Whenever we have a national conversation about government debt, Democrats invariably respond that spending is not the reason the debt is now nearly equal to our national GDP. The real cause of our indebtedness, they inform us, is that taxes aren't high enough and the rich don't pay their fair share. From increasing the marginal tax rate to more than…

As the economic climate deteriorates amid Biden Administration mismanagement, the Federal Reserve announced this week that consumer debt rose to an all-time record in the first quarter of this year and surpassed $17 trillion for the first time.   It also reported that more Americans find it difficult to remain current on car, credit card…

The debt-ceiling standoff has people concerned about what will happen if the U.S. defaults on its debt. I certainly hope both sides will come together to avoid this outcome. But it is still worth reminding everyone how incredibly precarious the status quo is, and why something needs to change. You've heard the warnings about our debt levels, to the…

For more than two years now, Republicans have been predicting that President Joe Biden's big-spending policies will crash the U.S. economy into recession. It hasn't happened yet, although the country did experience two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth – a widely accepted definition of recession – in the…

If you read news coverage about the brewing battle over raising the debt ceiling, you might think it's a fight between demons and angels. On one side, you have Republicans who are willing to risk a default on the government's debt unless they get spending cuts that will starve people. On the other side, you have Democrats who, guarding the interests…

On Tax Day this year, about a dozen left-wing millionaires joined with some of the most liberal Democrats in Congress for a Washington, D.C., press conference. The luminaries included Abigail Disney, Walt Disney's granddaughter, and former BlackRock whiz kid Morris Pearl.  The group argued that it wants to pay more taxes and urged new tax laws…

Government debt as a share of the U.S. economy is falling. This must mean the Biden administration and Congress are practicing fiscal responsibility, right? No, it doesn't. The main driver behind the reduction is inflation – inflation that politicians in Washington created with their irresponsible spending and refusal to engage in austerity…

Whom will American voters believe in 2024, Joe Biden or their lying bank balances?   In the years preceding Biden’s presidency, average U.S. wage gains outpaced inflation, which meant increasing purchasing power for American consumers.  As this graph starkly illustrates, however, when Biden entered the White House those two trend…

I have heard some people say that the Federal Reserve has a credibility problem. The agency missed the biggest inflation spike since the 1980s, was slow to start rolling back pandemic policies and failed to spot the risks that some banks, such as Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), were facing. Instead of instilling confidence and stability, the Fed's policy…

President Joe Biden recently issued his first veto since taking office on Jan. 20, 2021.  Biden rejected a bipartisan bill that would have required investment fund managers to take politics out of their investment decisions and to stay focused on providing the best return to their clients as much as possible.  Why should you care? Because…

Budgets are about priorities. In the Biden administration's new budget, its apparent priorities are marred by problems. Here's the cheat-sheet version: Rather than containing explosive growth in spending, it would use a bunch of new taxes to wage class warfare. While this budget is dead on arrival in Congress, it's worth reviewing some reasons why…

The failure of three banks in the last two weeks, including Silicon Valley Bank on Friday and Signature Bank on Sunday, is a saga of utter government incompetence. Call these bank collapses Biden's Banking Busts. The Biden administration has been obsessing on woke causes while banks teeter toward insolvency. Three days before Silicon Valley Bank collapsed…

"I have no respect for the passion of equality," Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of America's great jurists, once declared, "which seems to me merely idealizing envy."  But envy, and its sister vice, greed, are very much back in fashion today when it comes to the progressive Left. Just listen to President Joe Biden, who wants…

Joe Biden's name has never been synonymous with factual accuracy or intellectual integrity.   True to form, his 2023 State of the Union address pitched an exhaustive wish list employing a class-envy predicate that the U.S. income tax system “is not fair”:   And we pay for these investments in our future by finally…

Like Nero bragging about rebuilding Circus Maximus after burning it down, President Joe Biden took to the podium Tuesday night to take credit for solving a slew of problems he helped create. At the top of his State of the Union address, the president boasted that he had "more jobs created in two years than any president has created in four years…

