by Dan Mitchell | Jul 12, 2015 | Bailouts, Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
I very rarely feel sympathy for the people of Greece. Indeed, events over the past five years have even led me to write that “I hate the Greeks.” I also disparaged the people of Greece by stating on TV that they’ve beentrying to loot and mooch their way through life....
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 11, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Free Market
When I first got to Washington in the mid-1980s, one of the big issues was the supposedly invincible Japanese economy. Folks on the left claimed that Japan was doing well because the government had considerable power to micro-manage the economy with industrial policy....
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 10, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending, States, Taxation
There’s an old saying that states are the laboratories of democracy. But since I’m a policy wonk, I focus more on the lessons we can learn from the states about public policy. Such as the importance of limiting the destructive nature of taxes. Such as the economic...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 9, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Europe, Government Spending
The European Commission’s data-gathering bureaucracy, Eurostat, has just published a new report on government finances for the region. And with Greece’s ongoing fiscal turmoil getting headlines, this Eurostat publication is worthwhile because it debunks the notion,...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 8, 2015 | Blogs, Economics, Health Care
I’m a long-time advocate of “dynamic scoring,” which means I want the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation to inform policy makers about how fiscal policy changes can impact overall economic performance and therefore generate “feedback” effects....
