by Dan Mitchell | Feb 25, 2020 | Uncategorized
Back in 2014, I shared a World Bank study that measured how tax complexity facilitates more corruption by government officials. Not that anyone should have been surprised. Complex tax codes enable politicians to extort bribes when writing the law (a problem that...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 28, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Regulations
The World Bank has released its annual report on the Ease of Doing Business. Unsurprisingly, the top spots are dominated by market-oriented jurisdictions, with New Zealand, Singapore, and Hong Kong (at least for now!) winning the gold, silver, and bronze. The United...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 16, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs
The great French economist from the 1800s, Frederic Bastiat, famously explained that good economists are aware that government policies have indirect effects (the “unseen”). Bad economists, by contrast, only consider direct effects (the “seen”). Let’s look at the...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 25, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Regulations
When I wrote last month about the Green New Deal, I warned that it was cronyism on steroids. Simply stated, the proposal gives politicians massive new powers to intervene and this would be a recipe for staggering levels of Solyndra-style corruption. Well, the World...
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...
