I recently co-authored with Dan Mitchell an article in the Swiss magazine Schweizer Monat explaining the many problems with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), and the schizophrenic nature of US tax policy in general. The key points: The rationale behind…
Daily Analysis
When an American Company Redomiciles to the Cayman Islands, What Lesson Should We Learn?
Another American company has decided to expatriate for tax reasons. This process has been going on for decades, with companies giving up their U.S. charters (a form of business citizenship) and redomiciling in low-tax jurisdictions such as Bermuda, Ireland,…
Creating Galt’s Gulch from Scratch?
Advocates of limited government love to fantasize. But because we’re strange people, we don’t have ordinary fantasies about supermodels or playing pro baseball. We daydream about a libertarian nirvana, where the rights of individuals are protected, guided by a moral…
When Germany and France Both Agree on Something, You Can Safely Assume It Is a Terrible Idea
I’ve joked on many occasions that bipartisanship occurs in Washington when the evil party and the stupid party come up with an idea that is simultaneously malicious and misguided. The international version of two-wrongs-don’t-make-a-right occurs whenever the French…
Warren Buffett’s Fiscal Innumeracy
Warren Buffett’s at it again. He has a column in the New York Times complaining that he has been coddled by the tax code and that “rich” people should pay higher taxes. My first instinct is to send Buffett the website where people can voluntarily pay extra money to…
D.C. Needs to Junk Jock Tax Plan
The Washington Times recently reported that the D.C. Council’s plan to introduce a “jock tax” will need an unlikely vote from Capitol Hill to succeed. Hopefully for D.C. sports fans the proposal will fail. What is a “jock tax,” you might ask? It is an income tax…
Reid and Pelosi Appoint Fiscal Foxes to Serve on Super-Committee Henhouse
Wow. Not even a pretense of caring about fiscal responsibility. Keep the status quo, even if it means America is doomed to suffer a Greek-style budget meltdown. Those were my thoughts when I heard that Harry Reid appointed Senators Kerry, Murray, and Baucus to the…
What Will You do to Celebrate “Cost of Government Day”?
Tomorrow, August 12, will be a wonderful day. Based on calculations from Americans for Tax Reform, we will have finally worked long enough to finance the total cost of government for 2011. This means the money we earn for the rest of the year will be for the benefit…
Easy Money from the Federal Reserve Is Not the Solution for America’s Economic Problems
Allen Meltzer, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University, writes today in the Wall Street Journal about the Fed’s worrisome announcement that it will continue the easy-money policy of artificially low interest rates. Professor Meltzer’s key point (at least to me) is…
The Clown Prince of Europe
If Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama are neck-and-neck competitors in the contest to be the public face of incompetent statism in America, then the competition in Europe is between Herman van Rompuy and Olga Stefou. But since I’ve already crowned Ms. Stefou as the Queen…