by Dan Mitchell | Jul 30, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending, Taxation
Because of changing demographics and poorly designed entitlement programs, the burden of government spending in the United States (in the absence of genuine reform) is going to increase dramatically over the next few decades. That bad outlook will get even worse...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 29, 2020 | Blogs, Economics
My view of the U.S. economic policy often depends on whether I’m writing about absolute levels of laissez-faire or relative levels of laissez-faire. If my column is about the former, I generally complain about excessive spending, punitive taxation, senseless red...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 28, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
Back in 2011, CF&P released this video citing four nations – Canada, Ireland, Slovakia, and New Zealand – that achieved very good results with multi-year periods of genuine spending restraint. Today, let’s focus on what’s been happening with government spending in...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 27, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
Way back in January of 2017, I predicted for a French TV audience that Donald Trump would be a big spender like George Bush instead of a small-government conservative like Ronald Reagan. Sadly, I was right. I crunched the numbers earlier this year and showed that...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 26, 2020 | Blogs, Economics, Socialism
When I write about socialism, I often point out that there’s a difference between how economists define it (government ownership, central planning, and price controls) and how normal people define it (lots of taxes, redistribution, and intervention). These definitions...