by Dan Mitchell | Jul 13, 2010 | Big Government, Blogs, Taxation
My former colleague at the Heritage Foundation, Brian Riedl, has a column in the Wall Street Journal today which discusses the degree to which President Bush’s policies can be blamed for current deficits. I think Brian is too easy on Bush’s terrible record as a big...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 11, 2010 | Big Government, Blogs, Taxation
Much of the economic debate in Washington revolves around the silly Keynesian notion that politicians can stimulate an economy by borrowing money from the private sector and using the funds to make government bigger. That didn’t work for Hoover and Roosevelt during...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 11, 2010 | Big Government, Blogs
I’m out in Sin City for the annual FreedomFest conference, where I moderated a debate earlier today on whether consumer spending or investment spending was the key to economic growth. As you can imagine, it was horribly painful for me to keep from injecting my two...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 6, 2010 | Big Government, Blogs
I’ve been very dismissive of supposed European “austerity” initiatives, in part because the term seems to describe politicians who want tax-financed government spending rather than Keynesian-style deficit-financed government spending. But what really matters is...
by Brian Garst | Jun 29, 2010 | Blogs, Taxation, VAT
The lazy politician looks at deficits and screams, “soak the rich!” But as CBO’s latest analysis of federal average tax rates shows, they are already paying a highly disproportionate share of taxes. The graphs above show that the highest earners are...
