Always interesting to look at the Census figures for each year. They just released estimates for state population change from July 1, 2006 to July 1, 2007.

A classic example of what happens when the government decides to intervene in the free market, causing vastly more harm than good: http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/kstrasselpw/?id=110010094

[...] Just as the smart people warned, the government's decision to play energy market God and forcibly divert huge amounts of corn stocks into ethanol has played havoc with key sectors of the economy. Corn prices have nearly doubled, which means livestock owners can't afford to feed their animals, and food and drink manufacturers are struggling to buy corn and corn syrup. Environmentalists are sour over new stresses on farmland; international aid groups are moaning that the U.S. is cutting back its charitable food giving, and many of these folks are taking out their anger on Congress.

Latest word on what the Democrats are planning to offer as an "AMT reform":
http://biz.yahoo.com/cnnm/070425/042507_amt_reform_dems.html?.v=1
http://greeneyeshade.townhall.com/blog/g/c543c409-28db-4bd7-831a-18895d9...

Bottom line: what they giveth with the one hand, they taketh away with the other.

A real AMT reform would recognize that the AMT is, very simply, a stealth tax. It hits people who weren't expecting to pay it. The solution is not to "fix" the stealth tax so that it hits a different group of people -- the solution is to *repeal* the stealth tax and (if necessary) replace it with a more transparent form of taxation.

Almost makes me wish I was living in Georgia to vote for this: http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2007/04/16/daily39.html?from_...

House Resolution 900 would let Georgians vote in November 2008 to ditch all current state and local: property taxes; sales taxes; income taxes; gas taxes; estate taxes; unemployment and worker's compensation taxes; gross receipts taxes; insurance premium taxes; business and occupation taxes; intangible taxes; and utilities taxes. In their place, the state would collect a 5.75 percent flat income tax and what amounts to a 5.75 percent sales tax without any of the current exemptions.

Lots more evidence that Democrats (surprise, surprise) aren't the "fiscally responsible" party they claimed to be in the last election.

Democrats trying to massively expand a federal health care entitlement program, despite the fact that the program's supposedly "underfunded" nature would disappear in an instant if it were to refocus on its original mandate and stop covering adults and the middle class: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009981

Schip was conceived--or at least sold--as a way to insure children from low-income families that aren't poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. Included as part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, Schip began as a federal block grant of about $40 billion over 10 years. [...] The Bush Administration wants to add $4.8 billion to the Schip budget, bringing it to $30 billion over the next five years. Democrats want to see that and raise by $50 billion to $60 billion. [...] But this "crisis" arose because some states have grossly exceeded Schip's mandate. They are using the program to expand government-subsidized coverage well beyond poor kids--to children from wealthier families and even to adults.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/119743.html

A few good snippets:

Last year, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), the lobbying group for local radio and TV stations, began running a series of truly awful advertisements attacking satellite radio. In one, for example, you hear the play-by-play for a baseball game. Just as the announcer gets to a crucial point in the action, an operator interrupts, and asks you the listener to deposit money to keep listening, as if you were on a pay phone. A voiceover then announces, "Radio. You shouldn't have to pay for it."

The ads were economically illiterate (as if the time you spend listening to the endless commercials on traditional radio were free), blatantly dishonest (you pay a monthly fee for satellite radio, not by the hour), and roundly criticized for their broad assault on the intelligence of the average radio listener. But the NAB stuck with them. They were part of the NAB's longstanding, sometimes vicious attack on satellite radio, an emerging medium that the NAB clearly sees as a long-term threat. And with good reason.

Suppose we discovered that the earth was cooling rather than warming. Would you encourage people to drive more and use more carbon-based energy as a way of warming the earth?

(from http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2007/04/global_warming_.html with a minor change of wording)

It's not new, but I just recently stumbled on this very insightful lecture, examining some of the fundamental differences between how economists and non-economists think about government regulation: http://www.aei-brookings.org/admin/authorpdfs/page.php?id=1144

In case you haven't heard of the speaker:

Sam Peltzman is one of the few economists, and probably the only regulatory economist, to have an effect named after him -- the "Peltzman effect." The Peltzman effect arises when people adjust their behavior to a regulation in ways that counteract the intended effect of the regulation. So, for example, when the government passes a seatbelt law, some drivers may respond by driving less safely.

...is the recent rise of the Religious Left, as exemplified by the following story: http://cbs2chicago.com/topstories/local_story_079133502.html

The governor called his campaign a "crusade," declaring that, as he sees it, he is on the side of God in offering Illinoisans more access to medical insurance and better schools. [...] “When we get sworn into office, do you know what we do?” Blagojevich said to the crowd. “We put our hand on the Holy Bible and we swear under God that we are going to do our duty for the people. And that’s what this fight is really all about – tax fairness to fund our schools and to give everyone the chance to live the American dream. This is more than a fight in Springfield. This is a crusade.”

