"What would a Das Kapital look like if written today?" may sound like a query that is more than a tad contrived, but in the hands of Rupert Younger and Frank Portnoy, who posed the question in a remarkable piece in the Financial Times recently, the conceit actually works quite well.
Hurricanes Irma and Maria strafed much of the island of Puerto Rico and worsened what was already a perilous fiscal problem facing the island’s government. However, a reconstruction program that has finally kicked into high gear helped its surprisingly robust economy bounce back, and the employment…
I have fond memories of watching Jerry Lewis's annual muscular dystrophy telethon, even though, let's be frank: The event made for wretched TV, even by the standards of the 1970s. Jerry Lewis, rest his soul, would ramble interminably about the plight of people afflicted with the disease until it…
A neighbor has parked his classic Jaguar in front of my apartment building for the last two months. Around it are a new BMW, a Mercedes, and two Audis.
Very few songs have joined the Pop Christmas Canon in the last forty years with only two at present being considered for inclusion, in my estimation: The Pogues' "Fairytale of New York" and Dan Fogelberg's "Same Old Lang Syne." Both differ from most of the other songs in the oeuvre by the fact that…
Investment companies that run index funds—which merely seek to replicate the ups and downs of a broader market index and that entail no investment strategy by any managers—are becoming ever more popular, with a greater proportion of our retirement savings are going into them. Forty percent of all…
As the House Ways and Means committee proceeds with the markup of its landmark tax reform proposal, one change that seems inevitable is the curtailment of the modest reforms of the myriad home ownership tax breaks contained in the original legislation. These included capping the deduction for…
Recent reports suggest that the contest for the next chair of the Federal Reserve is down to Jay Powell, a current member of the Federal Reserve board, and Kevin Warsh, a member of the board from 2006 to 2011. And the rumor mill suggests that it is Warsh—a former Wall Street denizen whose…
Our tax code is screwed up in a thousand ways and there’s scarcely a cohort in America that isn’t hurt by this mess.
Forty years ago the economists Finn Kydland and Ed Prescott wrote a paper (for which they later won the Nobel Prize) observing that there are situations when the government makes a promise it can't be expected to keep, and that policy inevitably reflects that reality.
Is cutting the corporate tax rate merely a sop to the wealthy, as a report recently published by the Institute for Policy Studies alleges? It's an important question, since a corporate rate cut is a prominent feature of every tax reform proposal currently on the table.
For the last three days the NFL has been vacillating over what to do about this weekend’s game featuring the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at the Miami Dolphins. The problem is that Hurricane Irma, with its torrential rainfall and 150 mph winds, is forecast to make landfall near Miami around game time…
In July, the Senate Banking Committee held two hearings focused on what to do with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that purchase and securitize most of the nation’s mortgages. The Treasury placed the two mortgage giants into conservatorship at the onset of the…
A dozen years ago a friend and I, both of us new to the Capital, hosted a political fundraiser. It was the first time either of us had attempted such a thing, and the politician was a member of the Peoria school board—our home town—running for the Illinois state assembly named Aaron Schock. (You…
Last week the president feigned striking a blow for lower college costs with his proposal to make junior colleges free for all attendees meeting minimal academic standards. True to form, the president has taken on something not heretofore considered an impediment to college attendance with an…
Disposing of a used couch in an urban neighborhood turns out to be a complicated affair.
Glen Campbell’s passing left me sad, and not just because I enjoy his music. Campbell was the first celebrity I ever met: Not only was our encounter memorable but it struck me later as an amazingly instructive lesson for how a person should conduct oneself when faced with an awkward situation.
A few years ago Boston honored Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy—the mother of President John F. Kennedy as well as Senators (and presidential candidates) Teddy and Robert Kennedy—by naming its newly reclaimed Greenway after her. Two of her daughters also achieved great success in public service: Eunice…
Anyone who doubts the power of the bureaucracy ought to look into the quandary confronting ExxonMobil.
