McDonald's are going up, shows that people are adjusting to economic adversity by cutting back their spending,” columnist and economist Thomas … Sowell wrote recently.…
Whoever called politics "the art of the possible" must have had a strange idea of what is possible or a strange idea of politics, where the impossible is one of the biggest vote-getters.
People can get the possible on their own. Politicians have to be able to offer the voters...
"Outliers" are not politicians who lie even more than other politicians. It is a term used by statisticians to describe some data that are far away from the average-- data on seven-foot women or freezing temperatures in Los Angeles, for example.
"Outliers" is also the title of a very insightful...
We could definitely use another Abraham Lincoln to emancipate us all from being slaves to words. In the midst of a historic financial crisis of unprecedented government spending, and a national debt that outstrips even the debt accumulated by the reckless government spending of previous administration, we are still enthralled...
What about ThomasSowell? … It is the clear-headed part that made Sowell double over in laughter when he was asked about running for office. … Former left-wing David Mamet partially credits Sowell with turning him from being "a brain-dead liberal."…
Those who regard government "entitlement" programs as sacrosanct, and regard those who want to cut them back as calloused or cruel, picture a world very different from the world of reality.To listen to some of the defenders of entitlement programs, which are at the heart of the present financial crisis,...
Two unrelated news stories on the same day show the contrast between government decisions and private decisions.Under the headline "Foreclosed Homes Sell at Big Discounts," USA Today reported that banks were selling the homes they foreclosed on, at discounts of 38 percent in Tennessee to 41 percent in Illinois and...
The only thing surprising about Barack Obama's latest blow against Israel is that there are people who are surprised. As for a Palestinian homeland, that was never a big issue when the Arabs controlled that land, up to 1967. Obama's declaration that Israel must give up the land it acquired,...
One of the painfully revealing episodes in Barack Obama's book "Dreams From My Father" describes his early experience listening to a sermon by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Among the things said in that sermon was that "white folks' greed runs a world in need." Obama was literally moved to tears...
When someone gives you a check and the bank informs you that there are insufficient funds, who do you get mad at? In your own life, you get mad at the guy who gave you a check that bounced, not at the bank. But, in politics, you get mad at...
There is a lot of talk from many people about bullying in school. The problem is that it is all talk. There is no sign that anybody is going to do anything that is likely to reduce bullying.When politicians want to do nothing, and yet look like they are doing...
Someone once said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. That may have been true when he said it, but today taxes are mostly the price we pay so that politicians can play Santa Claus and get reelected. That's not the worst of it. We may think of...
Since everybody else seems to be coming up with plans on how to cope with the skyrocketing national debt, let me try my hand at it too.The liberals' easy solution is just to increase taxes on "the rich." But, if you do the math, there aren't enough of "the rich"...
Walter Williams fans are in for a treat-- and people who are not Walter Williams fans are in for a shock-- when they read his latest book, "Race and Economics."It is a demolition derby on paper, as Professor Williams destroys one after another of the popular fallacies about the role...
The boomlet for Donald Trump as a Republican nominee for President of the United States ought to be a wake-up call for Republican candidates and Republican Party leaders alike.Why has Trump surged ahead of other Republican candidates and potential candidates in the polls? It is not likely that his resurrection...
Banfield, along with two distinguished black scholars, ThomasSowell and Walter Williams, has written that since the late 1880s, despite … Sowell writes that, "the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960.…
In Thomas Sowell's book "The Vision of the Anointed" (which should have been titled "(SET ITAL) Conceit (END ITAL) of the (SET ITAL … ) Self (END ITAL)-Anointed", Sowell points out that politicians use "the word 'ask' -- as in 'We are just asking everyone to pay their…
A recent, widely publicized incident in which a policeman was called to a school classroom to deal with a disruptive student has provoked all sorts of comments on whether the policeman used "excessive force." What has received far less attention, though it is a far larger question,...
You don't just walk up to the local bully and slap him across the face. If you are determined to confront him, then you try to knock the living daylights out of him. Otherwise, you are better off to leave him alone.Anyone who grew up in my old neighborhood in...
When people in Washington start creating fancy new phrases, instead of using plain English, you know they are doing something they don't want us to understand. It was an act of war when we started bombing Libya. But the administration chose to call it "kinetic military action." When the Federal...
Attorney General Eric Holder recently told a group of black clergymen that the right to vote was being threatened by people who are seeking to block access to the ballot box by blacks and other minorities.This is truly world-class chutzpah, by an Attorney General who stopped attorneys in his own...
Would anyone work to support themselves or their families -- and then turn over a chunk of that hard-earned money to somebody else, just because of the words used by that somebody else?A few people may be taken in by the words of con men, here and there, but the...
