Obama’s Favorite Economic Excuses
President Obama didn’t have time to take “victory laps” back in 2009 when he was saving the economy from the worst recession since the Great Depression, because he was too busy with the saving. We know...
View ArticleObama’s Economic Excuses Are Firing Up
Here in 2016, the American economy has not recorded even one year of 3 percent growth for ten straight years now. This has never happened before. The recovery from the deep crisis of 2008-09 is easily...
View ArticleYellen Spoke At Jackson Hole, And The Fed Is Not Quitting
At the Federal Reserve confab at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, yesterday, Fed chair Janet Yellen gave a speech. Of course she did. The chair’s speech happens every year at the Fed’s favorite gathering. Except...
View ArticleMonetary Policy’s “Impossible Trinity” Is Neither
Last week, The Economist named the “impossible trinity” one of the greatest ideas in economics of the past half-century. Here’s the definition. Having these three things at once is unachievable: a...
View ArticleThe Civil Rights Revolution? That Was The Tax Cut
When Larry Kudlow and I started researching our book (released last week), JFK and the Reagan Revolution: A Secret History of American Prosperity, we got a crucial lead from an archivist at the Lyndon...
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Hillary On Economic Growth: ‘What Difference Does It Make?’
Is Hillary Clinton running on her husband’s record or President Obama’s? With every turn in this campaign, it sure looks like the latter. She is for an infrastructure bank. She is for raising tax rates...
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Thanks, Obama, For The Decimation Of The Working Class
A few months ago, I wrote a memo for a political office-seeker who was looking for perspective on why the American worker was getting so uncompetitive. It didn’t seem right, to this candidate, that...
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Lowlights In Council Of Economic Advisers History
News is coming in that President-elect Donald Trump is considering Larry Kudlow as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Here is one of his qualifications: Larry just wrote a book, with me in...
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Communism Is The Reason For The Trade Deficit With China
What a stunning turn of events over the last generation. Only in 1989, the year of the fateful events in Tiananmen Square, China was irrelevant in the world economy. The battered and brutalized giant...
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Free Trade And Fiat Money: The Two Lodestars of ‘Settled Economics’
Consensus in scientific fields is a curious thing. It often indicates a blind spot. Science does not regularly yield consensus, but varying conjectures, each one in confrontation with evidence in an...
View ArticleEarth To Daily Caller: There Are Conservatives On Campus
On Monday, the Daily Caller caused another sensation with a story that students at a big public university in Texas are given all sorts of things—scholarships, laptops, honors credit—to take a course...
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A Tariff Exposes The Nature of Government Better Than The Income Tax
At yet another G-20 confab over the weekend in Germany, something different finally happened. The communiqué that emerged dropped standard language that the big twenty countries would “resist...
View ArticleDon’t Whiff On Tax Cuts Like Bush 41
Friday the 13th, October 1989. The day started out quietly on the stock exchanges, with the indexes hanging a few points shy of all-time highs. The market’s swell comported with economic facts. Over...
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JFK And The Reagan Revolution — And The Trump Tax Reform
Economic growth: the great missing element of our time. Throughout American history, it has reliably been epic. The only times it wasn’t—say in the Great Depression of the 1930s—the bad times...
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JFK’s Surpassing Legacy: Economic Growth
Centenarian John F. Kennedy—born a hundred years ago, on May 29, 1917—remains, with Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King and über-select entrepreneurs such as Robert Noyce, among the very greatest and...
View ArticleAgainst The Gold Standard? That’s Not Quite Ivy League
An old saw in Washington has it that if you come out for the gold standard, you lose your reputation. In supply-side circles, it’s the opposite. If you don’t favor gold as the anchor of the monetary...
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The Fed Is Anticipating Tax Reform
The growing consensus that tax reform is an urgent necessity has made things easier for the Federal Reserve. Last week, the Fed revealed that it will soon begin to reduce its massive holdings of all...
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Richard Thaler’s Behavioral Economics Changed The Subject
After the 1970s, the stagflation decade, we learned something big about economics—very big. We learned that extended periods of economic sluggishness, under-employment, diminished opportunity,...
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The Real Functions Of The Top Tax Rate
In our tax reform debate, one matter seems quite a bit off. There is not going to be a big drop in the top rate of the income tax. The 39.6% rate might go only to 35%, with an option to keep it close...
View ArticleDemocrats Should Recall Their Extensive Tax-Cut History
A story in the Washington Post has reported that the “Treasury Secretary…called on the Senate yesterday to shunt aside about $8 billion worth of pending tax reform proposals, saying they could cause an...
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