by Dan Mitchell | Feb 6, 2018 | Blogs, Tax Havens, Taxation
According to bureaucrats at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, so-called tax havens are terrible and should be shut down. Their position is grossly hypocritical since they get tax-free salaries while pushing for higher taxes on...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 1, 2018 | Blogs, Tax Competition, Taxation
If I was a citizen of the United Kingdom, I would have voted to leave the European Union for the simple reason that even a rickety lifeboat is better than a slowly sinking ship. More specifically, demographic changes and statist policies are a crippling...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 13, 2017 | Blogs, Tax Competition, Taxation
When Ronald Reagan slashed tax rates in America in the 1980s, the obvious direct effect was more prosperity in America. But the under-appreciated indirect effect of Reaganomics was that it helped generate more prosperity elsewhere in the world. Not because Americans...
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...