Here’s another depressing column about how government workers are getting showered with high pay and lavish benefits while people in the productive sector of the economy are bearing the economic pain of financing a bloated welfare state: …government unionized workers often have gold-plated health benefits packages that are among the most expensive in America. Several years […]

The past several months have witnessed an unfortunate setback in the fight for good tax policy. Bolstered by a shift in the U.S. position from benign neglect to active support, anti-tax competition ideologues have won a somewhat significant victory. Low-tax jurisdictions, faced with direct and indirect threats of sanctions from powerful nations, have been forced to weaken their human-rights policies by agreeing that privacy laws no longer protect foreign investors. Indeed, jurisdictions are being coerced to sign agreements to provide confidential data upon request to at least 12 of their high-tax brethren.

Politicians who like higher taxes would like to shut down so-called tax havens so they can set up an “OPEC for politicians” and implement higher tax rates. Yet since all the evidence shows that low-tax jurisdictions are very beneficial for the global economy, the politicians often resort to dishonest demagoguery. This educational video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity debunks President Obama’s two most common smears against tax havens.

President Obama and other politicians are advocating higher taxes, with a particular emphasis on class-warfare taxes targeting the so-called rich. This Center for Freedom and Prosperity video explains why fiscal policy based on hate and envy is fundamentally misguided.

Low-tax jurisdictions are being attacked by several committees in the U.S. Congress. These so-called havens are being assaulted by international bureaucracies such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and European Commission (EC). And they are being turned into scapegoats by the politicians meeting this week for the G-20 Summit. These events do not bode well for supporters of tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy.

The Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation has produced videos showing the economic and moral benefits of so-called tax havens. This final video in the three-part series addresses some of the most common myths put forth by politicians from high-tax nations. Using academic research and data from international organizations, the video shows that the most common attacks made against low-tax jurisdictions are empty demagoguery.

This Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation video demonstrates that low-tax jurisdictions offer millions of people around the world a safe haven from tyrannical and oppressive government. For this, and many other reasons, there is a powerful moral case for preserving and promoting tax havens.

Statist politicians and international bureaucracies such as the OECD and UN routinely attack tax havens, claiming that they lead to “harmful tax competition.” Yet at no point do critics bother to provide any evidence for this claim. This mini-documentary from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity looks at the empirical data and scholarly research and reports that tax havens actually have a very positive impact on the global economy.

In addition to several other tax increases, Senator Barack Obama wants to increase the Social Security payroll tax burden by imposing the tax on income above $250,000. This would be a sharp departure from current law, which only requires that the tax be imposed on the amount of income needed to “pay for” promised benefits. But more important, at least from an economic perspective, the Senator’s initiative would increase the top tax rate on productive behavior by as much as 12 percentage points – and this would be in addition to his proposal to kill the 2003 tax rate reductions and further boost the top rate by 4.6 percentage points.

The six-minute video explains the key features of the flat tax revolution and highlights the reforms in Hong Kong, Estonia, and Iceland. The flat tax revolution has been especially strong in former Soviet-bloc nations, a rather ironic development since a so-called progressive income tax was a key tenet of Marx’s Communist Manifesto.