The failure to work out sensible budgets makes it impossible for government agencies to make long-term plans, and instead leaves them scrambling to spend money in the short term.

What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and...

In reality, everybody in Congress is a stand-in for some kind of lobbyist. In many cases it’s difficult to tell whether it’s the companies that are lobbying the legislators or whether it’s the other way...

Everybody I knew, practically, was a journalist when I was a kid – my father, all of his friends. I never wanted to be like those people.

These leaders are like the drug lords who ruled America’s ghettos in the crack age, men (and some women) interested in just two things: staying in power, and hoovering up enough of what’s left of...

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists.

The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.

To Wall Street, a firm like BP isn’t just a profitable energy company with lots of assets like oil rigs and pipelines and gas stations – it’s also a corporation that routinely borrows hundreds of...

intrusive government and layer upon layer of regulatory red tape. When

What we have now is a situation where politicians get a whole bunch of money from mainly business interests. Then once they hold that office, they spend all their time in office paying back over...

2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went...

The party in power almost always unapologetically engages in deficit spending, while the other party argues passionately against the evils of debt and deficits.

The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis – and, of course, in capitalism we’re not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let’s mention it anyway – shows a culture that is slowly...

Like wars, forest fires and bad marriages, really stupid laws are much easier to begin than they are to end.

I was a bit of a troubled kid growing up, let’s put it that way. I didn’t take pleasure in hard work.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood...

Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you’ll buy products that they’re advertising.

The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers.

Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out.