President Obama’s fiscal policy is a dismal mixture. On spending, he wants a European-style welfare state. On taxes, he is fixated on class-warfare tax policy. If we want to know the consequences of that approach, we can look at the ongoing collapse of Greece. Or, if we don’t like overseas examples, we can look at […]

Even though he is a foolish statist, I wanted Francois Hollande to win the French presidency. Sarkozy was a statist as well, after all, and my “Richard Nixon Disinfectant Rule” says that it’s better to have the out-of-the-closet statist prevail in such contests in hopes that the supposedly right-of-center party can then regroup and offer […]

A good tax system (like the flat tax) does not impose extra layers of tax on income that is saved and invested. I’ve tried to emphasize this point with a flowchart, and I’ve defended so-called trickle-down economics, which is nothing more than the common-sense notion that investment boosts wages for workers by making them more […]

The silly debate about the “Buffett Rule” is really an argument about the extent to which there should be more double taxation of income that is saved and invested. Politicians conveniently forget that dividends and capital gains get hit by the corporate income tax. And since America now has the developed world’s highest corporate income […]

I speculated last year that the political elite finally might be realizing that higher tax rates are not the solution to Greece’s fiscal situation. Simply stated, you can only squeeze so much blood out of a stone, and pushing tax rates higher cripples growth and drives more people into the underground economy. Well, it turns […]