by Brian Garst | Feb 5, 2019 | Opinion and Commentary
Originally published by Cayman Financial Review on February 4, 2019. The global trade system is under assault thanks in large part due to the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president. His pledge to “put America first” has been carried out through tariff hikes, U.S....
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 3, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Taxation
When I ask friends on the left to answer my two-question challenge about prosperity and the size of government, they sometimes will flip the script and demand that I answer their version of the same question. Name a jurisdiction that became rich with small government,...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 26, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
When I think about social welfare spending, I mostly worry about recipients getting trapped in dependency. But I also feel sorry for taxpayers, who are bearing ever-higher costs to finance redistribution programs. Today’s column won’t focus on those issues. Instead,...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 19, 2019 | Blogs, Economics, Tax Competition, Taxation
Like most taxpayer-supported international bureaucracies, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has a statist orientation. The Paris-based OECD is particularly bad on fiscal policy and it is infamous for its efforts to prop up Europe’s...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 11, 2018 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
The world is in the middle of a dramatic demographic transition caused by increasing lifespans and falling birthrates. One consequence of this change is that traditional tax-and-transfer, pay-as-you-go retirement schemes (such as Social Security in the United States)...