by Dan Mitchell | Mar 15, 2018 | Blogs, Taxation
Ideally, there should be no capital gains tax. After all, the levy is a self-destructive form of double taxation that reduces the quantity and quality of investment. And that’s not good for wages and jobs. To add insult to injury (to be more accurate, to add injury to...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 14, 2018 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
Way back in 2009, I narrated a video explaining that people worry too much about deficits and debt. Red ink isn’t desirable, to be sure, but I pointed out that the real problem is government spending. And the bottom line is that most types of government...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 13, 2018 | Blogs, Economics
The biggest challenge, when I talk to politicians about the free-market agenda, is convincing them that they should restrain the growth of government. To be more specific, I think they often understand and accept the argument that ever-rising fiscal burdens are bad...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 12, 2018 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
I’ve narrated a video on why big government is theoretically bad for an economy, another video looking at the empirical evidence on government spending and economic performance, and also a video on the growth-maximizing size of the public sector. But if you want to...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 11, 2018 | Big Government, Blogs, Free Market
Every time I write a column criticizing Trump’s protectionism, I get pushback. Some of the resistance is from people who genuinely think trade barriers are a good thing, and I routinely respond by asking them to ponder these eight questions or these five charts. But I...