President Obama’s political operatives—if Vice President Joe Biden merits even that honorific—are going to the wall this campaign season on the government bailout of the automakers from a few years back. “Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,” mouthed Biden ten days ago to a campaign throng. Obama himself wants Republican presidential candidate [...]

“Thinly-veiled Social Darwinism” has emerged as the attack line of choice of President Obama on the theme of the budget proposal of Republican Rep. Paul Ryan. Ryan’s budget seeks to slow the growth of federal spending over the next decade.  Yet as Obama puts it, the budget “is antithetical to our entire history of upward [...]

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s big speech last week before the students at George Washington University didn’t necessarily start out to be a screed against the gold standard, but it sure turned out that way. For its first two-thirds, the speech was a folksy historical justification of central banking. But in the peroration, the end, [...]

President Obama’s main economic advisor from early on in his term, Christina Romer, is trying to discredit supply-side economics. On Sunday, she took to her column in the New York Times to dismiss the “worn out assumptions” at play when “politicians have trumpeted the supply-side benefits of cutting marginal tax rates.” In particular, she has Mitt [...]