One of my many frustrations of working in Washington is dealing with perpetual-motion-machine assertions. The classic example is Keynesian economics, which is based on the notion that you magically create additional economic activity by having the government spend money instead of allowing the private sector to decide how it gets spent (in an especially bizarre […]

Greetings from frigid Minnesota. I’m in this misplaced part of the North Pole to testify before both the Senate and House Tax Committees today on issues related to the Laffer Curve. In other words, I will be discussing how governments should measure the revenue impact of changes in tax policy – what is sometimes known […]

Here’s a new mini-documentary from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, narrated by Natasha Montague of Americans for Tax Reform, that explains why the process of tax competition is a critical constraint on the propensity of governments to over-tax and over-spend. The issue is very simple. When labor and capital have the ability to escape […]

Sooner or later, there will be a giant battle in Washington over the value-added tax. The people who want bigger government (and the people who are willing to surrender to big government) understand that a new source of tax revenue is needed to turn the United States into a European-style social welfare state. But that’s […]

Here’s a video arguing for the abolition of the corporate income tax. The visuals are good and it touches on key issues such as competitiveness. I do have one complaint about the video, though it is merely a sin of omission. There is not enough attention paid to the issue of double taxation. Yes, America’s […]

I looked yesterday at the spending side of Obama’s budget and found some good news and bad news. The good news was the absence of any big new initiative to expand the burden of government. That’s a welcome relief since the past couple of years have featured budget busting proposals such as the so-called stimulus […]

Chalk up another victory – at least on the rhetorical level – for the Tea Party. President Obama will release his fiscal year 2012 budget tomorrow and he’s apparently become a born-again fiscal conservative. Here are some excerpts from a Washington Post story. President Obama will respond to a Republican push for a drastic reduction […]

Proponents of higher taxes are fond of claiming that Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase was a big success because of budget surpluses that began in 1998. That’s certainly a plausible hypothesis, and I’m already on record arguing that Clinton’s economic record was much better than Bush’s performance. But this specific assertion it is not supported […]

I don’t know if this commercial was broadcast nationally, but I saw it in northern Virginia. A very smart, anti-politician message. The worst commercial (this is a no-brainer) was from Chrysler. Not because the advertising was bad, but because the company is mooching from the taxpayers.

This Economics 101 video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity explains that excessive government spending undermines prosperity by diverting resources from the productive sector of the economy. Moreover, the two main ways of financing government – taxes and borrowing – cause additional economic damage.