by Dan Mitchell | Sep 29, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
I haven’t written much about the budget fights over a government shutdown, Obamacare, the continuing resolution, and the debt limit for the simple reason that the battles are mostly about politics and strategy rather than policy. At the risk of oversimplifying, here’s...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 22, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Health Care, Welfare and Entitlements
One of the challenges of good entitlement reform (or even bad entitlement reform) is that recipients think they’ve “earned” benefits. If you tell them that programs such as Medicare are unsustainable and need to be changed, some of them suspect you’re trying to...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 19, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
As we get closer to the debt limit, the big spenders in Washington are becoming increasingly hysterical about the supposed possibility of default if politicians lose the ability to borrow more money. I testified yesterday to the Joint Economic Committee on “The...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 18, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Taxation
We have an amazing man-bites-dog story today. Let’s begin with some background information. A member of the European Commission recently warned that: “Tax increases imposed by the Socialist-led government in France have reached a “fatal level”…[and] that a series of...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 17, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
I’m testifying tomorrow to the Joint Economic Committee about “The Economic Costs of Debt-Ceiling Brinkmanship.” I won’t give away what I’m going to say (though you can probably figure out my views rather easily by reading this, this and this), but I do want to share...
