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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

What do the flat tax and national sales tax (and even the value-added tax) have in common? As I explain in this Senate Budget Committee testimony, they are all single-rate, consumption-base, loophole-free tax systems that fulfill the key principles of good tax policy. But good theory doesn’t operate in a vacuum, which is why I […]

Early in 2010, I wrote about a reprehensible IRS plan to create a cartel in the tax preparation industry, which would screw small firms and entrepreneurs to help line the pockets of big companies such as H&R Block. And, earlier this year, I specifically criticized the IRS Commissioner for moving ahead with this scheme, which […]

Last year, while lounging on the beach in the Caribbean…oops, I mean while doing off-site research, I developed the first iteration of a rule to describe how fiscal policy should operate. Good fiscal policy exists when the private sector grows faster than the public sector, while fiscal ruin is inevitable if government spending grows faster […]

This interview with the IRS Commissioner is really irritating. He wants us to believe that all the problems exist because of bad laws enacted by Congress. I certainly agree that the crowd in Washington is venal, corrupt, and duplicitous. But the IRS takes a bad situation and makes it worse, whether we’re looking at gross […]

Leftists want higher tax rates and they want greater tax compliance. But they have a hard time understanding that those goals are inconsistent. Simply stated, people respond to incentives. When tax rates are punitive, folks earn and report less taxable income, and vice-versa. When tax rates increase, sometimes they engage in tax avoidance, lowering their […]

Perhaps the title of this post is a bit unfair since the International Monetary Fund is good on some issues, such as reducing subsidies. And some of the economists at the IMF even produce good research. But I can’t help but get agitated that this behemoth global bureaucracy wants more money when it has a […]