by Dan Mitchell | Oct 30, 2011 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
A couple of weeks ago, I proposed a “Golden Rule of Fiscal Policy” that was probably a bit too wordy. Good fiscal policy exists when the private sector grows faster than the public sector, while fiscal ruin is inevitable if government spending grows faster than the...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 24, 2011 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Europe, Government Spending
A couple of months ago, after reading an excellent column in the semi-official newspaper of the Vatican, I joked that we should send Obama to Rome for an economics lesson. I now completely retract that statement. There may be some economically astute people who write...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 23, 2011 | Bailouts, Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
Almost two years ago, I wrote that bailing out Greece was misguided because it would dig the debt hole deeper. More recently, I wrote an I-told-you-so post that looked at my four original predictions and patted myself on the back for being accurate (not that it took...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 20, 2011 | Bailouts, Big Government, Blogs, Europe
I would have structured this flowchart differently, for reasons I discuss in this post, but this is pretty good picture of why Europe is in trouble. They say all roads lead to Rome, and this flowchart shows all roads lead to a banking crisis (see this post to...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 17, 2011 | Bailouts, Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
The welfare states of Europe are in deep trouble. Decades of over-taxing and over-spending have sapped economic vitality and produced high levels of debt. The high debt levels, by themselves, might not be a problem if European governments implemented good policy....
