In his Washington Post column discussing a crisis of confidence among economists, Robert Samuelson correctly notes that Keynesians don’t seem to have the right answers. But he concludes that other schools of thought are similarly befuddled by current…
Daily Analysis
Russia Getting Rid of Capital Gains Tax
The former communists running Russia apparently understand tax policy better than the buffoons in charge of U.S. tax policy. Not only does Russia have a 13 percent flat tax, but the government has just announced it will eliminate the capital gains tax (which…
Anti-Tax Competition Schemes by High-Tax Nations Will Expand the Underground Economy
Regular readers know that I am a big supporter of international tax competition as a mechanism to limit the greed of the political elite. Unfortunately, the statists are having some success in their efforts to undermine the fiscal sovereignty of low-tax jurisdictions….
Primer Makes the Case for Tax Competition to Restrain Government Oppression
The Freeman has an article by an expert from Bermuda about the importance of giving taxpayers an escape option to curtail the greed of the political elite: The Declaration of Independence had it exactly right: “He [King George III] has erected a multitude of New…
America Will Now Be the Unquestioned World Leader…But in the Wrong Way.
The United States has a very anti-competitive corporate tax regime. The federal tax rates is 35 percent and the average of state corporate tax systems brings the rate to nearly 40 percent. In Europe, by contrast, the average corporate tax rate is about 25 percent….
Obama Selectively Embraces Dynamic Scoring
Budget wonks have long battled over the use of “static” versus “dynamic” budget scoring by agencies like the Congressional Budget Office or the Joint Committee on Taxation. While these organizations do often consider how changes in policies…
Pontificating about the Stupidity of Big-Government Stimulus
Obama and the Democrats are trying to enact a third so-called stimulus (a.k.a., jobs bill). I’d make a joke about three strikes and your out, but we should remember that this is actually the fourth attempt since we should count Bush’s lame faux stimulus in…
Another Reason Why Welfare Is Economically Destructive
I’m normally not a big fan of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development since it is an international bureaucracy that persecutes low-tax jurisdictions. But the economists at the OECD sometimes do good work (the same can be said of the…
Producers on Strike
The Wall Street Journal wisely warns against drawing too many conclusions from one month’s job data, but they also point out that the economy is much weaker than the White House claimed – in large part because of a series of public policy decisions that…
Will Higher Tax Rates in 2011 Cause an Economic Collapse?
Art Laffer has a compelling column in the Wall Street Journal, where he makes the case that future tax rate increases will cause considerable economic damage because people have an incentive to maximize income this year to take advantage of current tax rates –…