by Dan Mitchell | Apr 8, 2018 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Welfare and Entitlements
There is a lot of good news about the job market in America. The official unemployment rate, released just yesterday, is down to 4.1 percent, which is the lowest its been since the end of the Clinton years. Even more impressive, the number of people getting...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 7, 2018 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
My major long-run project during Obama’s presidency was to educate Republicans in Washington about the need for genuine entitlement reform. I explained to them that the United States was doomed, largely because of demographics, to suffer a Greek-style fiscal future if...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 6, 2018 | Big Government, Blogs, States, Tax Competition, Taxation
I’m a big fan of federalism because states have the flexibility to choose good policy or bad policy. And that’s good news for me since I get to write about the consequences. One of the main lessons we learn (see here, here, here, here, and here) is that high-earning...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 5, 2018 | Blogs, Economics, Keynesian
When I give speeches on Keynesian economics, I usually begin with a theoretical discussion on why consumer spending is a consequence of growth rather than the cause of growth. I then focus on two reasons to be skeptical about borrow-and-spend schemes to artificially...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 4, 2018 | Blogs, Economics
I explained last month that the World Trade Organization’s dispute-resolution mechanism is the best way of discouraging China from short-sighted mercantilist and cronyist trade policies. The Trump Administration, though, thinks that the best response to bad Chinese...
