Just a partial list. Much more at the link: http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/victordavishanson/index
Let me know if you want in or out.
Links: FR Index of his articles: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson
His website: http://victorhanson.com/
NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
Pajamasmedia: http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/
... Consider the political effects of Bill Clinton’s two budget surplus years — and ignore the ongoing argument to what effect they were the result of creative accounting, not sustainable, or any of the other conservatives rationalizations use to deprecate the achievement. The truth is that they were, and are, now accepted as unusual achievements.
... So just assume that by hook and crook Clinton balanced the budget and examine the ensuing political fallout (We are talking politics now, not economics).
By the end of his term, the United States was headed into a recession. The president was mired in sexual scandal and had been impeached, and yet his ratings remained overwhelmingly positive. Clearly part of the Clintonian resilience was because Americans not only were relieved that they were not piling up debt on their children, but through modest surpluses were making some progress in paying down the national debt. And they gave Clinton credit (not just the Republican Congress that forced him to stop excessive spending), which trumped his otherwise deplorable behavior.
As you can see, Hanson knows the argument that Clinton's balanced budget was not quite so and anyway who was really responsible for it - the Republican Congress. The main point remains - the public in large remembers that as "Clinton balanced the budget". We are talking about perception here that reflects the reality, but not the reality itself. And as we know, in politics perception beats the reality. Especially with the help of our Orwellian Media.
Dr. Hanson is wrong when he says “Bush at least gave us tax cuts — but a large deficit. “
The deficits ballooned after 9/11 to protect the nation. In FY2007, the deficit was down to $250 billion and on a clear multi-year trajectory toward a balanced budget. The Democrat engineered train wreck of the economy (by forcing banks to abandon lending standards so the poorest of the poor could own a home with an ARM) is what destroyed the financial system and led us to the current mess including the $2 TRILLION deficit, 8 times larger than Bush’s last full year in office.
I like Dr. Hanson a lot, but at times his Democrat background continues to seep through his otherwise impeccable logic.
Not true.
The National Debt has not decreased year-to-year since 1957.
On June 30, 1957 the debt was about $2 billion less than it was on June 30, 1956.
Here is the historical record.
There were a couple of years in the late 1990s when the debt "only" went up $20 billion or so, but it's been up continuously every single year since 1957.
I quit reading right there.
This Keynesian nonsense is the old democrat coming out in Hanson.
The American people for the most part are too ignorant of the impact of policy decisions on their lives. It will be years before we have to face the music on what the Democrats have done since 2007 and especially starting this year.
The real difficulty is, as he has proposed, psychological and hence political, but there does come a point at which people looking at an unstable currency are less likely to take risks than they might otherwise be: psychological and hence economic. And if those people are, say, foreign people looking for a place to put their surplus cash that won't imperil it by inflation, that tends to be a problem considerably more than the psychological.
There isn't actually anything particularly stunning about a tax break increasing revenues, and there Hanson embarrassed himself a bit. The bite the government takes out of flow is considerably greater than the one it takes out of any static pie, and that's true whether your name is Keynes or von Mises.