In his latest pivot to jobs and the economy, the President spoke earlier today in Tennessee. Much of his speech was tax-spend-and-regulate boilerplate, but he did repackage some of his ideas into a so-called grand bargain. He said he’s willing to cut the corporate tax rate in exchange for a bunch of new spending on […]

What’s the biggest fiscal problem facing the developed world? To an objective observer, the answer is a rising burden of government spending, caused by poorly designed entitlement programs, growing levels of dependency, and unfavorable demographics. The combination of these factors helps to explain why almost all industrialized nations – as confirmed by BIS, OECD, and […]

I’ve relentlessly complained that the United States has the highest corporate tax rate among all developed nations. And if you look at all the world’s countries, our status is still very dismal. According to the the Economist, we have the second highest corporate tax rate, exceeded only by the United Arab Emirates. But some people […]

feel sorry for the people of California.  They’re in a state that faces a very bleak future. And why does the Golden State have a not-so-golden outlook? Because interest groups have effective control of state and local political systems and they use their power to engage in massive rip-offs of taxpayers. One of the main […]

In prior posts, I’ve shared some remarkable numbers on the cost of regulation. Americans spend 8.8 billion hours every year filling out government forms. The economy-wide cost of regulation is now $1.75 trillion. For every bureaucrat at a regulatory agency, 100 jobs are destroyed in the economy’s productive sector. But the long-run damage may be even worse than […]

Whether it’s American politicians trying to extort more taxes from Apple or international bureaucrats trying to boost the tax burden on firms with a global corporate tax return, the left is aggressively seeking to impose harsher fiscal burdens on the business community. A good (or “bad” would a more appropriate word) example of this thinking […]

The Senate is holding a Kangaroo Court designed to smear Apple for not voluntarily coughing up more tax revenue than the company actually owes. Here are four things you need to know. Apple is fully complying with the tax law. There is no suggestion that Apple has done anything illegal. The company is being berated […]

I’ve written many times about how investors, entrepreneurs, small business owners and other successful people migrate from high-tax states to low-tax states. Well, the same thing happens internationally, as France’s greedy politicians are now learning. It’s a lot harder for Americans to escape our tax system, though, in part because of reprehensible exit taxes that […]

I could only use 428 words, but I highlighted the main arguments for tax havens and tax competition in a “Room for Debate” piece for the New York Times. I hope that my contribution is a good addition to the powerful analysis of experts such as Allister Heath and Pierre Bessard. I started with the […]

Regular readers know that I’m a big advocate of the Laffer Curve, which is the common-sense notion that higher tax rates will cause people to change their behavior in ways that reduce taxable income. But that doesn’t mean “all tax cuts pay for themselves.” Yes, that happened when Reagan lowered tax rates on the “rich” […]