commented on President Obama's speech the night before. There's not much to take issue with in Putin's pie...

  • September 9, 2013

    Election Fraud: Detecting the Undetectable

    To know the true extent of a crime, it must be detectable. Progressives contend that election fraud isn't a problem in America because of its low incidence of detection. That's like saying that because border agents didn't apprehend (i.e., detect) an...

  • August 31, 2013

    Complexity and Its Cult

    The world seems to be getting increasingly complicated. For some people, however, that's just fine and dandy. You see, these people actually want things to be complicated. They celebrate complexity. They have a fetish for complexity. They think that ...

  • August 14, 2013

    Presidential Lawlessness: It's So Cool

    When the law no longer commands respect, one can pretty well write off a nation that pretends to be a constitutional republic. But how can The People respect the law when the government doesn't? President Obama seems to regard the law as a mere incon...

  • August 4, 2013

    Immigration Reform versus Unemployed America

    With millions of Americans un- or underemployed, it's difficult to see how any political party that's looking out for the folks would want to import more people. America doesn't seem to be able to provide jobs for the people already here. Yet, import...

  • July 27, 2013

    Norman Ornstein Fixes America's Broken Election System

    On June 25 in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act (1965). This decision has raised a lot concern about democracy in America. Not to put too fine a point on it, the debate over elections in A...

  • July 20, 2013

    The End of the World and Other Entertainments

    Folks have always been fascinated by the End of the World. Christianity addresses this little problem in Revelations, where we read about the Beast of the Apocalypse, the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, the Whore of Babylon, the Seven Seals, and such. H...

  • July 11, 2013

    The Law Means Nothing to These People

    President Obama has just nullified, all by his lonesome, a provision in a duly-enacted law: the employer mandate in ObamaCare. It's one thing to give priority to enforcing one law over another, such as stressing interdiction of cocaine over marijuana...

  • July 7, 2013

    Mark Steyn, Accommodation, and the Fall of Khartoum

    Since 9/11, Mark Steyn has emerged as one of the West's most important public intellectuals and culture critics. His weekend columns at NRO (National Review Online), as well as his "Happy Warrior" columns in the wood pulp National Review are must-rea...

  • June 29, 2013

    Election Integrity under the Arizona Ruling

    Ed Wallis, commenting on my last article at American Thinker, left this message: "Dear author, please read J. Christian Adams' article on the Arizona decision; it seems most Conservatives read it WRONG: WE WIN." Inasmuch as Mr. Wallis was good enough...

  • June 20, 2013

    The Real Threat from Comprehensive Immigration Reform

    Greg Gutfeld, cohost of The Five and resident wit at Fox News, thinks that the scandals swirling around D.C. right now are so bad that Congress should be grounded for a year.  That's right -- no new laws, no initiatives, no nothin' until Congres...

  • June 16, 2013

    Internet Retailing Under the Marketplace Fairness Act

    For far too long, the American people have allowed their lawmakers to think they can tax just about anything. One of the more presumptuous taxes that lawmakers impose on us is the so-called "use tax," which works in tandem with the sales tax. Basical...

  • June 4, 2013

    Robert Reich's War on Global Capital

    Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration, has written yet another empty tract. He gripes that "global capital, in the form of multinational corporations as well as very wealthy individuals, is gaining enormous bargaining pow...

  • May 27, 2013

    Steve Rose on Obama's Arrogance

    "President Obama's arrogance is undoing his presidency," by columnist Steve Rose, appeared on the op-ed page of Sunday's print edition of the Kansas City Star. It's a surprisingly frank assessment from a journalist few would think of as a conservativ...

  • May 23, 2013

    The IRS Scandal and Tax Reform

    Of the three big scandals currently roiling DC -- the Benghazi terrorist attack, the seizing of phone records from the Associated Press, and the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups seeking tax exempt status -- the IRS scandal ...

  • May 19, 2013

    Krugman: Hardly 'Hard-line'

    For years now, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has been writing the same column over and over again with this simple message: austerity bad, spending good. He continues in this vein with "The Chutzpah Caucus." With "Krugman's Still Wrong" at Na...

  • May 17, 2013

    'Barack Hussein Nixon'

    Michael Booth, who runs Cato's Domain and whose pen name is Cato the Eldest, has written an interesting article that came out on May 13: "Barack Hussein Nixon." Booth compares, contrasts, and assesses the last eight presidents, from Nixon through O...

  • May 11, 2013

    The Future of Private Property

    It seems to just bug the dickens out of progressives, but we still have "private property" in these here United States. The question is, for how much longer? Private property has come under assault in America, and these assaults are coming mainly fro...

  • April 19, 2013

    Culture and the Barbarians at the Gate

    A lot of attention is being paid to culture. We read about clashes of culture and culture wars. Concerning the Atlanta scandal of 35 educators indicted for inflating the test scores of their students, former Reagan budget director David Stockman on A...

