If you knew economic growth and new job creation begin to slow when total government spending is larger than about 25 percent of the economy, and you knew total government spending in the United States is about 36 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) - would you propose policies to make government larger or smaller to create more jobs and boost economic growth?

Over the last few decades, many economists have done studies on the "optimum" size of government. A new study just completed shows the optimum size of government is less than 25 percent of GDP. Optimum is defined as that point just before government becomes so large as to reduce the rate of economic growth and job creation.

Rather than increasing the size of government, the empirical evidence shows that sharply reducing taxes, regulations, and government spending down to at least 25 percent of GDP would do the most to spur economic growth and create more jobs over the long run.

There is virtually no empirical evidence - in the United States or anywhere else - to support the belief of economists of the Keynesian school that a big increase in government spending will make matters better, rather than worse. 

Last Friday (6/19), Kyrgyzstan's interim president, Roza Otunbayeva, flew to the site of this month's ethnic violence -- and raised the estimate of the dead to 2,000.

Some 400,000 ethnic Uzbeks have become refugees, with 100,000 safely across the border in Uzbekistan and 300,000 trapped in Kyrgyzstan. Their homes have been burned, their relatives beaten, raped or slaughtered.

The Kyrgyz military and police stood by and let it happen -- or pitched in. The interim government couldn't control them, once the ethnic cleansing began.

And it matters to us. Remote Kyrgyzstan has permitted our forces to use Manas air base to shuttle troops and supplies into Afghanistan. The base is vital, but our continued presence was already iffy. Now the Yankees may be told to go home.

This latest bout of butchery also matters because it fits in with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's strategy of re-establishing Russian hegemony over Central Asia. That's why he denied a Kyrgyz request for Russian peacekeepers.  That's why he's screwing Obama in Central Asia.

You work hard, take care of your family, and pay all the taxes the government says you owe as is typical of honest, upright citizens.

But what happens to your tax money? It is now going to "bail out" firms that pay their senior executives millions of dollars a year. Congress also intends to spend your tax dollars on an $825 billion "stimulus program" filled with many dubious projects and plain old-fashioned "pork."

Many good economists who have looked at the details of the stimulus package believe it has much more "de-stimulus" than stimulus in it and will make the American economy worse off rather than better off.

While you may have thought you are required by law to pay taxes on all your income, you learn the "important" folks in Washington seem to think paying taxes is optional - for them.

Hats off to Senator Jeff Sessions! The top Republican on the Senate's Judiciary Committee has opened up an important new front in the debate over Solicitor General Elena Kagan's fitness to serve on the Supreme Court: Her attitude towards the repressive legal code authoritative Islam calls Shariah and her enabling of efforts to insinuate it into this country.

By so doing, the Alabama legislator has given his colleagues and the country an opportunity not only to flesh out and evaluate the thin public record of President Obama's second nominee to a lifetime appointment on the nation's highest court. The Senator has also afforded us all what Mr. Obama might call a "teachable moment."

Specifically, this Supreme Court nomination offers a prism for examining the concerted and ominous campaign underway to bring Shariah to America, thanks to the troubling role Ms. Kagan played during her tenure as dean of Harvard's Law School.

April 1, 2013.  Unemployment is approaching 25 percent, inflation is close to 40 percent, major portions of the U.S. are having power "brownouts," and Americans are forced to go to foreign countries for timely and quality medical care.

How did the world's largest and most prosperous economy fall into such a morass in only a very few years?

Collapse of the American economy in 2013 began with several major policy mistakes by the Fed, the "Bush 43" administration, and Congress in the years from 2004-08, which were compounded with even greater policy mistakes by the Obama administration, Congress and the Fed from 2009 thereafter.

After promises of "change," the new Obama administration, the Democrat Congress and the Fed only made changes for the worse.

Afghanistan just got its worst news since the Soviet invasion three decades ago: American geologists have charted as much as a trillion dollars' worth of mineral deposits in that tormented landscape.

Up to now, Afghanistan's internal factions and neighbors have been fighting over worthless dirt, Allah and opium. Assigning the battlefield a trillion-dollar value is not a prescription for reconciliation. Expect "The Beverly Hillbillies" scripted by Satan.

Even were Afghanistan at peace, its endemic corruption would generate a grabocracy -- a Nigeria, not a Norway. Throw in inherited hatreds and the appetites of its neighbors, and Afghanistan may end up more like eastern Congo, a playground for state-sanctioned murderers and looters.

Beyond reportedly vast deposits of rare minerals (lithium, etc.) essential to popular technologies, there's copper, cobalt, iron and gold in them thar hills. Afghanistan never before offered so much to fight over.

Afghanistan's one hope was that, eventually, outsiders would leave it alone. That hope's gone now. Development of a full-blown mining industry will take decades, but that just means decades of violent competition.

Members of Congress each will receive a $4,700 pay raise this month, which will give them a salary of $174,000 per year. Do you think they are worth it?

Most of us would like to be in the position of voting for our own pay raises from an employer who has almost unlimited access to money, so when many others are taking pay cuts or losing jobs we would not have to worry.

Given that members of Congress were in a large part responsible for the current economic mess, it is hard to see how they can justify a raise, which they claim is merely a cost-of-living increase.

Part of the problem is that they give themselves pay raises based on the rate of inflation. If these increases depended on the rate of change (increase or decrease) in real per capita disposable income (i.e., after taxes) of the average citizen, Members of Congress would have an incentive to maximize economic growth rather than encourage inflation.

In the next few weeks, members of Congress will have an opportunity to pass a "stimulus package" that enhances economic growth or one that makes things worse.  Which do you think they will choose?

Last weekend, the Feds popped two more US citizens who yearned to kill their fellow Americans for Allah. 

Add them to the would-be Times Square car bomber, the guess-what's-in-my-knickers Christmas Day airline bomber, no end of got-‘em-in-time apprehensions, plus the Ft. Hood butcher, Major Nidal Hasan... both the Feds and the media barely hint at what all these fanatics have in common.

Dare to suggest that radical Islam might be to blame, and you're a bigot.  Just as pointing out that Palestinian terrorism led to Israel's hard line stand makes you a fascist.  But those who reject radical Islam's role as the driving force behind today's terrorism must answer one obvious question:

Where are the Christian terrorists?

The ignored persecution, deprivation and massacres aren't in Gaza, the global left's favorite petting zoo.  The cover-up victims are the Middle East's Christians.

Here's a shocker.  The HFR, after checking to make sure its glass is really just half-full, raises it this week to... this is not easy, how did this glass get so heavy?... to... take a deep breath... to Hillary Clinton.

How is that possible?  Two words:  Eritrea and Honduras.

***
Oh, what about that other Clinton?  The one hogging the headlines in Norkland?  Was there some sinister sellout, some secret deal Slick made with the Norks to the grave detriment of his country?  The answer is no.

***
The more the HFR sees these town hall protests escalate, the more it thinks that concern over ZeroCare is just the proximate cause.  The real underlying cause is anger over how their country (and in many cases themselves personally as voters) was suckered into electing Zero in the first place.

And the more the HFR sees how this anger is escalating, the more it looks at Zero as LBJ redux, only faster.  For the anger is not going away until Zero does.  It took 3 years to get rid of Lyndon Johnson (1/65 to 3/68 when he announced he wouldn't run again, and he coasted from then on).  The anger today, however, will not wait that long, not even close.