Another attack on tax competition.

If poor nation’s want to catch up, they need to liberalize their economies.

In the Irish tax policy debate, Bono knows better than bosses from the leading Irish labor union. Moreover, the U.S. could learn a lot from Ireland’s success with a pro-growth corporate tax policy.

There’s an old joke about two guys camping in the woods, when suddenly they see a hungry bear charging over a hill in their direction. One of the guys starts lacing up his sneakers and his friend says, “What are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear.” The other guys says, I don’t have to […]

Cigarette butt, to be more specific. All over the world, governments impose draconian taxes on tobacco, and then they wind up surprised that projected revenues don’t materialize. We’ve seen this in Bulgaria and Romania, and we’ve seen this Laffer Curve effect in Washington, DC, and Michigan. Even the Government Accountability Office has found big Laffer […]

With the exception of a few top-notch thinkers such as Pierre Bessard and Allister Heath, there are very few people in Europe who can intelligently analyze public policy, particularly with regard to fiscal issues. I don’t know if Fredrik Erixon of the Brussels-based European Centre for International Political Economy is even close to being in […]

I wrote last year about a backlash from long-suffering Greek taxpayers. These people – the ones pulling the wagon rather than riding in the wagon – are being raped and pillaged by a political class that is trying to protect the greedy interest groups that benefit from Greece’s bloated public sector. We now have another […]

I’ve always been proud of my Irish heritage, but now I’m having to reconsider. As is so often the case when something goes awry, the blame belongs to a politician (this Craig Ferguson joke is right on the mark). Michael Higgins, the President-Elect of Ireland, has lived a very comfortable life sucking on the government […]

The Congressional Budget Office has just released the update to its Economic and Budget Outlook. There are several things from this new report that probably deserve commentary, including a new estimate that unemployment will “remain above 8 percent until 2014.” This certainly doesn’t reflect well on the Obama White House, which claimed that flushing $800 […]

It’s not often that I am unenthusiastic about the possibility of a nation reducing its corporate tax rate. But when the country is doing the right thing for the wrong reason, I hope that feelings of ambivalence are understandable. In this case, some Irish politicians are talking about using a lower corporate tax rate as […]