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 financial privacy (read Pierre Bessard and Allister Heath to understand […]

I was a bit surprised couple of years ago to read that an American company re-located to Canada to benefit from better tax policy. But I wasn’t totally shocked by the news because Canada has been lowering tax rates, reducing the burden of government spending, and taking other steps to make its economy more competitive. […]

Every so often, you read something so ridiculously stupid and absurd that you assume that you’re being pranked. So you look to the date of the article to see if it says April 1. Or you look at the Internet address to see if it’s a parody of a real website. So when I read […]

In previous posts, I put together tutorials on the Laffer Curve, tax competition, and the economics of government spending. Today, we’re going to look at the issue of tax reform. The focus will be the flat tax, but this analysis applies equally to national sales tax systems such as the Fair Tax. There are three […]

I appeared on CNBC a couple of days ago to discuss a new report which claims that some big U.S. companies “only” paid 9 percent of their income to the government. While I’m a bit skeptical of the numbers (did it include the taxes paid to foreign governments, for instance, which can be substantial for […]

My friends at Americans for Tax Reform have received a bunch of attention for a new report entitled “Win Olympic Gold, Pay the IRS.” In this clever document, they reveal that athletes could face a tax bill – to those wonderful folks at the IRS – of nearly $9,000 thanks to America’s unfriendly worldwide tax […]

Considering that every economic theory agrees that living standards and worker compensation are closely correlated with the amount of capital in an economy (this picture is a compelling illustration of the relationship), one would think that politicians – particularly those who say they want to improve wages – would be very anxious not to create […]

Mitt Romney is being criticized for supporting “territorial taxation,” which is the common-sense notion that each nation gets to control the taxation of economic activity inside its borders. While promoting his own class-warfare agenda, President Obama recently condemned Romney’s approach. His views, unsurprisingly, were echoed in a New York Times editorial. President Obama raised…his proposals […]

The fiscal nightmare in Europe should be all the proof that’s needed about the dangers of wasteful spending and punitive tax rates. Unfortunately, if his proposals for bigger government and class-warfare tax policy are any indication, President Obama still seems to think those policies would be good for America. American states also are a laboratory, […]

It seems I was put on the planet to educate people about the negative economic impact of excessive government. Though I must be doing a bad job because the burden of the public sector keeps rising. But hope springs eternal. To help make the case, I’ve cited research from international bureaucracies such as the Organization […]