When I think about taxes, my first instinct is to rip up the corrupt internal revenue code and implement a simple and fair flat tax. When I think about Social Security, my first instinct is to copy dozens of other nations and implement personal retirement accounts. Unfortunately, the political system rarely generates opportunities to enact […]

Governor Rick Perry of Texas is being attacked by two rivals in the GOP presidential race. His sin, if you can believe it, is that he told the truth (as acknowledged by everyone from Paul Krugman to Milton Friedman) about Social Security being a Ponzi scheme. Here’s an excerpt from Philip Klein’s column in the […]

The editors at Bloomberg have decided that condemning younger workers to a more dismal future is the best way to deal with the Social Security program’s giant long-run shortfall. They want workers to pay higher taxes to prop up the bankrupt system. And, in exchange for those higher taxes, they want to give people less […]

Maybe I’m just old fashioned, or maybe I’m a bit stiff-necked, but I will never relent in my opposition to tax increases so long as the crowd in Washington is spending money on things that are not appropriate functions of the federal government. But that’s just one obstacle that has to be overcome. I will […]

The Economist magazine has a couple of good articles about Australia’s increasingly enviable economic status. Here’s a blurb from the first article, which outlines the pro-market reforms that enabled today’s prosperity. Only a dozen economies are bigger, and only six nations are richer—of which Switzerland alone has even a third as many people. Australia is […]

I wrote yesterday about the shocking case of a millionaire collecting food stamps. Today, I have an equally disgusting story of government waste. The Social Security program is actuarially bankrupt, with unfunded liabilities of several trillion dollars. Our topic today deals with the disability portion of Social Security, which is in especially poor shape, with […]

I was excited when I saw that Professor Martin Feldstein of Harvard University had a column in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal entitled, “Private Accounts Can Save Social Security.” This is great, I thought, another person advocating the kind of pro-growth, pro-freedom reform which has taken hold in about 30 nations all over the world. Imagine […]

Under current law, Social Security is supposed to be an “earned benefit,” where taxes are akin to insurance premiums that finance retirement benefits for workers. And because there is a cap on retirement benefits, this means there also is a “wage-base cap” on the amount of income that is hit by the payroll tax. For […]

One of my presentations at CPAC addressed America’s long-term entitlement crisis. I was part of a panel organized by the National Taxpayers Union, and I discussed how to solve the long-run fiscal problems caused by Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The lighting and focus leave something to be desired, but hopefully my message is crisp […]