With occasional exceptions such as Switzerland and Estonia, there’s rarely good news from Europe. At least with regards to fiscal policy. But maybe there’s a bit of sense on the Iberian Peninsula. I reported a couple of years ago that Portugal was at least flirting with the notion of lower tax rates and spending restraint. Now Spain may be undoing some […]
read more...Since I’ve already created a Moocher Hall of Fame to acknowledge the strangest and most reprehensible examples of government dependency, it’s occurred to me that there also should be a Bureaucrat Hall of Fame to highlight the government employees that have figured out how to most successfully rip off taxpayers (and here are some good candidates for charter membership). […]
read more...One of the many challenges of being libertarian is that people sometimes think you’re naive about foreign policy (sort of like the first entry in this 24-part satirical collage of libertarians). In large part, I think that’s because they confuse non-interventionism with pacifism. To elaborate on why they’re wrong, I’ve shared some thoughts from Mark Steyn, George Will, and Steve […]
read more...If some special-interest lobbies give money so that a left-wing group can propose something like a value-added tax to finance bigger government, that’s no surprise. And if a bunch of subsidy recipients donate money to Barack Obama or some other statist politician because they hope for new programs, that’s also standard procedure in DC. I’ll fight these […]
read more...I actually have a perverse fondness for Bill Clinton. This is both because we got better policy while he was President (whether he deserves credit is a separate question) and because he single-handedly generated a lot of quality political humor. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t a typical politician. And the same is true for his wife. Indeed, […]
read more...I wrote the other day that Americans, regardless of all the bad policy we get from Washington, should be thankful we’re not stuck in a hellhole like Venezuela. But we also should be happy we’re not Europeans. This is a point I’ve made before, usually accompanied by data showing that Americans have significantly higher living standards than their cousins on the other […]
read more...Why are some nations rich and other nations poor? What has enabled some nations to escape poverty while others continue to languish? And if we want to help poor nations prosper, what’s the right recipe? Since I’m a public finance economist, I’m tempted to say a flat tax and small government are an elixir for prosperity, but those policies […]
read more...Last August, I shared a list of companies that “re-domiciled” in other nations so they could escape America’s punitive “worldwide” tax system. This past April, I augmented that list with some commentary about whether Walgreen’s might become a Swiss-based company. And in May, I pontificated about Pfizer’s effort to re-domicile in the United Kingdom. Well, to paraphrase what Ronald Reagan said to Jimmy Carter […]
read more...I’ve written a couple of serious posts about the death panels at the VA’s government-run health facilities. I think it’s particularly important to understand that the problem has nothing to do with funding levels. Instead, it’s about the chronic inefficiency of government. But sometimes mockery is more effective than analysis, and this Remy video, produced by Reason […]
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