Unemployment has risen to 9.8 percent, a 26-year high.

That’s much higher than the Obama administration predicted unemployment would rise, if Congress had refused to pass his $800 billion stimulus package.  The administration claimed unemployment would rise to 8 percent without a stimulus.

Small businesses are finding it more difficult than ever to borrow badly needed money to meet their payrolls.  New financial regulations backed by the administration are contributing to a terrible credit crunch.  Meanwhile, the wealthy Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs, perhaps the…

Read the full story

Memorial Day is an opportunity to thank our troops, and open our eyes to the disgraceful way they are treated by divorce courts. The bias that divorce courts in my home state of Virginia exhibit against males, people who start small businesses, and breadwinner spouses in general has been ably chronicled by Richard Crouch, a prominent family lawyer, in the Virginia state bar publication Family Law News.

But what ashames me most as a lawyer is how divorce courts routinely flout…

Read the full story

Many of the federal regulatory and tax laws include a “small business exemption” - politicians displaying an aversion to crippling a politically powerful constituency.  Often this is done by a cap - “This law will not apply to businesses having net annual sales less than some amount.”  Years ago, I saw one consequence of this law in the organization of the US scrap industry.  A prospering scrap firm would approach the cap ceiling and re-organize into two smaller businesses — sometimes…

Read the full story

After running into the owners of a Colorado Brewery this weekend, I stumbled on a battle going on in the state between, as the Brewers see it, liquor stores and grocery stores. Really, it is a battle between liquor stores and consumers. While it is predictable that liquor stores would try and block legislation that would allow any other store to carry beer I was extremely surprised to find that many craft brewers are adamantly taking the side of liquor stores…

Read the full story

As I blogged about earlier many states in the US,  facing budget shortcomings of their own making are looking at beer and wine tax increases as a way to make some cash. One of my assertions, beside the fundamental stupidity of penalizing production and wealth creation, is that such tax increases will hurt employees and pubs hardest. To back that up we can take the UK as an example—they are experiencing the roosting chickens of Chancellor Darling’s 2008 beer tax in the…

Read the full story

February 1st 2009 is the day that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s per-drink tax increase will go into effect throughout the state. The tax hike will be a seemingly small 5 cent increase on beer, wine, and spirits in an attempt to in an attempt to shrink the state’s budget deficit of $40 billion.

Is this a wise idea? Well, “sin taxes” like those applied to drinking and smoking are, generally, intended as deterrents against an activity some government agent believes is harmful…

Read the full story

Tomorrow, electric utilities and green groups team up at the National Press Club to ask for billions of new spending on what they term energy efficiency. New versions of such stimulus and bailout proposals appear almost daily.

We spend a lot of time at CEI now proposing wealth-enhancing alternatives to these massive wealth transfers to government contractors and corporations. The right “stimulus” instead liberalizes wealth creation, it doesn’t spread around the dwindling wealth that already exists, like a self-appointed Benevolent Vulture;…

Read the full story