  • April 15, 2013

    The Rising Price of Civilization

    Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously opined: "Taxes are the price we pay for civilization." Right, but that price is rapidly rising. Might we be paying for more "civilization" than we can afford? When I filed my 2013 Personal Property...

  • April 8, 2013

    ObamaCare: Welcome to the 19th Century

    Sunday's Kansas City Star features a trenchant column by E. Thomas McClanahan on the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare: "An industrial-era monstrosity, forced on a digital age." McClanahan looks at the various adjustments Americans a...

  • April 2, 2013

    Family Fortunes and the I.R.S.

    Why do we tax what we tax? In subsection C of §21. Other Property Exemptions of ARTICLE VII. REVENUE AND FINANCE of the constitution of the great state of Louisiana, the following is exempted from the property tax: "(19) All artwork including sculpt...

  • March 27, 2013

    Refining Our 'Theory' of Taxation

    We Americans are taxed at just about every juncture in life that involves money.  We are taxed when we earn our money and when we spend our money.  We are even taxed when we give our money away, unless our gift recipient is a government-app...

  • March 19, 2013

    Will Obama Grab Your IRA?

    On February 22, I was distressed to read an article at American Thinker by John White headlined: "The Feds Want Your Retirement Accounts." It must have made a bunch of other readers bilious, too, as it garnered 457 comments. I had heard rumors about ...

  • March 14, 2013

    Obama's Obsession with the One Percent

    On January 8 in "Stories behind the tax cuts," Kansas City Star columnist Dave Helling began his commentary thus: Pop quiz: Who's the bigger tax cutter, Barack Obama or Ronald Reagan? Answer: Obama. The fiscal cliff agreement, signed early this year...

  • March 5, 2013

    ObamaCare and the 'RobertsTax'

    One of the necessary features of any law is enforcement. Taxes are laws, and if you don't pay your taxes, the government swoops down on you like a raptor on a rodent. You then must either pay up or prove that you don't owe the money the government sa...

  • March 5, 2013

    Will Obama Grab Your IRA?

    On February 22, I was disturbed to read an article at American Thinker by John White headlined: "The Feds Want Your Retirement Accounts." It must have made a bunch of other readers bilious, too, as it garnered 457 comments. I had heard rumors about t...

  • February 19, 2013

    Without Serious Spending Cuts, the Conservative Base Will Walk Away

    The good news on taxes is that for the first time in twelve years Americans have permanent tax rates for the biggest source of revenue to the federal government, the Individual Income Tax. That not only gives Americans a measure of certainty, it also...

  • February 14, 2013

    The Taxpayer's Share

    Taxes have been in the news of late even more than usual, and not only in America. France's new socialist president has proposed a 75 percent top tax rate, causing the investor class to seek sunnier tax climes than dreary old Gaul. Actor Gerard Depar...

  • February 3, 2013

    Loyalty in Football

    Americans would do well on Super Bowl Sunday to remind themselves what team sports are really all about. Last November in the sports section of the Kansas City Star, my hometown paper, there appeared the nearby photo of Jimmy Nielsen of Aalborg Den...

  • January 13, 2013

    'Put Not Your Trust in Aryans': A Movie Review

    Frontpagemag contributor Ben Shapiro needs to be taken to task for his article "Why Conservative Movies Outperform Liberal Ones." His main thesis seems correct, but he offhandedly dismisses an excellent film that FPM readers would enjoy. I'm here to ...

  • December 31, 2012

    A Currency as Good as Gold

    The nifty thing about a gold-backed currency is: they aren't making any more gold. The alchemists have tried to make the stuff, but have failed. Of course, a currency can be backed by other precious metals, like silver. But the supply of those other ...

  • December 19, 2012

    Fiscal Cliff: Negotiating with a Weak Hand?

    The only time in American history that the federal government completely paid off its debt was in 1835. Because the feds have carried a debt for more than 99 percent of our history, one might therefore wonder whether the national debt is really such ...

  • December 13, 2012

    Krugman Sends 'Deficit Scolds' Straight to Hell

    New York Times columnist Paul Krugman comes up with quaint little terms for those who dare to disagree with him.  (One charming example is "confidence fairies.")  The term Mr. Krugman uses for those concerned about the federal deficit is "d...

  • December 7, 2012

    Saved from Another Great Depression?

    Occasionally one hears a guest on a talk show say that a statement is counterfactual. What they mean is merely that the statement is contrary to the facts, untrue. It's a polite way of saying:You don't know what you're talking about, pal. If you were...

  • December 1, 2012

    The Twinkie Economist Looks at the 1950s

    In his November 18 New York Times column, "The Twinkie Manifesto," progressive economist Paul Krugman compares and contrasts the 1950s with today: "Yet in the 1950s incomes in the top bracket faced a marginal tax rate of 91, that's right, 91 percent....

