Boehner at the Bridge

The Democrats hold fast to their Keynesian economic excuse that stealing a dollar from the private sector and giving it to someone who will spend it on something -- anything at all -- will stimulate the private sector by increasing demand.  This theory has been at least twice discredited: first by FDR's failure to jump start the economy in the thirties, and now by Obama's almost identical failure in 2009.

Only the Republican-controlled House stands against the Democrat desire to enlarge government by spending and taxing more.

The House Republican leadership, their backs stiffened by the Tea-Party response of the American electorate to Obama's first stimulus, at last seem ready to make their stand against this fiscal insanity.

If It Walks Like A Subsidy...

The Senate voted to repeal a tax credit for ethanol blenders this week.  Even though that bill won't become law -- such a bill must start in the House and the President probably would veto it to enhance his electoral prospects in the corn belt -- it is a remarkable event.  Votes in the Senate against subsidies are rare.

Grover Norquist points out that repealing any tax credit without balancing tax rate cuts is a violation of a pledge signed by many Republican Legislators.  Norquist is a Hero of the Revolution and deserves great respect and credit for creating Americans for Tax Reform and its pledge that focuses Republican opposition to increased taxes.  However, anyone who agrees with Grover and ATR that cutting a tax credit is a tax increase needs to think more clearly.

Wisconsin Collective Bargaining Law to Go Live

In the bellwether election in Wisconsin earlier this Spring that the unions finally lost a couple of weeks ago, the one that returned Judge David Prosser to the Supreme Court bench, the bell has just tolled for the the unions.

Why Central Planning Fails

In the ISI quiz to which I sent the link earlier today, there is the following multiple choice question:

Free markets typically secure more economic prosperity than government's centralized planning because:

1) the price system utilizes more local knowledge of means and ends

2) markets rely upon coercion, whereas government relies upon voluntary compliance with the law

3) more tax revenue can be generated from free enterprise

4) property rights and contracts are best enforced by the market system

5) government planners are too cautious in spending taxpayers' money

Only 16% of the 2500 respondents to the original survey got the answer right.  Sixteen percent!   The expected value for random guessing is twenty percent.

A Quiz on the Constitution, History, and Economic Freedom

Here is a great quiz on our Constitution, our history, and economic freedom.  It will challenge you in places, but should only take you a few minutes that will be time well spent.

The quiz is the product of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute which says about itself

Tonight's Republican Presidential Debate Transcripts

You can find transcripts of the four segments of tonight's debate at the bottom of this page.

You will find small things with which to disagree, as I did.  But I think that after reading these you'll believe as I do that if any of these candidates were seated in the oval office listening to their advisers argue over one of those issues, they'd make the right decision most of the time.

Thank You, President Obama!

When I stand before a microphone and address a politician, I always like to open with a compliment.  "Thank you for your efforts on behalf of economic freedom," or "Thanks for standing up for smaller government," or "I really appreciate your service to the country."  That way I have them softened up for a substantive question.

Its a little tougher when I face a leftist. 

How You Know That Progressivism Has Peaked

You know that the Progressivists have hit their peak and started the long slide toward historical irrelevance and oblivion when the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities from a small liberal arts college on the Hudson -- a college that the Princeton Review ranked as the second most liberal college in the US -- who claims he is a Democrat that voted for Obama in 2008 and who was, to boot, a one-time Henry Kissinger Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations writes a commentary titled " When Government Jumps the Shark*."

A Republican Redistricting Strategy for New Mexico

In yesterday's LA Times, there was this very interesting piece on Latino voting with a heavy emphasis on recent New Mexico politics, brought to our attention by New Mexico politico Mickey Barnett.

It comes complete with quotes from former Chairman Harvey Yates of the New Mexico Republican Party, from Albuquerque Journal pollster and political statistician Brian Sanderoff, and from as-yet-un-indicted co-conspirator Bill Richardson, who told the reporter this:

Fanniegate: An Albatross Around Democrat Necks

Walter Russell Mead is a political observer who addresses the problems of the left from the center-left.

Someday I will write about his description of the sequence of collectivist policy approaches he calls The Blue Models, their failures and their forced abandonments, but here I want to point you quickly at his review of a new book on the financial crisis that lays it at the feet of Democrat politicians, and his commentary on that issue's potential political impact should Republicans wake up to it and wield it correctly.  He says