by Dan Mitchell | Apr 25, 2020 | Blogs
At the risk of understatement, I’m not a fan of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The international bureaucracy is the “Johnny Appleseed” of moral hazard, using bailouts to reward profligate governments and imprudent lenders. The IMF also is infamous for...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 24, 2020 | Blogs
When I put forth the “The Case for Social Security Personal Accounts” in early 2011, I pointed out that the program’s long-run fiscal shortfall was more than $27 trillion. We should be so lucky to have that problem today. The Social Security Administration just...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 23, 2020 | Blogs, Economics
Remember the “jobless recovery” of the Obama years? Part of the problem was that President Obama kept extending unemployment benefits, which subsidized joblessness, as even Paul Krugman and Larry Summers had warned. The good news was that Congress eventually said no...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 22, 2020 | Blogs, Economics, Taxation
The folks who don’t want to let a crisis go to waste have been very busy in the era of coronavirus, pushing an ever-expanding menu of bad ideas. Propping up high-tax states such as New York, Illinois, and California by restoring the tax code’s deduction for state and...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 22, 2020 | Blogs, Economics, Trade
One year ago, I shared this video to explain why a “trade deficit” doesn’t matter, in large part because it is simply a result of foreigners wanting to invest in America’s economy with some of the dollars they earn. We also have a trade deficit, I pointed out, because...
