Has Italy Passed the Point of No Return for Statism and Big Government?

by Dan Mitchell | Oct 27, 2014 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics

The world is a laboratory, with lots of experiments to see if a nation can prosper with big government and pervasive intervention. The results are not encouraging. I’ve written about France being a basket case, over and over again. And I am equally pessimistic...

Statist Policy and the Great Depression

by Dan Mitchell | Sep 17, 2014 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending

It’s difficult to promote good economic policy when some policy makers have a deeply flawed grasp of history. This is why I’ve tried to educate people, for instance, that government intervention bears the blame for the 2008 financial crisis, not capitalism or...

America’s Ever-Expanding Regulatory Swamp

by Dan Mitchell | Sep 4, 2014 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Regulations

Maybe I’m biased because I mostly work on fiscal policy, but it certainly seems feasible to come up with rough estimates for the damage caused by onerous taxes and excessive spending. On a personal level, for instance, we have a decent idea of how much the government...

Financed by American Tax Dollars, the OECD Endorses Obama’s Statist Agenda for the U.S. Economy

by Dan Mitchell | Sep 3, 2014 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics

I hate to sound like a broken record, but the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is once again pushing for bigger and more intrusive in the United States. The international bureaucracy’s “Economic Survey” of the United States reads like it...

Lower Tax Rates vs. Targeted Tax Credits, Part II

by Dan Mitchell | Aug 28, 2014 | Blogs, Economic Growth, Economics, Taxation

I wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal last week about the policy debate over whether it’s better to lower tax rates or to provide targeted tax cuts for parents. Since this meant I was wading into a fight between so-called reform conservatives (or “reformicons”)...