Columnist.
Despite recent stock market jitters related to the coronavirus, the U.S. economy is doing well.
As Sen. Bernie Sanders looks more and more like the one who may win the Democratic presidential nomination, some tell us that he isn't the radical leftist others make him out to be.
President Donald Trump's proposed fiscal year 2021 budget has been released. Generally, budget documents are more of a statement about priorities and aspirations than of anything else.
My fellow taxpayers, this is your quarterly warning that Uncle Sam is not a good steward of your money. The Congressional Budget Office just released its most recent 10-year projections for federal spending and revenues. The picture is not pretty.
The Tariff Man has done it again. President Donald Trump recently announced that he will expand import taxes on American consumers of auto parts, nails and other goods made in the United States with steel and aluminum.
Three years into the Trump administration, we see a clear pattern forming. The Obama administration implemented labor rules that make the labor market less flexible, often at the expense of smaller businesses, but in ways that made unions happy.
A few years ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released two reports detailing enforcement and litigation abuses by the Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, or OFCCP.
In June 2018, President Donald Trump attended the groundbreaking ceremony for a Foxconn factory in Wisconsin. Ever exuberant in his comments, he called the project the "eighth wonder of the world" and "one of the great deals, ever." Always a bragger, his praise was directed at himself for orchestrating the use of state subsidies and tax credits to bring the Taiwanese multinational electronics company to Wisconsin for it to manufacture high-resolution LCD screens.
Mark Twain once wrote, "New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion."
Looking back at 2019 is incredibly disorienting. The country is horribly divided.
Despite overwhelming historical evidence demonstrating the folly of government-imposed price controls, modern politicians just can't seem to quit inflicting them on us.
Imagine what it must be like for private companies that have invested in a new technology and suddenly find out they have to compete with a tax-supported government agency — the very one that also regulates the industry.
Once again, Congress failed to pass its budget before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. It also failed to do this critical part of its job before the continuing resolution, or CR — which they enacted in September to fund the government — expired on Nov. 21.
At a time when our country seems as divided as ever and many are talking as if the end times are coming, it's more important than ever to look at what we should be thankful for.
When the U.S. House of Representatives voted to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank last week, special interests got their way in the swamp that is Washington. While advocates for the nation's official export credit agency pretend it supports small businesses, grows exports and sustains growth, the reality is quite different. Ex-Im Bank is better described as a vessel for corporate welfare, mostly for the benefit of large domestic and foreign manufacturers.
Here we go again. We're approaching another deadline to pass a government spending bill or risk a government shutdown. Legislators routinely manufacture this sort of "crisis" to ram through provisions that wouldn't survive scrutiny standing on their own. Congress is reportedly likely to push the budget deadline into December, but whenever the next full funding bill is finally taken up, there will inevitably be an effort to load it up with crony handouts.
The more I follow the Democratic presidential campaign, the more I see how little I understand some people. After all, we can have differences when it comes to ideology, and we can aspire to different things in life. We can even have different understandings of what morality means. Still, there are things on which we should all agree.
It's time for the annual Congressional fight over the Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS. In one corner sit corn farmers and their representatives, who fight tenaciously not just to preserve the RFS but to expand it.
It's open season on wealth and those who create it. Candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination like Sen. Bernie Sanders, for instance, say that "Billionaires should not exist" and the wealth disparity in America is "a moral and economic outrage."
