Back in January, Austan Goolsbee of the White House Council of Economic Advisers started chanting for public consumption that if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling this May the “impact on the economy would be catastrophic,” due to the fact the government would have to stop borrowing money and might default. On Jan. 6, […]
Scores of people responded to my column last week, reporting they, too, were told they “had the wrong name” when they went to renew their Nevada drivers licenses. Perhaps the most moving was that of an 83-year-old woman who moved here from Colorado to help her brother, who’s in a wheelchair and often can’t drive.
What would people in Washington City be doing right now, if they were really preparing for the federal government to be “shut down” thanks to the refusal of Democrats to trim spending by even 1.5 percent — the pathetically inadequate goal held out by the supposed “radical, Tea-Party” GOP? (And if you want to hear […]
If anyone wondered why the forces of the Left have been so over-the-top during the past two years, shrieking in the face of all contrary evidence that the Tea Party movement — everyday Americans seeking some restraint on government spending and taxation — was in fact some far-right league of racist lynchers, the logic finally […]
America has borrowed too much; her government has grown too large. The only hope of an extended economic recovery is to reduce not only the size, intrusiveness, and cost of government, but also to stop the way government borrowing is eating up all available credit, leaving too little for the growth of private, non-subsidized business […]
This year’s insurgent class of freshmen Republican congressfolk were elected in large measure based on their pledge to reduce federal spending by $100 billion. The question — leaving aside for the moment whether a trim of that modest proportion would sufficiently rein in the tax-and-regulatory state to produce a substantial economic rebound — is whether […]
Last year, Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller stopped by our office here in the Stephens Media bunker, escorting a guy from the Census Bureau. Their joint message: Tell people to fill out their census forms, since the count will be used to distribute lots of goodies from Washington. I politely told our guests I […]
America’s system of compulsory public schools is based on the premise that “professional educators” (people with degrees not in science or literature but in “education”) can do a better job schooling the nation’s children than if that job were left up to their parents, as it was before the Civil War, when Alexis de Tocqueville […]
In my Jan. 9 column — “I like to pay taxes; with them I buy civilization” — I wrote: “What’s that? What about those unemployed through no fault of their own? Get rid of all the government interventions in the labor market, including payroll taxes, and jobs would sprout like fungi. Of course, they might […]
As part of the GOP’s campaign “Pledge to America” last fall, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives promised to roll back federal spending to 2008 levels, a move which could involve cutting as much as $84 billion from nine appropriations bills — cuts that would average 18 percent below President Obama’s budget […]