The Economist magazine has a couple of good articles about Australia’s increasingly enviable economic status. Here’s a blurb from the first article, which outlines the pro-market reforms that enabled today’s prosperity. Only a dozen economies are bigger, and only six…
Daily Analysis
Unemployment at 9.1 Percent: Heckuva Job on that Stimulus, Mr. President!
Based on this morning’s numbers, I’ve updated my chart showing what the Obama Administration said would happen with the so-called stimulus compared to what actually has happened. As you can see, the unemployment rate is about 2.5 percentage points higher than the…
New Study Shows Government Hindering Job Growth While Unemployment Lingers
It would not surprise most Americans to hear that unemployment rates are still lingering lower than pre-recession levels. As Dennis Cauchon wrote last week in USA Today: The nation has 5% fewer jobs today — a loss of 7 million — than it did when the recession began in…
National Economic Suicide to Drive Out Capital
Richard Rahn writes in the Washington Times today on a pair of regulations which he describes as “national economic suicide.” At issue is the IRS’s proposed regulation that would require U.S. banks to report information on foreign account holders,…
New Paper Explains Why Low-Tax Jurisdictions Should Resist OECD Attacks Against Tax Competition and Fiscal Sovereignty
One of the biggest threats against global prosperity is the anti-tax competition project of a Paris-based international bureaucracy known as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD, acting at the behest of the European welfare states that…
A Very Depressing Picture of Tax Complexity and Political Corruption
Read it and weep. Or maybe I should say look at it and weep. I suppose this is a good time to recycle my flat tax video. I don’t mention this in the video, but Hong Kong’s flat tax system, which has been around for more than 60 years, requires less than 200 pages….
Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Which Nation Has the Most Debt of All?
Last night, I spoke at the closing dinner of the European Resource Bank. My message was simple and straightforward: Entitlement programs are killing the developed world. That’s not exactly a surprise, but what may be shocking is America’s relative position. In my…
Could Technical Default Today Save America from Greek-Style Fiscal Disaster in the Future?
There’s a lot of buzz about a Wall Street Journal interview with Stanley Druckenmiller, in which he argues that a temporary delay in making payments on U.S. government debt (which technically would be a default) would be a small price to pay if it resulted in the…
Policies that Disproportionately Hurt Blacks Are Bad, even if They Are Unintentionally Racist
Professor Walter Williams comments on new research showing how the minimum wage is hurting African-American employment. Last week, two labor economists, Professors William Even (Miami University of Ohio) and David Macpherson (Trinity University), released a study for…
Let’s Copy the Baltic Nations and Really Cut Spending
All the talk of spending cuts in Washington is fictitious. Even the House Republican Study Committee budget allows spending to increase, on average, by 1.7 percent each year for the next decade. The Ryan budget, which critics deride for its “savage” cuts, allows…