For a man who ironically chose “No Malarkey!” as his campaign slogan, Joe Biden certainly traffics in it.   In the latest farcical example, witness the Biden Administration repeating for weeks on loop that he “takes classified documents very seriously,” even while continuing new discoveries confirm just the opposite…

The average American home is almost 2,200 square feet. An average home in the United Kingdom is a minuscule 818 square feet, in Finland 880 square feet and in Germany under 1,200 square feet. Cramped. Americans have bigger houses and a higher material standard of living – more appliances, clothing and cars – largely…

Most people don't lie awake at night worried about the national debt. Unfortunately, that includes President Joe Biden and the spendaholic Democrats in Congress.  They should be worried. Frankly, so should you, no matter what your politics. Economics is a science, and numerous studies by world-class economists confirm that when a nation's debt…

In what has become a miserable new normal, the U.S. Labor Department this week reported a November annualized inflation rate of 7.1%.   So how did Joe Biden react?  By spinning the number as some sort of triumph and spiking the ball, naturally.   We’re now two years into the Biden presidency, and the best they can say…

Fretting over your 401(k) lately? For all the current turbulence in these retirement plans – from their rocky recent market performance to asset managers' politicization of their investments through the "environment, social and governance" agenda – the main problem lies in their flawed design decades ago, a range of retirement…

The Democrats' new reconciliation bill isn't just going to be the largest-ever expansion of a government agency. It's going to be the largest expansion of the domestic police state in American history. Only a statist could believe that a federal government, which already collects $4.1 trillion every year – or $12,300 for every citizen…

While peddling the ludicrously named Inflation Reduction Act on CNN this past week, Sen. Joe Manchin claimed that Democrats were merely trying to "close the loopholes and collect the taxes that are owed to the Treasury and the United States people." In Washington, a "loophole" is a euphemism for a perfectly legal policy that Democrats…

With Americans increasingly desperate for a life preserver, Senator Joe Manchin (D – West Virginia) instead just threw them an anvil forged by Chuck Schumer (D – New York).   Although our economy just entered a recession, Manchin inexplicably decided that now’s the perfect time to reverse years of promises by supporting…

The first thing to remember about the reconciliation bill Sens. Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer agreed to Wednesday is that, despite its utterly preposterous name, it has absolutely zero to do with inflation. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is crammed with the very same spending, corporate welfare, price fixing and tax hikes that were part of Build…

If you think runaway inflation is brutal, wait until you get hit by the cure.  Last week, the Federal Reserve raised the interest rate on money it lends to other banks by .75%, the biggest hike in three decades. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the hike is necessary to rein in skyrocketing inflation. He's planning more hikes in the coming months.…

President Joe Biden has written an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal detailing his plan to fight inflation. Well, perhaps the word "detailing" is too generous. The preponderance of the column features Biden taking credit for economic growth that can be attributed to the reopening of the economy that was shuttered by the governing class during…

In today’s polarized culture, debate is characterized more often by normative subjectivity than empirical objectivity.   Even where one side in a debate possesses an advantage of common sense and lessons learned through experience, objective resolution is often impossible and people must simply agree to disagree.   It&rsquo…

“Putin Price Hike.”   If Joe Biden and his enablers lie regarding a subject as amenable to precise mathematical refutation as inflation, one wonders what other lies roam beneath the murk of mainstream media guile and bureaucratic obfuscation.   The simple fact is that inflation commenced its sharp upward trend in January…

The government says inflation rose 8.5% in March compared to last year – the worst it has been in 40 years, since the bad old days of 1981. While inflation has infected virtually every area of the economy, the worst news concerns some very fundamental human activities: eating, finding warmth and shelter, and moving around. Look deep…

U.S. senators need to forgo the posh Capitol dining rooms and go food shopping in the shoes of ordinary Americans. Shoppers are panicking at the meat counter, where beef prices are up more than 20%. Nearly everything in the basket costs more. Most pols are clueless about the pain inflation is causing. Retirees are the biggest victims. Inflation is…