One of my favorite political cartoons is this Michael Ramirez gem showing President Obama following the European lemmings over the cliff of statism. But this isn’t a laughing matter. As shown in this remarkable graph on global living standards, Americans enjoy…
Daily Analysis
Let’s Shed a Tear for those Under-Appreciated Bureaucrats Who Get Lavish Pensions and Live in $700K Homes
When I first read this story in the Washington Post about supposedly under-appreciated federal bureaucrats, I was tempted to focus on the sentence referring to “the sledgehammer of budget cuts scheduled to hit today.” Is the Washington Post so biased and/or clueless…
Jack Lew and Citigroup: How the Corrupt Rich Get Unjustly Richer with Crony Capitalism
If you’re an amoral person with political connections, it’s possible to make a lot of money. Warren Buffett lined his pockets by making a government-subsidized investment in Goldman Sachs during the financial crisis. The rest of us suffered and he got richer, but the…
OECD Outlines New Assault on Tax Competition
The latest attempt at ending tax competition was kicked off with an OECD report called “Addressing Base Erosion and Profit Shifting.” The paper is deeply troubling for advocates of tax competition and pro-growth policies.
Virginia’s RINO Infestation Results in Higher Taxes and More Spending
The number one goal for fiscal policy is to reduce the burden of government spending. The simple way to achieve this goal is to adhere to Mitchell’s Golden Rule and and make sure the private sector grows faster than the public sector. But when politicians fail to…
Earth to New York Times: Please Show Us these “Deep Spending Cuts” You Keep Writing About
Sigh. I feel like a modern-day Sisyphus. Except I’m not pushing a rock up a hill, only to then watch it roll back down. I have a far more frustrating job. I have to read the same nonsense day after day about “deep spending cuts” even though I keep explaining to…
Debunking Sequester Hysteria from the Big Spenders in Washington
I shared a couple of amusing sequester cartoons the other day, and I’ve previously written about the absurdity of anti-sequester hysteria in Washington when all it means is that the federal budget will grow by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years rather than $2.5…
Corporate Jet Loopholes, Depreciation, and Common-Sense Tax Policy
I’m not a fan of loopholes in the tax code. I’ve complained about the number of pages in the tax code, the number of provisions in the tax code, and I’ve even groused about the rising number of pages in the instruction manual for the 1040 tax form. And I’ve…
The New York Times Calls (again) for Higher Taxes on Middle-Class Americans
ll statists want much bigger government, but not all of them are honest about how to finance a Greek-sized welfare state. The President, for instance, wants us to believe that the rich are some sort of fiscal pinata, capable of generating endless amounts of tax…
The Tax Code Shouldn’t Steer Capital to State and Local Governments at the Expense of Private Investment
I’m a proponent of a pro-growth and non-corrupt tax code. I mostly write and talk about the flat tax, though I’d be happy to instead accept a national sales tax if we could somehow get rid of the 16th Amendment and replace it with something so ironclad that even…