The geniuses in Washington have come up with a great idea to attract more tourists to the United States. Yes, you guessed correctly. The politicians are going to impose a tax! Normal readers are probably scratching their heads about the logic of attracting visitors by…
Dan Mitchell
Daniel J. Mitchell is the President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity and the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation. Dr. Mitchell advocates limited government and fundamental tax reform, and is the nation’s leading opponent of tax harmonization schemes developed by the Brussels-based European Union, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the United Nations.
In addition to fiscal policy, Dr. Mitchell is a trenchant observer of economic developments and an expert on Social Security reform – particularly the fiscal policy impact of reform and what the US can learn from other nations that have created personal retirement accounts.
Bureaucrats vs. Taxpayers, Part XII
Only the government could fire someone for “serious abuses” and yet allow that person to collect an extra $550,000 of taxpayer money for “unused vacation” – even though he had six times as many carryover days as the rules allow. This is a…
Classic Political Humor from Dave Barry
After looking at the “humor” section of the archives and finding this post, a reader emailed to reminisce about a very funny Dave Barry column from the 1990s that made fun of bureaucratic stupidity. After a bit of digging, I found a link. Here’s my…
Real World Evidence for the Laffer Curve from the Government of Washington, DC.
President Obama is proposing a series of major tax increases. His budget envisions higher tax rates on personal income, increased double taxation of dividends and capital gains, and a big increase in the death tax. And his health care plan includes significant tax…
Bush's Minimum Wage Increase Killed Jobs.
In addition to being in favor of more spending, increased regulation, bailouts, and protectionism, President Bush also saddled the economy with a big minimum wage increase. A new study shows that this pernicious policy has destroyed more than 500,000 part-time jobs….
Lessons from the Greek Budget Debacle.
Fiscal crises have a predictable pattern. Step 1 occurs when the economy is prospering and tax revenues are growing faster than forecast. Step 2 is when politicians use the additional money to increase government spending. Step 3 is that politicians do not treat the…
Senator Bunning Exposes Washington's Fiscal Frauds.
President Obama and many other politicians in Washington are big fans of pay-as-you-go budgeting, which means they want any new spending or tax relief offset (or “paid for”) with tax increases or spending cuts from other parts of the budget. Or at least that’s what…
Politicians Are the Enemy, not Rich People.
Politicians like to play a class-warfare game of demonizing rich people. Walter Williams explains, though, that rich people can only do bad things to us if they are conspiring with politicians. The moral of the story, of course, is that government is a threat to our…
Mark Steyn on Greece.
Pulling no punches, Mark Steyn ponders the entitlement-driven collapse of Greece and asks why politicians in America are repeating the same mistakes: Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal…
Yes, Simon, People in the United Kingdom Die Because of Government-Run Healthcare.
For those of you who saw this segment of Wednesday’s show on CNBC, my co-host got quite agitated when I said I did not want America to have a substandard government-dictated healthcare system. Simon expressed doubt about my assertions, so it’s rather…