I recently speculated whether Detroit’s fiscal problems should be a warning sign for the crowd in Washington. The answer, of course, is yes, though it’s not a perfect analogy. The federal government is in deep trouble because of unsustainable entitlement programs…
Daily Analysis
Even European Commission Bureaucrats Realize that Taxes Can Be Too High!
I’m not a big fan of the European Commission. For those not familiar with this entity, it’s sort of the European version of the executive-branch bureaucracy we have in Washington. And like their counterparts in Washington, the Brussels-based bureaucracy enjoys a very…
Why Tax Migration and Federalism Mean Doom for Left-Wing States such as New York, California, and Illinois
Maybe this means I’m not a nice person (notwithstanding my high score for tenderness in a recent test), but I can’t help but be happy when I read bad news about fiscal policy in high-tax welfare states. And because I’m a huge fan of tax competition, I get even happier…
The Common-Sense Case for Dynamic Scoring
As regular readers know, one of my great challenges in life is trying to educate policy makers about the Laffer Curve, which is simply a way of illustrating that government won’t collect any revenue if tax rates are zero, but also won’t collect much revenue if tax…
Taxes Even Impact When We’re Born and When We Die
As a fiscal policy economist, one of my responsibilities is to educate policy makers about the impact of taxation. Simply stated, I try to help them understand that taxes alter behavior. If you tax something at a higher rate, you get less of whatever is being taxed….
More Compelling Evidence that America’s Corporate Tax System Is Pointlessly Destructive
It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that the United States has the world’s worst corporate tax system. We definitely have the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world, and we may have the highest corporate tax rate in the entire world depending on how…
More Americans Going Galt
President Obama promised he would unite the world…and he’s right. Representatives from dozens of nations have bitterly complained about an awful piece of legislation, called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), that was enacted back in 2010. They despise…
More Double Taxation of Dividends and Capital Gains Would Turn Tax Reform into Tax Deform
Even though I’m a big fan of tax reform, I explained back in June that I’m not very comfortable with the “blank slate” tax reform plan put forth by Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT). My main gripe is that they start with the assumption that there…
America Is a Tax Haven…and That’s a Very Good Thing
I like tax havens for the simple reason that we need some ways of restraining the greed of the political class. Simply stated, if profligate politicians think that we are “captive customers,” they are much more likely to impose (even) higher tax rates (as we’ve seen…
Beware the President’s Bait-and-Switch on Corporate Tax Reform
In his latest pivot to jobs and the economy, the President spoke earlier today in Tennessee. Much of his speech was tax-spend-and-regulate boilerplate, but he did repackage some of his ideas into a so-called grand bargain. He said he’s willing to cut the corporate tax…