by Dan Mitchell | Feb 4, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Health Care
My Cato Institute colleague Michael Tanner has produced some first-rate substantive research on issues. He produced a study showing that personal retirement accounts would have been a better deal than Social Security even for people who retired at the depth of the...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 30, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Waste
I’ve periodically cited the great 19th-century French economist, Frederic Bastiat, for his very wise words about the importance of looking at both the seen and the unseen when analyzing public policy. Those that fail to consider secondary or indirect effects of...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 29, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending, Taxation, Welfare and Entitlements
The Obama Administration has already announced a bunch of tax increases that will be part of the President’s soon-to-be-released budget. But, in a remarkable development, the White House has preemptively thrown in the towel and said that it will no longer pursue a...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 28, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics
There’s a lot of navel-gazing analysis in Washington about whether to expect some sort of bipartisanship over the next two years. I find such discussions very irritating because they assume that you automatically get good results when Republicans and Democrats both...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 17, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Europe, Welfare and Entitlements
In my younger years, I oftentimes would have arguments with statists who wanted me to believe that countries in Northern Europe like Sweden “proved” that generous welfare states were compatible with economic prosperity. That doesn’t happen as often today because the...