Twenty years ago the guy in charge of picking up the beer and pizza for the Prosperity Caucus—a group of socially awkward hill staffers, economists, and various D.C. denizens interested in issues related to growth and prosperity—decided to go back home and run for Congress. It was an unexpected…
A question no one’s asked out loud with regard to the ongoing Illinois state budget negotiations is what happens if—or when—the state becomes unable or unwilling to pay its bills a few years down the road.
In April, the American solar manufacturer Suniva filed a petition under Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974, asking the U.S. International Trade Commission for new tariffs on solar cells and the establishment of a minimum price for solar modules imported into the United States. Last month, the…
It appears that the Treasury will soon be getting a champion of the pro-growth conservative crowd on its team in David Malpass, who has his confirmation hearing for Undersecretary for International Affairs in front of the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the business lunch is slumping of late: The new trend, it seems, is for workers to eat meals at their desk brought from home instead, a development the Journal endorses as being healthier, less expensive, and more efficient to boot.
It is official: Puerto Rico has entered into the "Title III" bankruptcy that many feared would be the ultimate outcome of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act passed by Congress last summer. This includes the island's largest public pension plan, the Employee Retirement…
For politicians, giving away money is fun, but telling others to give away money is even better. That's what the Washington, D.C., government is contemplating as it debates a new rule that would have employers subsidize people who neither take the Metro nor drive to and from work. They want to give…
Cheri Bustos, a Democratic congresswoman from Central Illinois, was touted last week by Politico as the politician who has cracked the code for getting Trump voters to elect a Democrat.
The Washington Post recently trumpeted an innovative new way that D.C. area residents are getting to work: taking the bus! It's just the contrarian, old-is-the-new-hip take that's bound to make the kids start buying morning newspapers again; never mind the fact that bus trips are down 12 percent in…
I had an economics teacher who liked telling his classes he had a deal with the local grocery store: He doesn’t produce his own food and it doesn't teach economics.
One day soon I will presumably receive a notice from the D.C. health exchange informing me how much my family’s health insurance will cost for 2015. That I’ve not yet been made privy to this salient bit of information mere weeks before I have to decide whether to change providers is a function both…
Comprehensive tax reform, done right, would accomplish many things: It should boost investment, productivity, and employment, and along with these economic growth. That is the intent, anyway.
My attitude towards the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has always been one of casual indifference, but this year's enshrinement of the band Yes has changed my perspective.
Comprehensive tax reform, done right, would accomplish many things: It should boost investment, productivity, and employment, and along with these economic growth. That is the intent, anyway.
Kudos to the Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins for proposing a new corollary to public choice theory: namely, that actions objected to by special interests are motivated by a desire to raise campaign money from special interests.
An aggressive monopolist doesn't just content itself with monopoly profits in the market it controls; where possible, it leverages that advantage to gain market power in additional markets as well, where regulators may be less vigilant and the players in the target market are vulnerable.
Bob Michel, the former Republican minority leader in the House of Representatives, passed away February 17, a few days short of his 94th birthday.
If some sort of fundamental tax reform does occur this year—and the odds of its happening are looking good—the politicians, economists, tax lawyers, congressional staffers, trade associations, think tanks, academics, corporations, and others claiming credit for having influenced the legislation…
If some sort of fundamental tax reform does occur this year—and the odds of its happening are looking good—the politicians, economists, tax lawyers, congressional staffers, trade associations, think tanks, academics, corporations, and others claiming credit for having influenced the legislation…
Nearly every household in the country spends a sizable proportion of its income on housing. The median household allots over one-third of its income to keeping a roof over its head, and the annual expenditure of the median earner's income on housing has increased by 35 percent since 2000.
Nearly every household in the country spends a sizable proportion of its income on housing. The median household allots over one-third of its income to keeping a roof over its head, and the annual expenditure of the median earner’s income on housing has increased by 35 percent since 2000.
