Last year, I came up with a saying that “Bad Government Policy Begets More Bad Government Policy” and labeled it “Mitchell’s Law” during a bout of narcissism. There are lots of examples of this phenomenon, such as the misguided War on Drugs being a precursor to intrusive, costly, and ineffective money laundering policies. Or how […]

Peter Dunn, warning of the many issues with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, has written a great article at American Thinker called “FATCA: A Ticking Time Bomb for the Economy.” Lawmakers clearly need to reconsider the law and its accompanying regulations and withdraw them before trillions are driven from the economy: Now the HIRE […]

I don’t often have reason to praise the White House. But the Administration occasionally winds up fighting on the right side when dealing with the statists on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I lauded the Obama Administration two years ago when the Treasury Department was fighting against a scheme from the Europeans to […]

I recently co-authored with Dan Mitchell an article in the Swiss magazine Schweizer Monat explaining the many problems with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), and the schizophrenic nature of US tax policy in general. The key points: The rationale behind FATCA is simple in its destructiveness. Even though the United States has a […]

Another American company has decided to expatriate for tax reasons. This process has been going on for decades, with companies giving up their U.S. charters (a form of business citizenship) and redomiciling in low-tax jurisdictions such as Bermuda, Ireland, Switzerland, Panama, Hong Kong, and the Cayman Islands. The companies that choose to expatriate usually fit […]

Advocates of limited government love to fantasize. But because we’re strange people, we don’t have ordinary fantasies about supermodels or playing pro baseball. We daydream about a libertarian nirvana, where the rights of individuals are protected, guided by a moral order based on freedom and responsibility, and the leviathan state is forever constrained. Ayn Rand […]

Sound tax policy is hard to find these days. As CF&P has extensively covered, Congress included the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act as part of the HIRE Act, passed in March 2010. FATCA takes a fundamentally wrong-headed approach to tax policy. Rather than looking at how to make the U.S. tax system more hospitable to […]

One of the tax increases buried in Obamacare was an onerous and intrusive “1099″ scheme that would have required businesses to collect tax identification numbers for just about any vendor and then send paperwork to the IRS whenever they did more than $600 of business. Send one of your sales people to New York for […]

Richard Rahn writes in the Washington Times today on a pair of regulations which he describes as “national economic suicide.” At issue is the IRS’s proposed regulation that would require U.S. banks to report information on foreign account holders, even though they are not taxed in the U.S., as well as the Foreign Account Tax […]

There’s a supposed expose in the U.K.-based Daily Mail about how major British companies have subsidiaries in low-tax jurisdictions. It even includes this table with the ostensibly shocking numbers. This is quite akin to the propaganda issued by American statists. Here’s a table from a report issued by a left-wing group that calls itself “Business […]