My favorite Heritage Foundation publication (other than…ahem…my studies on government spending and the flat tax) is the annual Index of Economic Freedom. Like the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World and the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, the Index is a broad measure of liberty to engage in voluntary exchange in a system of secure property rights and honest government. […]

It’s time to extinguish any lingering Christmas cheer. Today’s topic is over-bearing and tyrannical tax administration. To be more specific, we’re going to look at the extent to which taxpayers are mistreated during the process of collecting revenue. Yes, the amount that governments steal from you also is important, but that’s a topic we’ve already […]

The Tax Foundation in Washington does some great work on fiscal issues, but I also admire their use of maps when they want to show how various states perform on key indicators. They’re best known for “Tax Freedom Day,” which measures how long people have to work each year before they’ve earned enough to satisfy […]

Back in 2010, I put together a “Moocher Index” as a rough measure of which states had the highest levels of welfare dependency after adjusting for poverty rates. My goal was to answer this question. Is there a greater willingness to sign up for income redistribution programs, all other things being equal, from one state […]

Sometimes I myopically focus on fiscal policy, implying that the key to prosperity is small government. But I’ll freely admit that growth is maximized when you have small government AND free markets. That being said, our goal should be to expand freedom, not merely to have the largest possible GDP. Which is why the Freedom […]