  • November 28, 2012

    Snookered on the Fiscal Cliff

    On January 1, the rates for the federal individual income tax are scheduled to go back to their Clinton-era levels.  According to Tax Foundation, the higher tax rates would bring in an extra $156 billion to the federal treasury in 2013.  Bu...

  • November 23, 2012

    A Persistent ObamaCare Factoid

    It used to be standard practice in journalism to corroborate. A responsible news outfit would get a second source (at the very least) to back up a story, and a good reporter would try to get it straight from the horse's mouth. This standard practice ...

  • November 17, 2012

    Reeling from Fiscal Vertigo

    Conservatives would have much less to fear from Big Government and the entitlement state if one simple little mechanism were in place that was ironclad and could not be gotten around. That simple little mechanism is this: a requirement that the feder...

  • November 5, 2012

    Claire McCaskill: 'Other People's Money' and Marijuana

    In its Midwest Voices series, The Kansas City Star (a McClatchy newspaper) regularly runs guest commentaries by "citizen journalists."  Because the Star is a left-wing outfit and almost invariably endorses Democrat candidates, many of these arti...

  • October 31, 2012

    Todd Akin: It's the Majority, Stupid

    Missourians who are alarmed by America's continuing slide into national decline need to vote on November 6 for Todd Akin for the U.S. Senate.  Before explaining why, some background: First, I didn't vote for Mr. Akin in Missouri's August 7 Repub...

  • October 27, 2012

    'The Policies That Caused the Mess in the First Place'

    For the last four years, Democrats and their amen corner in the old media have been trying to lay all the blame for the financial crisis of 2008 on poor old George W. Bush.  They want folks to believe that that since the crisis happened on "his ...

  • October 21, 2012

    Recovery and the Fed's 'Exit Strategy'

    Since the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve's policy has been to keep interest rates at about zero percent, and to run a program called "quantitative easing" (or QE), which is designed to pump money into the system by buying U.S. Treasury bo...

  • October 12, 2012

    The Weight of the Fed in the Voters' Decision

    In science there are lots of facts but only a few theories. Fewer still, perhaps, are the "laws" of science, one of which is the Law of Conservation of Matter, which holds that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. The laws of science, however...

  • September 29, 2012

    The Brokest Nation

    Remember how alarmed we were toward the end of 2008, when we realized that Congress for the first time in history was going to run a deficit of a trillion dollars?  Congress had never run a deficit even half that size, and some speculated that t...

  • September 22, 2012

    America's Road to Perdition

    Although it takes a little longer than bombing, one sure way to destroy a nation is from within.  Just ruin a nation's people, and you can walk right in and take over.  In Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell mu...

  • September 15, 2012

    Putting Sand in the Gears of the Price Mechanism

    To make a halfway rational decision about a purchase, one needs to know its price.  That commonplace idea now seems lost on many Americans.  But it's difficult to know the true and complete price of things when at every turn the price mecha...

  • September 11, 2012

    Inequality: The Cudgel of Progressives

    Just about every issue that progressives fulminate about is dressed up in the garish garb of equality.  Progressives -- so-called "liberals," a.k.a. "the Left" -- invoke equality as though there were no arguments against it, as though no decent,...

  • August 29, 2012

    'Fun Facts' from Barbara Shelly on Wacky, Ignorant Missouri

    The Kansas City Star, the city's main newspaper, has a strange business model -- i.e., insulting large swaths of Missouri readers.  In an op-ed on August 23, "Todd Akin is the legitimate face of Missouri Republicans," columnist Barbara Shelly wr...

  • August 23, 2012

    Howard Dean: A Piece of Work

    Howard Dean, a medical doctor, was governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2003 and chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009. He was also a candidate for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, but flamed out in Iowa, which is wh...

  • August 22, 2012

    If All Else Fails: What to do if Akin doesn't step aside

    The situation for Missouri Republicans over replacing Todd Akin as their candidate for U.S. Senate results from a confluence of factors. The first factor is the 17th Amendment, but there's not much we can do about that before November. The next facto...

  • August 21, 2012

    The Impact of ObamaCare on the Economy

    According to the experts, the top issue by far in the November election is the economy. The polls all seem to bear this out. But there may be a problem with the polls in that some of the other choices in their multiple choice questions relate to the ...

  • August 4, 2012

    ObamaCare: The Most Recent in a Parade of Horribles

    The Supreme Court's salvage operation on ObamaCare may have opened up a can of worms.  At The Daily Paul, the issue of changing the penalty (for noncompliance with the individual mandate) into a tax (for not owning health insurance) was summed u...

  • July 16, 2012

    Did the 'Individual Mandate' Survive?

