by Dan Mitchell | May 6, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending, Taxation
I’ve openly stated that there are tax-hiking budget deals that theoretically would be attractive. But notice that “theoretically” is part of that sentence. That’s because in the real world, tax hikes have a poisonous effect on fiscal policy. Instead of being the...
by Dan Mitchell | May 1, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Taxation
For the people of China, there’s good news and bad news. The good news, as illustrated by the chart, is that economic freedom has increased dramatically since 1980. This liberalization has lifted hundreds of millions from abject poverty. The bad news is that China...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 26, 2015 | Blogs, Taxation
It must be fun to be a leftist. You get to spend other people’s money. But that’s just for starters. Using the power of majoritarianism, you also get to tell the rest of the country what to do, how to behave, and even what to eat. Best of all, you can be a complete...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 13, 2015 | Blogs, Economics, Laffer Curve, Taxation
What’s the Laffer Curve? It’s the simple, common-sense observation that there’s not a linear relationship between tax rates and tax revenue. Folks in the private sector understand this principle. No restaurant owner, for instance, would double meal prices and assume...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 12, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs
When writing about the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international bureaucracy based in Paris, my life would be simpler if I created some sort of automatic fill-in-the-blanks system. Something like this. The OECD, subsidized by $____...
