Eli Lehrer writes in the Weekly Standard this week about a bill from Congressman Ron Klein that seems to be companion legislation to Congressman Richard Neal’s Reinsurance Bill.  The article correctly points out the anti-market effects of such legislation:  Those who think the federal government needs even more debt and more responsibilities will love Florida […]

David Paul Kuhn recently wrote about an interesting new approach to tax collection in the Keystone State: Pennsylvania has a common problem. Hundreds of millions in unpaid taxes. And it needs that revenue. The state took the offensive with a $3 million ad campaign. The television ad begins with a satellite view of earth. A […]

The New York Times ran an article this week about an increasing number of Americans living and working abroad who are considering taking the drastic step of giving up their American citizenship.  Most of these expats would ideally like to maintain their citzenship but are being pressured to relinquish it by America’s complicated tax code and system […]

Last Thursday, the Senate took a vote on a non-binding “sense of the Senate” resolution concerning a Value Added Tax.  The result was an 85-13 victory for the anti-VAT side.  The roll call can be found here.  The statement of purpose read as follows:  Expressing the sense of the Senate that the Value Added Tax […]

The New York City NBC affiliate reported this week that twenty six professional tax preparers were wanted or arrested on tax fraud charges as the result of a recent crackdown.  Some of the preparers allegedly used the names of dead people to collect fraudulent returns.  Apparently, this scam had been going on since at least […]

Nicholas Sarkozy spoke at Columbia University in New York on Monday and, as he has done before, demonstrated that everyone who calls themselves a conservative is not a free marketer.   The French President pressed for an expansion of global financial bureaucracies and blasted the right of individual countries to be fiscally sovereign.  The following Associated […]

In a great article written in response to the passage of the health care bill last week, Thomas Sowell argued that perhaps the biggest problem with a government controlled health care system is the inherent threat to privacy.  The same argument can be made regarding increased government involvement in any area of life, including financial […]

According to the Sacramento Fox Network affiliate, a car wash in Sacramento recently came under investigation by the IRS and even received a visit from federal agents.  The cause:  The car wash owed a whopping four cents in backed taxes.  Certainly there is a valid “law-and-order” argument that even small infractions need to be addressed, […]

In a National Review Online article, Kevin Williamson notes that a proposed federal banking tax seems purely inspired by vilification politics, but will none-the-less put American banks at a very real competitive disadvantage in the global market: The new proposed tax on banks — 15 basis points on all liabilities — is not about revenue or […]