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...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 14, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Welfare and Entitlements
The modern welfare state is a disaster. But rather than go into lengthy details, let’s simply look at some very powerful images (click for enlarged view). Probably the most damning evidence is that the poverty rate in America was steadily falling after World War II....
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 12, 2015 | Blogs, Economics
For the past several years, on the issue of jobs, I’ve focused more on the employment-population ratio rather than the official unemployment rate. Both figures are important, of course, but I think the employment-population ratio has more economic meaning since our...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 9, 2015 | Blogs, Economics, Health Care, Taxation
Today I’m going to say something nice about Obamacare. Not because I like the overall law, but because honesty is the best policy. Regular readers know that our healthcare system is screwed up by bad government policy. More specifically, spending programs such as...
