by Dan Mitchell | Aug 4, 2020 | Blogs, Economics
In early June, I pontificated about the upside-down incentives that are created when government pays people more to be idle than they could get by working. This is a real-world concern because the crowd in Washington earlier this year approved a $600-per-week bonus...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 30, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending, Taxation
Because of changing demographics and poorly designed entitlement programs, the burden of government spending in the United States (in the absence of genuine reform) is going to increase dramatically over the next few decades. That bad outlook will get even worse...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 29, 2020 | Blogs, Economics
My view of the U.S. economic policy often depends on whether I’m writing about absolute levels of laissez-faire or relative levels of laissez-faire. If my column is about the former, I generally complain about excessive spending, punitive taxation, senseless red...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 27, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
Way back in January of 2017, I predicted for a French TV audience that Donald Trump would be a big spender like George Bush instead of a small-government conservative like Ronald Reagan. Sadly, I was right. I crunched the numbers earlier this year and showed that...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 26, 2020 | Blogs, Economics, Socialism
When I write about socialism, I often point out that there’s a difference between how economists define it (government ownership, central planning, and price controls) and how normal people define it (lots of taxes, redistribution, and intervention). These definitions...
