by Dan Mitchell | Oct 10, 2013 | Blogs, Tax Competition, Taxation
The Tax Foundation in Washington does some great work on fiscal issues, but I also admire their use of maps when they want to show how various states perform on key indicators. They’re best known for “Tax Freedom Day,” which measures how long people have to work each...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 29, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
I got involved in a bit of a controversy last year about presidential profligacy. Some guy named Rex Nutting put together some data on government spending and claimed that Barack Obama was the most frugal President in recent history. I pointed out that Mr. Nutting’s...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 20, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Welfare and Entitlements
About two years ago, I shared a map put together by a pro-statism organization that supposedly showed that welfare benefits were very miserly and not sufficiently generous to lift people out of poverty. My gut instinct was to reject the findings. As I wrote at the...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 25, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Welfare and Entitlements
Back in 2010, I put together a “Moocher Index” as a rough measure of which states had the highest levels of welfare dependency after adjusting for poverty rates. My goal was to answer this question. Is there a greater willingness to sign up for income redistribution...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 11, 2013 | Blogs, Economics, Tax Competition, Taxation
I’ve relentlessly complained that the United States has the highest corporate tax rate among all developed nations. And if you look at all the world’s countries, our status is still very dismal. According to the the Economist, we have the second highest corporate tax...