by Dan Mitchell | Jan 21, 2014 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics
A bunch of well-connected rich people and government officials are descending upon Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. This upsets many people, and perhaps with some justification. After all, bad things often happen when big business and...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 19, 2014 | Blogs, Economics
According to the most recent numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate has dropped to 6.7 percent. Is this good news? Well, it’s depends on your benchmark. Compared to France’s anemic economyand double-digit levels of unemployment, America is...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 14, 2014 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Free Market
My favorite Heritage Foundation publication (other than…ahem…my studies on government spending and the flat tax) is the annual Index of Economic Freedom. Like the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World and the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 11, 2014 | Blogs, Economics
If you ask an economist about the difference between capitalism and socialism, you’ll probably get a boring answer about the size of government, the impact on incentives, and the power of the state. Or maybe you’ll get a nit-picking answer, sort of like when I...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 10, 2014 | Blogs, Economic Growth, Economics
Washington is in the middle of another debate about redistributing money. But that’s hardly newsworthy. Politics, after all, is basically a never-ending racket in which insiders buy votes and accumulate power with other people’s money. The current debate about...