by Dan Mitchell | Jan 11, 2012 | Blogs, Economics, Taxation
I realize this is about as productive as talking to a brick wall, but I’m going to explain some basic economics to statist French policymakers (oops, pardon the redundancy). This heroic – albeit surely futile – impulse is triggered by a recent proposal from President...
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...
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...
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...
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...