President Obama is stubbornly clinging to his ideological agenda of bigger government and class warfare. Wasteful programs magically become “investments” for growth, and higher tax rates get turned into “shared sacrifice.” Interestingly, we already know what eventually happens with this approach. Europe’s welfare states are now dealing with the wreckage of Obamanomics-type policies and the […]
read more...The big-government advocates at the Center for American Progress recently released a series of charts designed to prove America is a low-tax nation. I wish this was the case. The United States does have a lower overall tax burden than Europe, which is shown in one of the CAP charts, but that doesn’t exactly demonstrate […]
read more...I was on Larry Kudlow’s CNBC show recently, where I debated against Robert Reich. I made (what I hope are) good points about the Laffer Curve and the big-government policies of both Bush and Obama. The bad news, as least from a personal perspective, is that the last half of the interview became a debate […]
read more...My good friend Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University did a very illuminating interview with Bloomberg about the serial inaccuracy of government fiscal forecasts. Veronique uses health care as an example, giving particular attention to the Medicare program. One obvious implication is that we should have zero faith in the […]
read more...As I have explained elsewhere, tax increases are a bad idea – unless you favor bigger government. And I’ve already added my two cents to the tax debate between Senator Coburn and Grover Norquist regarding the desirability of higher taxes. So it won’t surprise anyone to know that I fully agree with this new video […]
read more...A new study from the Adam Smith Institute in the United Kingdom provides overwhelming evidence that class-warfare tax policy is grossly misguided and self-destructive. The authors examine the likely impact of the 10-percentage point increase in the top income tax rate, which was imposed as an election-year stunt by former Gordon Brown and then kept […]
read more...Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University is a big booster of the discredited notion that foreign aid is a cure-all for poverty in the developing world, but he is now branching out and saying silly things about policy in other areas. In a column for the Financial Times, he complains that tax competition is forcing governments […]
read more...I don’t particularly like soccer and I’m not normally a fan of the research of Professor Emannuel Saez, so it is rather surprising that I like Professor Saez’s new research on taxes and soccer. While Saez may have a reputation for doing work that often is used by advocates of class warfare, his latest research […]
read more...Greetings from frigid Minnesota. I’m in this misplaced part of the North Pole to testify before both the Senate and House Tax Committees today on issues related to the Laffer Curve. In other words, I will be discussing how governments should measure the revenue impact of changes in tax policy – what is sometimes known […]
read more...I write about the Laffer Curve so often that I’m surprised people don’t run away screaming. But I’ll continue to be a pest because I want people to understand that you can’t just look at changes in tax rates when predicting changes in tax revenue. You also have to consider changes in taxable income. Simply […]
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