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I’m very worried about the burden of government spending.Moreover, I’m quite concerned that poorly designed entitlement programs will lead to fiscal disaster.And I’m especially irked that Obama made the problem worse by ramming through yet another misguided and costly health care entitlement.Given this background, you can imagine that I was very interested (and depressed) to see that Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center put together some very important charts and analysis based on new fiscal policy projections.After crunching the new numbers from CBO, here’s her bottom line conclusion. …data from the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) recently released update to its...

Breakdown by Category 82,679,000 Medicaid51,471,000 Food Stamps22,526,000 Women, Infants and Children Program20,355,000 Supplemental Security Income13,267,000 Public Housing or Housing Subsidies 5,442,000 Temporary Assistance to Needy Families 4,517,000 Other Forms of Federal Cash Assistance Population Estimates (2013 estimates) California 38,332,521Texas 26,448,193New York 19,651,127Florida 19,552,860 Those four states have a population of 103,984,701. Those on welfare nearly totals that amount. Full Time Employment BLS figures show 115.735 million "usually" working full time at the end of 2012. There are currently 118.489 million "usually" working full time. Obamacare Welfare Expansion Inquiring minds may be asking "How did Obamacare effect welfare numbers?" Let's take...

The Census Bureau just released a report on America’s aging population. The big takeaway is that our population will be getting much older between now and 2050. And since I’m a baby boomer, I very much like the fact that we’re expected to live longer. But as a public finance economist, I’m not nearly as happy. As I explain in this interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Digital Network (and as confirmed by BIS, OECD, and IMF data), the United States is going to get deluged by a tsunami of entitlement spending. Dan Mitchell Discussing the Slow Motion Train Wreck...

Before this column is done I’m going to make a point on federal spending that really should open your eyes. Actually, you will think that it’s so basic and simple that it’s a wonder nobody has presented it to you in this manner before! You’re soon going to learn that the way we’ve been addressing our spending problem --- and it most definitely IS a spending problem – is all wrong. You’ve been a newborn puppy long enough. Time to open your eyes. But first …. I’ll address YOUR spending problem, and present a solution that will surprise you. It’s...

Oh, how far-removed we are from what now seems like the "innocent" Bill Clinton days when all we had to worry about was the various definitions of the word "is". And now, after watching President Obama's second term inaugural address, it is clear we have a president who calls into question the meaning of the word "liberty." It is incomprehensible that this former constitutional lawyer would argue during his speech that America has evolved to the extent "our founding documents" no longer require us to "define liberty in exactly the same way." But then again, it's not so far-fetched considering...

WASHINGTON - If you thought President Obama's first term was one long, uninterrupted political brawl, the next four years will make that period look tame by comparison. If you need any evidence for this prediction, Obama's in-your-face, second inaugural address is Exhibit A. It was a speech tailored to make the hearts of liberal Democrats beat faster, cheering what some in the Washington news media called "Obama unbound." It was a speech that sent an unmistakable message to his party's base that this time around, it's no more Mr. Nice Guy. The gloves are off, these are my issues, and...

Sometimes, looking at the political discourse in this country, I wonder if we really understand the ratchet effect of increasing government programs and power over time: unlike in business, unlike in nature, unlike in, well, real life -- failure is not punished, but at best ignored, at worst rewarded. Once a program is in place, it is almost impossible to repeal, even when Republicans obtain political power because voters become dependent on it. Progressives have known this for as long as they have been blowing up the bureaucracy. Congressman Henry Waxman famously said that, if it took losing a few...

It's often good fun and sometimes revealing to divide American history into distinct periods of uniform length. In working on my forthcoming book on American migrations, internal and immigrant, it occurred to me that you could do this using the American-sounding interval of 76 years, just a few years more than the Biblical lifespan of three score and 10. It was 76 years from Washington's First Inaugural in 1789 to Lincoln's Second Inaugural in 1865. It was 76 years from the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865 to the attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Going backward, it was 76...

Who wants a fantastic job? Unemployment is high, so there ought to be many candidates. The job is leader of the Republican Party. As leader, you will be the spokesman for a philosophy of smaller government, more individual liberty, fiscal responsibility, free markets and budget cuts. You will speak up for the traditional family and strong community organizations. On one hand, you stand for keeping taxes low on the very richest Americans. On the other, you're for cutting programs that are broadly popular. Congratulations. What are you for that Americans support? That's what is so great about this job. It...

