I’ve relentlessly complained that the United States has the highest corporate tax rate among all developed nations. And if you look at all the world’s countries, our status is still very dismal. According to the the Economist, we have the second highest corporate tax…
Daily Analysis
Final Score: Dwight Howard 8,000,000 – Jerry Brown 0
feel sorry for the people of California. They’re in a state that faces a very bleak future. And why does the Golden State have a not-so-golden outlook? Because interest groups have effective control of state and local political systems and they use their power to…
New Academic Research Confirms the “High Price” of High Tax Rates
I periodically cite new academic research about tax policy and economic activity. I sometimes even publicize research from international bureaucracies showing the link between taxes and growth. I’m not naive enough to think that any particular study will change minds,…
What’s the Half-Life of a “Temporary” Tax Increase?
Milton Friedman famously noted that, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program”and Ronald Reagan sagely observed that “a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” They’re both right, but they should have…
Tax Havens Are Good for High-Tax Nations
Regular readers know that one of my main goals is to preserve and promote tax competition as a means of restraining the greed of the political class. Heck, I almost wound up in a Mexican jail because of my work defending low-tax jurisdictions. As you can imagine, it’s…
Some Much-Needed Remedial Public Finance Economics for David Cameron and other Statists
In a recent interview with the BBC, I basically accused UK Prime Minister David Cameron of being a feckless and clueless demagogue who is engaged in a desperate effort to resuscitate his political future. I shouldn’t have been so kind. Cameron manages to combine bad…
The Link Between Systemic Risk and One-Size-Fits-All Regulation
After the financial crisis, the consensus among government officials was that we needed more regulation. This irked me in two ways. 1. I don’t want more costly red tape in America, particularly when the evidence is quite strong that the crisis was caused by government…
Can the David of Swiss Human Rights Withstand the Goliath of IRS Extraterritorial Tax Enforcement?
Because we live in an upside-down world, Switzerland is being persecuted for being a productive, peaceful nation that has a strong human rights policy with regards to privacy. More specifically, politicians from high-tax nations resent the fact that investors flock to…
Responding to Scandals and Corruption, the IRS Rewards Itself with Giant Bonuses
What do you do if you’re part of a government bureaucracy that has been caught red-handed engaged in sleazy, corrupt, and (almost surely) illegal targeting of Americans for their political beliefs? But before you answer, keep in mind that your bureaucracy also has…
Europe’s Politicians Learned the Wrong Lesson from Saint Augustine
In my never-ending crusade to push for the right kind of austerity, I appeared on RT to pontificate on the merits of limited government. We got to cover a lot of material, so here’s some augmenting material. 1. The right kind of “austerity” is less government…