Earlier this season the National Football League announced a $100 million initiative to do more to study and reduce the effects of concussions and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) on its players—an apparently sizeable figure for which it took a number of bows. While this appears at first…
I'm just old enough to recall when the Dow hit 1,000. I was in the second grade and our Social Studies teacher devoted the election week to a discussion of politics and business. When the Dow hit 1,000 she asked my father to come in and explain the basics of the stock market to our class.
I am a diehard Chicago Bears fan, but when they are not in contention (a common occurrence these days) I need someone else to root for. When I’ve made a wager on the game the task is easy, but failing that I tend to pick the team that has a uniform that most closely resembles what they wore when I…
Our neighborhood dodged a bullet. At least that's the spin the local weekly paper covering our tony D.C. community put on the news that a former museum would become a single-family residence rather than be converted into apartments. This despite the fact that the building boasts 27,000 square feet,…
The Puerto Rico Fiscal Oversight Board is on a tight deadline to draft a recovery plan that will put the island back on its financial feet, avoid further defaults, and pave the way for a sustainable economic future. The Board is currently slated to unveil its Fiscal and Economic Growth Plan (FEGP)…
The issue of illegal immigration was a central plank in the campaign of President-elect Donald Trump and played no small role in getting him elected to the White House. His populist, "America First" position spoke to the economic anxieties of many Americans, and it could be argued that he has a…
Last Friday the FDA decided to remove the black box warning it places on the smoking cessation drug Chantix. That the black box itself existed was a source of great frustration to me, because it represented the triumph of narrative over rational economic analysis. A few compelling stories,…
In the months since the passage of PROMESA and the implementation of Congress' Federal Oversight Board, Puerto Rico's woefully underfunded pension systems have taken center stage in discussions concerning the island's fiscal reform. While there is no disputing that the Commonwealth's pension plans…
Having failed in their attempt to paint energy companies with the same brush as tobacco companies, environmental activists have switched tactics and are now accusing publicly traded oil and gas corporations of hiding the true costs of climate change to their businesses. The effort threatens to…
It is common knowledge that Puerto Rico is a financial mess and that it arrived at its current predicament due to its government's unwillingness to make difficult decisions. Ex-Governor Luis Fortuno made an attempt to return the island's finances to sanity, but his efforts cost him his reelection…
When I sit down on a barstool in my favorite watering hole in Peoria, Illinois to watch game 6 of the World Series Tuesday night, I will be proudly wearing the "Chicago Cubs: NL Champs" t-shirt I just bought.
My allegiance to the Chicago Cubs—which may actually bring something other than misery this year—began in earnest when the team hired Harry Caray to announce their games in 1982. My eternal affection for Harry goes beyond his broadcast brilliance: A long time ago, he helped my adoptive grandfather…
My allegiance to the Chicago Cubs—which may actually bring something other than misery this year—began in earnest when the team hired Harry Caray to announce their games in 1982. My eternal affection for Harry goes beyond his broadcast brilliance: A long time ago, he helped my adoptive grandfather…
I was an ardent critic of the "PROMESA" legislation Congress passed this summer to help restructure Puerto Rico's debt for one primary reason: It was clear hat it would serve as a blueprint for the states that have overburdened pension funds to escape their own debts by shortchanging the…
When a government agency makes mistakes when doing a prescribed task, should Congress insist that it improve its performance, or simply tell it to dismiss the task altogether? When it comes to the FDA's Office of Criminal Investigation (OCI), we may soon find out.
What constitutes a "fair" price for a drug? Unsurprisingly, that depends on who's asking the question, as well as who's answering. To get a price that can actually be construed as fair, it is essential that these are not the same entity.
Smoking rates have fallen appreciably in the last decade, driven by sharply higher cigarette taxes, public smoking bans, and changing mores that have made the activity basically unacceptable in many social circles.
The House of Representatives is currently considering legislation passed by the Senate that would change the law of foreign sovereign immunity in order to allow the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia, where 15 of the 19 attackers were citizens, for its supposed culpability.…
Congress has a terrible time with deadlines. It's not that it's unable to meet real deadlines. Just the opposite, in fact: If it absolutely has to pass legislation by a given day it invariably figures out a way to get it done, no matter who is in charge. The trick is convincing everyone that there…
I have a simple rule for politicians who profess their belief in the primacy of the market economy: Don't spend taxpayer money to provide a service that competes with the private market.
