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...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 16, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
Keynesian economics is a perpetual-motion machine for statists. The way to boost growth, they argue, is to have governments borrow lots of money from the economy’s productive sector and then spend it on anything and everything. Even if the money is squandered on...
