It’s hard to keep track of all the tax hikes that President Obama is proposing, but it’s very simple to recognize his main target – the evil, nasty, awful people known as the rich. Or, as Obama identifies them, the “millionaires and billionaires” who happen to have yearly incomes of more than $200,000. Whether the […]

Wow, this is remarkable. The alternative minimum tax (AMT) is one of the most-hated features of the tax code. It is such a nightmare of complexity that even Democrats routinely have supported “patches” and “band-aids” to protect millions of additional households from getting trapped in this surreal parallel tax universe – one that requires taxpayers […]

I’m normally disappointed when religious figures comment on economics, particularly since they often turn the individual call to charity into a blank check for government-coerced redistribution. This runs contrary to individual choice, free will, and morality. So I’m delighted that Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, writing for  L’Osservatore Romano, the quasi-official newspaper of the Vatican,  persuasively explains […]

I enjoy mocking the French every so often, including posts about the nation’s absurd fiscal policy, its protesting government workers, its oddball laws against meanness, its penchant for high taxes, and its shallow attempts to redefine success. Sometimes, I even criticize the French when they move policy in the right direction. But it’s worth pointing […]

Warren Buffett’s at it again. He has a column in the New York Times complaining that he has been coddled by the tax code and that “rich” people should pay higher taxes. My first instinct is to send Buffett the website where people can voluntarily pay extra money to the federal government. I’ve made this […]

If Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama are neck-and-neck competitors in the contest to be the public face of incompetent statism in America, then the competition in Europe is between Herman van Rompuy and Olga Stefou. But since I’ve already crowned Ms. Stefou as the Queen of Greece, then Mr Rompuy (a.k.a., President of the Euorpean Council) […]

Politicians last night announced the framework of a deal to increase the debt limit. In addition to authorizing about $900 billion more red ink right away, it would require immediate budget cuts of more than $900 billion, though “immediate” means over 10 years and “budget cuts” means spending still goes up (but not as fast […]

In an ideal world, GOPers would hold firm and not pass any debt limit until Democrats agreed to enact something like the Ryan plan/Cut-Cap-Balance. But I’ve never thought that was a realistic strategy. When we got to the drop-dead point, Obama would have Geithner or Bernanke give an inflammatory speech designed to panic financial markets […]

I testified earlier today before the Joint Economic Committee about budget process reform. As part of the Q&A session after the testimony, one of the Democratic members made a big deal about the fact that federal tax revenues today are “only” consuming about 15 percent of GDP. And since the long-run average is about 18 […]

That seems like a joke question, but it’s an apparently serious belief of Bruce Bartlett, a former supply-sider and Bush Administration official who has flipped sides and joined the left. I’ve known Bruce for decades and he’s a fun guy to hang out with, but he’s gone hard left in recent years, pimping for a […]