Fresh off new delays in its implementation of the disastrous FATCA legislation, the Treasury Department has announced that it is in discussions with more than 50 countries to sign bilateral agreements…
Daily Analysis
Just as “Fair Trade” Means Protectionism for the Benefit of Special Interests, “Fair Tax Competition” Means Tax Harmonization for the Benefit of Politicians
Very few people are willing to admit that they favor protectionism. After all, who wants to embrace a policy associated with the Great Depression? But people sometimes say “I want free trade so long as it’s fair trade.” In most cases, they’re simply protectionists who…
Study from German Economists Shows that Tax Competition and Fiscal Decentralization Limit Income Redistribution
If we want to avoid the kind of Greek-style fiscal collapse implied by this BIS and OECD data, we need some external force to limit the tendency of politicians to over-tax and over-spend. That’s why I’m a big advocate of tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and…
Germany’s Dark Vision for Europe
Like Sweden and Denmark, Germany is a semi-rational welfare state. It generally relies on a market-oriented approach in areas other than fiscal policy, and it avoided the Keynesian excesses that caused additional misery and red ink in America (though it is far from…
Three Cheers for Tax Competition
CF&P’s Brian Garst, in an editorial for the Daily Caller yesterday, observes a disturbing trend in the rhetoric of this year’s Presidential campaign. An unholy alliance of political opportunists and long-time opponents of tax competition has formed and…
Another Much-Needed Defense of Tax Competition and Tax Havens by a British Politician
I sometimes make fun of the English, for reasons ranging from asinine laws to milquetoast politicians to horrid healthcare policy. But at least some U.K. elected officials are willing to stand up for tax competition and fiscal sovereignty by defending low-tax…
Obama and Geithner Advising the Europeans on Fiscal Crisis?!? This Is a Case of the Blind Leading the Blind…on Steroids
This is either frightening or hilarious. The people in Washington who are trying to make America more like Europe are advising the Europeans to double-down on the awful policies that have pushed the continent’s welfare states to insolvency. Here are some of the…
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…
With the Support of the Obama Administration, Paris-Based OECD Now Wants De Facto World Tax Organization as Part of its Anti-Tax Competition Campaign
I’ve been battling the Organization for Economic Cooperation for years, ever since the Paris-based bureaucracy unveiled its “harmful tax competition” project in the late 1990s. Controlled by Europe’s high-tax welfare states, the OECD wants to prop up the fiscal…
Jeffrey Sachs and the Fictional “Race to the Bottom” Caused by Tax Competition
Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University is a big booster of the discredited notion that foreign aid is a cure-all for poverty in the developing world, but he is now branching out and saying silly things about policy in other areas. In a column for the Financial Times, he…