    In the aftermath of the Supreme Court's June 28 decision on ObamaCare, there've been some confusing reports in the media that the "individual mandate" survived: On July 12 in an excerpt from a soon-to-appear article in National Review, attorneys Jona...

  • July 10, 2012

    The Tax You Need Not Pay

    Except for the decision on the expansion of Medicaid, ObamaCare largely survived the scrutiny of the Supreme Court.  However, the individual mandate is gone; the Constitution does not allow Congress to command Americans to own health insurance....

  • July 2, 2012

    Taxes: 'Heresies of the Obvious'

    Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush recently came to D.C. and testified before the House Budget Committee, chaired by Paul Ryan. At The Washington Post, Michael Gerson instructs us: Bush has naturally gotten more attention for his departures from Repub...

  • June 23, 2012

    Long-Term Budgeting by a Short-Term Congress

    The only budgets a Congress has control over are those that fall within its two-year term.  Nevertheless, a Congress may pretend that it can set its spending priorities in stone so that a future Congress must do what it "dictates."  The 112...

  • June 13, 2012

    What 'Every Economist' Says

    The expression "every economist" is one of the most widely abused in politics.  In various formulations, one hears a lot of this rhetoric.  You see, there's no disagreement among economists.  Keynesians, Austrians, Marxists, classical ...

  • June 4, 2012

    The Aesthetics of ObamaCare

    One question legal minds might entertain when pondering whether ObamaCare ought to be overturned is this: Should any law be constitutional that is so damned ugly? Whether one looks at process, product, implementation, or its legal defense, ObamaCare ...

  • May 31, 2012

    A Raging Prairie Fire of Lies

    In her Right Turn blog at The Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin reports that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently told Iowans a "prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation and every day we fail to act that fire gets c...

  • May 28, 2012

    Election Fraud: A new special report from Fox News

    Despite the indictments and convictions, the position of progressives is that election fraud isn't really much of a problem in America. Eric Shawn of Fox News has done more than anyone else on television to expose the truth about election fraud. For ...

  • May 15, 2012

    'Marriage Equality' and the Public Interest

    At the Empire State Pride Agenda's Fall Dinner, shortly before he was elected governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo declared: I don't want to be the governor who just proposes marriage equality. I don't want to be the governor who lobbies for marriage ...

  • May 8, 2012

    Obama's Blank Check

    Recently, you may have heard that President Obama has run up more debt in one term than George W. Bush ran up in two.  Let's check that out.  On Inauguration Day 2001, Bush inherited a debt of $5.7T (see chart).   The data for this ch...

  • April 27, 2012

    ObamaCare and Freedom

    In an article at The Daily Beast on "the right's freedom fetish," Newsweek correspondent Michael Tomasky opined: Behind the challenges to the Affordable Care Act [ObamaCare] being heard at the Supreme Court this week is the idea that Barack Obama wa...

  • April 25, 2012

    ObamaCare and Freedom

    In an article at The Daily Beast on "the right's freedom fetish," Newsweek correspondent Michael Tomasky opined: Behind the challenges to the Affordable Care Act [ObamaCare] being heard at the Supreme Court this week is the idea that Barack Obama wa...

  • April 21, 2012

    Taxing Thoughts from Justice Sotomayor

    Two years after its enactment, certain pundits still don't understand the basics of ObamaCare.  At The Atlantic on March 29, Robert Wright opined:  If the Supreme Court rules against President Obama on the constitutionality of the Affordab...

  • April 14, 2012

    ObamaCare's Real Price Tag

    In a 2002 fact sheet, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (or AHRQ, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) reported: The United States spends a larger share of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care than ...

  • April 6, 2012

    Paul Krugman's History Problem

    The national debt divides America into two camps. One camp contends that the debt is a manageable, long-term problem and is not all that menacing. The other camp fears that the debt poses a serious, immediate and perhaps even existential threat to Am...

  • April 1, 2012

    'Let Voters Decide': Tax Reform in Missouri

    A campaign in the great state of Missouri called Let Voters Decide seeks to abolish the state's income tax and replace the lost revenue by expanding the state's sales tax.  Signatures are being collected to put the matter before voters on the No...

  • March 24, 2012

    Mandatory Spending by a Broke Nation

    Federal spending has two sides: mandatory spending and discretionary spending.  The biggest programs on the mandatory side are Social Security and Medicare.  These two programs are called "mandatory" because they are not subject to the budg...

  • March 10, 2012

    Sandra Fluke and the Nature of Insurance

    On Feb. 23, Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke testified before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee about women's health and contraception. Ms. Fluke thinks that the health insurance program provided by Georgetown University, Premium ...

  • March 5, 2012

    'Nobody Considers That a Tax'

    We Americans need to expand our idea of what a tax is. Some may contend that an expenditure  is only a tax when government labels it as such and there's a rate or assessment attached to it. Those people are sophists. Provided that it is not a pe...

