Some things in life are very dependable. Every year, for instance, the swallows return to Capistrano. And you can also count on Dan Mitchell to wax poetic about the looming collapse of French statism. Back in 2011, I said France was engaged in economic self-destruction. In September 2012, I wrote that it was time to start the […]

The welfare state is a nightmare. Programs such as Medicaid are fiscal catastrophes. The food stamp program is riddled with waste. The EITC is easily defrauded, even sending checks to prisoners. And housing subsidies are a recipe for the worst forms of social engineering. The entire system should be tossed in the trash. But what’s […]

There’s a tendency in public life to exaggerate the positive or negative implications of any particular policy. This is why I try to be careful not to overstate the potential benefits of reforms I like, such as the flat tax. Yes, we would get better growth and there would be less corruption in Washington, but […]

I’m very worried about America’s fiscal future. Simply stated, data from several sources (BIS, OECD, and IMF) indicates that we face a future Greek-style fiscal crisis unless policy makers implement genuine entitlement reform. Unfortunately, politicians have little incentive to control spending and reform programs if they think that higher taxes are an option. So how […]

What’s the biggest fiscal problem facing the developed world? To an objective observer, the answer is a rising burden of government spending, caused by poorly designed entitlement programs, growing levels of dependency, and unfavorable demographics. The combination of these factors helps to explain why almost all industrialized nations – as confirmed by BIS, OECD, and […]

Regular readers know that one of my main goals is to preserve and promote tax competition as a means of restraining the greed of the political class. Heck, I almost wound up in a Mexican jail because of my work defending low-tax jurisdictions. As you can imagine, it’s difficult to persuade politicians. After all, why […]

Because we live in an upside-down world, Switzerland is being persecuted for being a productive, peaceful nation that has a strong human rights policy with regards to privacy. More specifically, politicians from high-tax nations resent the fact that investors flock to Switzerland to benefit from good policies, and they are pressuring the Swiss government to […]

I’ve been very critical of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Most recently, I criticized the Paris-based bureaucracy for making the rather remarkable assertion that a value-added tax would boost growth and employment. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The OECD has allied itself with the nutjobs from the so-called Occupy movement […]

I’m not a big fan of the German government. Angela Merkel has a disturbing desire to impose fiscal and political union on the European continent. And even the supposedly free market Free Democratic Party seems perfectly comfortable with a gradual descent into statism. No wonder I mocked the Washington Post for labeling Germany a “fiscally […]