The Laffer Curve is a graphical representation of the relationship between tax rates, tax revenue, and taxable income. It is frequently cited by people who want to explain the common-sense notion that punitive tax rates may not generate much additional revenue if…
Ron Paul has made “End the Fed” a popular slogan, but some people worry that this is a radical untested idea. In part, this is because it is human nature to fear the unknown. But there are plenty of examples of policy reforms that used to be considered radical but are…
The new unemployment numbers have been released and the White House must be somewhat happy. The joblessness rate is down to 8.2 percent, which means the number that gets the most publicity continues to move in the right direction. I’ve been predicting that Obama will…
Why is big government bad for an economy? The easy answer is that big government usually means high tax rates, and this penalizes work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship. And perhaps some of the spending is financed by borrowing, and this diverts money from…
What do the flat tax and national sales tax (and even the value-added tax) have in common? As I explain in this Senate Budget Committee testimony, they are all single-rate, consumption-base, loophole-free tax systems that fulfill the key principles of good tax policy….
Last year, I shared a very amusing Michael Ramirez cartoon showing Obama as the European lemming. Now, Mark Helprin takes a much more serious look at the same issue in the Wall Street Journal, commenting on the wisdom (or lack thereof) of Obama’s interest in the…
Tax competition, as I have explained to the point of being a nuisance, is an important restraint on the greed of the political class. Simply stated, politicians are less like to over-tax and over-spend if they know that geese with the golden eggs can fly across the…
In a recent post comparing Reaganomics and Obamanomics, I explained why I think Barack Obama’s policies have been hurting the economy. In today’s New York Post, I do a full-scale indictment. Here are my bullet points. * The unemployment rate is still above 8 percent,…
n previous posts, I’ve used data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank to show how Obamanomics is leading to very weak results, particularly compared to the economic boom triggered by Reaganomics. So you can imagine how I was anxious to participate when U.S. News…
Last year, while lounging on the beach in the Caribbean…oops, I mean while doing off-site research, I developed the first iteration of a rule to describe how fiscal policy should operate. Good fiscal policy exists when the private sector grows faster than the public…