by Dan Mitchell | Aug 27, 2017 | Big Government, Blogs
When I write about politicians in their role as politicians (rather than their policy prescriptions), it’s usually to mock them for venality, corruption, immorality, sleaze, incompetence, or hypocrisy. Today, I want to plead with them to exercise self-restraint. Some...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 23, 2017 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
The annual budget for our bloated and sclerotic federal government consumes about $4 trillion of America’s economic output, yet President Trump so far has not proposed to reduce that overall spending burden by even one penny. A few programs are targeted for cuts, to...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 9, 2017 | Blogs, Education, Government Spending, Government Waste
The story of the private sector is that competition generates ever-more output in ways that bring ever-higher living standards to ever-greater numbers of people. By contrast, the story of the government is inefficiency and waste as interest groups figure out how to...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 12, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Bureaucracy, Government Waste
As a public finance economist, I normally focus on big-picture issues such as the economically debilitating effect of excessive government spending and punitive taxation. But as a human being, what irks me most about big government is the way that insiders use the...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 7, 2016 | Uncategorized
My biggest complaint about government employees is that they work for bureaucracies that shouldn’t exist. As far as I’m concerned, they may be the most wonderful, conscientious, and hard-working people in the world, but we shouldn’t have a Department of Housing and...
