Brandon Parsons & I just had an article published in Public Choice entitled “Do US presidents leave fiscal fingerprints? The power of the executive branch through a century of tax data.” It shows something we find interesting, namely that “the tax burden declined under every Republican administration. Conversely, it increased under every Democratic administration, but Harry Truman’s, in which it remained constant. It is worth noting that Truman came into office following the...

In the United States, growth ain’t what it used to be, and it scares me. The post-WWII peak came in the 1960s, and even that was already a step down from earlier eras. The trend becomes obvious once you smooth the data using a ten year annualized growth rate, which filters out short term swings and highlights the structural decline. What’s especially interesting is that this slowdown since the 1960s has come even though we’ve fired off most of the so-called silver bullets that both the left...