Representatives of both political parties agree that the current tax laws inadvertently create an incentive for multinational corporations to invest abroad. The high domestic tax rate on corporate income, combined with our worldwide tax system that double-taxes profits made overseas and then…
Despite the acrimony among the Republicans who ran for the presidency in 2016, there was actually a fair amount of agreement when it came to their policy proposals. For instance, nearly every candidate put together a major tax reform proposal, and none differed terribly much from the others save…
Our government isn’t very good at knowing when and how to change bankruptcy law, and every time it contemplates doing so it makes the wrong decision. With Puerto Rico staring at insolvency and Congress debating some sort of relief for the island, it appears this dubious streak may remain intact.
Following the reintroduction of the Puerto Rico debt legislation this week, it appears that the battle over how to restructure the insolvent island may soon be headed for a Congressional vote. The basic problems with previous approaches to fixing what ails the island have been papered over, to be…
California and Massachusetts regulators have decided to allow Uber drivers to be considered independent contractors rather than employees, a distinction crucial to the success of the ride-sharing app. But it’s hardly the last word on the matter. The left has been vilifying Uber as the villain of…
While the Obama administration touts its recent rules to limit corporate inversions as a step forward towards fixing our broken tax code, it is clear this administration fundamentally misunderstands the problems that are driving American companies abroad. In the long run, punitive Treasury…
Turks understand statistics better than the rest of us, or at least they seem to have a more practical statistical bias. I say that because today a bird pooped on me, and after I texted my wife the news she quickly responded by congratulating me and then telling me to buy lottery tickets.
Democrats and many others on the left have expressed outrage that judge Rosemary Collyer threw out the Financial Stability Oversight Commission's ruling that Metlife is a 'Financially Important Institution' and thus deserving of enhanced capital requirements. Andrew Ross Sorkin, writing in the New…
The Labor Department issued new regulations on Wednesday that will require financial advisers and brokers handling individual retirement and 401(k) accounts to act in the best interests of their clients. The government move is expected to encourage a shift of retirement funds into lower-cost…
Everyone is in agreement that the federal government needs to address Puerto Rico's insolvency sooner rather than later. What that would entail is where the consensus breaks down.
While for most people, thoughts of Ireland are limited to wearing green and drinking too much beer on St. Patrick's Day, for those of us who think about tax policy, the country and its successes are worth pondering more than once a year.
I went to a private college—Augustana College, in Rock Island, Illinois—and am grateful for having been able to do so. Doing so back then wasn't all that daunting: The tuition and room and board 30 years ago was just under $8,000, and with a $3,000 scholarship my parents found it a manageable…
As a long-suffering Cubs fan who's developed an affection for the Nationals, I am nauseated that Dusty Baker is the team's new manager. In a season or two, I suspect that fellow Nats fans will share my nausea.
Most student loans in the United States are guaranteed by the federal government. The main difference between private loans and the guaranteed loans is that the former usually come with a higher interest rate: Students generally don’t seek these out until they cannot access guaranteed loans any…
For those who haven’t been paying attention, Puerto Rico is in serious financial trouble. It has accumulated more than $70 billion of debt, driven by reckless spending and short-sighted borrowing, that has left the commonwealth's public corporations and utilities virtually insolvent. To make…
My friends accuse me of having a fetish for hopeless causes that interest no one and have no hope of ever being accomplished. Which brings me to my plan for fixing the Pro Bowl.
Do we really need new vehicles for retirement savings, especially ones that give new powers to state governments to coerce workers to save? Several states—most notably Illinois—are creating their own state-sponsored savings plans. The idea is to make retirement saving "easy" for workers (perhaps…
In their attempt to shame the rich and powerful into mouthing some platitudes on behalf of the poor at the upcoming Davos meeting, Oxfam announced last week that the 60 richest men in the world have as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the world's denizens.
