by Dan Mitchell | Dec 14, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
When you work in Washington (and assuming you haven’t been corrupted), you run the risk of being endlessly outraged about all the waste. But not all waste is created equal. Some examples are so absurd that they deserve special attention. Forcing taxpayers to pay...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 7, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Taxation
There’s a saying in the sports world about how last-minute comebacks are examples of “snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.” I don’t like that phrase because it reminds me of the painful way my beloved Georgia Bulldogs were defeated a couple of weeks ago by...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 2, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Welfare and Entitlements
I’m currently in the Faroe Islands, a relatively unknown and semi-autonomous part of Denmark located in the North Atlantic. Sort of like Greenland, but too small to appear on most maps. I’m in this chilly archipelago for a speech to the annual meeting of the Faroese...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 29, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
I haven’t written much about the budget fights over a government shutdown, Obamacare, the continuing resolution, and the debt limit for the simple reason that the battles are mostly about politics and strategy rather than policy. At the risk of oversimplifying, here’s...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 22, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Health Care, Welfare and Entitlements
One of the challenges of good entitlement reform (or even bad entitlement reform) is that recipients think they’ve “earned” benefits. If you tell them that programs such as Medicare are unsustainable and need to be changed, some of them suspect you’re trying to...