TaxBytes

How many times this past year did you hear some expert make some variation of the following statement: “We’ll never see gas prices below $X again.

No sooner had Senate Republicans killed a bailout for the Big Three automakers than the Bush administration indicated that it might be willing to tap perhaps $15 billion of the original $700 billion bailout to hand over to the car companies.

During the presidential campaign Barack Obama claimed that under his tax plan 95 percent of working Americans would get a tax cut.

The headline of the Nov.

Many people are bemoaning the current financial crisis facing most states.

While the conventional wisdom among most Democrats and many pundits is that the Big Three auto manufacturers are too big to fail, we wonder if they are too big not to fail.

On Oct.

For years the Institute for Policy Innovation has supported fundamental tax reform, such as the suggested “flat” income tax.

So what do you do if you’re Barack Obama and you’ve just been elected president of the United States and you’ve promised to spend a gazillion dollars to improve education and health care and the infrastructure and to hand out “tax cuts” (many of which will actually be income transfers) to 95 percent of the public? And you’re fiscally constrained because the government is bailing out or buying out banks left and right? What you need is some serious new inflows of cash, you need it fast, and, contrary to everything you’ve claimed on the campaign trail, you know you can’t get it all by dinging the people making over $250k.

As best we can tell, the free market had little or nothing to do with the banking crisis that has caused panic throughout the world.