New York Times columnist Mark Bittman is having a jolly good time contemplating ways to control other people. “It’s fun — inspiring, even — to think about implementing a program like this,” he declares. And what kind of program is he talking about? One which directs people away from their own preferences and toward making […]

Sound tax policy is hard to find these days. As CF&P has extensively covered, Congress included the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act as part of the HIRE Act, passed in March 2010. FATCA takes a fundamentally wrong-headed approach to tax policy. Rather than looking at how to make the U.S. tax system more hospitable to […]

Senator Carl Levin is revitalizing his crusade against so-called tax havens. In a press release yesterday, he announced the reintroduction of his Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, while touting the support of labor lobby groups and advocates of big government. As the Center for Freedom and Prosperity noted in a press release yesterday, the legislation […]

We fight to preserve tax competition among nations, but the principle’s effects exist within the US among the states, as well. George Scoville writes about the likely outcomes of a decision by Vermont to raise their cigarette taxes by $0.38 while New Hampshire lowers theirs by $0.10: Prices are information wrapped in incentives, and taxes […]

How was anything ever invented before government started “investing” in new technologies? One wonders these things, given the seriousness with which Keynesians seem to believe that if they don’t choose the economic winners and then throw large sums of money at them – other people’s money, of course – then there will be no innovation […]

We spend a lot of time pointing out the asinine and corrupt federal policies which come out of Washington, DC. But there’s another government in DC, and it’s also filled with petty tyrants who make bad policy in order to benefit special interests. That the local DC government is corrupt has never been a secret, […]

Richard Rahn writes in the Washington Times today on a pair of regulations which he describes as “national economic suicide.” At issue is the IRS’s proposed regulation that would require U.S. banks to report information on foreign account holders, even though they are not taxed in the U.S., as well as the Foreign Account Tax […]

We often look at how tax competition affects nations, but the same concept applies to U.S. states as well. Two recent reports demonstrate what happens when politicians fail to understand just how tax competition works. In a report from the Maine Heritage Policy Center, we see how New Hampshire’s low retail tax rate is attracting […]

I mentioned the other day a claim from CEI that regulatory burdens cost the economy nearly $2 trillion in 2008. The Phoenix Center also recently produced a policy bulletin examining the costs of the regulatory state (Hat-tip: Big Government). In quantifying the relationship between government spending and economic growth based upon 50 years of data, […]