RIP John Murtha, Titan of Pork Spending
The Titan of pork barrel spending, Rep. John Murtha died this afternoon at the age of 77. He passed away in Arlington, VA from complications with a recent gallbladder surgery.Murtha was first elected...
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What is Wrong With an Optimistic View of Recovery
Brian S. Wesbury, author of It's Not As Bad As You Think: Why Capitalism Trumps Fear and the Economy Will Thrive, and his colleague Robert Stein write in Forbes today their reasons why the economy has...
View ArticleAnimal Shelter Privatization Success in Kansas City
Last year I reported that Kansas City was privatizing its animal shelter to achieve three important goals: lower costs, increase pet adoptions and reduce the number of pets euthanized. Nearly one year...
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New at Reason: Don't Break the Banks
I have a new article published by Reason.com:In the past few weeks, President Barack Obama has proposed a harsh new liabilities tax targeted at the top 50 or so financial firms and disastrous new...
View ArticleData Still Show No Signs That Stimulus is Working
Stanford's John Taylor slices the data in several nice simple graphs and shows:Note that none of the action in real GDP growth is due to government purchases. In other words during the entire first...
View ArticleAndres Duany: Humans Are Part of the Natural World, Not the Problem
Popular Mechanics has a short and revealing interview with New Urbanist planner Andres Duany on Smart Growth. The interview focuses primarily on promoting the Smart Growth Manual, a book he coauthors...
View ArticleThe Financial Crisis, In Rhyme Form
By economist Karl Case:The volume of mortgages written back thenStunned imaginations.In a single quarter in 2003,A trillion in originations!But something happened late that yearThat caused long rates...
View ArticleBudget Buster Express: High-Speed Rail, Amtrak or Frustrated Children?
An interesting editorial in the Washington Times on February 7, 2010, suggested:“Members of Congress must feel a bit shortchanged by the amount of playtime they received during childhood. Their ongoing...
View ArticleTransit Won't Save Detroit. High Speed Trains Won't Save the US
Monday night PBS aired a documentary Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City which they say "examines how Detroit, a symbol of America’s diminishing status in the world, may come to represent the...
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Social Security Veers into the Red
USA Todayoffers a preview of things to come if we don't get serious about tackling out-of-control entitlement spending:Social Security's annual surplus nearly evaporated in 2009 for the first time in...
View ArticleKentucky House Leaders Want to Bet the Budget on Another Federal Bailout
Kentucky House leaders are so confident of either health care reform or another federal bailout of the states (see ARRA; stimulus) that they're willing to bet their budget on it. Per the Louisville...
View ArticleNo More iPhones: How Network Neutrality Threatens Wireless Broadband Innovation
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing unprecedented intervention and regulation of the wireless industry. The Commission argues that the proposals, grouped under the heading of...
View ArticleHurtling Down the Road to Serfdom
Government is taking us a long way down the Road to Serfdom. That doesn't just mean that more of us must work for the government. It means that we are changing from independent, self-responsible people...
View ArticleA Rand Revival
Ayn Rand, the controversial Russian-born American writer, would have turned 105 years old on February 2. This anniversary takes place amidst a Rand mini-revival, sparked by the Obama Administration's...
View ArticleYour Education Stimulus Dollars at Work: iPod Edition
The Polk County school district is giving away iPods to some parents.The school district is using the device to reward parents of children with disabilities who fill out a 10-minute online survey. The...
View ArticleFed Strategy
The Fed is slowly revealing how it plans to tighten monetary policy. Jon Hilsenrath writes:When the Fed is ready to tap the brakes, it plans to raise the rate paid on excess reserves, according to Fed...
View ArticleHigh-Speed Rail Plans Are Misconceived
As someone who loves riding trains, it pains me to say that the Obama administration’s high-speed rail initiative is misconceived. It appears to be a solution in search of a problem, or problems, to be...
View ArticlePalin Exposes the Tea Partiers' True Colors
The tea party movement started as a welcome protest against the alarming growth of federal spending and federal control. It had a strong anti-statist flavor, or seemed to. But judging from the applause...
View ArticleWho Killed Apartheid?
Twenty years ago today, the South African government freed Nelson Mandela, a prisoner who had become the leading symbol of resistance to the segregationist system known as apartheid. Mandela, who led...
View ArticleHigh-Speed Rail Doesn't Fix Any of Our Transportation Problems
My latest piece on high-speed trains:As someone who loves riding trains, it pains me to say that the Obama administration’s high-speed rail initiative is misconceived. It appears to be a solution in...
View ArticleDo Smart People Make Markets Tick?
Most market advocates believe that what's good about the marekts is that they reward merit. But I argue in my latest Forbest column that markets don't reward merit, they reward value. And the failure...
View ArticleA National Infrastructure Bank Is a Good Idea, In Theory
In recent weeks, the idea of a National Infrastructure Bank has gained new momentum. It has been endorsed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. The group...
View ArticleNational Infrastructure Bank: Can Congress Structure It Properly?
My Public Works Financing column is up:In recent weeks, the idea of a National Infrastructure Bank has gained new momentum. It has been endorsed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by the president’s...
View ArticleNet Neutrality Means No More iPhones
The Reason Foundation releases my policy brief today looking at the effect network neutrality regulation will have on wireless applications and services.Much has been written about the deleterious...
View ArticleTransit's Dependency on Cars
Ed Braddy's latest column at New Geography points out some crucial interdependence. For starters,Yet in pursuing this transit-friendly future political leaders rarely confront this inescapable reality:...
