by Dan Mitchell | Mar 26, 2020 | Bailouts, Big Government, Blogs, Europe
I’m not an optimist about Europe’s economic future. Most nations have excessive welfare states and punitive taxes, which is hardly good news. You then have to consider demographic trends such as aging populations (i.e., more people relying on government) and falling...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 20, 2020 | Taxation
There will be many lessons that we hopefully learn from the current crisis, most notably that it’s foolish to give so much regulatory power to sloth-like bureaucracies such as the FDA and CDC. Today, I want to focus on a longer-run lesson, which is how tax policy...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 13, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
Back in 2012, when America had a budget deficit above $1 trillion, Investor’s Business Daily opined that America’s fiscal mess could have been avoided if politicians had simply adopted a TABOR-style spending cap starting in 1998. As illustrated by the accompanying...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 27, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending, Taxation
About 10 years ago, the Center for Freedom and Prosperity released this video to explain that America’s real fiscal problem is too much spending and that red ink is best viewed as a symptom of that problem. I wrote a primer on this issue two years ago, but I want to...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 13, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
I gave a speech this past weekend about the economy and fiscal policy, and I made my usual points about government being too big and warned that the problem would get much worse in the future because of demographic change and poorly designed entitlement programs....