There are bad deficits and there are good deficits. What makes a fiscal deficit good or bad depends on both the context in which the deficit is run and the reason that the deficit is rising. The belief that it is unquestionably foolish to adopt policies that directly or indirectly increase the...

Advocates of estate tax repeal often assert that family-run businesses and farms are broken up when heirs are unable to pay the estate tax. This claim has never been proven, but a recent Joint Economic Committee report claims to demonstrate that it is true. I assess the arguments and evidence...

Congressional Republicans, starting in 2011, embarked upon an unprecedented strategy of budgetary brinkmanship, threatening not to increase the statutory debt ceiling by the amount necessary to accommodate their own taxing and spending decisions. Starting from the very beginning, Neil H....

This was an invited keynote article for Economics & Labour Relations Review. The article places the debate over the debt ceiling in the context of anti-deficit orthodoxy, explaining how the American political debate has turned into a parody of itself, with right-wing politicians using an...

In a stylized, parliamentary-style debate, one of the participants on the opposing team was not able to attend, so Neil H. Buchanan became N. Harold Buchanan and argued for the opposing side. Buchanan's alter ego noted that, because Congress has enacted an array of incentives to encourage...

Transactions at non-equilibrium prices are false trades. Under standard assumptions, markets without false trading produce Pareto-efficient outputs. This paper demonstrates graphically the complications created when false trades occur, showing that quantities produced deviate from...