by Dan Mitchell | Jan 26, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Taxation
Just like the swallows return each year to Capistrano, I eagerly await the Congressional Budget Office’s release of its annual Economic and Budget Outlook. But not just because I’m a fiscal wonk. I also like perusing this publication to find CBO’s “baseline” forecast...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 20, 2015 | Blogs, Economics, Tax Competition, Taxation
The most compelling graph I’ve ever seen was put together by Andrew Coulson at the Cato Institute. It shows that there’s been a huge increase in the size and cost of the government education bureaucracy in recent decades, but that student performance has been...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 16, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
Keynesian economics is a perpetual-motion machine for statists. The way to boost growth, they argue, is to have governments borrow lots of money from the economy’s productive sector and then spend it on anything and everything. Even if the money is squandered on...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 2, 2015 | Blogs, Economics, Laffer Curve, Taxation
Barack Obama and the rest of the class-warfare crowd act as if “tax the rich” is an appropriate answer to every question about fiscal policy. I’m not joking. Here are some of the President’s main tax hikes that have been enacted or proposed. Obama imposed higher...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 1, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Europe, Health Care, Welfare and Entitlements
Let’s look at three very important things that may happen this year and what they might mean. 1. Will the Republican Senate support genuine entitlement reform? One of the best things to happen in recent years is that House Republicans embraced genuine entitlement...