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 […]

While I disagree with statists, I sometimes admire their discipline. They are very good at staying “on message.” I am 100 percent confident, for instance, that they intend big tax hikes on the middle class, even though they would piously swear an oath to the contrary. Indeed, I suspect more than 90 percent of them […]

I like sequestration. Automatic budget cuts might not be the best way of reducing the burden of government spending, but a sequester is better than leaving the federal budget on autopilot. Particularly since the “cuts” are mostly just reductions in already-scheduled increases. The only exception, at least in the short run, is the defense budget. […]

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 […]

Montgomery County in Maryland is not exactly a hotbed of free market thinking or a bastion of limited government. It’s one of the richest counties in the nation, but not because of entrepreneurship and wealth creation. Instead, it’s a bedroom community for over-paid bureaucrats, corrupt lobbyists, fat-cat contractors, and other ne’er-do-wells who commute into Washington […]

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 […]

With all the fiscal troubles in Greece, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and Italy, there’s not much attention being paid to Cyprus. But the Mediterranean island nation is a good case study illustrating the economic dangers of big government. For all intents and purposes, Cyprus is now bankrupt, and the only question that remains to be answered […]

Every day brings more and more evidence that Obamanomics is failing in Europe.  I wrote some “Observations on the European Farce” last week, but the news this morning is even more surreal. Let’s start with France, where I endorsed the explicit socialist over the implicit socialist precisely because of a morbid desire to see a […]

Since I’ve written several times that the United States will face a fiscal crisis if entitlement programs aren’t reformed, you won’t be surprised to see that I repeat those points in this CNBC debate. But I’m not happy with my performance. Not because my leftist opponent grabbed more air time (mostly because the host started […]

It seems that any argument about the economy eventually boils down to the core issue of whether government spending acts as a stimulus or whether it is – in the words of Thomas Sowell – a sedative that undermines prosperity. So when Robert Reich and I went on Erin Burnett’s CNN show to discuss Obama’s […]