ObamaCare’s Cost Could Top $6 Trillion

Congressional Democrats are using several budget gimmicks to disguise the cost of their health care overhaul, claiming the House and Senate bills would cost only (!) about $1 trillion over 10 years.  Now that critics have begun to correct for those budget gimmicks, supporters of ObamaCare are firing back.
One gimmick makes the new entitlement spending […]

The Reagan Tax Cuts, Budget Forecasting, and Government Revenue

While perusing the Internet, I saw an article by Iwan Morgan, who is the author of The Age of Deficits: Presidents and unbalanced Budgets from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush. The author asserted in this article that, “The deficit explosion on his watch was a nasty surprise for Ronald Reagan not a deliberate strategy to […]

Chile Shows the Way on Trade

The longest and least uplifting chapter in my new Cato book Mad about Trade is Chapter 9, where I describe all the remaining duties and restrictions our government imposes on our freedom to trade with people in other countries. We are certainly not “the most open market in the world,” as a member of President […]

Elmer Kelton’s Cowboy Individualism

John J. Miller of National Review introduces many of us to Elmer Kelton, who, he writes in an email, “may be the best writer you’ve never heard of.” Kelton, who died in August, wrote both classic and modern Westerns. And while he may not have written the Great American Novel, he just might have written […]

We Should Not Praise Stalin, But Bury Him

Although the debate has been raging for months, it has just come to my attention that the man responsible for the second-most number of murders ever – after Mao, of course, with Hitler a distant third – is to have his bust placed at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia.
Defenders of the Stalin bust argue that, whether we like […]

Real Competition

Democratic National Leadership Council chairman Harold Ford, former IBM chairman Louis Gerstner, and KB Homes founder ELi Broad have an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal in which they admonish the Obama administration to hang tough on the “Race to the Top” education sweepstakes. They also declare that ”competition brings out the best performance. That’s true in athletics and in business, […]