The Truth about the 1 Percent
Every year, new estimates of the incomes of the “top 1 percent” are reported with the requisite fanfare from Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez ...
Focus on the Debt
America faces two very serious budget problems: Democrats, and Republicans. Partisan wrangling over the brief shutdown of about 17 percent of the federal government has been unnecessarily long and convoluted ...
A Flawed Assessment
President Obama made the right and honorable decision to ask Congress before launching a missile attack on Syria. It was a surprising change, and impressive. The issue now turns to ...
The WMD Excuse, Again
When it comes to reports of civilian deaths from chemical weapons in opposition-occupied Syrian towns, the Obama White House suddenly claims to be as certain of its own intelligence as ...
A Better Fiscal-Cliff Deal
When the Treasury Department scored the president’s ill-fated 2013 budget last February, it estimated that raising the top two personal-income-tax rates — to 36 from 33 percent and to 39.6 ...
Obamanomics Explained
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed (November 2) President Obama wrote that “in the eight years after” Bill Clinton left office, “we followed a different path. Bigger tax cuts ...
Slow Growth Affects Elections
Several economists have examined the impact of economic conditions on presidential elections. I summarized this research in an article in the Washington Times in September 2003. In the nine years ...
David Stockman vs. Bain Capital
The overblown title of a new cover story from the moribund Newsweek magazine is “Mitt Romney: The Great Deformer.” The subtitle reads, “Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan’s ...
Obama’s ‘Trillion Dollar’ Tax-Cut Fraud
Two days before the last night’s presidential debate, the Washington Post’s frenetic blogger Ezra Klein wrote that “Romney’s tax cuts cost $5 trillion over 10 years before his (unnamed) offsets. ...
Obama’s Advisers Favor Romney’s Tax Reform
President Obama and the press keep saying Governor Romney’s goal of revenue-neutral tax reform is vague on specifics and arithmetically impossible, citing a flawed study from the Tax Policy Center ...