Dan Mitchell - Page 3

Governor Rick Perry of Texas is being attacked by two rivals in the GOP presidential race. His sin, if you can believe it, is that he told the truth (as acknowledged by everyone from Paul Krugman to Milton Friedman) about

I recently posted four charts eviscerating Obama’s record on jobs. My Cato colleague, Caleb Brown, has a good complement to those charts. He’s put together a short video looking at how government spending and regulation undermine job creation. [youtube Q6xIw9eYxOs]

President Obama may have a buddy-buddy relationship with big labor, but he’s no friend to ordinary workers. Here are four damning pieces of evidence. 1. The unemployment rate remains above 9 percent according to the Labor Department data released on

Being the world’s self-appointed defender of so-called tax havens has led to some rather bizarre episodes. The bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development threatened to have me thrown in a Mexican jail for the horrible crime of

I’ve commented on the failure of Obamanomics, with special focus on how both banks and corporations are sitting on money because the investment climate is so grim. Not exactly flattering to the White House. Using Minneapolis Federal Reserve data, I’ve

The Congressional Budget Office has just released the update to its Economic and Budget Outlook. There are several things from this new report that probably deserve commentary, including a new estimate that unemployment will “remain above 8 percent until 2014.”

Just last week, I made fun of Paul Krugman after he publicly said that a fake threat from invading aliens would be good for the economy since the earth would waste a bunch of money on pointless defense outlays. Yesterday,

Another American company has decided to expatriate for tax reasons. This process has been going on for decades, with companies giving up their U.S. charters (a form of business citizenship) and redomiciling in low-tax jurisdictions such as Bermuda, Ireland, Switzerland,

I’ve poked fun at Paul Krugman for his views on health care and British fiscal policy, and I’ve semi-defended him about unemployment subsidies and housing bubbles. Now it’s time for some more mockery. Back in 2001, Paul Krugman received some

Warren Buffett’s at it again. He has a column in the New York Times complaining that he has been coddled by the tax code and that “rich” people should pay higher taxes. My first instinct is to send Buffett the

Wow. Not even a pretense of caring about fiscal responsibility. Keep the status quo, even if it means America is doomed to suffer a Greek-style budget meltdown. Those were my thoughts when I heard that Harry Reid appointed Senators Kerry,

President Obama just spoke about the downgrade and his remarks were very disappointing. He uttered some empty platitudes, offered no plan, (amazingly) called for more government spending, and continued his advocacy of class-warfare taxation. So what does this mean? Other

It was a strange experience to read the comments and emails generated by yesterday’s post on the “Obama downgrade.” Democrats and liberals were upset that I blamed Obama for the downgrade, as you might expect. Republicans and conservatives, however, were

Even though I predicted it had to happen at some point because of the Bush-Obama spending binge and America’s giant long-run entitlement crisis, I confess that I’m somewhat surprised that the United States has suffered a debt downgrade for the

Senator Rubio continues to impress with his Reagan-like efforts to restrain government and promote growth. His latest initiative is legislation to curtail rogue IRS bureaucrats who are seeking to use regulatory edicts to overturn 90 years of law. Here are

While driving home Friday, I had the miserable experience of listening to a financial journalist being interviewed about the anemic growth numbers that were just released. I wasn’t unhappy because the interview was biased to the left. From what I

In a perverse way, I’m glad that there are places such as Greece and Illinois. These profligate jurisdictions are useful examples of the dangers of bloated government and reckless statism. There also are some cities that serve as reverse role

I testified before the House Ways & Means Committee this week. As always, my trip inside the belly of the beast was an interesting adventure. The tax-writing committee was holding a hearing on the value-added tax. I was on a

That seems like a joke question, but it’s an apparently serious belief of Bruce Bartlett, a former supply-sider and Bush Administration official who has flipped sides and joined the left. I’ve known Bruce for decades and he’s a fun guy

Actually, the answer is all of the above. He pontificates about debt, but he voted for the fake stimulus and budget-busting Obamacare legislation. He’s a preening self-styled deficit hawk, but the nation’s four largest deficits have occurred since he became

The on-again, off-again “Gang of Six” has come back on the scene and is offering a “Bipartisan Plan to Reduce Our Nation’s Deficits.” The proposal is quite similar to the one put forth by the President’s Simpson-Bowles Commission, which isn’t

Here’s a new video from the Cato Institute that looks at the “Cut, Cap, and Balance” proposal, and analyzes that budget reform in the broader context of the debt-limit fight and America’s looming fiscal crisis. [youtube 8_oWsdttvnw] The video features

At his press conference Friday, President Obama repeatedly said that a “balanced approach” is needed to deal with the fiscal situation. The White House has obviously poll-tested and focus-grouped that phrase. But just because it’s gimmicky, that doesn’t mean balance

In my speeches, especially when talking about the fiscal crisis in Europe (or the future fiscal crisis in America), I often warn that the welfare state reaches a point-of-no-return when the number of people riding in the wagon begins to

The United States has been on a decade-long spending binge. Thanks to the profligate policies of both Bush and Obama, the burden of federal spending has climbed to about 25 percent of economic output, up from 18.2 percent of GDP

There are three reasons why I’m not very hopeful about the outcome of the debt-limit battle. 1. There is no unity in the GOP camp. Republicans have been all over the map during this fight. Some of them want a

It’s hard to imagine how we would get through life without necessities like bacon and duct tape. But have you ever thought about how the free market gives you so much for so little? Here’s a video that should be

There’s lots of talk in Washington about spending cuts, with almost everybody saying that there needs to be at least $2 trillion of cuts in order to boost the debt limit. Since the federal budget is about $3.8 trillion and

The President has issued an ultimatum that more tax revenue must be part of budget negotiations. Indeed, he endlessly repeats his desire for a “balanced approach,” implying that as much as 50 percent of the deficit reduction in any agreement

The big-government advocates at the Center for American Progress recently released a series of charts designed to prove America is a low-tax nation. I wish this was the case. The United States does have a lower overall tax burden than

For both political and policy reasons, the left is desperately trying to maneuver Republicans into going along with a tax increase. And they are smart to make this their top goal. After all, it will be very difficult – if

This new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity explains why Medicaid should be shifted to the states. As I note in the title of this post, it’s good federalism policy and good fiscal policy. But the video also

The notion that American taxpayers are about to subsidize another Greek bailout (via the Keystone Cops at the IMF) is way beyond economically foolish. It is also morally offensive. To turn Winston Churchill’s famous quote upside down: “Never have so

One of the tax increases buried in Obamacare was an onerous and intrusive “1099″ scheme that would have required businesses to collect tax identification numbers for just about any vendor and then send paperwork to the IRS whenever they did

I’ve explained before that one of the most damning pieces of evidence against Obamanomics is that the economy is suffering from sub-par growth, something that is particularly damning since normally one expects to see faster-than-average growth following an economic downturn.

The main political goal of the left is to seduce Republicans into supporting higher taxes. Bluntly stated, all of their fiscal policy goals require more tax revenue coming to Washington. The most important factor (from their perspective) is that they