by Dan Mitchell | Mar 18, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
Sweden is an odd country, at least from the perspective of public policy. On the positive side, it has private Social Security accounts. It has an admirable school choice system. And it was a good role model of spending restraint back in the 1990s. But on the negative...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 4, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Health Care
My Cato Institute colleague Michael Tanner has produced some first-rate substantive research on issues. He produced a study showing that personal retirement accounts would have been a better deal than Social Security even for people who retired at the depth of the...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 1, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Tax Competition, Tax Havens, Taxation
If nothing else, our leftist friends deserve credit for chutzpah. All around the world, we see concrete evidence that big government leads to stagnation and decay, yet statists repeatedly argue that further expansions in taxes and spending will be good for growth....
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 22, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Welfare and Entitlements
There’s a famous quote, commonly attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, about the American character. America is great because America is good. If America ever stops being good, it will stop being great. What makes this quote so popular (even though Wikipedia says it’s...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 18, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
If the Moocher Hall of Fame ever moves from the virtual world to brick-and-mortar reality, it’s going to need a lot of space. That’s because, to use a politically correct term, many of the featured freeloaders are plus-sized. Stanley looks like a rather robust eater,...