by Dan Mitchell | Nov 3, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Taxation, VAT
Some honest statists understand and acknowledge that you can’t have bigger government unless you target middle-income taxpayers. The New York Times endorsed higher taxes on the middle class in 2010. The then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer also gave a green light...
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...
