Don Luskin

Earlier this month, William Bennett — the high-profile Republican “morality” advocate — was outed in the media as a big-time gambler, a high-roller who made and lost millions in the casinos. There was the usual tempest in the public teapot,...

President Bush’s proposal to eliminate the double taxation on dividends was simple, moral, and innocent — a lot like Jefferson Smith, the James Stewart character in Frank Capra’s classic film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. And just like Smith,...

Ah, the beloved Warren Buffett. He’s the second richest man in the world according to Forbes , and he’s America’s self-appointed corporate virtue czar, the Bill Bennett of the executive suite. He’s the one whose folksy Berkshire Hathaway...

Yesterday’s market drop had the odor of an all-too-familiar panic about it. Once again, it feels as if the fragile fabric of policy stability in the Bush administration is threatening to unravel — as if we’re headed toward another...

With today’s meeting of the FOMC not likely to generate a lot of surprises, let’s take a moment to look at a chart that offers a remarkable perspective on monetary history. One wants to be careful about taking this kind of analysis too literally, but it is...

If President Bush and his team want a great argument to support their proposed elimination of the unfair double taxation of dividends and retained earnings, they should look to an excellent column in the “Week In Review” section of last month’s New...

Last week I sat across a table from President George W. Bush in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. He told me and a dozen fellow economists that “the American economy is a theatre in the war on terrorism.” With steely conviction he told us that he...

It’s back to last December 31, and we’re playing a New Year’s Eve guessing game. The country is heading for recession and war — so what will the stock market do in the first quarter of the new year? If I told you that Amazon.com and Yahoo!...

Let’s talk about the economics of mass destruction — the single most dangerous idea in economic policy… the Phillips Curve. Even if you don’t know it by that name, you’ve been its victim. The Phillips Curve is the formal construct...

The Senate’s surprise vote Tuesday to reduce the value of President Bush’s proposed tax-cuts by more than half has been played in the press as a major setback for the President’s agenda. But the way I see it, it’s actually great news: a tax-cut...

If you hoped that Alan Greenspan’s congressional testimony last month would help cut through the thick fog of competing opinion on President Bush’s tax-cut plan, you were probably bitterly disappointed. Greenspan proved once again, in my opinion, that...

When antitrust cases are about complex technical subjects like Microsoft and the market for PC operating systems, or Hughes/Echostar and the market for satellite TV broadcasting, it’s easy just to throw up your hands and assume that the government’s...

We may be facing an unusual moment in the history of market valuations in which both risk and expected returns are on the rise at the same time — and unfortunately, at the moment risk is winning. Clearly, fears of the domestic consequences of possible war with...

Whether you look at it as a fundamental investor, a value investor or a technical investor, the market is getting ready to take a turn for the better. Let’s start with fundamentals. All the evidence shows that the economy is gradually improving —...

I have to strongly disagree with Mickey Kaus and Daniel Drezner — both have recently argued that it would be to President Bush’s realpolitikal advantage to delay the war against Iraq, and start it closer to the 2004 election. Kaus in Slate (2/28/2003) says...

Warren Buffett is warning that derivative securities are a “mega-catastrophe” and “financial weapons of mass destruction” in the sneak preview of this year’s annual letter to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, published in the latest...

It’s almost painfully clich

I respectfully differ with my fellow New York Times-watchdog Andrew Sullivan, who says today “Good for the Times for correcting the record.” He’s giving them Good Journalism brownie points for a story reporting that former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay may...

The Economic Policy Institute, a left-wing advocacy group, has collected the signatures of 400 economists — including 10 Nobel prize winners — on a statement opposing President Bush’s tax cuts. It is running this week as a full-page advertisement in...

Gold traded above $370 per ounce at the end of last month, for the first time in six years. Anxiety about war with Iraq has no doubt contributed to gold’s surge — but a look at history suggests that gold may be telling us as much about Alan Greenspan as it...

My previous columns here have been about President Bush’s bold tax-cut proposal — how it will help the economy grow, and how some of the criticisms of it are wrong. Today’s column sets those issues aside and looks at the simple short-term impact that...

In science, you start with a hypothesis. Then you conduct an experiment to see if your hypothesis is true. If the experiment proves the hypothesis wrong, you throw it out and come up with a new hypothesis based on what you’ve learned. I guess economics must not...

I haven’t been much of a fan of the proposal to eliminate taxes on dividend income. But a new wrinkle in the Bush administration’s tax plan is making a believer out of me. What our growth-challenged economy needs most right now is a cut in capital-gains...