The main goal for any tax reform that merits being called a reform is to boost economic growth. The way to do that, most economists whose last name isn’t Krugman aver, is to reduce marginal tax rates on businesses both large and small and make up the lost revenue by eliminating various tax…
My local weekly newspaper, The DC Current, (like most such things amply funded by real estate ads) reports that the latest housing development in my upmarket D.C. neighborhood has run into an obstacle.
Saturday's Wall Street Journal revealed that the Federal Reserve has been conducting numerous exercises to explore would it could to arrest the growth of asset bubbles as well as the risks inherent in doing such a thing (as opposed to nothing about it, which has been the standard operating…
Just before Thanksgiving, Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), proposed an amendment that would essentially prohibit Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that purchase, repackage and resell home mortgages, from taking any steps to rebuild capital or to sell any of the government's…
The fact that no one's spending much time discussing Social Security reform in the current presidential election is not necessarily a bad thing; campaigns can be terrible places to have serious discussions. Nevertheless, a few candidates and their advisers have put out vague plans: Senator Bernie…
President Obama may be walking into a trap of his own side's devising as he departs for the latest climate action summit in Paris. If Republicans can suppress their innate ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, the summit’s outcome could hand the GOP an incredibly potent election-year…
As you may have heard, the denizens of Princeton University are in a tizzy over the fact that the school's most famous alum, former president Woodrow Wilson, was a racist. This hasn't exactly been a secret all these years, but college students have apparently run out of more relevant things to be…
Were you thinking that corporate tax reform seemed like a potentially bipartisan issue that could actually get accomplished in the last year of the Obama administration? Elizabeth Warren is here to scuttle that dream.
What kind of skills might be essential for someone to be head of a Federal Reserve Regional Bank? If your response is a basic knowledge of monetary policy and a deep understanding of financial markets you are mistaken: The answer is, apparently, experience at Goldman Sachs. The appointment of…
Businesses and investors are often subject to the whim of capricious government regulations. While appropriate oversight can be necessary and proper—beneficial for both the taxpayer and the overall business environment—when those in political office change their mind about pre-existing…
An amazing amount of research, development, and human capital has gone into improving and advancing the cell phone. Today’s smartphone is a wondrous invention that scarcely resembles the early cell phones of two decades ago.
REO Speedwagon’s legendary guitarist Gary Richrath, a native of my hometown of Peoria, passed away on September 13 at age 65, which is a ripe old age for a rock star. His death marks an end to a musical era—I encourage you to skip the schlocky ballads of the band’s latter years and listen to the…
The central Illinois music scene (the ostensible subject of my magazine piece this week) was amazingly fecund in the 1970s, and worthy of a self-indulgent blog post all its own. The alpha and omega of this time and place was REO Speedwagon, and Gary Richrath enjoyed an intensely loyal following…
Puerto Rico is an economic basket case. It’s been in a recession for nearly a decade, its skilled labor is leaving the island in droves, and the island’s government recently told its bondholders that it is unable to fully repay them. To emphasize that point, it recently failed to meet some bond…
There are two explanations, one political, one economic, for the Fed's decision to leave interest rates alone. The first of course, is that Fed chair Janet Yellen is a political animal, and the forces on her side have been agitating loudly to leave rates alone. History has shown that the Fed finds…
The answer is climate change—at least if the question is “why should we keep a costly and ineffective government agency." The Obama Administration’s recent repurposing of a heretofore moribund government agency as a tool to soften the impact of climate change—a move heralded in a recent Washington…
As inconvenient as it may be, the forces of supply and demand are difficult to counteract—especially in labor markets. The Obama administration has exerted much effort attempting to do so over the last seven years, and it has yet to succeed.
