by Dan Mitchell | Dec 1, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
Back in 2017, I compared the welfare state vision of “positive rights” with the classical liberal vision of “negative rights.” To elaborate, here’s a video from Learn Liberty that compares these visions. For what it’s worth, I don’t like the terms “positive rights”...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 10, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
Compared to most of the world, Japan is a rich country. But it’s important to understand that Japan became rich when the burden of government was very small and there was no welfare state. Indeed, as recently as 1970, Japan’s fiscal policy was rated by Economic...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 1, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
Before our depressing discussion today about the fiscal impact of entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, EITC, Food Stamps, welfare, and Obamacare, etc), here’s a video of how it all began. I think this is a great introduction to the issue,...
by Dan Mitchell | May 21, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs, Europe, Welfare and Entitlements
Despite the fact that Social Security is an ever-increasing fiscal burden with a 75-year cash-flow deficit of nearly $45 trillion, many politicians in Washington have been trying to buy votes with proposals to expand the program (Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 24, 2020 | Blogs
When I put forth the “The Case for Social Security Personal Accounts” in early 2011, I pointed out that the program’s long-run fiscal shortfall was more than $27 trillion. We should be so lucky to have that problem today. The Social Security Administration just...
