There’s an old joke about two guys camping in the woods, when suddenly they see a hungry bear charging over a hill in their direction. One of the guys starts lacing up his sneakers and his friend says, “What are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear.” The other guys says, I don’t have to […]

The business pages are reporting that Chrysler will be fully owned by Fiat after that Italian company buys up remaining shares. I don’t know what this means about the long-term viability of Chrysler, but we can say with great confidence that the company will be better off now that the parent company is headquartered outside the United […]

Back in the 1960s, Clint Eastwood starred in a movie entitled The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I was thinking that might be a good title for today’s post about some new research by Michelle Harding, a tax economist for the OECD. But then I realized that her study on “Taxation of Dividend, Interest, […]

There’s a tendency in public life to exaggerate the positive or negative implications of any particular policy. This is why I try to be careful not to overstate the potential benefits of reforms I like, such as the flat tax. Yes, we would get better growth and there would be less corruption in Washington, but […]

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Bill Clinton. In part, that’s because economic freedom increased and the burden of government spending was reduced during his time in office. Partisans can argue whether Clinton actually deserves the credit for these good results, but I’m just happy we got better policy. Heck, Clinton […]

The Tax Foundation in Washington does some great work on fiscal issues, but I also admire their use of maps when they want to show how various states perform on key indicators. They’re best known for “Tax Freedom Day,” which measures how long people have to work each year before they’ve earned enough to satisfy […]

We have an amazing man-bites-dog story today. Let’s begin with some background information. A member of the European Commission recently warned that: “Tax increases imposed by the Socialist-led government in France have reached a “fatal level”…[and] that a series of tax hikes since the Socialists took power 14 months ago – including €33bn in new […]

I recently speculated whether Detroit’s fiscal problems should be a warning sign for the crowd in Washington. The answer, of course, is yes, though it’s not a perfect analogy. The federal government is in deep trouble because of unsustainable entitlement programs while Detroit got in trouble because of a combination of too much compensation for […]

Maybe this means I’m not a nice person (notwithstanding my high score for tenderness in a recent test), but I can’t help but be happy when I read bad news about fiscal policy in high-tax welfare states. And because I’m a huge fan of tax competition, I get even happier when I find out that […]

The United States is suffering through the weakest economic expansion since the Great Depression, which is a damning indictment of Obamanomics. But that doesn’t mean the United States has the world’s worst-performing economy. Japan’s statist economy has been mired in stagnation for more than 20 years, which is about what you might expect in a […]