by Dan Mitchell | Oct 17, 2017 | Blogs, Economics, Laffer Curve
I gave a couple of speeches about fiscal policy in Australia late last week. During the Q&A sessions (as so often happens when I speak overseas), the audiences mostly asked questions about Donald Trump. I generally give a three-part response. I tell them I was...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 16, 2017 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
I’ve learned that it’s more important to pay attention to hard numbers rather than political rhetoric. Republicans, for instance, love to beat their chests about spending restraint, but I never believe them without first checking the numbers. Likewise, Democrats have...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 15, 2017 | Blogs, Taxation
When companies want to boost sales, they sometimes tinker with products and then advertise them as “new and improved.” In the case of governments, though, I suspect “new” is not “improved.” The British territory of Jersey, for instance, has a very good tax system. It...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 14, 2017 | Blogs, Taxation
I’m not a fan of the International Monetary Fund. Like many other international bureaucracies, it pushes a statist agenda. The IMF’s support for bad policy gets me so agitated that I’ve sometimes referred to it as the “dumpster fire” or “Dr. Kevorkian” of the global...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 10, 2017 | Blogs, Tax Competition, Taxation
I shared some academic research last year showing that top-level inventors are very sensitive to tax policy and that they migrate from high-tax nations to low-tax jurisdictions. Now we have some new scholarly research showing that they also migrate from high-tax...
