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)...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 20, 2018 | Blogs, Tax Competition, Taxation
If you live in Illinois or California and you’re sick and tired of high taxes and crummy government, should you have the freedom to move to a state with no income tax, such as Florida or Texas? The answer is yes (though Walter Williams joked that leftist politicians...
