I’ve written before about whether California is the Greece of America, in part because of crazy policies such as overpaid bureaucrats and expensive forms of political correctness, And we all know that California has one of the nation’s greediest governments, imposing confiscatory tax rates on a shrinking pool of productive citizens. So it is hardly […]
read more...Alan Blinder has a distinguished resume. He’s a professor at Princeton and he served as Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve. So I was interested to see he authored an attack on the flat tax – and I was happy after I read his column. Why? Well, because his arguments are rather weak. So anemic […]
read more...One of my frustrating missions in life is to educate policy makers on the Laffer Curve. This means teaching folks on the left that tax policy affects incentives to earn and report taxable income. As such, I try to explain, this means it is wrong to assume a simplistic linear relationship between tax rates and […]
read more...The Laffer Curve is the simple notion that higher tax rates don’t necessarily generate as much loot as politicians expect because taxpayers have less incentive to earn and/or report income. And it works in both directions. Lower tax rates don’t lose as much revenue as politicians fear because better tax policy leads to more taxable […]
read more...It’s hard to keep track of all the tax hikes that President Obama is proposing, but it’s very simple to recognize his main target – the evil, nasty, awful people known as the rich. Or, as Obama identifies them, the “millionaires and billionaires” who happen to have yearly incomes of more than $200,000. Whether the […]
read more...Thomas Sowell just completed a three-part “Back to the Future” series, looking at a couple of fiscal policy issues. His unifying theme is how the political class fails (perhaps deliberately) to learn from mistakes. In Part I, he decimates President Obama’s new stimulus scheme. Once we get past the glowing rhetoric, what is the president […]
read more...Now that the debt-limit fight is basically over (the Senate will join the House in approving it later today), we need to immediately prepare for the next stage in the fight to stop big government and restore economic liberty. President Obama and other leftists clearly have signaled that they want the new “super committee” – […]
read more...President Obama is stubbornly clinging to his ideological agenda of bigger government and class warfare. Wasteful programs magically become “investments” for growth, and higher tax rates get turned into “shared sacrifice.” Interestingly, we already know what eventually happens with this approach. Europe’s welfare states are now dealing with the wreckage of Obamanomics-type policies and the […]
read more...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 Europe, which is shown in one of the CAP charts, but that doesn’t exactly demonstrate […]
read more...I was on Larry Kudlow’s CNBC show recently, where I debated against Robert Reich. I made (what I hope are) good points about the Laffer Curve and the big-government policies of both Bush and Obama. The bad news, as least from a personal perspective, is that the last half of the interview became a debate […]
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