In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Steve Moore notes that the Senate health care bill creates incentives for dual income couples to avoid marriage: Marriage is a revered institution in America but not apparently under the Congressional health care legislation, which contains steep “marriage penalty” taxes, i.e. tax burdens that only get heavier when a […]
read more...I must confess that I didn’t think Scott Brown was going to win the election in Massachusetts, even though I predicted a 50-48 GOP victory. This is a monumental development. It doesn’t necessarily mean Obamacare can be stopped. And it may be that Brown turns out to be a big government squish, like Snowe in […]
read more...The internal revenue codes is so mind-numbingly complex that even the head of the IRS uses a professional tax preparer. But that’s hardly a surprise. What is a bit shocking, though, is that Commissioner Shulman has the gall to claim that he favors tax code simplification when his IRS has been promulgating rules and regulations […]
read more...The government is so incompetent that it never put the Christmas-day underwear-bomber on the no-fly list – even though the nutjob’s father reported his son’s radical views to American authorities. But the TSA for several years has targeted Mikey Hicks, a cub scout from New Jersey who is eight years old. Nobody got fired after […]
read more...This blog periodically makes fun of England (even though it is one of my favorite nations) for big government and political correctness, but these two stories caused my jaw to drop. First, the Daily Mail reports that a man was jailed for several hours because he was falsely suspected of writing an email that indirectly may have […]
read more...Academic research is fairly unanimous that high tax rates cause tax avoidance and tax evasion. Not many people, after all, are going to take big risks or engage in inefficient tax planning to escape Hong Kong’s low-rate flat tax. But people begin to figure out ways of keeping more of their money as tax […]
read more...The Washington Times has an article exposing how a law firm is simultaneously doing legal work on a program for the government while also lobbying for more handouts from that program. Here’s an excerpt from the expose: One of the law firms hired to provide legal work for the Treasury Department on a multibillion-dollar federal […]
read more...A new survey from International Living says that France has the highest quality of life, followed by Australia and Switzerland. The United States, meanwhile, is in seventh place, behind nations such as Germany, New Zealand, and Luxembourg: To produce this annual Index we consider nine categories: Cost of Living, Culture and Leisure, Economy, Environment, Freedom, […]
read more...While American politicians are experts when it comes to squandering money, they may be just amateurs compared to the kleptocrats at the European Commission. The overall burden of government is heavier in Europe, so that certainly suggests that there are greater opportunities to waste money, but what makes the European Commission special is that it […]
read more...In the ongoing contest to see which group of politicians can squander money in the most obscene fashion, it appears that the bureaucrats at the European Commission in Brussels might be surpassing their counterparts in Washington. Here’s a story from the UK’s Daily Telegraph, reporting that the European Commission is subsidizing a ski trip for […]
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