The New York Times has an article describing widespread tax evasion in Greece, along with an implication that the country’s fiscal crisis is largely the result of unpaid taxes and could be mostly solved if taxpayers were more obedient to the state. This is an…
Daily Analysis
Is Obama Turning America into a Banana Republic?
I meant to write about this article when it first came out, but it got buried in my inbox. That being said, this Washington Times column by Richard Rahn makes an excellent point about the dangers of too much government. He points out that Argentina used to one of the…
Greek Chutzpah
There’s an old joke that if you owe a bank $10,000, you have a problem, but if you owe a bank $10,000,000, the bank has a problem. The Greek government certainly seems to have that attitude. Short-sighted and corrupt politicians in Athens have spent their nation…
American and German Taxpayers Should Be Rioting, not Greek Moochers
My blood pressure spiked after reading this story from the UK-based Times. The Greeks are rioting in the streets because they want our money (i.e., an IMF bailout) and they want to keep all the inefficient and wasteful government policies that caused the crisis. In…
They're Watching You in Pennsylvania.
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….
Obama's Hypocritical Class Warfare
The President had another “spread the wealth” slip of the tongue the other day, this time remarking that “at some point you have made enough money.” Some have commented that this exposes Obama’s anti-capitalist ideology, and others have…
Ny Trip to Spain
GreeI arrived in Madrid last week for a speech to the annual Convention of Independent Financial Advisors, and it is somehow fitting that Spain was downgraded by Standard and Poor’s as I entered the country. I’m not a fan of the bond-rating agencies, and…
Excellent Primer on the Financial Crisis
Russ Roberts of George Mason University has written a very good article for the Mercatus Center explaining – for economists and non-economists – how government intervention created distortions in the housing and finance sectors. He also blames Wall Street,…
Government Is a Racket to Enrich Bureaucrats and Rip Off the Rest of Us
Every experience I’ve had with speed cameras has been negative. That’s hardly a surprise, but the other common experience is that they always are set up in places where the speed limit is absurdly low (a 45-mph limit on a stretch of interstate highway in…
More Regulation Will Increase Systemic Risk
One bonus of speaking at the Global Financial Services Centres Conference in Dublin last week is that I got to listen to Paul Atkins, a former Commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Unlike many others who have served in that role, Paul understands…