by Dan Mitchell | Oct 30, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending, Welfare and Entitlements
In my speeches, I routinely argue that an aging population is one of the reasons why we need genuine entitlement reform. A modest-sized welfare state may be feasible if a country has a “population pyramid,” I explain, but it’s a recipe for fiscal chaos when changing...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 23, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending, Welfare and Entitlements
Republicans are probably going to surrender on spending caps, thus allowing Obama to reverse his biggest-ever defeat. Moreover, GOPers almost surely will get nothing in exchange for raising the debt limit, thus squandering an opportunity to limit profligacy in...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 5, 2015 | Blogs, Economics
Chile is one of the world’s economic success stories. Reforms in the 1980s and 1990s liberalized the nation’s economy and resulted in rapid increases in economic growth and big reductions in poverty. Unfortunately, the current government is pushing policy in the wrong...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 2, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs
What’s worse, Democrats who deliberately seek to make government bigger because of their ideological belief in statism, or Republicans who sort of realize that big government is bad yet make government bigger because of incompetence? I’m not sure, though this is a...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 26, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Welfare and Entitlements
I repeatedly try to convince people that the welfare state is bad for both taxpayers and poor people. Sometimes I’ll add some more detailed economic analysis and explain that redistribution programs undermine growth by reducing labor supply (with Obamacare being the...