by Dan Mitchell | Dec 20, 2025 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
Let’s start today’s column with a refresher look at my video on the Rahn Curve. Though maybe it should be called the Armey Curve. Or even the Barro Curve since Professor Robert Robert Barro from Harvard graphed the relationship between government...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 19, 2024 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
It’s been a while since I shared this video about the Rahn Curve (or Armey-Rahn Curve), so let’s watch this Golden Oldie from 2010. The insight of the Rahn Curve (sort of a spending version of the Laffer Curve) is that economic performance declines once government...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 6, 2022 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
At the end of last month, I wrote about the growth-maximizing size of government, citing a study that estimated that the public sector in Sudan should not consume more than 11.17 percent of the nation’s economic output. I realize that very few people care...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 30, 2022 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
Most people have heard of the Laffer Curve, which shows that there is a non-linear relationship between tax rates and tax revenues (for instance, doubling tax rates won’t produce a doubling of tax revenue because people and businesses will have less...
by Dan Mitchell | Jun 14, 2022 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
Echoing remarks earlier this month to a group in Nigeria, I spoke today about fiscal economics to the 2022 Africa Liberty Camp in Entebbe, Uganda. During the Q&A session, I was asked to specify the ideal amount of government spending....
