The IMF’s Creative New Rationale for Higher Tax Rates

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...

Higher Tax Rates = Fewer Superstar Innovators

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...

Four (Past) Presidents Debunk the Case for Higher Taxes

by Dan Mitchell | Sep 30, 2017 | Blogs, Taxation

I’m currently in Iceland for a conference organized by the European Students for Liberty. I spoke earlier today on the case for lower taxes and I made six basic points. Taxes undermine prosperity. Taxes reduce competitiveness. Taxes are self-destructive. Taxes are...

European-Sized Government Means Ever-Rising Tax Burdens for Lower-Income and Middle-Class Taxpayers

by Dan Mitchell | Sep 20, 2017 | Big Government, Blogs, Taxation

I argued last year that leftists should be nice to rich people because upper-income taxpayers finance the vast majority of the American welfare state according to government data. Needless to say, my comment about being “nice” was somewhat sarcastic. But I was making...

The European Welfare State Means a Stifling Burden for Middle-Class Taxpayers

by Dan Mitchell | Aug 8, 2017 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Taxation

According to leftists like Bernie Sanders, European nations have wonderfully generous welfare states financed by high tax rates on the rich. They’re partly right. There are very large welfare states in Europe (though I wouldn’t use “wonderfully” and “generous” to...