Author: Norman Leahy

The tone of the GOP presidential race, so far, has been diffused, angry, and in recent days, focused almost entirely on the former incumbent’s legal perils. Perhaps that’s understandable. Turning a bright light on the failings – real and imagined – of the current incumbent and his party is a tried and true political strategy. Up to a point. A relentlessly downbeat campaign, particularly one as long as a presidential nominating contest, can also be exhausting for the candidate and voters alike. So it’s refreshing to read that optimism is making a comeback among the Republican presidential contenders: Vice President…

I’ve written about various government threats to individual privacy rights and 4th Amendment protections. As harrowing as some of those are – particularly regarding such practices as warrantless searches – it’s important not to forget that the private sector is no slouch when it comes to surveillance. Including unauthorized, and possibly criminal, spying like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) occurred with Amazon’s Ring product. The Federal Trade Commission has filed suit against Ring alleging it “deceived its customers by failing to restrict employees’ and contractors’ access to its customers’ videos, using customer videos to train algorithms, among other purposes, without…

There’s good news and bad news coming out of the IRS in recent weeks. On the upside: the agency is answering its phones again, and (hopefully) providing taxpayers with the right answers to their questions. On the downside, answering the phones more promptly has caused the paper jam at the agency to grow again, delaying action on millions of paper tax returns. According to National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins: …the IRS is currently juggling 3.7 million amended returns, 6.8 million “in suspense” with missing information and 5.3 million pieces of correspondence. “Those are pretty big numbers that the IRS is…

As official Washington turns to the defense budget and the possibilities it holds for sneaking additional billions of new spending into pet congressional causes and crusades, there is little discussion of what should be done about the spending left off the table. Which means the big ticket items – the so-called “mandatory” spending programs that include Social Security, Medicare and the other line-item no one really wants to grapple with, interest on the federal debt. There are those who assure us none of these items matter, everything’s awesome, move along. While such handwaving has its allures, for apologists of the…

On Capitol Hill, the political fallout from the recent debt ceiling deal continues, as the House of Representatives ground to a halt in the face of GOP Freedom Caucus members refusing to agree to rules of debate for assorted Republican bills. Rather than continue to argue, the House adjourned (none dare call it a “time out”) until next week. While that tantrum runs its course, it’s worth recalling exactly what the disagreements really should be all about: the nation’s future fiscal health. In testimony before the House Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Monetary Policy, the Government Accountability Office’s Jeff Arkin…

In case you missed it, there’s a term floating around economic circles that seeks to put the blame for inflation squarely on the shoulders of businesses. It’s called “greedflation.” On the left, it’s a term used to describe, well, theft…the blatant effort of corporations big, small, local and foreign to raise prices while everyone else’s attention is focused on other things. Setting aside the genuine supply and demand shocks that rattled the global economy during the COVID lockdowns, coupled with unprecedented levels of government spending and easy monetary policy (all of which stoked demand…does the greedflation hypothesis have any real-world…

One-party control of state government can result in some spectacularly stupid pieces of legislation getting approved. California, where Democrats have long had trifecta control of state government, demonstrated how bad ideas can advance from the fringe to the floor with the so-called “Journalism Preservation Act.” At bottom, this bill would require big online companies like Google and Facebook to pay California news outlets for the privilege of linking to their news stories. In other words, a “link tax.” The bill’s intentions are to help news outlets cope with the collapse of ad revenue. That’s not a new problem – ad…

Official Washington is generally proud of itself for having reached an agreement to avoid an entirely avoidable economic catastrophe. The debt limit has been raised and extremely modest spending cuts on a fraction of the budget have been agreed to. Time to move on. Or at least that’s the intended story line. The real story is that even before a single dollar of those modest cost savings has been realized, both major parties were looking to increase spending on defense. Recall that defense spending is at a record this year – and the deal would cap it for only the…

With federal spending still on a lot of people’s minds, it’s worth noting another section of the budget deal between House Republican leaders and the Biden administration contained a 3.3 percent hike in defense spending. That means in the next fiscal year, America will spend roughly $886 billion on defense programs and personnel. While it’s undeniably true that defense is a constitutionally-mandated federal activity, spending willy-nilly isn’t. There’s plenty of waste in the Department of Defense budget – as well as allegations of price gouging. But the budget is so big, and dispersed over so many projects, in so many congressional…

The budget deal brokered between House GOP leaders and the Biden administration proposes very modest spending restraint, even as it removes the possibility of another debt ceiling showdown for at least two years. This pleases no one on the fringes of political discourse – those who embraced the Trumpish assertion that default was better than a bad spending deal or those who say the modest spending restraint is a “cruel attack” on the poor. Would that the complaints from the fringes ended there. But, sensing an opportunity for air time, the fiscal nihilists have decided they will oppose not just…