  • February 22, 2012

    Elections in America: 'Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient'

    America's voter registries are a mess, according to "Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient," a new report from The Pew Center on the States. The 11-page report asserts: Approximately 24 million -- one of every eight -- active voter registrations in th...

  • February 13, 2012

    ObamaCare's Moral Conscience Accommodation

    Saturday's opinion in The Wall Street Journal, "Immaculate Contraception," explains the absurdity of ObamaCare's "accommodation" for those whose moral conscience prevents them from paying for birth control: Under the new rule, which the White House ...

  • February 5, 2012

    America's One True Religion

    "Tell old God that the last man you saw on earth was Quantrill." America is a Christian nation, or so some would like to believe.  But, just as in Europe, traditional religion is losing its sway in America, and a substitute religion is taking ...

  • January 21, 2012

    Krugman's Premature Victory Lap

    Inflation is the cruelest tax, and it doesn't come just in April. What money the government is kind enough to allow the taxpayer to keep, inflation can destroy. Government creates inflation when the Federal Reserve creates money. That last statement,...

  • January 14, 2012

    The Company Men

    A terrific 2010 movie that examines the heartbreak caused by corporate downsizing has come to cable TV.  The Company Men follows the lives of three executives fired by a conglomerate trying to prop up its stock price and fend off a leveraged buy...

  • January 10, 2012

    Non-citizen Voting in Connecticut

    The Mayor of New Haven, Connecticut, John DeStefano, a Democrat, wants to let non-citizens vote in city elections.  One might ask the good mayor if he also thinks it OK for non-citizens to run for city offices, too -- like for mayor.  Accor...

  • December 21, 2011

    A Diseased Economy Awaits the Correct Diagnosis

    "America's debt is not its biggest problem." So reads the headline of an article in The Washington Post by Bill Gross, renowned head of the world's largest bond fund, PIMCO. Here's what Mr. Gross thinks America's "biggest problem" is: But while our ...

  • December 11, 2011

    Voter Fraud for the Complete Idiot

    A Doonesbury cartoon on a recent Sunday contained a distillation of a current talking point among progressives: "Question: What fraud? Voter fraud is close to non-existent!" Progressives think that if they make the above claim as though it were an in...

  • November 19, 2011

    Your 'Fair Share' in the New Tax Rate Regime

    The ongoing stir over the rich paying their "fair share" of the tax burden is associated with investor Warren Buffett's claim to have a lower effective tax rate than his secretary. In an opinion for The New York Times last summer, Buffett claimed to ...

  • November 3, 2011

    The Missouri GOP Wakes Up

    Common sense has triumphed over appearances and liberal caterwauling in the Show Me State's Republican Party.  Is the Stupid Party waking from its slumber? In "Democracy Demands Voters," an article on the op-ed page of the Oct. 26 wood pulp...

  • October 29, 2011

    Tax Rates for Limiting the Leviathan

    In McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Chief Justice John Marshall wrote: "A right to tax, without limit or control, is essentially a power to destroy." President Obama has talked a lot lately about the wealthy paying their "fair share" of the tax burden....

  • October 13, 2011

    Who's the Real Tea Party Candidate?

    The most important elective Republican since the 1920s was surely Ronald Reagan. Ronaldus Magnus' coattails ushered in the first Republican Senate in 26 years. And unlike Eisenhower, who lost his GOP Congress in the next election, Reagan's GOP Senate...

  • September 28, 2011

    Joe Stiglitz Wants Your Money

    Are there any progressives out there who understand money? In the recent flap over House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's sensible desire to find pay-as-you-go offsets to fund hurricane relief, one progressive TV commentator commented that if the feds c...

  • September 24, 2011

    The Left's Big Obsession

    The "leftist mind" has been undone by its allegiance to bad ideas. In the movie Casino (1995), Ace Rothstein is dining in the restaurant of the casino he manages and discovers that his blueberry muffin doesn't have as many blueberries as his dinner c...

  • September 14, 2011

    Inequality: It's a Good Thing

    Equality is the highest value of the American political left.  So the left is always on the lookout for any trace of inequality.  And of course they find it -- everywhere.  That's because equality doesn't exist in this world, except wh...

  • September 7, 2011

    Creative Destruction in Kansas City?

    The prospect for job seekers in America is dismal. The Vice President even said that many of the lost jobs aren't coming back.  But if we ran our enterprises more carefully, the employment situation would be even worse.  There's a lot of "d...

  • September 2, 2011

    Tea Parties are like the confederates or something

    The Sunday August 28 issue of The Kansas City Star, a McClatchy newspaper, devoted several pages of section A to the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. Among the stories was "The Civil War at 150: The past in the present?" by David W. Blight, a prof...

