by Dan Mitchell | Dec 26, 2024 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
Scandinavian nations are not socialist, at least if we’re using the technical definition (government ownership, central planning, and price controls). But those countries do have big welfare states. And that means stifling tax burdens. And those harsh taxes...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 4, 2024 | Big Government, Blogs, Education, Health Care, Welfare and Entitlements
To augment my four-part series on the economics of government spending, here’s a video from Prager University explaining how big government doesn’t work. The video, narrated by Professor Joshua6 Rauh of Stanford, highlights three major types of spending and...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 2, 2024 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
One of Margaret Thatcher’s famous observations was that socialist governments fail because they inevitably run out of other people’s money. If I’m in a pedantic mood, I will nit-pick that statement by pointing out that she should have...
by Dan Mitchell | Jun 21, 2024 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Welfare and Entitlements
Earlier this week, the Congressional Budget Office issued a new 10-year fiscal forecast showing spending, revenues, and red ink between 2025 and 2034. As these examples show, almost all of the resulting headlines focused on deficits and...
by Dan Mitchell | Jun 4, 2024 | Big Government, Blogs, Taxation, Welfare and Entitlements
The main argument for smaller government – from an economic perspective – is that more resources are left in the productive sector of the economy and this leads to faster growth and higher living standards. This is a reason why the United...