In 2008, voters under 30 preferred Barack Obama over John McCain by a 66 to 32 percent margin. Among older voters, Obama led McCain by 50 to 49 percent. How has Obama paid back the Millennial generation, which provided almost all his margin of victory? With what American Interest superblogger Walter Russell Mead calls "Obama's war on the young." Mead is not a tea party crazy or Ayn Rand zealot. He is a history professor at Bard College and an expert on American foreign policy. He voted for Obama in 2008, and he's not wild about Mitt Romney this year....

Some astoundingly grim news on the "economic recovery" front: half of American households are receiving government funds to support themselves. No matter which way you slice it, this number isn't good news for the Obama administration -- they can spin the jobs numbers by ignoring the number of people who dropped out of the workforce, but this statistic is pretty straightforward. The 49.1% of the population in a household that gets benefits is up from 30% in the early 1980s and 44.4% as recently as the third quarter of 2008. The increase in recent years is likely due in large...

When the April figures on unemployment were released May 4, they were more than disappointing. They were deeply disturbing. While the unemployment rate had fallen from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, 342,000 workers had stopped looking for work. They had just dropped out of the labor market. Only 63.6 percent of the U.S. working age population is now in the labor force, the lowest level since December 1981. During the Reagan, Bush I and Clinton years, participation in the labor force rose steadily to a record 67 percent. The plunge since has been almost uninterrupted. Here is a major cause...

Filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's daughter, has unleashed a firestorm of social controversy by interviewing some welfare recipients who told her on camera that they believe they're entitled to "Obama money." That is, welfare checks. Some of those Pelosi spotlighted are young men who are not even looking for work. They have plenty of excuses for that. But the bottom line: They want money handed to them, and stuff you if you don't like it. Also, some of these men have multiple children by multiple "baby mamas." Again, their posture is blank you if you don't approve. That attitude appalls...

Kicking the can down the road. That's been the Obama administration's response on issues from Iran's nuclear weapons program to America's entitlement systems. Start with Iran. In a statement in the Oval Office before his meeting with President Obama on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu noted that Obama had "reiterated yesterday" the principle that "when it comes to Israel's security, Israel has the right, the sovereign right, to make its own decisions." That evening, speaking to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Netanyahu said: "Israel has waited patiently for the international community to resolve this issue. We've waited for...

If Congress was ever in search for a theme song, it would surely be the 60’s hit by Sonny and Cher called—“The Beat Goes On”. Americans received yet another reminder of just how far this group of fiscal miscreants will go to avoid making tough budget decisions when Congress passed a “minibus” spending bill. This hodgepodge of appropriations manages to simultaneously delay, once again, the painful necessity of confronting excessive spending, while simultaneously eroding the little fiscal discipline that does exist. No one should be surprised that fiscal malpractice continues in Congress as we lurch from CR to CR to...

What is it about Palm Beach County that swells the ranks of the unemployed, higher than either Florida or the U.S.? Well, for one thing, businesses in this county get socked with higher taxes and fees than most other areas of Florida. County government has leeched businesses by keeping taxes high, and burdensome.

Think $700 billion to bail out Wall Street is expensive? Just wait. The mortgage meltdown is cheap compared with the coming fiscal firestorm fanned by unfunded Social Security and Medicare costs. Together, these programs hold unfunded obligations totaling $41 trillion - 60 times larger than the proposed Wall Street bailout. And even this understates the difference, because $41 trillion is the current net value of the unfunded obligations over 75 years. The actual cumulative yearly deficits these programs face over the next 75 years are several magnitudes larger than $41 trillion. [Snip] The entitlement problem is simple to understand. In...

Last week, President Bush and the Democratic Congress had a showdown over Iraq war funding. Unfortunately, it was the wrong one. Lost amid the week's political struggles was this blunt reality: America's political leaders have been reluctant to confront the public with the need to make financial sacrifices to pay for the conflict and for the ongoing struggle against al-Qaeda. And that could spell disaster later on. It wasn't always this way. After Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt minced no words with the American people. "War costs money," he said. "That means taxes and bonds and bonds and taxes....

WASHINGTON - The House narrowly passed a $2.6 trillion budget Thursday evening that would cut back the Medicaid health care program for the poor for the first time since 1997 in a step toward trimming federal deficits. The 214-211 vote approved a blueprint that instructs lawmakers to freeze or cut spending in many domestic programs outside defense and homeland security and restrain farm, student loan, pension and some other government programs that grow automatically from year to year. The Senate simultaneously debated the measure and moved toward a vote Thursday night. Republicans said Vice President Dick Cheney was standing by...