by Dan Mitchell | Mar 1, 2017 | Big Government, Blogs
I focus most of my ire on the federal government because bad policy from Washington is the biggest threat to our nation’s freedom and prosperity. But we also get plenty of bad policy from other levels of government. I periodically focus on the foibles of states such...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 28, 2017 | Blogs, Economics, Laffer Curve, Supply Side, Taxation
I shared yesterday an example of how a big tax increase on expensive homes led to fewer sales. Indeed, the drop was so pronounced that the government didn’t just collect less money than projected, which is a very common consequence when fiscal burdens increase, but it...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 27, 2017 | Blogs, Economics, Laffer Curve, Supply Side, Taxation
In my never-ending strategy to educate policy makers about the Laffer Curve, I generally rely on both microeconomic theory (i.e., people respond to incentives) and real-world examples. And my favorite real-world example is what happened in the 1980s when Reagan cut...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 26, 2017 | Big Government, Blogs, Health Care, Welfare and Entitlements
The United States is going to become another Greece, and it’s largely because of poorly designed entitlement programs. As the old saying goes, demography is destiny. Let’s look at just one piece of that puzzle. James Capretta of the American Enterprise Institute has a...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 25, 2017 | Blogs, Economics, Laffer Curve, Taxation
For more than 30 years, I’ve been trying to educate my leftist friends about supply-side economics and the Laffer Curve. Why is it so hard for them to recognize, I endlessly wonder, that when you tax something, you get less of it? And why don’t they realize that when...
