by Dan Mitchell | Apr 16, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
As I’ve repeatedly explained, governments generally get in fiscal trouble because politicians can’t resist spending lots of money when the economy is buoyant and therefore generating lots of tax revenue. And this is why I’m a huge fan of spending caps. If outlays...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 1, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Socialism
The debate over socialism shouldn’t even exist. Everywhere big government has been tried, it has failed. And we have reams of evidence that free-market economies dramatically out-perform statist economies. Yet the siren song of socialism still appeals to a subsection...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 22, 2016 | Blogs, Economics
Folks on the left tell us that they want to help the less fortunate. I sometimes wonder if their real motive is to penalize success and punish the “rich,” but let’s be charitable and assume that many of them truly wish to help the poor. That’s a noble sentiment, to be...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 19, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
I don’t know whether Keynesian economics is best described as a perpetual motion machine or a Freddy Krueger movie (or perhaps even the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz), but it’s safe to say I’ll be fighting this pernicious theory until my last breath....
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 18, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics
According to a “Happy Planet” index put together by some leftists a few years ago, Venezuela is supposed to be one of the world’s best nations. But I strongly suspect that the vast majority of these people would be horrified if they actually had to live there. That’s...