Wouldn’t it be nice if voters punished politicians who increase budget deficits? Well, according to one research paper, they do. Adi Brender (Bank of Israel) and Allan Drazen (University of Maryland) crunched data from 23 nations on budgets and the electoral fortunes of chief executives. Their unambiguous finding was that “increased deficits during an incumbent’s […]
Strengthening Congress by Shrinking the ...
Regulatory reform appears to be gaining traction in Washington, D.C. The White House directed agencies to halt the issuance of new regulations. Congress also got in the act. In its first week in session, the House of Representatives passed three bills to reduce the proliferation and costs of regulations. These are good first steps, but […]
Inventing America
My review of Fergus Bordewich’s illuminating tome, The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government, appears in the September 26, 2016 copy of the Weekly Standard. The Constitution they enacted is a remarkable document, but parchment was not enough to meld together the disparate states and peoples. […]
First Among Equals: How George Washingto...
George Washington was born to middling stock in Virginia in 1732. He was a “conventional Virginia provincial” whose world had a stable social order and agrarian political economy. A planter class led this stratified society. These gentlemen dressed, spoke, and behaved differently from others, and their mores owed much to the English motherland and to […]
Inappropriate Appropriations
Congress spent $310 billion last year on some 250 agencies and programs that were no longer — as required under the law and Congress’s own rules — authorized to receive and spend funds. This problem of “expired authorizations” has grown with the ever-expanding size of government; and it contributes to that expansion by undoing long-established […]
A Revived Congress?
Since arriving in the U.S. Senate in 2011, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, has made many of his colleagues crazy. Unwilling to go along to get along, Lee has called out publicly our nation’s legislature for its profligacy and habit of showing up for work barely half the year. Six months into his time in office, […]
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