by Dan Mitchell | Apr 13, 2015 | Blogs, Economics, Laffer Curve, Taxation
What’s the Laffer Curve? It’s the simple, common-sense observation that there’s not a linear relationship between tax rates and tax revenue. Folks in the private sector understand this principle. No restaurant owner, for instance, would double meal prices and assume...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 12, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs
When writing about the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international bureaucracy based in Paris, my life would be simpler if I created some sort of automatic fill-in-the-blanks system. Something like this. The OECD, subsidized by $____...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 8, 2015 | Blogs, States, Taxation
With tax day looming, let’s wallow in misery by contemplating the burden on America’s taxpayers. But we’ll ignore the angst caused be dealing with an indecipherable tax code and an oppressive IRS and simply focus on the amount of money that gets extracted from our...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 31, 2015 | Blogs, Economics, Taxation, VAT
I warned just last week about the dangers of letting politicians impose a value-added tax. Simply stated, unless the 16th Amendment is repealed and replaced with a new provision forever barring the re-imposition of any taxes on income, a VAT inevitably would be a new...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 25, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending, Taxation
Last week, I applauded the Chairmen of the House and Senate Budget Committees for proposing budgets that complied with my Golden Rule, which means the burden of government would grow slower than the private sector. But my praise was limited because neither budget is...
