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 […]

Simon Johnson is a professor at MIT and a former IMF official. With that kind of resume, you won’t be surprised to learn that he is much too sympathetic to big government. For instance, we both testified to the Ways & Means Committee last year about the value-added tax, and he sided with all the other […]

The Laffer Curve is a graphical representation of the relationship between tax rates, tax revenue, and taxable income. It is frequently cited by people who want to explain the common-sense notion that punitive tax rates may not generate much additional revenue if people respond in ways that result in less taxable income. Unfortunately, some people […]

Last year, I expressed skepticism that the White House was serious about reducing the corporate tax rate. And, sure enough, when the Obama Administration produced a plan earlier this year, it was a disappointing mix of a few good provisions and several unpalatable proposals. This is unfortunate because the United States has one of the […]

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 […]

Tax competition, as I have explained to the point of being a nuisance, is an important restraint on the greed of the political class. Simply stated, politicians are less like to over-tax and over-spend if they know that geese with the golden eggs can fly across the border. This is mostly an issue in the […]

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 […]

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 […]

I speculated last year that the political elite finally might be realizing that higher tax rates are not the solution to Greece’s fiscal situation. Simply stated, you can only squeeze so much blood out of a stone, and pushing tax rates higher cripples growth and drives more people into the underground economy. Well, it turns […]