Below is a chart comparing categories of income tax between 1913 and 2016, published by Americans for Tax Reform. Note the categories labeled “Top Tax Bracket Threshold” and “Family Standard Deduction,” both adjusted in terms of today’s dollars. Our tax liability now begins at 25 times the amount it began at in 1913. Our deduction […]
Archives
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Happy Tax Day (Late)
19 Apr 2016
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There was a time, way back in the eighteenth century, and as recently as the nineteenth century in the United States, that a person who owned land possessed legal title (in so-called “fee simple,” the normal way people own land unless they lease it) to it from the “center of the earth to the zenith […]
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“The Immense and Tutelary Power”
22 Feb 2016
I think I quoted this passage from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, last year, but have enlarged the context. Is this a description of the centralized command and control bureaucratic government that we [sic] have been creating over the past 100 years or so? And is Tocqueville on to something? Feel free to comment. […]
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A Tale of Two Kinds of Institutions
26 Jan 2016
I must first apologize for the length of this post. It is a bit involved, but because the subject is not so simple as we sometimes would like to believe. As I consider the current state of government and of colleges and universities, and their dysfunction, I can’t help but do so in terms of […]
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Have we reached a critical mass of voters? On what issue you might ask. On whether big government is bad on the whole. I have read a couple of articles recently, addressing that question. I don’t honestly know whether or to what extent people may believe big government is basically good. But here is a […]
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Sometimes I sound like a broken record—err, broken iPad for all the millennials. But once again, the problem of bureaucracy comes up, in this case, specifically in relation to the Veterans Administration. This is the scandal that won’t go away. It is in the news again, as we rad of whistleblowers who are “rewarded” for […]
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A New Paradigm for Addressing Poverty
13 Dec 2015
Is there a “poverty industry”? Is the way we attempt to alleviate poverty wrong, outdated, even harmful? These are two questions the new documentary Poverty, Inc. attempts to address. I had the opportunity to host a screening this video documentary at Cedarville University, sponsored by the Department of History and Government and the Institute for […]
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“Dark Matter” in the Federal Universe
11 Dec 2015
I regret I cannot compete with my colleague Mark Smith for sheer humor. In fact, talking about Federal regulations can be really boring. But what they lack in pizzaz, they make up for in importance–unfortunately in a negative way. I read a very illuminating study by Clyde Crews, entitled “Mapping Washington’s Lawlessness: A Preliminary Inventory […]
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If you don’t have much to do at the moment perhaps you want to read about the proposed mens rea reform. Perhaps that topic might sound just a bit esoteric if not downright boring, but I venture to say that it may prove to be one of the more important measures discussed among legal scholars […]
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Once again, there is so much out there that I am somewhat at a loss to focus on a single issue. If you haven’t been hibernating early, the newsworthy items include the refugee problem, the Paris and Mali attacks, the VA travesty regarding its treatment of veterans, the Missouri-inspired (or was it Yale) episode of […]
Bert Wheeler
Jeff Haymond
Marc Clauson
Mark Caleb Smith
Tom Mach