I feel like a pendulum this election season. Something will happen that makes me want to eviscerate Obama’s statist policies and I’ll write a foaming-at-the-mouth post warning that the President is turning America into Greece. But then Romney will do something odious…
Daily Analysis
It’s Not April Fool’s Day, but New York Times Columnist Wants America to Become More Prosperous by Raising Taxes on the Middle Class and Becoming More Like Italy
Every so often, you read something so ridiculously stupid and absurd that you assume that you’re being pranked. So you look to the date of the article to see if it says April 1. Or you look at the Internet address to see if it’s a parody of a real website. So when I…
Explaining Ryan’s Budget in the Wall Street Journal
Even though I’ve already made clear that I am less-than-overwhelmed by the thought of Mitt Romney in the White House, I worry that people will become to think I’m a GOP toady. That’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time providing favorable analysis and commentary…
Social Security’s $30 Trillion Fiscal Time Bomb
I don’t give the issue much attention on this blog, but I’m very interested in Social Security reform. I wrote my dissertation on Australia’s very successful system of personal retirement accounts, for instance, and I narrated this video on Social Security reform in…
OECD Presses Big Government Agenda
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is heavily subsidized by US taxpayers, but spends a lot of time pushing an agenda against taxpayer interests. Richard Billies recently did a good job recounting the OECD’s ongoing list of big…
Just as Happened in Europe, the VAT Is Becoming a Money Machine for Big Govenrment in Japan
For years, I’ve been warning that a value-added tax (VAT) would be a terrible idea. Simply stated, politicians would have no reason to control spending or reform entitlements if they had a new source of tax revenue. In this video, I explain why this European-style…
A Primer on the Flat Tax and Fundamental Tax Reform
In previous posts, I put together tutorials on the Laffer Curve, tax competition, and the economics of government spending. Today, we’re going to look at the issue of tax reform. The focus will be the flat tax, but this analysis applies equally to national sales tax…
The Other Problem of Dependence
A lot has been said about the growing dependence of American citizens on the federal government, including in this great CF&P Economics 101 video narrated by Emily O’Neill. But there’s another kind of growing dependence about which we need to be…
More Leftists Let Their Masks Slip, Admit They Want Big Tax Hikes on the Middle Class
While I disagree with statists, I sometimes admire their discipline. They are very good at staying “on message.” I am 100 percent confident, for instance, that they intend big tax hikes on the middle class, even though they would piously swear an oath to the contrary….
Since Leftists Don’t Like Corporate Loopholes, They Should Support the Flat Tax
I appeared on CNBC a couple of days ago to discuss a new report which claims that some big U.S. companies “only” paid 9 percent of their income to the government. While I’m a bit skeptical of the numbers (did it include the taxes paid to foreign governments, for…