America’s Future Inflation Crisis?

by Dan Mitchell | Feb 15, 2026 | Blogs, Government Spending, Welfare and Entitlements

Let’s start today’s column with two simple and uncontroversial statements. Without real entitlement reform, the burden of government spending will grow dramatically over the next few decades. There are only three ways – taxes, borrowing, and money-printing – to...

The World’s Biggest Economic Problem

by Dan Mitchell | Jan 16, 2026 | Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements

While I periodically disagree with some of the magazine’s analysis (see here, here, and here), I enjoy perusing the Economist because it covers issues I care about. A recent headline in the U.K.-based publication caught my attention. The...

Learning the Right Lesson from the Massive Medicaid Fraud Scandal in Tim Walz’s Minnesota

by Dan Mitchell | Dec 30, 2025 | Blogs, Government Spending, Health Care, Welfare and Entitlements

I wrote earlier this month about pervasive corruption and fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid program. Now that the issue has become big national news (I first started writing about Medicaid scams more than 12 years ago), let’s take a more detailed look...

Voters Sometimes Like Big Government…When Someone Else Is Paying

by Dan Mitchell | Dec 18, 2025 | Big Government, Blogs, Taxation, Welfare and Entitlements

The United States faces a huge long-run fiscal problem because government is growing too fast. Entitlement programs are the main problem. For example, a rising burden of Social Security spending means that outlays will exceed revenues by $65.8...

Demographic Decline, Part II: America’s Unaffordable Young-to-Old Welfare State

by Dan Mitchell | Dec 16, 2025 | Blogs, Economics, Welfare and Entitlements

In Part I of this series, I explained that modern welfare states are in deep trouble because of falling birth rates. The core of the problem is that entitlement programs generally tax young people to subsidize old people. And fewer babies today means fewer workers...