  • August 17, 2011

    Stop Coddling Warren Buffett

    Long ago tycoon Warren Buffett famously observed that his secretary had a higher tax rate than did the great investor himself.  On August 14 in The New York Times, Buffett once again trotted out that factoid in "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich." Mr...

  • August 14, 2011

    Tax Reform for a Broke Nation

    Now that the debt ceiling deal is done -- or at least done until Congress must break through the new ceiling -- some want to move on to tax reform.  In addition to the effectiveness and enforceability of new tax systems, the issue of fairness s...

  • August 9, 2011

    What took the S&P downgrade so long?

    After the downgrade of U.S. sovereign debt by the rating agency Standard and Poor's, there came a concerted effort to blame it all on the little old Tea Party. Sen. John Kerry, David Axelrod and other progressives went on the Sunday morning talk show...

  • August 6, 2011

    A Ridley Scott Movie for Conservatives

    For maybe a decade now, I've been conducting a one-man boycott of Hollywood.  Even so, I eventually see some new movies on cable, but I don't pay to see them in the theatre.  And now that I have my 1080p Vizio HDTV, not seeing flicks in the...

  • August 2, 2011

    Debt Ceiling: Anything But Spending Cuts

    Some pundits say that it is all but certain that the major credit rating agencies (Moody's, and Standard and Poor's) will soon downgrade U.S. sovereign debt. For months, we've been told that such a downgrade would be calamitous, that interest rates w...

  • July 24, 2011

    Debt Ceiling: The Long Run Is Here

    It's last call and you better be blind-drunk, three sheets to wind, because the saloon's only female, who's looking at you with a sly lascivious grin, is uglier than sin. When one hears David Beers of Standard & Poor's yesterday on Fox News state...

  • July 22, 2011

    Bill O'Reilly Addresses the Tea Party

    When folks tell me they don't watch The O'Reilly Factor, I urge them to at least watch the first 2 minutes of the show: the Talking Points memo. Bill usually has something perceptive to say. On Thursday night (7-21-2011), Bill delivered one of his be...

  • July 20, 2011

    Can Increased Demand Save the Economy?

    Progressive economists have been bewailing the slowdown in demand since soon after the onset of the recession.  According to these economists, low demand is what ails the American economy, and the only cure is for the federal government to spend...

  • July 15, 2011

    Debt Ceiling: Groping for Clarity

    Americans may never understand what's at stake in the debt ceiling negotiations if government officials and the establishment media don't make an effort to be accurate. Their central message is that the United States will default if the debt ceiling ...

  • July 9, 2011

    ObamaCare and the King's Royal Deer

    Long ago in jolly old England it was a crime to hunt deer.  Deer in England, you see, belonged to the crown.  Poaching "the King's royal deer" might get you hanged, and with a silken rope.  So Englishmen sailed across the stormy Atlant...

  • July 7, 2011

    Debt Ceiling: The Trap of Budget Cuts in the 'Out Years'

    President Obama is making noises about getting a multi-year deal in the upcoming debt ceiling negotiations.  House Republicans should resist this -- it is a trap. The only things a Congress can control are those that happen during its own time i...

  • July 2, 2011

    Presidential Elections: An End Run Around the Constitution?

    In "Time to rethink the way we vote for presidents," a commentary that appeared on June 26 in the wood pulp version of The Kansas City Star, columnist Steve Kraske opines about a proposal that would effectively end the Electoral College. Kraske repor...

  • June 22, 2011

    The 'Real' Tax Rates on Top Earners

    The top rate for the federal Individual Income Tax was 91 percent in 1963. In 1965 Congress lowered the top rate to 70 percent, in memory of JFK who had floated the idea. Then Ronaldus Magnus charmed Congress into lowering the top rate to 50 percent ...

  • June 16, 2011

    The Debt Ceiling Showdown in an Uncertain Recovery

    The federal government borrows about 40 cents of every dollar it spends. But Democrats think that Congress has no choice but to raise the debt ceiling; to not raise the debt ceiling would usher in the End of the World, Armageddon. Which means the fed...

  • June 11, 2011

    Bobby Fischer Against the World

      Regular readers of American Thinker might pass on the documentary I'm recommending, but it's not primarily about chess.   Bobby Fischer Against the World (2011) is mainly about the psychology of a troubled mind. But it's also a sweet litt...

  • June 4, 2011

    Paul Krugman: The Lesser of Two Evils?

    In times when there are no good alternatives, tradeoffs can become an acceptance of an increase in one bad thing in order to affect a decrease in another bad thing seen as being the greater evil.  Progressives think the central tradeoff right no...

  • May 14, 2011

    The Ever-Shifting Price of ObamaCare

    One reason the price of a new Cadillac isn't higher is because not everyone wants a new Cadillac -- at least not if they themselves have to pay for it. But if everyone were in the market for a new Cadillac, one could be assured with metaphysical cert...

