The decision by a high ranking IRS official to in invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to testify to a Congressional hearing grabbed most of the headlines.  But that wasn’t the only shocker. On May 10 Ms. Lois Lerner, Director of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division, gave an address to a meeting of the American Bar [...]

The gradual decline in the unemployment rate over the past 4 years does not reflect rising prosperity.  It is a statistical deception, due entirely to a shrinking labor force. The Labor Department’s Jobs report for the month of April once again called attention to the alarming drop in what statisticians call the “labor force participation [...]

Rarely has there been a better opportunity to judge the validity of economic ideas than the last four, miserable years.  We have experienced in real time an audacious experiment, testing the theory of economist and progressive hero John Maynard Keynes that the government can buy prosperity by spending enormous amounts of borrowed money and the [...]

The President has submitted his 2014 budget to Congress.  At a White House media event he spoke of  “deficit reduction” and claimed to have proposed  “smart cuts” in spending. 

President Obama roared into office vowing to “fundamentally transform America.”  The transformation has not been kind to middle class workers. The Labor Department just published another new normal – miserable – jobs report.  The headline, that in March unemployment ticked down from 7.7%, to 7.6%, was, once again, an illusion that masked the real news.  [...]

The latest Obama budget crisis is the “sequester,” an idea he came up with in the summer of 2011 that was intended to delay action on the government’s ballooning debt until after the election.  He is now leading a political and media campaign to pressure Congress to resend it. As the chart to the right [...]

In only four years the President and the Democrats have made amazing progress toward realizing the progressive dream of a powerful central government, controlling every corner of the economy and dominating the states and The People.  The only thing holding them back is the Republican House majority, supported by popular resistance to deficit spending and [...]

Here’s a textbook example of the continuous loop of failure that is government by the progressive political movement now led by Barack Obama. In his State of the Union speech President Obama briefly assured us the deficit/debt problem was almost solved and then moved on.  He proposed lots of new government run programs and government [...]

During President Obama’s first four years the federal government ran deficits totaling $5.1 trillion, far and away the largest in history.  Concern over the explosion in government debt caused by an apparent new normal of yawning deficits is a major barrier to the to the President’s agenda of dramatically expanded government power.  Thus, he opened [...]

President Obama has invented a new name one of Washington’s most enduring deceptions, the promise of spending cuts in return for tax increases.  He calls it his “balanced approach.”  As always the tax increases are real and immediate while the spending cuts turn out to be illusory. The President wants to rescind the Sequester spending [...]