by Dan Mitchell | Jan 9, 2012 | Blogs, Tax Havens, Taxation
I’m not a big fan of Mitt Romney. I hammered him the day before Christmas for being open to a value-added tax, and criticized him in previous posts for his less-than-stellar record on healthcare, his weakness on Social Security reform, his anemic list of proposed...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 8, 2012 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Taxation
Austan Goolsbee, the former Chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, has a column in the Wall Street Journal that argues government spending isn’t too high. That’s obviously a silly assertion, as I explain here, here, and here, but I want to focus...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 4, 2012 | Big Government, Blogs, Taxation, VAT
My Iowa caucus predictions from yesterday were hopelessly wrong, probably because I was picking with my heart rather than my head. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, Mitt Romney’s openness to a value-added tax makes him a dangerously flawed candidate, and I hoped Iowa...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 30, 2011 | Big Government, Blogs, Taxation
Last year, I came up with a saying that “Bad Government Policy Begets More Bad Government Policy” and labeled it “Mitchell’s Law” during a bout of narcissism. There are lots of examples of this phenomenon, such as the misguided War on Drugs being a precursor to...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 20, 2011 | Blogs, Taxation
I’ve written several times about the foolish War on Drugs, which has been about as misguided and ineffective as the government’s War on Poverty. So when I saw a news report about a couple of Swedes getting busted for smuggling 200-plus kilos of contraband into Norway,...
