One of the biggest threats against global prosperity is the anti-tax competition project of a Paris-based international bureaucracy known as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD, acting at the behest of the European welfare states that dominate its membership, wants the power to tell nations (including the United States!) what is acceptable […]

Read it and weep. Or maybe I should say look at it and weep. I suppose this is a good time to recycle my flat tax video. I don’t mention this in the video, but Hong Kong’s flat tax system, which has been around for more than 60 years, requires less than 200 pages. Slovakia’s […]

Last night, I spoke at the closing dinner of the European Resource Bank. My message was simple and straightforward: Entitlement programs are killing the developed world. That’s not exactly a surprise, but what may be shocking is America’s relative position. In my remarks, I shared with the audience some data from a 2010 study by […]

Yesterday, I took aim at a truly pathetic human being who lives as an “adult baby.” But what got me upset was not his lifestyle, but rather the fact that he was mooching off the taxpayers thanks to the dumb bureaucrats at the Social Security Administration, who granted him “disability’ status, which means he gets […]

There’s a lot of buzz about a Wall Street Journal interview with Stanley Druckenmiller, in which he argues that a temporary delay in making payments on U.S. government debt (which technically would be a default) would be a small price to pay if it resulted in the long-term spending reforms that are needed to save […]

I got a few cranky emails after my post suggesting the United States should copy the Baltic nations and implement genuine spending cuts. These less-than-friendly pen pals were upset that I favorably commented on the fiscal discipline of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia while failing to reveal that these nations were suffering from high unemployment. From […]

All the talk of spending cuts in Washington is fictitious. Even the House Republican Study Committee budget allows spending to increase, on average, by 1.7 percent each year for the next decade. The Ryan budget, which critics deride for its “savage” cuts, allows spending to rise by an average of 2.8 percent each year. And […]

I spoke yesterday at a press event put together by some of the Tea Party groups. Here’s what I said about the debt limit. I debunked the notion that a higher debt limit was needed to avoid default and explained that the problem is too much spending and that deficits and debt are the symptoms […]

I recently took part in a symposium on “The Budget Deficit and U.S. Competitiveness.” Put together by the Council on Foreign Relations, five of us were asked to concisely explain our thoughts on the issue. Here’s some of what I wrote: Excessive government spending can slow growth by diverting labor and capital from more productive […]

Martin Feldstein’s on a roll, but not in a good way. Earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal, he advocated throwing in the towel on reforming Social Security into a system of personal retirement accounts. Today, in the New York Times, he endorses big tax increases. Rather odd positions for someone who served as […]