by Dan Mitchell | Jan 21, 2015 | Blogs, Economics
Watching politicians give speeches, such as Obama’s State of the Union address, is an occupational hazard when you work at a think tank. Which is why, in the past, I’ve heartily recommended the State-of-the-Union Bingo game developed by Americans for Tax Reform....
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 20, 2015 | Blogs, Economics, Tax Competition, Taxation
The most compelling graph I’ve ever seen was put together by Andrew Coulson at the Cato Institute. It shows that there’s been a huge increase in the size and cost of the government education bureaucracy in recent decades, but that student performance has been...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 17, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Europe, Welfare and Entitlements
In my younger years, I oftentimes would have arguments with statists who wanted me to believe that countries in Northern Europe like Sweden “proved” that generous welfare states were compatible with economic prosperity. That doesn’t happen as often today because the...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 16, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
Keynesian economics is a perpetual-motion machine for statists. The way to boost growth, they argue, is to have governments borrow lots of money from the economy’s productive sector and then spend it on anything and everything. Even if the money is squandered on...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 15, 2015 | Blogs, Economics, Minimum Wage
It’s very frustrating to write about the minimum wage. How often can you make the elementary observation, after all, that you’ll get more unemployment if you try to make businesses pay some workers more than they’re worth? But it’s my mission to promote economic...
