Austan Goolsbee’s Budget Math Is Wrong – More than 100 Percent of Long-Term Fiscal Challenge Is Government Spending

by Dan Mitchell | Jan 8, 2012 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Taxation

Austan Goolsbee, the former Chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, has a column in the Wall Street Journal that argues government spending isn’t too high. That’s obviously a silly assertion, as I explain here, here, and here, but I want to focus...

Will the Last Job Creator to Leave California Please Turn Off the Lights?

by Dan Mitchell | Dec 27, 2011 | Blogs, Taxation

I’ve written before about whether California is the Greece of America, in part because of crazy policies such as overpaid bureaucrats and expensive forms of political correctness, And we all know that California has one of the nation’s greediest governments, imposing...

European Fiscal Agreements Show that Balanced Budget Rules Mean Higher Taxes, not Smaller Government

by Dan Mitchell | Dec 21, 2011 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Europe, Government Spending, Taxation

I have many frustrations in my life, and near the top of the list is the conservative fixation about balancing the budget. This view is very misguided. Red ink isn’t good, but the fiscal problem in America (as well as Europe, Japan, etc) is that the public sector is...

Economics Reporter from New York Times Has Accidental Encounter with Reality, Learns Nothing

by Dan Mitchell | Dec 15, 2011 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending

Earlier this year, I wrote about how the person Obama put in charge of Medicare made some very interesting observations about prices, competition, and markets, but then drew exactly the wrong conclusion about what was needed to solve the third-party payer problem in...

Senator Schumer’s Feeble/Dishonest Grasp of Fiscal History

by Dan Mitchell | Dec 14, 2011 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending

I’m not a big fan of Senator Schumer of New York. As I’ve noted before, he’s a doctrinaire statist who wants the government to have control over just about every aspect of our lives. But that describes a lot of people in Washington. I guess what also bothers me is his...