I have a handful of simple rules for good tax policy. Keep government small, since it’s impossible to have a reasonable tax system with a bloated welfare state. Keep tax rates low to minimize penalties against income, production, and wealth creation. Since capital formation is critical for long-run growth, don’t double-tax income that is saved […]

I’m in Slovenia where I just finished indoctrinating educating a bunch of students on the importance of Mitchell’s Golden Rule as a means of restraining the burden of government spending. And I emphasized that the fiscal problem in Europe is the size of government, not the fact that nations are having a hard time borrowing […]

Even though I’m not a Romney fan, I sometimes feel compelled to defend him against leftist demagoguery. But instead of writing about tax havens, as I’ve done in the past, today we’re going to look at incremental tax reform. The left has been loudly asserting that the middle class would lose under Mitt Romney’s plan […]

In previous posts, I put together tutorials on the Laffer Curve, tax competition, and the economics of government spending. Today, we’re going to look at the issue of tax reform. The focus will be the flat tax, but this analysis applies equally to national sales tax systems such as the Fair Tax. There are three […]

I appeared on CNBC a couple of days ago to discuss a new report which claims that some big U.S. companies “only” paid 9 percent of their income to the government. While I’m a bit skeptical of the numbers (did it include the taxes paid to foreign governments, for instance, which can be substantial for […]

The silly debate about the “Buffett Rule” is really an argument about the extent to which there should be more double taxation of income that is saved and invested. Politicians conveniently forget that dividends and capital gains get hit by the corporate income tax. And since America now has the developed world’s highest corporate income […]

What do the flat tax and national sales tax (and even the value-added tax) have in common? As I explain in this Senate Budget Committee testimony, they are all single-rate, consumption-base, loophole-free tax systems that fulfill the key principles of good tax policy. But good theory doesn’t operate in a vacuum, which is why I […]

Early in 2010, I wrote about a reprehensible IRS plan to create a cartel in the tax preparation industry, which would screw small firms and entrepreneurs to help line the pockets of big companies such as H&R Block. And, earlier this year, I specifically criticized the IRS Commissioner for moving ahead with this scheme, which […]

Last year, while lounging on the beach in the Caribbean…oops, I mean while doing off-site research, I developed the first iteration of a rule to describe how fiscal policy should operate. Good fiscal policy exists when the private sector grows faster than the public sector, while fiscal ruin is inevitable if government spending grows faster […]

This interview with the IRS Commissioner is really irritating. He wants us to believe that all the problems exist because of bad laws enacted by Congress. I certainly agree that the crowd in Washington is venal, corrupt, and duplicitous. But the IRS takes a bad situation and makes it worse, whether we’re looking at gross […]