by Dan Mitchell | Dec 20, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Welfare and Entitlements
The welfare state is a nightmare. Programs such as Medicaid are fiscal catastrophes. The food stamp program is riddled with waste. The EITC is easily defrauded, even sending checks to prisoners. And housing subsidies are a recipe for the worst forms of social...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 18, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Health Care, Welfare and Entitlements
Obamacare was put together by people who don’t understand economics. This is probably the understatement of the year since I could be referring to many features of the bad law. The higher tax burden on saving and investment, making an anti-growth tax system even...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 1, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Europe, Government Spending
We’re making a tiny bit of progress in the battle against the welfare state. No, policy hasn’t changed yet, but at least there’s growing recognition that maybe, just maybe, it’s not a good idea to pay people not to work. Particularly when you trap them in lives of...
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...