  • May 6, 2011

    Hit and Run Journalism in Kansas City

    On May 4 in BLOG BIT, a regular feature at the top of the opinion page of The Kansas City Star (a McClatchy newspaper), editorial page columnist Barb Shelly writes:The folks at the Concord Coalition, which advocates for deficit-reduction, were amused...

  • April 27, 2011

    The Debt Ceiling: Who's Holding Whom Hostage?

    The big question about the federal government's little debt problem can be boiled down to this: How much time do we have?  Some say the problem is years away; others contend the problem is imminent but manageable; and another group believes the ...

  • April 21, 2011

    Removing the Payroll Tax Cap

    In 2010, Social Security paid out more in benefits than it received in revenue from the payroll tax. This shortfall happened seven years before it was supposed to, and the Congressional Budget Office projects shortfalls from now on out.One idea for m...

  • April 14, 2011

    Social Security 'Whoppers' and the Compliant Media

    It's bad enough that year after year career politicians shamelessly perpetuate the same untruths, but when the media don't call them on it it's intolerable. Journalists are supposed to be guardians of the truth; they comprise one of just three profes...

  • April 12, 2011

    NY Times columnist wrong: Congress Can End Social Security Whenever They Choose

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  • April 9, 2011

    The Price of Government Employees

    One of the world's more pressing problems is sovereign debt.  From Japan to Greece to America, the debts run up by governments are forcing painful choices.But some think we needn't make hard choices.  They think things can go on as before a...

  • April 3, 2011

    Robert Reich: Who You Calling a Liar?

    Robert Reich begins his recent column, "The Republicans' Big Lies About Jobs (And Why Obama Must Repudiate Them)," with a quote from George Orwell's novel, 1984: "And if all others accepted the lie which the party imposed -- if all rec...

  • April 1, 2011

    Paul Krugman: Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt

    Before the financial crisis, before the meltdown of the real estate market, before the collapse in employment, Paul Krugman was the nation's foremost economist urging Congress to forget about balancing the budget. Whether it's good times or it's bad ...

  • March 24, 2011

    Kansas City Star whitewashes Senator McCaskill's offenses

    In today's editorial, "McCaskill's missteps damage her image," in The Kansas City Star, a McClatchy newspaper, the paper can't bring itself to condemn their girl, the one they endorsed, for having run afoul of the law:Two things seem clear ...

  • March 9, 2011

    'Waiving' goodbye to the Constitution

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  • February 15, 2011

    The Unbearable Lightness of the Social Security "Trust Fund"

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  • February 7, 2011

    Who's afraid of a little election fraud?

    What do Saddam Hussein, Sen. Al Franken, Hamid Karzai, Gov. Christine Gregoire, George W. Bush, Hugo Chavez, Huey Long, John F. Kennedy and Hosni Mubarak all have in common? Read on.The Kansas City Star, a McClatchy newspaper, has issues with Kris Ko...

  • January 8, 2011

    The Limits of Federal Power: ObamaCare on Trial

    One of the first orders of business for the 112th Congress is for the new House to fulfill its campaign promise to pass a repeal of ObamaCare. This  will be a vain effort, however, as repeal will likely die in the Senate.  But even if repea...

  • December 11, 2010

    Obama Chooses Badly: Recovery Thwarted

    President Obama's defenders and detractors look at the same economic data but come to entirely different conclusions.  Obama defenders say things would have been worse; Obama detractors say things should have gotten better by now.Obama defenders...

  • November 19, 2010

    Shrink the Fed Before It Shrinks the Dollar

    At Tea Party rallies and at other get-togethers over the last two years, one could often see placards reading "End the Fed." That also happens to be the title of a worthy book by Rep. Ron Paul. If one googles those three words within quotat...

  • September 28, 2010

    Money Is Still Money, Isn't It?

    The emphasis on America's national debt doesn't tell the entire story. Federal finance is rather different from that done by the individual. The debt payments an individual makes on his house ultimately result in retirement of his debt. The individua...

  • August 18, 2010

    Shared Sacrifice in Obamaland

    Over the last fifty years, the federal government has run budget deficits exactly 90 percent of the time. The American people, however, never seemed very concerned about it. But with the advent of the Great Recession and a quantum jump in the size of...

  • August 1, 2010

    Obama and the Age of Reaganomics

    Certain ideas get so firmly fixed in some folks' brains that no amount of evidence can dislodge them. Such ideas become articles of faith. And one article of faith that is particularly deeply stuck in the minds of "the faithful" is that Rea...

  • July 10, 2010

    The Reindustrialization of America

    Consumer spending drives 70 percent of the American economy. In such an economy, the individual must spend continually and lustily lest the economy fall into recession.But what's good for the economy isn't necessarily good for the individual. Right n...

