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January 11, 2024
With the national debt soaring past $34 trillion, liberal politicians hoping to expand the federal leviathan face a conundrum. How can they convince Americans wary of the effects of runaway government spending—painfully evident in recent elevated inflation and interest rates—to nonetheless support even greater expenditures? As President Biden and others demonstrate, one way is to cast new…
January 11, 2024
Never shy about lampooning government dysfunction, Ronald Reagan famously said that if you want more of something, subsidize it. But even the Gipper couldn’t have imagined today’s growing zeal to subsidize getting more people on government benefits, which undermines work and leaves too many on the sidelines of the economy. Welfare programs achieve that dubious distinction…
January 10, 2024
Congress’s long list of unfinished business for the new year includes “tax extender” legislation, which is normally considered before lawmakers adjourn for the holidays in December. The fact that this legislation has lingered into January isn’t the only oddity. In an era of already rapidly rising spending, the more troubling anomaly is much of that supposed…
November 21, 2023
Thirty years ago, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) wrote a seminal essay titled “Defining Deviancy Down.” He argued that Americans had “become accustomed to alarming levels of crime and destructive behavior” such as soaring out-of-wedlock childbearing behind increased welfare dependence. Policy-makers responded to Moynihan’s call, and the bipartisan 1994 crime bill (which Moynihan…
October 25, 2023
Every culture has its famous myths, such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, and the world of politics is no different. Take, for example, President Joe Biden’s claims that he is a unifier or that ” Bidenomics” is working . The president offered another mythical claim last month when he said that “we cut child poverty by nearly half ……
September 29, 2023
Last week, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) added a startling new figure to the ever-growing estimates of abuse inflicted on unemployment benefits during the pandemic, finding that “between $100 billion and $135 billion” was lost to fraud. As a dismal Washington Post headline summarized, “Fraudsters may have stolen $1 of every $7 in covid jobless aid.” Unfortunately, this disastrous episode…
August 31, 2023
As summer temperatures rise , the Biden administration has pushed its green energy agenda hard — all the while ignoring the financial pain those policies disproportionately cause lower-income Americans. Last month, the Department of Transportation released fuel economy standards constituting a de facto mandate to purchase new electric vehicles. With the average EV price exceeding $60,000 , government subsidies may help the well-off…
July 26, 2023
The disparity between what the federal government collects in taxes and what it spends was never greater than during the pandemic, when annual deficits peaked at $3.1 trillion in 2020. Even today, when the president swears Bidenomics is “working everywhere,” annual deficits exceed $1.5 trillion, and are expected to only grow. One little-noticed driver of record deficits was…
July 19, 2023
President Joe Biden is desperately trying to sell Americans on Bidenomics, but they’re not buying it. Recent polls show only 39% of US adults approve of Biden’s economic leadership, and a majority of the country has disapproved of his overall job performance for almost two years. At this stage of a presidential administration, only Jimmy Carter had…
June 30, 2023
With unemployment near record lows and President Joe Biden running for reelection, some Democrats recently offered an unexpected take on the U.S. economy: It stinks, especially for low-income families. During a recent Senate Finance Committee hearing, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) thundered that parents are currently “scraping by … in this savage economy,” burdened with “some of the lowest…