Bill Owens shows some fiscal leadership: Gov. Bill Owens, once touted in conservative Republican circles as presidential material, teamed with Democrats last spring in drawing up the proposals that will ask voters to give up as much as $3.7 billion in tax refunds over the next five years. This from a politician who used to […]

Even Jonah Goldberg understands that blaming the New Orleans poor for their lack of resources to flee the path of Katrina is misplaced: That said, it’s becoming increasingly less obvious that more first responders etc, would have made an enormous difference in the aftermath of this unfolding calamity. The disaster zone after 9/11 was less […]

Yes, I agree that there’s plenty of blame to go around. I’m sure that local authorities made some poor or slow decisions. But the Bush administration’s new coordinated effort to blame local authorities for the hundreds or thousands of deaths that have happened in Katrina’s wake is despicable: In public statements and even more bluntly […]

The Bush administration has finally put together a plan to deal with the Katrina crisis, reports the New York Times: White House Enacts a Plan to Ease Political Damage WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 – Under the command of President Bush’s two senior political advisers, the White House rolled out a plan this weekend to contain the […]

People needed help on Tuesday not this weekend. Help was slow in coming and criticism of our government was well deserved. Yet, folks like David Frum “criticize the criticism”, which for those who may have forget was what the Taliban spokesperson whined after 9/11. Maybe you don’t agree with me that David Frum has zero […]

We awaked this Saturday to see the good news – help has arrived to New Orleans. Eleanor Clift provides one explanation of why it took so long for the Federal government to get its act together: This has been a colossal failure of government. President Bush spent Tuesday, the day after Katrina struck, at a […]

The NRO econopundits are contradicting themselves once again on monetary policy. While Victor Canto is arguing for a commodity price rule, John Tamny seems upset that the market does not decide the money supply. And the funny part is that these two probably don’t even understand that their positions are inconsistent.

Yet another thing that Katrina has done this week is to highlight some stark differences in what people believe about the world and the appropriate role for government. That’s because Katrina has grimly reminded us of this fact of life: sometimes bad things happen to good people, through no fault of their own. Sometimes people […]

Not because I’m thinking much about it today, but because I feel like I should at least mention it: the August employment report was released by the BLS this morning. From the report: Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 169,000 in August, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 4.9 percent, the Bureau of Labor […]

One of the most basic reasons why we have a government is for the reason articulated by Thomas Hobbes over 350 years ago: without government, we would be in a “state of nature” in which there are: “no arts, no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent […]