by Dan Mitchell | Dec 27, 2012 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Regulations
In large part because of an excessive burden of government, the American economy is suffering European-style stagnation, with even the Washington Post now confessing that growth far below the long-run trend. This helps explain why job creation has been so dismal in...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 15, 2012 | Big Government, Blogs
The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards put together a remarkable (and depressing) chart showing that federal bureaucrats get almost twice the level of compensation as workers in the productive sector of the economy. Defenders of the bureaucracy (including a federal...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 12, 2012 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Tax Competition, Taxation
Hopefully we’re all disgusted when insiders rig the system to rip off taxpayers. And I suspect you’re not surprised to know that the worst examples come from California, which is in a race with Illinois to see which state can become the Greece of America. Well, the...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 29, 2012 | Big Government, Blogs, Free Market, Regulations
I’ve written before about the heavy costs of regulation, including these rather sobering statistics. Or, to be more accurate, here are some staggering numbers. Americans spend 8.8 billion hours every year filling out government forms. The economy-wide cost of...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 22, 2012 | Big Government, Blogs, Bureaucracy
Since I’ve been in Washington from more than 25 years, it takes something really remarkable to shock me. But when I read today that federal bureaucrats are supposedly underpaid, notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary, I thought somebody had sent me an...