  • June 28, 2010

    Federal Revenue and the Economy

    The Office of Management and Budget reports that total federal revenue more than doubled every decade from 1940 to 1980 (Table 1.3, tables). And from 1980 to 2000, total federal revenue almost doubled every decade, going from $517 billion in 1980 to ...

  • May 28, 2010

    Trillion-Dollar Deficits and the Press

    The prolongation of the Great Recession is due to bad government policy, just as in the Great Depression. And just as in the 1930s, the greatest threat to prosperity is the federal government. But one would never suspect this if one got one's news fr...

  • May 16, 2010

    The Dollar's Demise is not Inevitable

    In a recent American Thinker article, "The Dollar's Inevitable Demise," author Vasko Kohlmayer compares the federal debt to the American economy, or GDP. Mr. Kohlmayer begins his article by correctly pegging GDP at "roughly $14 trillio...

  • March 26, 2010

    Engineering the New Electorate

    Voting is so central to the American system that three of the last five amendments to our Constitution deal with it (Amendments 23, 24 and 26). Amendment 26, for instance, extends the vote to eighteen-year-olds.But the American political Left (a.k.a....

  • March 24, 2010

    Roosevelt Redux?

    Democrats unreservedly revere Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and they've beatified him into secular sainthood. Republicans honor FDR for his leadership during World War II. Roosevelt is unique: No other American president has served more than two terms. ...

  • February 20, 2010

    A Tax Holiday for Corporations?

    America has the second-highest corporate tax rate on Earth. Economists say that this puts America at a competitive disadvantage. So to spur growth and help get us out of the Great Recession, some have urged Congress to lower the corporate tax rate. B...

  • February 9, 2010

    Federal Overreach and the New States' Rights Movement

    Ever since the election of Woodrow Wilson, America has been concentrating more and more power and control in the federal government. With the 2008 elections, the century-long creep towards statism accelerated. America is not only on the wrong track -...

  • December 28, 2009

    Money: Debauched, Debased, and Destroyed

    Years ago, I was having a beer in the bar of a restaurant with an academic when he said something to the effect of "Money isn't real." On the contrary, he insisted, money's real because we agree that it's real. Money exists in an agreed-upo...

  • November 24, 2009

    Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Federal Trust Funds

    The Congress of the United States of America is consigning you, your children, and your children's progeny to slavery.Maybe it's the Scottish strain in my DNA, but I've been concerned about the national debt since before it breached the $1 trillion m...

  • November 11, 2009

    To Hell with the Constitution?

    Much has been made recently of the unconstitutionality of federal health care reform, especially a government-run system (the "public option") that could devolve into a "single-payer" system. The main objection is that the federal...

  • November 7, 2009

    The Price of the Public Option

    For decades now, prices in the health care industry have outpaced the overall inflation rate. Health care takes up a larger and larger portion of the economy. While health care's share of GDP has very recently been a 7th, it now makes up a 6th (and i...

  • October 25, 2009

    Rightwing Fascists and Other Fables

    The political Left has been saying for the longest time: Fascism is an ideology of the right. In January 2008, Jonah Goldberg's excellent Liberal Fascism debuted, and in it he demonstrated for all time that fascism is most definitely an ideology of t...

  • October 2, 2009

    Obama's Deficit: The Devil Made Me Do It

    Ever since his inauguration, President Obama has said that he "inherited" the federal budget deficit from his predecessor. But immediately upon taking office, Obama signed two new bills, the $787B stimulus and the $410B omnibus, that togeth...

  • September 22, 2009

    Two Tweaks to the Constitution

    Sometimes, We the People discover that we have made a serious mistake, and we don't want to wait for the next election to correct it. In some states, voters can correct their mistakes with a recall election, such as the 2003 recall of California Gove...

  • August 25, 2009

    Health Insurance and the Lure of Someone Else

    Insurance is all about "someone else" paying your bills.However, if everyone's healthcare bills were the same, if our bodies failed and expired in the same way and on the same schedule, if our little lives were as predictable as those of th...

  • July 6, 2009

    The Fair Price of Civilization?

    "Taxes are the price we pay for civilization" ... Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. The U.S. Tax Code is a perennial whipping boy, and rightly so. It's unfair and monstrously complex.Some would like to replace the entire Tax Code and the IRS w...

  • March 23, 2009

    Where's the 'Do Nothing Congress' When You Need Them?

    With passage of the $410 billion "omnibus" spending bill coming hard on the heels of the $787 billion stimulus package and the $700 billion bailout of the financial sector along with the prospect of more bailouts, rescues, buy-ins and stimu...

  • January 29, 2009

    Federal Finance: having it both ways

    To the dismay and disappointment of conservatives, the Republican Congress set a record "unified budget" deficit of $412 Billion in FY 2004. This departure from fiscal conservatism may have been an under-appreciated factor in the GOP's loss...

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