Milton Friedman famously noted that, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program”and Ronald Reagan sagely observed that “a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” They’re both right, but they should have…
Dan Mitchell
Daniel J. Mitchell is the President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity and the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation. Dr. Mitchell advocates limited government and fundamental tax reform, and is the nation’s leading opponent of tax harmonization schemes developed by the Brussels-based European Union, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the United Nations.
In addition to fiscal policy, Dr. Mitchell is a trenchant observer of economic developments and an expert on Social Security reform – particularly the fiscal policy impact of reform and what the US can learn from other nations that have created personal retirement accounts.
Tax Havens Are Good for High-Tax Nations
Regular readers know that one of my main goals is to preserve and promote tax competition as a means of restraining the greed of the political class. Heck, I almost wound up in a Mexican jail because of my work defending low-tax jurisdictions. As you can imagine, it’s…
The Moochers and Looters in France Are Running Out of Victims
The late, great Margaret Thatcher famously said that “Socialist governments…always run out of other people’s money” and “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” is an iconic line from Apocalypse Now. Thinking about the fiscal mess in Europe, I’m going to combine…
Stop the Presses, Europe’s Doing the Right Thing on Failed Banks!
The European Union has basically made the right decision on how to deal with insolvent banks. Here are some details from the EU Observer. Bank shareholders and creditors will be first in line to suffer losses if their bank gets into difficulties, according to draft…
By Global Standards, the Government Education Bureaucracy Gets the Most Money while Delivering Mediocre Results
I don’t write or speak about education very much, but, when asked, I explain that America has a very costly and inefficient government school monopoly. The strongest piece of evidence is an amazing chart put together by a Cato colleague. It shows that education…
Some Much-Needed Remedial Public Finance Economics for David Cameron and other Statists
In a recent interview with the BBC, I basically accused UK Prime Minister David Cameron of being a feckless and clueless demagogue who is engaged in a desperate effort to resuscitate his political future. I shouldn’t have been so kind. Cameron manages to combine bad…
Great Moments in IRS Incompetence
The IRS is worthy of scorn. It is a bloated bureaucracy that routinely violates the rights of taxpayers. But even I didn’t think it was possible for a collection of bureaucrats to display the blithering incompetence necessary to send $46 million of handouts to nearly…
The Very High Cost of Government Regulation and Red Tape
In prior posts, I’ve shared some remarkable numbers on the cost of regulation. Americans spend 8.8 billion hours every year filling out government forms. The economy-wide cost of regulation is now $1.75 trillion. For every bureaucrat at a regulatory agency, 100 jobs…
The Never-Ending Story of Government Cost Overruns
Why does virtually everything the government does cost more than we’re initially told? In 2009, for instance, I warned that Obamacare would be much more costly than advertised, so I certainly wasn’t surprised several years later when the numbers began to climb. Heck,…
The Link Between Systemic Risk and One-Size-Fits-All Regulation
After the financial crisis, the consensus among government officials was that we needed more regulation. This irked me in two ways. 1. I don’t want more costly red tape in America, particularly when the evidence is quite strong that the crisis was caused by government…