I sometimes get irked when I read columns by David Brooks. He’s sort of the token Republican at the New York Times, so he has a very important perch that could be used to educate an important audience about the harmful impact of excessive government. And Brooks often…
Daily Analysis
Block Granting and Decentralization: The Sensible Way of Reducing Rampant Medicaid Fraud
When you work in Washington (and assuming you haven’t been corrupted), you run the risk of being endlessly outraged about all the waste. But not all waste is created equal. Some examples are so absurd that they deserve special attention. Forcing taxpayers to pay…
The Most Pro-Capitalism Place to Live in North America Is…
Back in February, I said Australia probably was the country most likely to survive and prosper as much of the world suffered fiscal collapse and social chaos. In hindsight, I probably should have mentioned Canada as an option, in part because of pro-growth reforms in…
Ryan-Murray Budget Deal Replaces Real Spending Restraint of Sequester with Budget Gimmicks and Back-Door Tax Hikes
How Disappointing, but how predictable. Politicians approved legislation in 2011 that was supposed to impose a modest bit of spending restraint over the next 10 years. It wasn’t much. The enforcement mechanism, known as sequestration, merely was supposed to guarantee…
FATCA System Fails Government Probe, Threatens Privacy
Despite spending more than $8.6 million so far, with another $8 million projected to be spent still, on developing the online portal for handling the registration of foreign financial institutions for the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), the IRS is still…
More Great Moments in Government Schooling
The government’s monopoly education system is a travesty mostly because taxpayers spend record amounts of money and we get very poor results. But I’m also irked at the way government schools engage in absurd displays of political correctness, particularly when it…
Massive Double Taxation Is a Self-Inflicted Tax Injury that Undermines American Competitiveness and Job Creation
Back in the 1960s, Clint Eastwood starred in a movie entitled The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I was thinking that might be a good title for today’s post about some new research by Michelle Harding, a tax economist for the OECD. But then I realized that her study on…
Progress on the Laffer Curve*
The title of this piece has an asterisk because, unfortunately, we’re not talking about progress on the Laffer Curve in the United States. Even Keynes himself accepted this. Like many other economists throughout the ages, he understood and agreed with the principles…
The “Stupid Party” Strikes Again: Congressional Republicans Poised to Give Up Sequester Victory
There’s a saying in the sports world about how last-minute comebacks are examples of “snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.” I don’t like that phrase because it reminds me of the painful way my beloved Georgia Bulldogs were defeated a couple of weeks ago by…
Another Misguided Plan to Burden America with a Value-Added Tax
It’s no secret that I dislike the value-added tax. But this isn’t because of its design. The VAT, after all, would be (presumably) a single-rate, consumption-based system, just like the flat tax and national sales tax. And that’s a much less destructive way of raising…