by Dan Mitchell | Dec 8, 2011 | Blogs, Taxation
To be blunt, I’m not a big fan of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. But my animosity isn’t because OECD bureaucrats threatened to have me arrested and thrown in a Mexican jail. Instead, I don’t like the Paris-based bureaucracy because it...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 26, 2011 | Blogs, Uncategorized
It isn’t fair to compare and contrast the views of a distinguished economist with the envious ramblings of a career politician/community activist. But it’s also not right for the government to use coercion to impose bad policy, so I don’t feel guilty about sharing...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 14, 2011 | Blogs, Economics, Flat Tax, Laffer Curve, Taxation
Alan Blinder has a distinguished resume. He’s a professor at Princeton and he served as Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve. So I was interested to see he authored an attack on the flat tax – and I was happy after I read his column. Why? Well, because his arguments...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 6, 2011 | Blogs, Economics, Laffer Curve, Taxation
One of my frustrating missions in life is to educate policy makers on the Laffer Curve. This means teaching folks on the left that tax policy affects incentives to earn and report taxable income. As such, I try to explain, this means it is wrong to assume a simplistic...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 24, 2011 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Europe, Government Spending
A couple of months ago, after reading an excellent column in the semi-official newspaper of the Vatican, I joked that we should send Obama to Rome for an economics lesson. I now completely retract that statement. There may be some economically astute people who write...