by Dan Mitchell | Apr 23, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Society, Welfare and Entitlements
Every year, the Social Security Administration issues a “Trustees Report” that summarizes the program’s financing. So every year (see 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, etc) I cut through all the verbiage and focus the numbers that really matter. First, here’s the data...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 27, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
Iceland is a tiny little country with just 338,000 people (about the population of Santa Ana, CA), but that doesn’t mean it can’t teach us lessons about public policy. I wrote about the nation’s approach to fisheries in 2016, and explained that the property...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 22, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
In the absence of genuine entitlement reform, the United States at some point is going to suffer from a debt crisis. But red ink is merely a symptom. I used numbers from Greece in this interview to underscore the fact that the real problem is government spending. The...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 7, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
The long-run fiscal outlook for most developed nations is very grim thanks to demographic change and poorly designed entitlement programs. For all intents and purposes, we’re all destined to become Greece according to long-run projections from the International...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 1, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
Back in January, I wrote about the $42 trillion price tag of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. To pay for this massive expansion in the burden of government spending, some advocates have embraced “Modern Monetary Theory,” which basically assumes the Federal...