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 […]
read more...I periodically cite new academic research about tax policy and economic activity. I sometimes even publicize research from international bureaucracies showing the link between taxes and growth. I’m not naive enough to think that any particular study will change minds, but when the bulk of the research unambiguously tells us that lower tax rates are […]
read more...Political cartoonists like Michael Ramirez and Chuck Asay are effective because they convey so much with images. But we need more than clever cartoons if we’re going to educate the general population about how government harms the economy and undermines freedom. And that’s why Thomas Sowell is so invaluable. He’s one of the nation’s top […]
read more...Regular readers know that one of my main goals is to preserve and promote tax competition as a means of restraining the greed of the political class. Heck, I almost wound up in a Mexican jail because of my work defending low-tax jurisdictions. As you can imagine, it’s difficult to persuade politicians. After all, why […]
read more...In a recent interview with the BBC, I basically accused UK Prime Minister David Cameron of being a feckless and clueless demagogue who is engaged in a desperate effort to resuscitate his political future. I shouldn’t have been so kind. Cameron manages to combine bad policy and bad morality in a way that is embarrassing […]
read more...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 […]
read more...In my never-ending crusade to push for the right kind of austerity, I appeared on RT to pontificate on the merits of limited government. We got to cover a lot of material, so here’s some augmenting material. 1. The right kind of “austerity” is less government spending, which is why I’m very frustrated that the […]
read more...At the European Resource Bank conference earlier this month, Pierre Bessard from Switzerland’s Institut Liberal spoke on a panel investigating “The Link between the Weight of the State and Economic prosperity.” His presentation included two slides that definitely are worth sharing. The first slide, which is based on research from the Boston Consulting Group, looks at […]
read more...I’m not reluctant to criticize my friends at the Heritage Foundation. In some cases, it is good-natured ribbing because of the Cato-Heritage softball rivalry, but there are also real policy disagreements. For instance, even though it is much better than current policy, I don’t like parts of Heritage’s “Saving the American Dream” budget plan. It’s […]
read more...I’ve repeatedly explained that Keynesian economics doesn’t work because any money the government spends must first be diverted from the productive sector of the economy, which means either higher taxes or more red ink. So unless one actually thinks that politicians spend money with high levels of effectiveness and efficiency, this certainly suggests that growth […]
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