by Dan Mitchell | Aug 20, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Welfare and Entitlements
About two years ago, I shared a map put together by a pro-statism organization that supposedly showed that welfare benefits were very miserly and not sufficiently generous to lift people out of poverty. My gut instinct was to reject the findings. As I wrote at the...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 12, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
Why does the Tea Party attract such vitriolic opposition, whether from Obama’s IRS or big-government Republicans like Karl Rove? The answer is simple. People in Washington don’t like the Tea Party because this citizen uprising is making it difficult to engage in...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 31, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
In an interview last week about Detroit’s bankruptcy, I explained that the city got in trouble because of growing dependency and an ever-rising burden of government spending. I also warned that the federal government faces the same challenge. Washington is in trouble...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 28, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
There are all sorts of ways to measure the burden of government spending. The most obvious approach is to look at the share of economic output consumed by the public sector. That’s what I did, for instance, when comparing fiscal policy in France and Switzerland. And...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 27, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
About two weeks ago, while making an important point about the Laffer Curve, here’s what I wrote about the fiscal disaster in Detroit. Detroit’s problems are the completely predictable result of excessive government. Just as statism explains the problems of Greece....