by Dan Mitchell | Nov 14, 2011 | Blogs, Economics, Flat Tax, Laffer Curve, Taxation
Alan Blinder has a distinguished resume. He’s a professor at Princeton and he served as Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve. So I was interested to see he authored an attack on the flat tax – and I was happy after I read his column. Why? Well, because his arguments...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 6, 2011 | Blogs, Economics, Laffer Curve, Taxation
One of my frustrating missions in life is to educate policy makers on the Laffer Curve. This means teaching folks on the left that tax policy affects incentives to earn and report taxable income. As such, I try to explain, this means it is wrong to assume a simplistic...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 14, 2011 | Blogs, Economics, Laffer Curve, Taxation
The Laffer Curve is the simple notion that higher tax rates don’t necessarily generate as much loot as politicians expect because taxpayers have less incentive to earn and/or report income. And it works in both directions. Lower tax rates don’t lose as much revenue as...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 20, 2011 | Blogs, Economics, Laffer Curve, Taxation
It’s hard to keep track of all the tax hikes that President Obama is proposing, but it’s very simple to recognize his main target – the evil, nasty, awful people known as the rich. Or, as Obama identifies them, the “millionaires and billionaires” who happen to have...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 17, 2011 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending, Taxation
Thomas Sowell just completed a three-part “Back to the Future” series, looking at a couple of fiscal policy issues. His unifying theme is how the political class fails (perhaps deliberately) to learn from mistakes. In Part I, he decimates President Obama’s new...