The EB-5 program allows people from foreign countries who want to invest in U.S. businesses, and who can do so in a way that will create jobs in the United States, to receive a visa to work in the country. It is a small program: The legislation that created it can allocate no more than 10,000 visas…
It would appear that few people know as much about business as liberal spokespeople. One of them, Generation Opportunity’s Patrice Reed, recently wrote in the Washington Post that the rules governing food truck owners in Washington, D.C.—one of the few approved occupations in the eyes of app…
The Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) is replete with bad policies. The so-called Cadillac tax is not one of them.
The recent excitement about homes and businesses someday soon operating off the grid—courtesy of rapidly improving solar panels and the potential of Elon Musk’s batteries—isn’t exactly a new phenomenon: In the late 1970s and early ‘80s I attended a high school completely off the grid. It was…
A half dozen residential buildings have been put up in my Washington, D.C. neighborhood in the last five years, and the one thing they all have in common is that they are shorter than their surrounding buildings—markedly so. Two recently completed developments are a full two stories shorter than…
The plunge in U.S. stock markets, along with various bourses around the world, is a result of fears that whatever is happening in China is a portent of worse things to come, and that what happens in China is contagious. Whether that is true is difficult to discern, however: We don’t have any…
A former Goldman Sachs executive just got named to an important job in the Federal Reserve system and if you think that’s a problem then you just may be an anti-Semite. Or maybe it’s that you don’t appreciate diversity.
Sendhil Mullainathan is a brave economist. I say that because the Harvard professor and recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant admitted in a recent New York Times piece that until recently he had no recollection how he had invested his retirement funds, and that when he finally got around to…
My three-year-old daughter and I typically wrap up our evenings with a pre-bedtime stroll around our northwest Washington, D.C., neighborhood. The nightly ritual ends back at home when I pry the fistful of coins she invariably finds on our walk out of her hands.
The oil export ban made little sense when domestic production was low, and it is definitely not a good idea now that we’re awash in the stuff. Yet the antiquated rule still has plenty of defenders in Congress. Getting rid of the ban would benefit the economy, create jobs, and do nothing to raise…
Puerto Rico is in a financial bind. The Commonwealth, along with its public utilities and various municipalities, collectively owes more than it can realistically repay.
NPR’s “Race Card Project,” a series of stories on the topic of race and society, found another way to make us confront our own latent racism as well as the lingering racism in society this week by telling us the story of a white guy named Jamaal.
Most of the time the International Trade Commission makes the news -- in these pages, at least -- it’s because of its enforcement of anti-dumping rules that do little but boost the price of items such as steel and sugar for U.S. consumers. However, on Tuesday, the Commission will hold what promises…
Bob: I've got an idea for a new government program to help homeowners.
While businesses across the globe scramble to exploit the potential opportunities to be found in a country with 1.3 billion consumers, operating in China comes with profound business risks as well.
On Friday, congressional Republicans appointed Keith Hall to become the next director of the Congressional Budget Office. The announcement ended a careful two-month process that involved figuring out how to fill the position with a competent and credible individual, but without giving Democrats…
About a year ago, the government of Washington, D.C., introduced a lottery system to allocate lunch hour parking spots for the city’s booming food truck industry. The one-year retrospectives have been almost uniformly positive, with the government, the media, and the food truck vendors themselves…
New York governor Andrew Cuomo, not content with President Obama’s proposal to make junior colleges free, recently introduced his own plan for New York to essentially waive the first two years of student debt payments for college graduates living in the state.
Republicans have been tripping over one another to slag President Obama’s tax proposal, made in his State of the Union address, to repeal the step-up in basis on inherited wealth and use the revenue it would generate to increase the child tax credit and pay for free community college. While it’s…
Ever since the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, proponents of robust economic growth and sensible regulation have been trying to rein it in.
Even in the giddy afterglow of the new Congress, when all things seem possible, few Republicans seriously think that the Affordable Care Act will be repealed in 2015. More realistically, various politicians have averred that a Republican Congress may have the wherewithal to repeal some of its more…
Last week the White House released a first draft for what it ultimately intends to be a report card for the nation’s colleges. And there’s no way this effort will improve the lot of the typical college student.
