My writings about Belgium have been very sporadic. When I do comments about that country’s policies, it’s usually to complain about the excessive burden of government spending (as captured by...
Today’s column is about international trade, but I’m not going to regurgitate my usual arguments about the benefits of free trade or get wonky about creative destruction. Instead, I’m going...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/05/15/trade-and-hypocrisy-captured-in-tweets/
Whenever I’m part of a debate about the merits of free markets, I ask my leftist opponent to respond to my never-answered question. Cite an example, I beg them, of big government producing pros...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/05/14/defending-neoliberalism/
When the Social Security Administration released its annual Trustees’ Report last week, I crunched the numbers to show that the fiscal burden of the program is projected to dramatically increas...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/05/13/social-security-debunking-the-debunking/
While President Javier Milei is easily the best head of state right now, it would be more difficult to pick the best head of state in my lifetime. It may turn out to be Milei, depending on whethe...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/05/12/the-missing-ghost-of-thatcherism/
A couple of weeks ago, I shared some good news about President Milei‘s efforts to rescue Argentina’s economy. Here’s a bit more of my optimism. You can see my entire interview on the Schill...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/05/11/renaissance-for-argentina/
I periodically highlight folks on the left who are sensible on the issue of gun control, either because they realize it is a bad idea or because they at least recognize that it is an impractical ...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/05/10/gun-control-epiphanies/
I wrote in 2014, 2017, and 2020 about how free markets and limited government have produced amazing results in Singapore. Let’s revisit that country and we’ll start with this video from the F...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/05/09/the-singapore-model-part-i/
Like other international bureaucracies (most notably the IMF and OECD), the United Nations routinely advocates for higher taxes. According to the bureaucrats, we are supposed to believe that high...
The Social Security Administration has released the yearly forecast of the program’s long-run finances. Jut like I did in 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, etc, it’s time to see what to expect in the f...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/05/07/social-securitys-61-7-trillion-problem/
Everything you need to know about wealth taxation can be summarized in two sentences. The biggest problem with most tax systems is the pervasive tax bias against income that is saved and invested...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/05/06/dishonest-pimping-for-a-global-wealth-tax-cartel/
Because it should not happen according to conventional economic theory, I put together an anti-convergence club to highlight richer nations that grow faster than poorer nations. The common theme ...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/05/05/united-kingdom-vs-poland/
I favor “freedom conservatism” over “national conservatism” because the former is unambiguously based on liberty and the latter veers toward populism. Of course, it’s never easy to defi...
Biden has pushed federal spending to record levels and he wants to push taxes to record levels. He’s also maintained and extended Trump’s protectionist policies. And we all know about his tra...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/05/03/bidens-red-tape-onslaught/
Just a few months ago, I wrote about Germany’s fiscal decay. Over the past eight years, government spending has grown much faster than the private sector, thus violating the Golden Rule of fisc...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/05/02/recovery-for-the-pigs/
Genuine material deprivation is almost nonexistent in rich nations such as the United States. This is a huge improvement compared to how people lived just 100 or 20o years ago. Yet public policy ...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/05/01/a-new-member-of-the-poverty-huckster-club/
I wrote a two-part series (here and here) in 2022 predicting that Italy was at risk of suffering a fiscal crisis. If and when it occurs, it will be because investors decide that Italy’s governm...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/04/30/italys-absurd-boondoggle-giveaway/
The tax bias against saving and investment is a major problem in the United States and many other nations. According to the latest-available data from the Tax Foundation, the worst of the worst i...
I already shared my thoughts about the value-added tax when discussing fiscal policy with an economist at the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise. Here’s some of what I said about tax progressi...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/04/28/comparing-taxation-in-sweden-and-the-united-states/
Class-warfare tax policy is bad news. Last year, I warned that, “rich people are not sheep, patiently waiting to be sheared. If their fiscal torture is too extreme, they will leave.” Norway i...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/04/27/norways-class-warfare-tax-policy-is-backfiring/
The most important election of 2023 took place in Argentina, where that nation’s voters elected the libertarian candidate, Javier Milei, as their new president. I discussed the outlook for Mile...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/04/26/more-good-results-from-argentina/
It’s only April, but I suspect Senator Elizabeth Warren, a doctrinaire statist from Massachusetts, is going to win Politician of the Year for 2024. Which is noteworthy because she’ll be the f...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/04/25/politician-of-the-year-3/
When Joe Biden began his push for a global corporate tax cartel back in 2021, I explained why the idea was very bad news for the world’s workers, consumers, and shareholders. And I pointed out ...
There’s going to be a big tax fight in Washington next year, regardless of who wins the House, the Senate, and/or the presidency. That’s because major portions of Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and ...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/04/23/trump-and-the-flat-tax/
When asked about tax loopholes, my first reaction is to determine whether something is an actual tax preference or merely a mitigation of a tax penalty. And that means understanding the “tax ba...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/04/22/dumbest-tax-loophole-or-most-self-serving-loophole/
There was a lot of wasteful spending during the pandemic. That was bad news, but what’s far more worrisome is that politicians used the pandemic as an excuse to permanently increase the spendin...
To show that living standards are much higher in the United States than they are in Europe, I periodically share OECD data on average individual consumption (2012, 2014, 2017, 2019, and 2022). Al...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/the-united-states-vs-europe/
Three years ago, I wrote about the erosion of economic liberty in Western Europe (specifically, the 15 nations that comprised the European Union between 1995-2004). Sadly, here’s a more up-to-d...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/04/19/the-drift-to-statism-in-the-western-world/
I’ve periodically tried to explain that even small differences in long-run growth can lead to immense benefits, including huge reductions in poverty. To illustrate the importance of higher grow...
Five years ago, I shared this video explaining why trade deficits generally don’t matter. The most important thing to understand is that a trade deficit is the same thing as a financial account...
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/04/17/dumb-idea-of-the-month-currency-devaluation/