by Dan Mitchell | Feb 14, 2017 | Big Government, Blogs
I’m not a big fan of Donald Trump, mostly because I fear his populist instincts will deter him from policies that we need (such as entitlement reform) while luring him to support policies that are misguided (more federal transportation spending). But I admit it’s too...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 2, 2017 | Big Government, Blogs, Uncategorized
In 2016, there were three very worthy candidates for the highly coveted Politician of the Year Award. In May, I gave the prize to Rodrigo Duterte, the newly elected president of the Philippines, because he assured voters that none of his mistresses were on the public...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 10, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Bureaucracy
I’m not a fan of federal bureaucracies and I don’t like the undeserved wealth of the Washington, DC metro region. So I’m very open to ideas that would address these problems. Paul Kupiec of the American Enterprise Institute suggests, in a thought-provoking column in...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 3, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics
In 2008, government spending consumed 50.9 percent of economic output in Greece according to OECD fiscal data. That same year, Greece’s score from Economic Freedom of the World was 7.12 (on a 0-10 scale), which was rather poor for a supposedly developed country and...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 18, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Europe
When I tell journalists and politicians that the European fiscal situation is worse today than it was immediately prior to the crisis, they don’t believe me. What about all the spending cuts, they ask? What about the draconian austerity? And the Troika-imposed fiscal...
