November 21, 2012

Why it matters whether or not the Administration lied about Benghazi

I hear lots of people (just yesterday, Joe Scarborough), wanting to sound worldly and mature, saying that the issue of the talking points, etc., is a distraction (and that lying in this context is in fact to be expected) -- that what really matters i...

April 7, 2012

President Obama, Meet Justice Brandeis

We now know that our brilliant constitutional law professor president doesn't know anything about constitutional law.  This isn't just a matter of some loose remarks in the Rose Garden -- he is still wildly mis-citing cases in this area, display...

March 11, 2012

Politics in Command

The bitterness and animosity that have developed around the issue of mandated insurance coverage of birth control is just the first fruit of what looks to be a long and divisive and totally unnecessary national struggle over health and medicine and l...

March 3, 2012

Who pays for birth control?

It seems to me this issue has become unnecessarily tangled. Let's set aside the Catholics -- the real ones, that is. Does a regular, non-religious employer (or college) have an obligation to provide "free" birth control? My instinct would be to say n...

February 19, 2012

Griswold vs. Obama

Earlier this year George Stephanopoulos took advantage of his status as a debate "moderator" to ask Governor Romney "do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?" If you go b...

July 17, 2011

Barack and Joe: Obama's Keynesian Vision

See also: Barack and Joe: Taxation, Barack and Joe: Social Justice As Obama explained it to Joe the Plumber, here's how our economy works: [M]y attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody. I...

July 16, 2011

Barack and Joe: Social Justice

In 'splaining things to Joe the plumber, then-candidate Obama leaned hard on the unfairness of our current political-economic system: We haven't given a break to folks who make less [the $250,000] and, as a consequence, the average wage and income f...

July 15, 2011

Barack and Joe: Taxation

I keep thinking about Joe the Plumber.  I went back and read the full transcript of his dialogue with then-candidate Obama, in October of 2008, right when all the awful things had begun to happen to the economy.  It is really an amazing exc...

July 13, 2011

Social Security: a Reckoning

Understanding what, and who, is to blame for the Social Security funding crisis will allow us to move on and reach a solution that fairly allocates costs amongst current generations. Gov. Christie recently said that pension and health care obligation...

July 11, 2011

No New Tax Cuts

On O'Reilly on July 8, 2011, Alan Colmes said -- in defense of Obama's fiscal policy -- that 40 percent of the 2009 stimulus was tax cuts.  If you look beyond this rhetorical flourish, you find that, yeah, there was 40 percent in things that the...

July 11, 2011

He rescued us?

On Sunday, on Meet the Press, Treasury Secretary Geithner said "The Amercian economy was falling off the cliff in the Fall of 08 and the first months of [President Obama's] Administration and he put in place the most creative, the most forceful set o...

November 22, 2010

The Cure is the Disease

In an age of high-velocity information, creative monetary "policy" can only do mischief.Think about this: the biggest variable -- the biggest source of uncertainty -- in our economy right now is what Fed monetary policy will be. Fortunes wi...

November 17, 2010

Bailouts and the 'Contagion' Metaphor

Is infectious disease an analytically useful economic metaphor? For those who favor bailing out states that can't control spending, it certainly seems so.A November 15, 2010 article in the Daily Telegraph -- "Contagion hits Portugal as Ireland d...

January 23, 2010

A modest health care reform proposal

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October 26, 2009

Why the left isn't socialist

If you define "socialist" as advocating government ownership of the "means of production," which is what I've always understood socialist to mean, then, no, modern leftists (or progressives or whatever they want to be called) no l...