It didn't take long. Democrats have already started to spend, spend, spend. They've added nearly $25 billion in non-emergency spending to the emergency "supplemental" Iraq/Afghanistan spending bill: http://www.examiner.com/a-622145~Rotten_politics_in_porky_Iraq_funding.html

the measure has been stuffed with such essential defense measures as:
» $74 million for peanut storage
» $25 million for spinach growers
» $100 million for citrus growers
» $16 million to build new office space for the House of Representatives
» $60 million for Indian tribes and fishermen affected by declining salmon populations in the Northwest
» $50 million for asbestos abatement at the Capitol Hill Power Plant
» $120 million for the shrimp and menhaden industries
» $283 million for extending the small dairy farm income loss contract program

Great article about Hong Kong and why it's still the most business-friendly place in the world, despite becoming part of China 10 years ago: http://www.american.com/archive/2007/march-april-magazine-contents/still...

The secret of Hong Kong’s success isn’t hard to find. It’s economic freedom, and everywhere a visitor is struck by how much of it there is. Red tape is almost unknown; registering a company requires only a one-page form. “A businessman can walk off a plane in the morning and start operating a firm in the afternoon,” reports The Economist. [...] Local entrepreneurs agree. “The top income tax rate is 16 percent, the top corporate rate is 17.5 percent [half that of the U.S.], and there are no capital gains taxes or sales taxes and complete free trade,” says Jim Thompson, the American-born chairman of the Crown Worldwide Group, a logistics company. Thompson, a Hong Kong resident for 28 years, says, “There’s no better place in the world to do business.”

Another great article from Arnold Kling on the topic: http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=030607D

For some reason, when the topic of global warming comes up, all semblance of economic logic seems to exit the room. In its place come empty rhetoric (how many of the countries that signed Kyoto are actually living up to their treaty obligations?), ridiculous moralizing (Al Gore's absurd claim that global warming is a "moral" issue, as opposed to an economic/political issue that has no easy win-win solutions and only involves tradeoffs), and, far more dangerous, rent-seeking -- lobbyists who are happy to take advantage of your "concern" about the issue so that you'll vote to give their companies lots of money. And if you object to any of this (say, you want your tax dollars to be spent wisely rather than handed out as political favors to "alternative energy" companies), some will even compare you to a Holocaust denier.

A great AEI-Brookings joint study by Clifford Winston (http://www.aei-brookings.org/publications/abstract.php?pid=1117 ) was released not too long ago presenting extensive evidence that government programs that claim to address "market failures" suffer extensively from a problem of their own: "government failure."

An additional thirty years of empirical evidence on the efficacy of market failure policies initiated primarily by the federal government, but also by the states, suggests that the welfare cost of government failure may be considerably greater than that of market failure. More specifically, the evidence suggests that policymakers have attempted to correct market failures with policies designed to affect either consumer or firm behavior, or both, or to allocate resources. Some policies have forced the U.S. economy to incur costs in situations where no serious market failure exists, while others, in situations where costly market failures do exist, could have improved resource allocation in a much more efficient manner.

I posted earlier on Alan Reynolds's research on income inequality and what is *really* going on with "the top 1%" in this country (http://www.swordscrossed.org/node/863 ). Now here's some more, courtesy of an economics professor who has read Reynolds's new book and done some analysis of his own. Here are some choice quotes from his series of articles:

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=121306A

How often have you heard that the vast majority of families' incomes in the United States are rising little or not at all, that the middle class is shrinking, that real wages are stagnating, that the top 20%, or 5%, or 1% are getting the lion's share of the gains in the U.S. economy, that average CEO pay is getting to be a couple of orders of magnitude larger than average people's pay, or that mobility across income groups has declined? [...] Well, guess what? All of the above claims are either absolutely false or at least highly misleading.

When various changes to the Social Security program are proposed, one frequent objection that is heard from folks of many different political stripes is: "That would turn Social Security into a welfare program." Let's ignore the question of whether that's a good or bad thing, and instead ask: is Social Security *already* a welfare program? The question seems to presume that it is not (i.e., that people, regardless of income, get benefits that are roughly proportional to what they pay in).

A new CBO study (http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/77xx/doc7705/12-15-Progressivity-SS.pdf ) attempts to answer this question. Their conclusion may be surprising to some: Social Security today is already a welfare program.

Here's a spectacular article illustrating the concept of opportunity cost and the impact of savings vs. consumption: http://www.slate.com/id/2110817/

Scrooge has been called ungenerous. I say that's a bum rap. What could be more generous than keeping your lamps unlit and your plate unfilled, leaving more fuel for others to burn and more food for others to eat? Who is a more benevolent neighbor than the man who employs no servants, freeing them to wait on someone else? [...] In this whole world, there is nobody more generous than the miser—the man who could deplete the world's resources but chooses not to. The only difference between miserliness and philanthropy is that the philanthropist serves a favored few while the miser spreads his largess far and wide.

It is an article of political faith on the left today that "the rich are getting richer and the middle class is getting left behind." But before we accept this claim as a matter of faith, we should ask a few questions.

Whenever anyone talks about how the top X% of the population earns Y% of the income, we should ask: top X% of *whom*? Households, individuals, or tax returns? Income as measured *how*? Those who would gloss over these issues commit the crime of lying with statistics, as the following article by Alan Reynolds explains.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009398