by Dan Mitchell | Jun 3, 2017 | Blogs, Economics, Taxation
Illinois is a mess. Taxes and spending already are too high, and huge unfunded liabilities point to an even darker future. Simply stated, politicians and government employee unions have created an unholy alliance to extract as much money as possible from the state’s...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 31, 2017 | Big Government, Blogs, Taxation
I sometimes feel like a broken record about entitlement programs. How many times, after all, can I point out that America is on a path to become a decrepit European-style welfare state because of a combination of demographic changes and poorly designed entitlement...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 10, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
A couple of days ago, I wrote about Clemens Schneider’s hypothesis, presented at the European Students for Liberty regional conference in Maastricht, that 1356 was a very important year in European history because of two events that promoted decentralization and...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 3, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics
In 2008, government spending consumed 50.9 percent of economic output in Greece according to OECD fiscal data. That same year, Greece’s score from Economic Freedom of the World was 7.12 (on a 0-10 scale), which was rather poor for a supposedly developed country and...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 18, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Europe
When I tell journalists and politicians that the European fiscal situation is worse today than it was immediately prior to the crisis, they don’t believe me. What about all the spending cuts, they ask? What about the draconian austerity? And the Troika-imposed fiscal...
