Back in 2009, I wrote about various schemes to impose taxes on unhealthy food. At the time, I was primarily concerned about the risks of giving politicians a new source of revenue that would be used to increase the burden of government spending. The folks at Reason TV look at the issue from a different […]

I’m not a big fan of international bureaucracies, mostly because they always seem to promote bad policy such as higher tax rates. The International Monetary Fund is urging higher tax rates and pushing for nations to replace flat tax systems with so-called progressive taxation. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has embraced Obama’s class-warfare […]

I’ve mocked France on several occasions, and I thought Sarkozy was so bad that I figured (in the long run) the election of Hollande was a step in the right direction. But in certain ways, France isn’t as bad as the United States. The New York Times has a big story about French entrepreneurs and […]

President Obama’s fiscal policy is a dismal mixture. On spending, he wants a European-style welfare state. On taxes, he is fixated on class-warfare tax policy. If we want to know the consequences of that approach, we can look at the ongoing collapse of Greece. Or, if we don’t like overseas examples, we can look at […]

Last year, as part of the fight over the debt limit, Congress created a “super-committee” that was designed to produce at least $1.2 trillion of “deficit reduction.” The statists saw this super-committee as a vehicle to seduce Republicans into a tax hike. They knew that some GOPers are perpetually gullible and would be susceptible to […]

Even though he is a foolish statist, I wanted Francois Hollande to win the French presidency. Sarkozy was a statist as well, after all, and my “Richard Nixon Disinfectant Rule” says that it’s better to have the out-of-the-closet statist prevail in such contests in hopes that the supposedly right-of-center party can then regroup and offer […]

I’ve written before how “The Value-Added Tax Would Be a Money Machine for Big Government.” Writing for Bloomberg, Josh Barro has a piece entitled, “Value-Added Tax Would Raise Tons for U.S. Coffers.” So you might think we see eye to eye on this issue, but that would be a rash assumption. While I see a giant […]

I’ve complained endlessly that America’s fiscal problem is too much spending, and that deficits and debt are best understood as symptoms of that underlying disease. So I’m obviously a big fan of this new video from the folks at Learn Liberty. I like how they use several types of measurements to show that there’s plenty […]

Simon Johnson is a professor at MIT and a former IMF official. With that kind of resume, you won’t be surprised to learn that he is much too sympathetic to big government. For instance, we both testified to the Ways & Means Committee last year about the value-added tax, and he sided with all the other […]

Many people think that my opposition to tax increases is ideological, but they’re wrong. If someone told me that I magically had the power to flick a switch and give the country a flat tax, but that simple and fair tax system would only be possible if the rate was set high enough to give […]