by Dan Mitchell | Oct 21, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Europe, Welfare and Entitlements
Whenever there’s a discussion of the Nordic nations, I feel conflicted. I don’t like the punitively high tax rates and socially destructive levels of redistribution in nations such as Denmark, but I also admire the very laissez-faire policies those countries have when...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 18, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Europe, Government Spending, Welfare and Entitlements
Some issues never seem to get resolved. One would think, for instance, that leftists would be more cautious about pushing for a bigger welfare state given the fiscal crisis in Europe. But we have folks like Bernie Sanders openly arguing we should be more like nations...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 16, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending, Welfare and Entitlements
Federal government redistribution programs don’t work. We’ve ignored the lessons of history about the dangers of government intervention, so is it any mystery that we now have millions of people mired in dependency. Yet some people in Washington want to double down on...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 11, 2015 | Uncategorized
If you look at oil-rich jurisdictions around the world, it’s easy to see why experts sometimes write about the “resource curse.” Simply stated, governments don’t have much incentive to be responsible when they can use oil as a seemingly endless source of tax revenue....
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 2, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs
What’s worse, Democrats who deliberately seek to make government bigger because of their ideological belief in statism, or Republicans who sort of realize that big government is bad yet make government bigger because of incompetence? I’m not sure, though this is a...