I’m not sure I could pick out a significant victory for human freedom in 2012. Maybe I’m missing something, but the only good policy that’s even worth mentioning was the decision in Wisconsin to rein in the special privileges and excessive compensation for government workers. But there definitely have been lots of sad developments. The […]
read more...Even though I knew some people would call me Scrooge, I wrote a few days ago about why we should get rid of the tax deduction for charitable contributions in exchange for lower tax rates. Simply stated, I’m a big advocate of fundamental tax reform, and I would like to scrap the corrupt internal revenue […]
read more...I’ve been very critical of Obama’s class-warfare ideology because it leads to bad fiscal policy. But perhaps it is time to give some attention to other arguments against high tax rates. Robert Samuelson, a columnist for the Washington Post, has a very important insight about tax rates and sleaze in Washington. His column is mostly […]
read more...I’ve been arguing against higher taxes because of my concerns that more revenue will simply lead to a bigger burden of government spending. Yes, I realize it is theoretically possible that a tax hike could be part of a political deal that produces a good outcome, such as entitlement reform. But that doesn’t seem to […]
read more...In addition to being my former debating partner, Richard Epstein is one of America’s premiere public intellectuals. You can watch him make mincemeat out of George Soros in this video, for instance, and you can listen to his astute observations about his former law school colleague Barack Obama in this video. Given his stature, I’m […]
read more...I have a handful of simple rules for good tax policy. Keep government small, since it’s impossible to have a reasonable tax system with a bloated welfare state. Keep tax rates low to minimize penalties against income, production, and wealth creation. Since capital formation is critical for long-run growth, don’t double-tax income that is saved […]
read more...I periodically mock Republicans for being the stupid party. Yes, some of them probably mean well, but they have this lemming-like instinct to throw themselves on hand grenades. But I noted back in April that the supposedly right-wing Christian Democrat party in Slovakia put on a display of stupidity that was so mind-boggling that it […]
read more...Even though I’m not a Romney fan, I sometimes feel compelled to defend him against leftist demagoguery. But instead of writing about tax havens, as I’ve done in the past, today we’re going to look at incremental tax reform. The left has been loudly asserting that the middle class would lose under Mitt Romney’s plan […]
read more...I appeared on CNBC a couple of days ago to discuss a new report which claims that some big U.S. companies “only” paid 9 percent of their income to the government. While I’m a bit skeptical of the numbers (did it include the taxes paid to foreign governments, for instance, which can be substantial for […]
read more...I have great fondness for Estonia, in part because it was the first post-communist nation to adopt the flat tax, but also because of the country’s remarkable scenery. Most recently, though, I’ve been bragging about Estonia (along with Latvia and Lithuania, the other two Baltic nations) for implementing genuine spending cuts. I’ve argued that Estonia […]
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