by Dan Mitchell | Jun 17, 2017 | Blogs, Tax Competition, Taxation
Whenever I debate my left-wing friends on tax policy, they routinely assert that taxes don’t matter. They argue that we don’t have to worry about the Laffer Curve because high tax rates don’t discourage taxable income. They argue that we don’t have to worry about...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 17, 2017 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Tax Competition, Taxation
Mancur Olson (1932-1998) was a great economist who came up with a very useful analogy to help explain the behavior of many governments. He pointed out that a “roving bandit” has an incentive to maximize short-run plunder by stealing everything from victims (i.e. a 100...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 26, 2016 | Blogs, Economics
There’s a somewhat famous quote from Adam Smith (“there is a great deal of ruin in a nation“) about the ability of a country to survive and withstand lots of bad public policy. I’ve tried to get across the same point by explaining that you don’t need perfect policy,...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 6, 2016 | Blogs, Europe
Back in 2012, I wrote a detailed article explaining that Europe became rich in part because Europe didn’t exist. The geographic landmass of Europe existed, of course, but the continent was characterized by massive political fragmentation. And this absence of...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 20, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Tax Competition, Tax Harmonization, Taxation
I’ve previously written about the bizarre attack that the European Commission has launched against Ireland’s tax policy. The bureaucrats in Brussels have concocted a strange theory that Ireland’s pro-growth tax system provides “state aid” to companies like Apple (in...
