by Dan Mitchell | Mar 12, 2018 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
I’ve narrated a video on why big government is theoretically bad for an economy, another video looking at the empirical evidence on government spending and economic performance, and also a video on the growth-maximizing size of the public sector. But if you want to...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 11, 2018 | Big Government, Blogs, Free Market
Every time I write a column criticizing Trump’s protectionism, I get pushback. Some of the resistance is from people who genuinely think trade barriers are a good thing, and I routinely respond by asking them to ponder these eight questions or these five charts. But I...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 6, 2018 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
Writing about federal spending last week, I shared five charts illustrating how the process works and what’s causing America’s fiscal problems. Most important, I showed that the ever-increasing burden of federal spending is almost entirely the result of domestic...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 28, 2018 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending, Taxation
I sometimes sardonically comment about Democratic politicians playing Santa Claus, but Republicans can play that game as well. Trump and his allies in Congress recently agreed on a big-spending budget deal that lavishes more money on both the Pentagon and domestic...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 26, 2018 | Blogs, States, Tax Competition, Taxation
In 2016, here’s some of what I wrote about the economic outlook in Illinois. There’s a somewhat famous quote from Adam Smith (“there is a great deal of ruin in a nation“) about the ability of a country to survive and withstand lots of bad public policy. I’ve tried to...
