by Dan Mitchell | Nov 29, 2019 | Blogs
It seems that the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have an ongoing contest to see which bureaucracy can be the biggest cheerleader for bad fiscal policy. They compete (OECD vs IMF) to promote more spending. They...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 22, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending, Taxation
While he’s not as outwardly radical as Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris, Andrew Yang has joined together two very bad ideas – universal handouts and a value-added tax. Needless to say, I was not overflowing with praise when asked to comment. At the...
by Dan Mitchell | Jun 28, 2019 | Uncategorized
There’s general agreement among public finance experts that personal income taxes and corporate income taxes, on a per-dollar-collected basis, do the most economic damage. And I suspect there’s a lot of agreement that this is because these levies often have high...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 20, 2018 | Blogs, Economics, Taxation, VAT
A couple of weeks ago, I used a story about a local tax issue in Washington, DC, to make an important point about how new tax increases cause more damage than previous tax increases because “deadweight losses” increase geometrically rather than arithmetically. Simply...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 8, 2018 | Blogs, Taxation, VAT
The value-added tax was first imposed in Europe starting about 50 years ago. Politicians in nations like France approve of this tax because it is generally hidden, so it is relatively easy to periodically raise the rate. And that’s the reason I am vociferously opposed...
