Think Tank West

A column in the Wall Street Journal discusses Senator Obama’s plan to boost the top tax rate on entrepreneurs and investors from less than 38 percent to more than 50 percent. This huge tax increase will significantly undermine incentives to both earn and report income. As a result, the author, formerly with the Social Security [...]

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The news that the commander of U.S. Central Command, William “Fox” Fallon, is retiring early is going to cause some panic among people concerned about war with Iran. There’s some reason to worry, but not much more than yesterday. Time will tell, but I don’t think this is about bombing Iran. Whether Fallon got fired [...]

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In 2002-2005 I documented in some detail what today’s Wall Street Journal editorial referred to as Eliot Spitzer’s “consistent excesses as Attorney General.” A January 2003 piece on “Spitzer’s Shakedown” revealed the fatuous nature of his inquisition against Wall Street. In 2004, there was Spitzer’s ridiculous “Mutual Fund Fee Fantasy.” In 2005, in “Trial by Press [...]

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Andrew and Adam have been fileting the Weekly Standard already today, but while I’ll happily defer to them on education policy, the Standard’s blog is advancing some honest-to-goodness foreign policy nonsense that shouldn’t go unremarked. Here they are grousing about Obama’s claim that “the continuation of a presence in Iraq as Sen. McCain has suggested [...]

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Following up on Andrew’s comments … I wish Sol Stern would have the professional integrity to finally correct himself in writing, because others seem to trust him and keep repeating his confusions and inaccuracies. The latest is from Daniel Casse, who writes a review of Sol Stern’s badly researched and poorly argued City Journal article, [...]

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Now’s no time to go wobbly on school choice. As I point out, again, in my earlier post, school choice programs have proliferated in the last ten years. And, as Andrew Coulson (among many others) points out, they work. This is a time for hope, not for preemptive surrender. In the 1990’s, a structured movement [...]

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Bill Clinton caught more hell for his affair with Monica Lewinsky than he did for trashing the Constitution. And so it goes with Eliot Spitzer. The history books will say Spitzer was a “crusading prosecutor” that was brought down by a sex scandal. But it was Spitzer’s so-called “crusade” that was his real crime.

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In the current issue of the Weekly Standard, speech-writer Daniel Casse opines on the school choice debate sparked last month by Sol Stern. Casse begins by uncritically repeating Stern’s claim that the American school choice movement has stagnated for over a decade. In attempting to defend that claim, Stern failed to mention that five new education tax credit programs [...]

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I’ve always enjoyed reading Ben Stein’s descriptions of life in Hollywood in The American Spectator. And his performance in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a cult classic. Unfortunately, his writings on economics are somewhat less fulfilling. A recent open letter to John McCain in the New York Times argues for “much higher taxes on the truly [...]

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From an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Pennsylvania hospitals and other medical providers often seek higher state reimbursements for treating low-income, elderly and disabled people under the state’s Medical Assistance program.  Now the state Department of Public Welfare has come up with a new tax idea that would make higher payments possible by placing an “assessment” on [...]

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