I have been reading Thomas Sowell‘s classic textbook Basic Economics in which he makes many wise observations, including this one: The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better. CNN.Money reports that Sen. Dick Durbin has “urged customers unhappy [...]
A wall street protester named Robert Stephens – we know he spells it with a “ph” and not a “v” because he hilariously pauses his passionate protest to make sure that the press knows how to spell his name - demands to be arrested because “the bank took my parents’ home.” This is how I behaved when I was [...]
President Obama and the Democrats are calling for higher taxes on the rich on the grounds that the rich are not paying their fair share and are not willing to share in the sacrifice it takes to reduce the deficit and get Americans working again. But politically is this the best way to frame the argument? I don’t think so. Mr. Obama’s [...]
Ed O’Keefe of WaPo has the scoop on yet another case of government waste in Dead Federal Retirees are Paid $120 Million Annually, Report Says: The federal government pays out millions of dollars to dead people each year â including deceased retired federal workers, according to a new report. Inspector General Patrick E. McFarland, who [...]
I found a very revealing table published by Stephen Moore over at the Library of Economics and Liberty which seems to show a direct correlation between the reduction in capital gains tax rates and the amount of capital invested by venture capitalists. Here’s Moore and his table: Significantly, the massive technology boom of the late 1990s [...]
From Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw: The Progressivity of the Tax System With all the rhetoric floating around regarding the “Buffett rule,” it might be worth trying extra hard to keep an eye on the facts. Here is the progressivity of the current tax system, according to the Tax Policy Center. If you can remember only one fact, [...]
Tim Manni of HSH.com tells us why a homeowner who has the ability to pay his mortgage might choose to walk away from it: Why does a homeowner simply decide to walk away from their home, their mortgage? If youâve ever been curious to how a homeowner comes to that decision, youâll want to read [...]
Russell Simmons is a rich liberal who claims he wants to pay more taxes then hypocritically fails to avail himself of the opportunity to do so: The idea that I canât pay more taxes is crazy, that oil companies canât repeal a tax break that they got is nuts with the success that they have. The Dow Jones [...]
Travel mogul Rick Steves is the latest in a long line of pro-tax rich guys who fails to see the irony of donating his Bush tax-cut dollars directly to a cause of his choosing while demanding that others pay more taxes to federal bureaucrats for donations to causes of their choosing. Kay Bell reports that the pro-tax Steves has chosen to donate his tax [...]
According to a Reason-Rupe Poll nearly 69 percent of taxpayers expect their taxes to go up in the next five years and 62 percent think Congress will spend tax increases on new programs instead of paying down debt i.e. the government will use the new money to expand government rather than pay down the deficit. We’ve [...]
Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman is upset that he’s being misquoted, but his outrage may be misplaced. Which of the following did Paul Krugman actually say: It would be good for the economy if the country were invaded by space aliens; or It would be good for the economy if the country had a serious earthquake. Krugman admits [...]
Joseph Henchman of The Tax Policy Blog reports that most economists say the government should focus primarily on spending cuts in order to reduce the federal deficit: The majority of economists surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics believe the federal deficit should be reduced only or primarily through spending cuts. The survey out Monday found [...]
A columnist for The New York Times believes that the objective of our tax policy should be to enforce equality of results rather than equality of opportunity. James B. Stewart is the latest in a long line of tax-the-richers who suggests that we should tax capital gains at the same rate we tax ordinary income: In the end, the [...]
Uber-liberal and uber-rich Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) yesterday said what socialists everywhere are thinking: “We gotta eliminate the rich.” Michelle Malkin thinks this may have been a Freudian slip, but I think Lautenberg intended to say precisely what he said. After all, the Senator has never been shy about playing the wealth-redistribution card: I say I don’t need a tax [...]
Liberals recognize that as long as the poor and the middle-class believe in upward mobility they will never sign on to their soak-the-rich, big government agenda. Consequently, the tax-the-rich crowd has a vested interest in convincing Americans that the American Dream is a fraud.¹ My tax blogging colleagues Linda Beale and James Maule are among many on the left who wax incredulous [...]
David Logan shows through a series of charts that Warren Buffet’s proposed tax increases on the rich would hardly put a dent in the national deficit: [T]aking half of the yearly income from every person making between one and ten million dollars would only decrease the nation’s debt by 1%. Even taking every last penny from [...]
During the Bush administration Americans were repeatedly told that American arrogance and heavy-handedness had caused the world to hate us. These Bush-era critics now, apparently, think that attacking an independent credit rating agency simply because it downgraded U.S. debt will convert that hate into love. For more nearly a century the U.S. has enjoyed the benefit of being considered [...]
The Wall Street Journal reports in Millionaires Go Missing that, Speaking of “millionaires and billionaires” (see above), the real tax news is that there are fewer of both these days. This month the IRS released more detailed tax data for 2009, and the nearby table records the decline of the taxpaying rich. In 2007, 390,000 [...]
David Logan of Tax Policy Blog points out why Warren Buffett’s claim to be undertaxed is, well, a little wacky: The United States currently boasts the most progressive income tax in the industrialized world. Meaning, our wealthy pay a greater share of the tax burden than do the wealthy in any other capitalist nation. Yet in [...]
As we watch in horror the revolt of the entitled in London it would be wise to remember what F.A. Hayek in The Fatal Conceit (University of Chicago Press, 1988, page 153) said about the dangers of socialism (numbering and emphasis added): Socialism has taught many people that they possess claims irrespective of performance, irrespective [...]