In 2005, the King-Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles, which served primarily low-income African American and Latino patients, closed its trauma unit. In 2001, D.C. General Hospital, the only public medical facility in the nation’s capital, closed its doors after nearly 200 years. At least 26 urban…
Amidst the cliched rhetoric decrying “unpatriotic” companies that accompanied the Obama administration’s recent move to address corporate inversions, it was easy to miss the fact that there is relatively little of substance that can be remedied via regulation alone, even with Treasury Secretary…
Few people are happy with the limbo in which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac currently dwell. The Treasury placed the two government-sponsored entities that buy and guarantee the bulk of all mortgages issued in the United States into a conservatorship in 2008 after the collapse of the housing market,…
In my quest to write an article about my family vacation to Turkey and thereby write off part of the cost, I came up with an observation I deemed worthy of David Brooks or Malcolm Gladwell. It turned out to be dead wrong.
When a class action lawsuit gets settled, the deal has to prescribe how the defendant will pay the members of the injured class and who can be part of that class.
Everyone involved in the Kabuki theater surrounding the nine-month extension of revenue for the highway trust fund has so far played their parts perfectly.
The law does not always deliver what people might consider the “fairest” outcome. But setting aside the law and the various compromises made by elected officials when they crafted it in order to deliver a “fair” outcome would be a costly mistake—costly for every single city, county or state…
A wizened soul who worked in the bowels of the United States Treasury in the Eisenhower administration once explained to me all that is wrong with the U.S. tax code.
My father is one of the reasons that student loans cannot normally be discharged via bankruptcy. Such an outcome was never his goal: quite the opposite, in fact, because exempting student debt from bankruptcy relief makes little economic sense and is patently unfair to the students saddled with…
An arithmetic riddle: How much money would the U.S. government collect if it were to impose a 5 percent tax on the $2 trillion currently parked in offshore accounts to avoid the high U.S. corporate tax rate of 35 percent?
The 620,000 residents of Washington, D.C., are not exactly partisans of supply-side capitalism: In most elections the nominees of the various green/workers/socialist parties usually come close to the vote totals of whatever Republican sacrificial lamb the local party convinced to run.
Should the government give different protections to different classes of property owners based on a politician’s ability to demonize them? The Senate Banking Committee may weigh in on this matter when it considers a proposal to reform the mortgage-finance market on Tuesday.
When House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp, a Michigan Republican, introduced a major tax reform proposal at the end of February, the entire tax policy world in Washington was set into motion. I have friends who lobby on tax issues who claim they did not sleep the two days after the…
My wife woke up Saturday with a badly swollen knee. We had no idea what could have caused it—her hot yoga class puts her in poses that put stress on the knee but she didn't remember the knee hurting during her last session.
Despite my earnest intentions, my family and I are still not covered on the Washington, D.C. Obamacare exchange. I am beginning to despair that I will ever obtain insurance from the exchange.
Unlike you, I will be watching the Pro Bowl this weekend, albeit grudgingly.
After a month of trying, I still can't complete an application to join the D.C. Health Exchange. For a week, the Obamacare marketplace asked me to prove my citizenship, my daughter's existence, and my fixed address in the District of Columbia, but it would not allow me to submit the requested…
There is a vintage Corvette parked on the street nearby, a 1977 canary yellow model in perfect condition. The NADA Blue Book says it’s worth around $15,000.
