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 […]
One major factor crippling the economic recovery is the tax-and-regulatory straightjacket confronting any American businessman who contemplates adding new jobs. The mechanism by which these regulations and extractions come into being is part of the problem. For long decades, Congress has fallen into the habit of passing laws full of noble sentiments, but with lots […]
Let us turn to the mailbag: “No, our money is just fine, Vin,” writes in one correspondent, answering my column of Nov. 21. “In spite of what the gold bugs would have you believe; the value of the dollar is still, historically and relatively speaking, at the place it was a century ago.” It’s hard […]
The House of Representatives on Dec. 8 honored lame-duck, one-term Nevada Congresswoman and permanent, lifetime UNLV politics professor (gubbimint jobs are like that) Dina Titus by enacting on a voice vote her bill to provide federal funding to schools and food banks to supply weekend meals to “low-income” children. Previously budgeted at $10 million per […]
There’s a back-handed compliment buried in there. If you’re a “think tank” dumping yet another new study on a jaded press and public, ranking cities from “best” to “worst” on some topic or other (and thus not-so-secretly lobbying for more government spending on your pet projects), there’s one sure way to make headlines. Highlight the […]
The common wisdom seems to be that four-term incumbent U.S. Sen. Harry Reid snatched a fifth term from Republican challenger Sharron Angle last month thanks to a better “ground game” that turned out a higher percentage of Democratic voters than the comparatively amateur Angle operation in Clark County (Las Vegas.) But did he?
When the Obama administration took over financially ailing General Motors instead of allowing the bankruptcy courts to reallocate the bloated firm’s assets to sharper entrepreneurs, more than one wag dubbed the resulting state-socialist enterprise “Government Motors.” Since then, GM has geared up production of pricey “hybrids” that supposedly cause less pollution — until one considers […]
Since few of us can actually wade through and comprehend a federal budget (or even a 2,000-page “health care law,” as written), most political decisions are based on “narratives” — histories of how we got here, reduced to a few easy-to-remember sentences. The problem is, if we get the “narrative” wrong, bad outcomes grow far […]
Barack Obama, who regularly attended a Muslim school and Muslim religious services with his mother’s Indonesian husband when he lived in that country as a youngster, told Indonesians in their own language last week as he re-visited that country with his thousands of courtiers — his $200-million-a-day royal entourage — that “Indonesia will always be […]
Skeptics of the United Nations have long warned that subsidizing an outfit that holds any Third World potentate preening on an upturned bucket stands as a moral equal to the president of the United States could lead to trouble. Supporters scoffed at the notion that — humored long enough — dashiki-clad kleptrocrats from nations where […]