The final paper in Stephen J. Entin of IRET’s three part series about the capital gains tax rate is entited, Revenue Estimation Of Capital Gains Needs Improvement, and as the title promises it explores the inacurate revenue estimates applied to potential changes in the capital gains tax rate: Two recent studies in IRET’s Capital Gains Tax […]

Eli Lehrer writes in the Weekly Standard this week about a bill from Congressman Ron Klein that seems to be companion legislation to Congressman Richard Neal’s Reinsurance Bill.  The article correctly points out the anti-market effects of such legislation:  Those who think the federal government needs even more debt and more responsibilities will love Florida […]

The blogging about Greece is too depressing, so let’s kick a couple of government bureaucracies for bone-headed stupidity. This excerpt is from a Pajamas Media story about how the Customs bureaucrats mistakenly confused BB guns for machine guns, and then turned the toys over to the BATF bureaucrats, who are now stonewalling and refusing to return […]

Here are some very depressing stories. The Daily Mail reports that a European Court has ruled that the U.K. no longer can impose restrictions on welfare payments to women married to suspected terrorists: A European court has instructed Britain to drop restrictions which limit social security benefits paid to the wives of terror suspects. Ministers […]

Here’s a bit of good news to end the weekend. Arizona politicians have been forced to suspend a statewide speed camera program. I’m especially pleased to see that civil disobedience played a role in forcing politicians to pull the plug on the Orwellian system:  Arizona is ending a groundbreaking and contentious program that put speed cameras […]

As expected, the European Union and International Monetary Fund have chosen to subsidize the profligacy of Greek politicians. A deal has just been announced. As the Washington Post reports:  Greece on Sunday announced a long-awaited deal with the European Union and International Monetary Fund for a $145 billion financial rescue, an unprecedented package… The three-year […]

Total government debt is about 115 percent of GDP in Greece, which clearly is one of the factors that spooked investors and led to the bailout. But Japan – at least on paper – is in much worse shape with government debt approaching 200 percent of GDP. And with a grim demographic outlook (lots of […]

Kevin Williamson has a long-overdue piece in National Review making two essential points about supply-side economics and the Laffer Curve. First, he explains that tax cuts are not the fiscal equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. Simply stated, too many Republicans have fallen into very sloppy habits. They oftentimes fail to understand the difference between […]

I always appreciate a column that sounds like I could have been the author, and this editorial from the WSJ hits the mark. The IMF/EU bailout is just masking the problems of a bloated welfare state and giving politicians some breathing room to avoid making the real reforms that are needed: It hasn’t been a […]

The New York Times has an article describing widespread tax evasion in Greece, along with an implication that the country’s fiscal crisis is largely the result of unpaid taxes and could be mostly solved if taxpayers were more obedient to the state. This is an grossly inaccurate. A quick look at the budget numbers reveals […]