by Dan Mitchell | Aug 19, 2014 | Blogs, Economics, Taxation
What do cigarettes and capital gains have in common? Well, they both start with the same letter, so maybe the Cookie Monster could incorporate them into his favorite song, but I’m thinking about something else. Specifically, both cigarettes and capital gains tell us...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 30, 2014 | Blogs, Financial Privacy, Tax Competition, Taxation
It’s a bad idea when governments demand information on your bank accounts and investments so they can impose economically destructive double taxation. It’s a worse idea when they also demand the right to tax economic activity in other jurisdictions (otherwise known as...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 6, 2014 | Blogs, Economics, Financial Privacy, Tax Competition, Taxation
I’ve argued that subsidies for the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are the most destructively wasteful outlays in the federal budget. At least on a per-dollar-spent basis. But what if we did the same exercise on the tax side of...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 4, 2013 | Blogs, Economics, Tax Competition, Tax Havens, Taxation
I like tax havens for the simple reason that we need some ways of restraining the greed of the political class. Simply stated, if profligate politicians think that we are “captive customers,” they are much more likely to impose (even) higher tax rates (as we’ve seen...
by Dan Mitchell | Jun 26, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Tax Competition, Tax Havens, Taxation
In a recent interview with the BBC, I basically accused UK Prime Minister David Cameron of being a feckless and clueless demagogue who is engaged in a desperate effort to resuscitate his political future. I shouldn’t have been so kind. Cameron manages to combine bad...