By every possible metric, one would expect corporate tax rates to be higher in Europe. The burden of government spending is higher across the Atlantic, so that presumably would lead to pressure for a higher corporate tax rate. The affinity for class warfare and…
Daily Analysis
David Cameron’s Foolish (or Cynical) Naivete about the Laffer Curve
Even though he’s allowing the budget to grow twice as fast as inflation, some people seem to think the new U.K. Prime Minster is a fiscal conservative. I’m skeptical. Not only is spending rising much too fast (there are promises of more restraint in the future, but…
Halfway Around the World, Fighting for Freedom, Low Taxes, and Sovereignty
I’m in Singapore for two days to help fight the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a statist international bureaucracy based in Paris. The OECD has something called a global tax forum, the purpose of which is to harass so-called tax havens in hopes…
Every Patriotic American Should Support the President
I wish the title of this blog post referred to the President of the United States, but instead our praise is directed across the Atlantic, to the President of the Czech Republic, who wisely has warned against giving “global governance” powers to the international…
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…
America’s Greediest State and Local Governments
I ran across two interesting lists showing how politicians at the state and local level are often just as bad as the ones in Washington, DC. First, Forbes has an article identifying the 10 states with the highest income tax rates. The top rate is a big deterrent to…
Should American Taxpayers Subsidize Left-Wing Bureaucrats in Paris (Who get Tax-Free Salaries) so They Can Advocate Higher Taxes in America?
The federal government is capable of enormous waste, which obviously is bad news, but the worst forms of government spending are those that actually leverage bad things. The old welfare system, for instance, paid people not to work and have babies out of wedlock (this…
Taxes Are for the Little People, not John Kerry
In the future, all dictionary publishers should get rid of their existing definitions for “hypocrisy” and replace them with a photo of Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. He’s just been caught committing the horrible sin of saving his family more than $500,000 by…
One Fish, Two Fish, High Tax, Low Tax
With apologies to Dr. Seuss, maybe that will be the name of a future book I’ll write about the anti-competitive impact of high tax rates. And one of my chapters will be about what we can learn from the states. Richard Rahn’s column in the Washington Times reviews some…