For much of the last century the United States was the world’s beacon for capitalism, but these days we’re far from such a lofty perch. Since the end of the Cold War, countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain have moved to reduce the role of government in the economy by changing the tax code as…
Every spring the Office of Management and Budget releases the president’s proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year. While Congress invites senior administration figures to testify before various committees, and the media pore through the document to elucidate the administration’s priorities, by…
Every spring the Office of Management and Budget releases the president’s proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year. While Congress invites senior administration figures to testify before various committees, and the media pore through the document to elucidate the administration’s priorities, by…
After a decade of the Democratic party dominating all levers in government the state of Illinois is a mess. Its government pension debt is far and away the largest of the 50 states and its dismal credit rating reflects it. Unlike neighboring states Illinois is hemorrhaging jobs and dancing around…
Argentina hasn’t always been a basket case: In the early 1990s the country embarked on a radical privatization of government assets, with the result being a decade of strong growth and foreign investment. Much of the successes of that time have been reversed, but the story of how the statist…
The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that worker productivity fell by .9 percent in the first quarter of 2012. Some press and Obama sympathizers have blithely spun this as a good thing for the economy, making the rote observation that less productive workers mean that companies have…
A report issued last week by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) finds that the average tax burden on income in the United States has been declining in recent years, in sharp contrast to the trend in the other OECD countries. Naturally, progressives have been quick to…
Most administrations are a bit reluctant to pass regulations that anger prominent members of their own party, but President Obama apparently has no qualms doing so. Last week the administration announced the final version of a regulation that will require depository institutions to report interest…
A decade ago I found myself in a town on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, being given a tour of the local soccer stadium by the town’s mayor. During the tour he evinced great pride in their community’s support for the team despite the fact that it had not won a championship since the 1950s—the…
Americans tend to think of Canada as a friendly, clean bastion of European-style socialism, replete with cradle to grave entitlements and a perpetually tepid economy. However, over the last few years Canada has set a pace for economic growth that clearly demonstrates that our current economic…
While the spending side of the House Republican budget plan is getting most of the media attention, the revenue portion of the plan deserves just as much attention for what it achieves—the resumption of a healthy debate over just what tax reform should entail.
There are a number of pricey regulations that have received attention of late: net neutrality, new ozone standards, countless regulations stemming from the passage of the Dodd-Frank bill. These rules typically garner a mention in the Wall Street Journal, a formal Office of Information and…
In case anyone skipped their daily dosage of news over the three day MLK holiday, it was New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s turn to pillory Republicans for acquiescing to the unequal income distribution in the United States, and more generally to defend the economic glory that is…
The conventional wisdom holds that a housing finance system built on the bedrock of long-term, fixed-rate mortgages—the sensible, historic, ostensibly free-market way to buy a home—is the key underpinning of the country’s residential real estate market and the economy as a whole. A closer look,…
One of the costliest tax deductions in the IRS code is the one that allows homeowners to deduct their mortgage interest from their income. The $477 billion in deductions taxpayers claimed last year (which includes second homes and home equity loans, and covers mortgages up to $1 million) is highly…
The biggest impediment to economic growth is the housing overhang, a fact that’s beginning to be acknowledged by both parties. In the last three weeks Glenn Hubbard and Martin Feldstein—two former Council of Economic Advisers chairmen for Republican presidents—published op-eds with plans for…
Economic theory and two century’s worth of observation tell us that the government cannot run a business nearly as effectively as a private owner, yet this inefficiency is used as a selling point by politicians defending the continued existence of state-run liquor stores.
About halfway through his 1984 State of the Union address, Ronald Reagan laid out the need for major tax reform. “There’s a better way,” he said. “Let us go forward with a historic reform for fairness, simplicity, and incentives for growth.” Reagan then proceeded to lay out an ambitious agenda:…
A host of liberal politicians and pundits have taken House Republican leader Eric Cantor to task for daring to insist that any disaster spending allocated to pay for the damage done by Hurricane Irene be offset in the budget elsewhere. They view Cantor as injecting politics into the country’s…
The home mortgage interest deduction costs the U.S. Treasury nearly $100 billion a year without actually doing much to encourage home ownership, most evidence suggests. Providing an impetus for home ownership in the form of a tax deduction means that most of the benefits go to taxpayers in the…
Just because the government spends a lot of money on something doesn’t mean a lot of new jobs are being created. In fact, long-delayed, poorly executed projects can end up destroying jobs. And I happen to know of just such a project.
Washington, D.C.'s Metro remains a great manifestation of liberalism today. Although it was created at the zenith of the Great Society, and although its union workforce gains overly generous pensions and maintains ridiculous job security, it is Metro's management of its passengers—its attempt to…