Many Americans who have wrestled with a 1040 form, or who have paid someone to prepare their taxes, no doubt cheered the news that Congress will soon resume working on tax reform. However taxpayers should temper their enthusiasm because, even in the unlikely event tax collection is simplified, tax reform will not reduce the American people’s tax burden.
Nearly four decades ago, political pundits were shocked as voters turned away President Jimmy Carter and voted in Ronald Reagan, who promised to bring fundamental change to Washington and the indwelling political establishment. At the time, unemployment was rising quickly and inflation raged in double-digits, and Reagan had promised to deal with the economic failures by cutting income tax rates, slashing government spending, and reducing the regulatory burden.
Entrepreneurship is a hot new study area in academia, with devotees of the Austrian school Peter Klein and his student Per Bylund extending the work of Ludwig von Mises, Israel Kirzner, and Murray Rothbard.
In our last update on money supply — using the “Austrian” measure of money supply developed by Murray Rothbard and Joseph Salerno — we found that money supply growth hit a 46-month high of 11.2 percent in October.
Growth has moderated since then, however, with year-over-year growth in US dollars dropping to 10.3 percent in November and 8.8 percent in December.
The Federal Reserve opted to stay the course this week after meeting for the first time since Trump took office. The real question is whether 2017 will be the year they begin to normalize their balance sheet.
“Big Corporation helps government regulators crush poor people.”
This is a headline fit for a series on the current war against making loans to low-income borrowers — although we’ll never see it framed this way by The Washington Post or The New York Times.
In our last update on money supply — using the “Austrian” measure of money supply developed by Murray Rothbard and Joseph Salerno — we found that money supply growth hit a 46-month high of 11.2 percent in October.
Growth has moderated since then, however, with year-over-year growth in US dollars dropping to 10.3 percent in November and 8.8 percent in December.
Democracy in America, Part I
Tocqueville begins his story by discussing the “Exterior Form of North America,” and in particular, the part that would become the United States. By European standard, it was a vast territory, dominated by the great central valley of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. In the east there were dense forests, to the west seemingly endless prairies. When European man came to the lands of the Caribbean and South America, he found Nature to be generous, a constant delight. Middle America, what would become the United States, was a land made for work.
The Introduction to Democracy in America
In the “Author’s Introduction” to the volumes that appeared in 1835, Tocqueville sketches the aim, approach and major themes that will dominate the whole work. Equality of condition was the fact that most impressed him in the United States, he says,
