I’ve already posted the Cato Institute’s overnight response to the President’s state-of-the-Union speech. Here’s the Dan Mitchell pre-SOTU speech to congressional staffers. I’ve already had people ask me for the charts I used in the speech. Here’s the double taxation chart. Here’s the tax complexity chart. Here’s the data on the Laffer Curve in the […]

President Obama’s two biggest “achievements” since taking office are the so-called stimulus and government-run healthcare. But neither one of those policies are popular, so the President largely ignored them during his state-of-the-union address and instead focused on using the tax code to promote “fairness.” But fairness doesn’t mean treating everyone equally by adopting a flat […]

One year ago, I wrote about how the French government was getting unexpected additional revenues following the implementation of lower tax rates. This is the Laffer Curve in action, and it’s happening again in France, only this time because the government reduced the wealth tax. Here’s part of the story at Tax-news.com. France’s solidarity tax […]

The German Chancellor and French President have put together a plan to boost growth. Sounds like a good goal, but what specifically are they proposing? Some of the obvious ideas include: Lowering tax rates to boost incentives for productive behavior. Reducing the burden of government spending to allow more efficient allocation of labor and capital. […]

I’ve written several times about a proposed IRS regulation that would force American banks to put foreign law above U.S. law. I’ve repeatedly warned that the scheme, which would force financial institutions to report the deposit interest they pay to foreigners, is bad economic policy, bad regulatory policy, and bad banking policy. My arguments have […]

In the past 20-plus years, I’ve seen all sorts of arguments for class-warfare taxation. These include: President Obama says he wants higher tax rates for fairness, even if the government doesn’t collect any revenue. Rich leftists say they want higher taxes because they can afford to pay, but then refuse when offered a chance to […]

I realize this is about as productive as talking to a brick wall, but I’m going to explain some basic economics to statist French policymakers (oops, pardon the redundancy). This heroic – albeit surely futile – impulse is triggered by a recent proposal from President Sarkozy to supposedly boost job creation by lowering payroll taxes […]

Last January, I identified five things that worried me for 2011. Here’s what had me concerned, along with some ex post facto analysis about whether I was right to fret: 1. A back-door bailout of the states from the Federal Reserve – Thankfully, I was way off base with this concern. Not only was there […]

I’ve written before about whether California is the Greece of America, in part because of crazy policies such as overpaid bureaucrats and expensive forms of political correctness, And we all know that California has one of the nation’s greediest governments, imposing confiscatory tax rates on a shrinking pool of productive citizens. So it is hardly […]

I have many frustrations in my life, and near the top of the list is the conservative fixation about balancing the budget. This view is very misguided. Red ink isn’t good, but the fiscal problem in America (as well as Europe, Japan, etc) is that the public sector is too big. Milton Friedman was right […]