I have a love-hate attitude toward international bureaucracies. I’m mostly negative about organizations such as the IMF, World Bank, UN, and OECD. In part this is because they are a very expensive burden on taxpayers, but also because they generally push for bad policy. It’s reprehensible, for instance, that the OECD has allied itself with […]
read more...I’m in Jersey, where I gave a speech last night. But not New Jersey, the state where you shouldn’t die. That’s the state that many people have been fleeing because they don’t like paying confiscatory taxes to finance bureaucrats who make as much as $320,000 per year. Instead, I’m in the Bailiwick of Jersey, which […]
read more...The half-joking response to the question in the title of this post is that policymakers should look at what’s happening in poorly run jurisdictions such as California, France, Illinois, and Greece – and then do just the opposite. In other words, steer clear of punitive class-warfare tax rates and make sure to control the burden […]
read more...Last week the Tax Foundation released report which provides a means for states to get away from a pernicious practice, one which many folks might be surprised to learn about. Most people think of property taxes as merely dealing with land and the structures on it, since that’s how it operates at the personal level. […]
read more...I periodically mock the crazy statists of California. The state is almost surely doomed to suffer a Greek-style fiscal chaos. The only unknown is whether Illinois will beat the Golden State into default. The politicians in Sacramento impose very high taxes to fund a bloated bureaucracy that oversees a bunch of politically correct nonsense. But […]
read more...I’ve shared evidence from around the world (England, Italy, the United States, and France) and from various states (Illinois, Oregon, Florida,Maryland, and New York) to argue that it is foolish to ignore the Laffer Curve. Not that it makes any difference. I’m slowly coming the conclusion that my friends on the left will never learn – in large part because […]
read more...Would you want to live in a city with no income, sales or capital gains taxes? Well you can soon move to Honduras and get your chance: Small government and free-market capitalism are about to get put to the test in Honduras, where the government has agreed to let an investment group build an experimental […]
read more...I spoke at the United Nations back in May, explaining that more government was the wrong way to help the global economy. But I guess I’m not very persuasive. The bureaucrats have just released a new report entitled, “In Search of New Development Finance.” As you can probably guess, what they’re really searching for is […]
read more...Since I’m probably the foremost defender of tax havens in the United States, I tend to get a lot of press inquiries whenever something happens that brings attention to these low-tax jurisdictions. In recent months, almost all of the media calls have been because (gasp!) Mitt Romney engaged in sound business practices and used tax […]
read more...Very few people are willing to admit that they favor protectionism. After all, who wants to embrace a policy associated with the Great Depression? But people sometimes say “I want free trade so long as it’s fair trade.” In most cases, they’re simply protectionists who are too clever to admit their true agenda There’s a […]
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