by Dan Mitchell | Feb 6, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
Whenever there’s a fight over raising the debt limit, the political establishment gets hysterical and makes apocalyptic claims about default and economic crisis. For years, I’ve been arguing that this Chicken-Little rhetoric is absurd. And earlier this week I...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 6, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Taxation
I have a very mixed view of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which is an organization representing self-styled deficit hawks in Washington. They do careful work and I always feel confident about citing their numbers. Yet I frequently get frustrated...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 2, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
I wrote last month that the debt burden in Greece doesn’t preclude economic recovery. After all, both the United States and (especially) the United Kingdom had enormous debt burdens after World War II, yet those record levels of red ink didn’t prevent growth. Climbing...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 29, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
Remember the big debt limit fight of 2013? The political establishment at the time went overboard with hysterical rhetoric about potential instability in financial markets. They warned that a failure to increase the federal government’s borrowing authority would mean...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 24, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
The conventional wisdom, pushed by the IMF and others, is that Greece’s economy will never recover unless there is substantial debt relief. Translated into English, that means the Greek government should be allowed to break the contracts it made with the people and...