by Dan Mitchell | Dec 15, 2018 | Blogs, Europe, Taxation
Less than 10 years ago, many European nations suffered fiscal crises because of a combination of excessive spending, punitive taxes, and crippling debt. The crises have since abated, largely because of direct and indirect bailouts. But the underlying policy...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 5, 2018 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
I don’t like writing about deficits and debt because I don’t want to deflect attention from the more important underlying problem of excessive government spending. Indeed, I constantly explain that spending is what diverts resources from the productive sector of the...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 2, 2018 | Blogs, Taxation
With the exception of 2010-2014, when the Tea Party briefly had a grip on the Republican Party, the burden of government spending has been increasing in the United States. This unfortunate trend can’t continue indefinitely, so sooner or later we’ll reach a point where...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 26, 2018 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics
I’ve warned many times that Italy is the next Greece. Simply stated, there’s a perfect storm of bad news. Government is far too big, debt is too high, and the economy is too sclerotic. I’ve always assumed that the country would suffer a full-blown fiscal crisis when...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 11, 2018 | Blogs
I’m not a big fan of the International Monetary Fund and I regularly criticize the international bureaucracy for its relentless advocacy in favor of higher taxes. But that’s not what worries me most about the IMF. To be sure, higher fiscal burdens undermine economic...
