ArcaMax

President Donald Trump's new budget confirms that without corrective action, trillion-dollar deficits will be with us for years and perhaps decades to come. Trump's budget plan has many smart and urgent spending reforms. But will Congress ignore them once again?

Alas, probably, but the longer we wait, the shorter the debt bomb fuse. But step ...Read more

President Donald Trump rightly touts the economy-wide savings from his deregulation initiatives. But one federal agency didn't get the memo. Some members of the Surface Transportation Board, which has oversight over the nation's network of freight railroads, wants to resurrect price controls on the industry.

It is a truly awful idea, and to ...Read more

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, President Donald Trump again talked positively about negative interest rates. That's not a very good idea considering negative interest rates are a warning signal of deflation, which can be as bad for an economy as runaway inflation.

But Trump was right to herald this era of low ...Read more

Almost all of us know (because President Trump boasts of it in nearly every speech) that our 3.5% unemployment rate has reached a 50-year low. But this official decline in joblessness doesn't tell the entire story of the improvement in the job market in the United States. And it doesn't fully capture the change in direction between what happened...Read more

Over the holidays, I read Elton John's biography, "Me." He writes about his friendship with Freddie Mercury, the ultratalented lead singer of the rock group Queen. Mercury tragically died of AIDS at the age of 45 in 1991. Mercury was one of the last people to die of the disease in Britain during the epidemic years. John writes sadly and almost ...Read more

These days, when you listen to the gloom of the media and many of the presidential candidates, you have to wonder what country these Debbie Downers are talking about.

Former Vice President Joe Biden recently declared, "The middle class is getting crushed. And the working class has no way up."

Sen. Bernie Sanders stews that President Donald ...Read more

If there is any lesson we have learned about the Federal Reserve system in the last few years, it is that the supposed oracles who run our central bank are anything but infallible.

This time last year, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell made a multitrillion-dollar mistake by raising interest rates at a time of no inflation and even ...Read more

Our sources are telling us that President Trump is nearing a decision on how to revive the all-but-dormant American uranium industry. This proposed plan would create a reserve of domestically mined uranium stored in a "Federal Uranium Security Stockpile." One option on the table is for the Department of Defense to purchase uranium through the ...Read more

Why are Democrats Sen. Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi teaming together to lobby for a tax bill that would provide about 80% of the benefits to Americans who make more than $100,000 a year?

Schumer and Pelosi are the ones who, for the last two years, have been railing against income inequality and tax cuts for the rich, but now ...Read more

Washington do-goodism almost always fails to help the people it is supposed to because politicians ignore the Law of Unintended Consequences. Nowhere is that more evident than when it comes to a congressional plan to put payday lenders and other short-term lending institutions, such as the burgeoning online lenders, out of business.

These are ...Read more

The Federal Communications Commission has thrown a curveball into the global race for deployment of 5G -- the much-anticipated fifth generation of cellular and wireless technology. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has announced his support for a government-run auction of an underutilized 500-megahertz space on the electronic spectrum that cellphone ...Read more

Every single plausible Democratic candidate for president has endorsed tax increases as a centerpiece of their economic agenda. Think about what we are hearing from Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and the rest of the "Punch and Judy" show: new wealth taxes, carbon taxes, energy taxes, higher death and income taxes with rates up to 70...Read more