View ArticleThe Right's Top 25 Journalists
The DailyBeast puts Reason's Nick Gillespie on this list. Not sure why he would be considered a journalist of the right. If anything Nick is a left-libertarian. But then, see, that is the thing with...
View ArticleFormer NSW Premier Bob Carr on Mobilizing Private Capital for Infrastructure
Reason Foundation's Innovators in Action 2009features an article by former New South Wales (Australia) Premier Bob Carr (PDF version here) in which he describes how his administration embraced...
View ArticleDon't Break the Banks
Reason.com When Joseph Olear opened his renovated Three Point Bowling Center in south Orlando last May he didn’t anticipate Wachovia taking an ax to his line of credit. Yet three months later the bank...
View ArticleThe Fable of Market Meritocracy
It's a good thing that French President Nicolas Sarkozy is brimming with amour-propre because he certainly did not earn any amour from the business elite gathered in Davos last month. In a bombastic...
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Reading a Sculpture
Jens Galschiot’s Survival of the Fattest, displayed in Copenhagen Harbor during the global climate conference, features an obese Justitia on the shoulders of a frail African. There’s an inscription:...
View ArticlePassing ObamaCare Won't Make It More Popular
Given the long, steep nosedive President Barack Obama's health care reform proposal's popularity has taken since last summer—Pollster.com's multi-poll average now shows opposition at 51.1 percent, with...
View ArticleBoskin on the Problems of a High Debt to GDP Ratio
From yesterday's WSJ:The deficits are so large relative to GDP that the debt/GDP ratio keeps growing and then explodes as entitlement costs accelerate in subsequent decades. So worrisome is this debt...
View ArticleCNN Looks at Government Pension Crisis
CNN reports on the growing problem with over-generous and unsustainable government worker pensions. My favorite part is the interview with the city sanitation worker who to the job because he wanted...
View ArticleWhere Privatization Needs to Be Improved
Froma Stateline article "Making IT Work",An estimated 85 percent of government IT projects fail to come in on-time, on-budget or both. “The IT project road is littered with failure, cost-overrun,...
View ArticleLet the Private Sector Compete to Provide Public Services and Watch the...
San Diego Union-Tribune San Diego should consider a budget reform that has proved to be a successful strategy at all levels of government â?? namely, introducing competition to provide government...
View ArticleTARP Watchdog Warns of Moral Hazard
Catching up on some news reading. From back on January 31:The Troubled Assets Relief Program, known as TARP, has not addressed the problems that led to the last crisis and in some case those problems...
View ArticleObama Spurns Gun Control
Among the many groups that opposed Barack Obama's presidential race, few were more certain or vehement than gun rights organizations. "Barack Obama would be the most anti-gun president in American...
View ArticleThe EPAâ??s Carbon Footprint
On December 7, as delegates from around the world gathered in Copenhagen for the United Nations climate conference, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that her...
View ArticleThe Presidential Commission on Birth, Death, and the Meaning of Life
In November, President Barack Obama issued an executive order establishing a new Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. He appointed political scientist and University of...
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Congressâ?? Phony Price Tags
Congress says that the health care package it passed at the end of 2009 will cost roughly $900 billion over 10 years—and will somehow end up saving taxpayers money in the long run. If you think that...
View ArticleThe Fiscal Pressures on the Fed
KC Fed President Hoenig believes that fiscal mismanagement is going to presure the FOMC to keep interest rates down. Reuters:The ballooning U.S. budget deficit and growing mountains of federal debt...
View ArticleLA Unified Needs a Lesson From Rhode Island
Via Instapundit and Business Insider, check out this headline:Unionized Rhode Island Teachers Refuse To Work 25 Minutes More Per Day, So Town Fires All Of ThemA school superintendent in Rhode Island is...
View ArticleWhy Obamaâ??s Budget Is Not Sustainable
Harvard Economist Gregory Mankiw explains why President Obamaâ??s budget is unsustainable, even from Mankiwâ??s New Keynesian perspective. From his latest New York Times column:The troubling feature of...
View ArticleParking Garage Privatization a Smart Move For L.A.
Following in Chicago's footsteps, Los Angeles recently issued a Request for Qualifications (available here) for a potential 20-50 year lease of 10 City-owned parking garages (over 8,300 parking...
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China's Bubblishness
The recent boom in the Chinese economy, fueled completely by massive amounts of credit dumped into the economy by a stimulating government, will come to an end. If the recent tightening by the Chinese...
View ArticleList Price
The Palestine Liberation Organization and the Irish Republican Army, two of history’s most notorious terrorist groups, have never appeared on the State Department’s List of Designated Foreign Terrorist...
View ArticleFlashbangs Under Fire
TheNew York Times reported last week that the New York City Police Department has halted the use of "flashbang" stun grenades. The department began phasing out the devices in 2003 after their...
View ArticleStimulus Program Gets a Grade of "F"
The Mackinac Center for PUblic Policy was tracking Vice President Joe Biden's trek through Michigan stumping for the stimulus program and asked economist David Littman and myself what we thought. We...
View ArticleWho Doesn't Trust Science Now?
All of you deniers and flat-earthers who are exploiting the glacial temperatures and bizarre snowfall to mock global warming fears are missing the point: Weather isn't the same as climate.Shoddy...
View ArticleClimate Crackup
On December 18, the Copenhagen climate change conference collapsed. Heads of state from about 120 countries had flocked to the Danish capital, anticipating a historic photo op that would lead future...
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