by Dan Mitchell | Dec 8, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Taxation, Welfare and Entitlements
I’ve written many columns about Sweden and Denmark over the past 10-plus years, and I’ve also written several times about Norway and Iceland. But I’ve mostly neglected Finland, other than some analysis of the country’s experiment with “basic income” in 2017 and 2018....
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 6, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending, Taxation
Arthur Okun was a well-known left-of-center economist last century. He taught at Yale, was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors for President Lyndon Johnson, and also did a stint at Brookings. In today’s column, I’m not going to blame him for any of LBJ’s...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 3, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Bureaucracy
An utterly depressing statistic is that the Washington, D.C.-area is now the richest region of the country. At the risk of understatement, that wealth is largely unearned. It’s mostly a reflection of overpaid bureaucrats, greedy politicians, fat-cat...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 1, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Socialism
Fifty years ago, Venezuela was ranked #10 for economic liberty and enjoyed the highest living standards in Latin America Today, the nation is an economic disaster. Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro deserve much of the blame. Their socialist policies have dropped...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 30, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Taxation, VAT
I wrote yesterday about Japan’s experience with the value-added tax, mostly to criticize the International Monetary Fund. The statist bureaucrats at the IMF are urging a big increase in Japan’s VAT even though the last increase was only imposed two months ago (in a...
