Every so often, you get a “teaching moment” in Washington, and we now have an excellent opportunity to educate lawmakers about the “offshore” world because President Obama’s nominee to be Treasury Secretary has been caught with his hand in the tax haven cookie jar….
Daily Analysis
Marketplace Fairness Act Targets Domestic Tax Competition
Like so many bad ideas in Washington, the recently introduced “Marketplace Fairness Act” has bipartisan support. But there’s nothing fair about allowing states to reach outside their borders to tax businesses headquartered elsewhere. In fact, the…
FATCA Overreach Will Sabotage American Global Competitiveness
If Congress set out right now to craft a law to sabotage the global competitiveness of the US economy, they’d have trouble coming up with one better than what they passed in 2010 in the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).
Another Hypocritical Leftist Caught with His Hand in the Tax-Haven Cookie Jar
I’m a huge fan of so-called tax havens. I’ve been working for more than 10 years to protect and promote the values of tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy. The bureaucrats at the OECD even threatened to have me tossed in a Mexican jail because I…
US Relying on the Ignorance of Foreign Governments to Propel FATCA Fiscal Imperialism
I wrote recently about the need to draw a line in the sand on FATCA. Long story short, if current efforts to form an international tax cartel are not halted immediately, we can look forward to a future with a bleak economic outlook due to depressed worldwide…
Do You Live in a “Death Spiral” State?
Three years ago, I put together a “Moocher Index” that measured the degree to which non-poor people in a state were benefiting from redistribution programs. As you can see if you click on the nearby table, Vermont was the worst state, followed by Mississippi, Maine,…
Gerard Depardieu Meets John Galt
Another Frenchman has “gone Galt.” First, it was France’s richest entrepreneur. Now, it’s the nation’s most famous actor. Gerard Depardieu has officially announced – in a letter to France’s thuggish Prime Minister – that he is tired of paying 85 percent of his income…
FATCA Opposition Spans Ideological Spectrum
Burdens created by the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, particularly on Americans living abroad, are so obviously unjust that they are now raising the ire of more than just those of us ideologically and philosophically opposed to large government. Writing for…
The $822,000-per-Year Bureaucrat and the Death of California
Hopefully we’re all disgusted when insiders rig the system to rip off taxpayers. And I suspect you’re not surprised to know that the worst examples come from California, which is in a race with Illinois to see which state can become the Greece of America. Well, the…
A Simple Lesson of Policy Diversity from “The Black Swan” Author: Don’t Put All Your Financial Eggs in One Regulatory Basket
Several months ago, I wrote a rather wonky post explaining that the western world became rich in large part because of jurisdictional competition. Citing historians, philosophers, economists, and other great thinkers, I explained that the rivalry made possible by…