by Dan Mitchell | May 2, 2014 | Blogs, Economics
The headlines from today’s employment report certainly seem positive. The unemployment rate has dropped to 6.3 percent and there are about 280,000 new jobs.* But if you dig into the details of the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you find some...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 30, 2014 | Blogs, Economics, Free Market
Using a comparison of Jamaica and Singapore, I recently argued that growth should trump inequality. Simply stated, a growing economic pie is much better for poor people that incentive-sapping redistribution programs that trap people in dependency. In other words,...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 29, 2014 | Blogs, Economics
There’s a new book by French economist Thomas Piketty, called “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” that supposedly identifies the Achilles’ Heel of the market economy. Piketty argues that the rate of return to capital is higher than the economy-wide growth rate and...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 28, 2014 | Blogs, Economics, Europe
I periodically (some would say over and over and over again, though occasionally made more palatable by using humor and cartoons) warn that the United States should not become a European-style welfare state. But I wonder whether I spend enough time explaining why this...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 27, 2014 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
What happens when you mix something good with something bad? To be more specific, what happens when you have a big success story, like the spending cap in Switzerland that has dramatically slowed the growth of government, and then expect intelligent and coherent...
