This is just a rumor, but some of the “stimulus” money has been spent to buy new pencil sharpeners for the IRS. Apparently, the new equipment puts agents in the right frame of mind before auditing taxpayers.
Daily Analysis
Obama’s New Stimulus Schemes: Same Song, Umpteenth Verse
Like a terrible remake of Groundhog Day, the White House has unveiled yet another so-called stimulus scheme. Actually, they have two new proposals to buy votes with our money. One plan is focused on more infrastructure spending, as reported by Politico. Seeking to…
Heads, They Win; Tails, We Lose
State and local politicians have rigged the property tax system so they always come out ahead. When home values are rising (even if incomes are flat), they automatically collect more revenue. Sometimes they even decide to reduce the tax rate, though rarely if ever by…
Obama’s Class-Warfare Tax Policy Will Hit Small Business
Kevin Hassett and Alan VIard of the American Enterprise Institute have a column in the Wall Street Journal showing how Obama’s proposed tax hikes will impose significant harm on small business owners and other entrepreneurs. Higher tax rates are damaging for the…
A Basic – but Critical – Economics Lesson from Walter Williams
Just because something is free, that doesn’t mean there is no cost. This is the core message of Walter Williams’ column, which uses the example of “employer-paid” Social Security taxes to explain how politicians specialize in giving us very expensive things for…
Smoke for the Motherland
Excise taxes, where government taxes the sale of particular goods, are usually levied with the excuse that consumption of a good or engagement in a certain activity is harmful for individuals. If this were actually true, you’d expect government bureaucrats to…
Crocodile Dundee vs Australia’s Tax Police
Here’s a Reuters story about the Australian Tax Office harassing Paul Hogan, better known to Americans as Crocodile Dundee, because of a tax dispute. The grinches at the tax office took advantage of Hogan’s return for his mother’s funeral to hold him hostage, refusing…
Why Can’t America Copy Europe’s Welfare States and Have a Low Corporate Tax Rate?
I tangle with my old nemesis Christian Weller, one of the statists at the Center against American Progress, in a debate on whether the corporate tax rate should be reduced. I was somewhat amused that Christian defended the current system because companies currently…
More Arguments Against a Value-Added Tax
The biggest long-term threat to fiscal responsibility is a value-added tax, as I’ve explained here, here, here, here, and here. So I’m delighted to see a growing amount of research showing that a VAT is bad news. Jim Powell has an excellent column at Investor’s…
Dishonest British Budgeting…Just Like We Do It in America
According to news coverage, United Kingdom Prime Minister Cameron is imposing deep and savage budget cuts. I was interviewed by the BBC recently, for instance, and asked whether 25 percent spending reductions were too harsh. And here’s an excerpt from a New York Times…