by Dan Mitchell | Jun 26, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
The Social Security Administration has released the 2016 Trustees Report, which shines a spotlight on the overall fiscal condition of the program. In previous years (2012, 2013, 2014), I’ve used this opportunity to play Paul Revere. But instead of warning that the...
by Dan Mitchell | May 29, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
The International Monetary Fund is a left-leaning bureaucracy that was set up to monitor the fixed-exchange-rate monetary system created after World War II. Unsurprisingly, when that system broke down and the world shifted to floating exchange rates, the IMF didn’t go...
by Dan Mitchell | May 25, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
I wrote last year about why Puerto Rico got into fiscal trouble. Like Greece and so many other governments, it did the opposite of Mitchell’s Golden Rule. Instead of a multi-year period of spending restraint, it allowed the budget to expand faster than the private...
by Dan Mitchell | May 24, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Taxation
Much of my work on fiscal policy is focused on educating audiences about the long-run benefits of small government and modest taxation. But what about the short-run issue of how to deal with a fiscal crisis? I have periodically weighed in on this topic, citing...
by Dan Mitchell | May 11, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Taxation
In my presentations about how to deal with budgetary deterioration and fiscal crisis, I often share with audiences a list of nations that have achieved very positive results with spending restraint. The middle column shows how these countries limited the growth of...
