As a Yankees fan, it was particularly exciting that Derek Jeter became only the second player to get his 3000th hit with a home run. As a student of human nature, it was remarkable that the fan who caught the ball, Christian Lopez, returned it to Jeter instead of selling it for as much as […]

One of the tax increases buried in Obamacare was an onerous and intrusive “1099″ scheme that would have required businesses to collect tax identification numbers for just about any vendor and then send paperwork to the IRS whenever they did more than $600 of business. Send one of your sales people to New York for […]

Read it and weep. Or maybe I should say look at it and weep. I suppose this is a good time to recycle my flat tax video. I don’t mention this in the video, but Hong Kong’s flat tax system, which has been around for more than 60 years, requires less than 200 pages. Slovakia’s […]

There hasn’t been much good economic news in recent years, but one bright spot for the economy is that the United States is a haven for foreign investors and this has helped attract more than $10 trillion to American capital markets according to Commerce Department data. These funds are hugely important for the health of […]

I suppose there are some good jokes to make about Pakistan employing transgender tax collectors in an attempt to coerce more money from taxpayers, but I’m enough of a policy wonk to have serious questions about the system. First, why does the government need to “shame” people. Can’t they just arrest taxpayers and/or seize their […]

Happy Tax Day! Or, if you’re like me, happy tax extension filing day. In the past couple of days, I’ve posted about the benefits of a better tax system and the unfairness of the current system. Those were compelling posts, at least I hope. But now let’s tie these themes together. Art Laffer has a […]

Since it is tax-filing season and we all want to honor our wonderful tax system, let’s go into the archives and show this video from last year about the onerous compliance costs of the internal revenue code. Narrated by Hiwa Alaghebandian of the American Enterprise Institute, the mini-documentary explains how needless complexity creates an added […]

My previous post looked at the federal government’s troubling decision to investigate, persecute, prosecute, and ultimately imprison a random home-loan borrower named Charlie Engle for the crime of mortgage fraud. Citing a column on the legal fallout from the financial crisis in the New York Times, I noted that it was rather odd that the […]

One of my many frustrations of working in Washington is dealing with perpetual-motion-machine assertions. The classic example is Keynesian economics, which is based on the notion that you magically create additional economic activity by having the government spend money instead of allowing the private sector to decide how it gets spent (in an especially bizarre […]

The IRS certainly deserves lots of condemnation for its rogue actions, including a $200 fine for a taxpayer who supposedly underpaid his tax bill by 4 pennies. But the tax-collection agency also should be criticized for blundering incompetence. In the past, I’ve mocked the Internal Revenue Service for sending checks to convicts. Now it’s time […]