Texas has a small state government and no state income tax. California has a bloated state government and a punitive state income tax. Here’s a simple quiz: Which state is doing better? The answer is obvious, as Michael Barone explains: Democratic majorities…
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.
Orwellian Nightmare or Nanny State Run Amok?
I’m not sure how to categorize this story from England. Local governments are surreptitiously adding microchips to garbage cans to weigh the amount of rubbish each household is unloading. It is generally thought that this is the beginning stage of a government…
Good News for American Taxpayers (in the short run), Bad News for European Taxpayers.
According to Financial Times report the politicians in Paris and Berlin want to set up some sort of European Monetary Fund to help bail out Greece and other profligate European nations. This is good news in the short run for American taxpayers since it is less likely…
Cast Your Vote on the Green Jobs Debate.
Andy Morriss, a professor at the University of Illinois Law School, is having a debate about so-called green jobs at The Economist. For some strange reason, the British magazine picked the nutjob Van Jones as his opponent (you may remember that he was forced to resign…
Mark Steyn Is 100 Percent Correct on Left's Motive for Government-Run Healthcare.
During the Cold War era, there was something known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, which was the notion that once a nation was taken over by communists, there was no going back. A similiar principle takes place in the battle between statism and freedom in America. The left…
Bureaucrats vs. Taxpayers, Part XV.
The left pretends to care about fairness, but they have no problem taking money from ordinary people to help fatten the wallets of overpaid government bureaucrats. Pat Buchanan asks what’s fair about redistributing from the poor to the rich: …government…
The Obama Administration's Dangerous Re-Definition of Poverty.
A former colleague from my days at the Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector, has a very disturbing article at National Review Online. Robert explains that the Obama Administration is putting together a new – and rigged – definition of poverty that has…
Mega-Landslide Vote in Iceland Against Bailouts
An incredible 93 percent of voters in Iceland voted against financing British and Dutch bank bailouts. The politicians in England and the Netherlands argued that they were bailing out local subsidiaries of an Icelandic bank, so Iceland’s taxpayers should pick up…
Bureaucrats vs. Taxpayers, Part XIII.
A solid analysis by a reporter finds that bureaucrats make almost $8,000 more than their private sector counterparts, but the bigger scandal is the giant gap in fringe benefits. Taxpayers cough up nearly $41,000 for every bureaucrat, but workers in the productive…
Tom Sowell: Restoring Free Markets Is the Way to Fix Healthcare.
As usual, Tom Sowell uses basic economics to explain a confusing topic. His core insight is that government has undermined market forces, which is leading to rising costs. Obama and the other statists somehow think more government will make things better:…