Taxes and Spending

Big loss for sales tax supporters in Washington State,

The middle classes have always been the only dependable source for taxes. If a government really wants revenue, that is where they have to go. 

Economists of an Austrian bent just can't take off their analytical spectacles, writes Mark Thornton, even when undertaking simple life activities like driving from here to there.

How is the big spender ever able to campaign on a platform that he has reduced the cost of government to taxpayers? Robert Murphy shows what's wrong with the claim.

Sean Corrigan shows how Rome and her history can give us a reaffirmation of our unshaken belief in the ability of Everyman, acting as a free individual, to repair all the damage ever done by history’s tyrants and their tax gatherers.

How is the Philippine government going to avert a looming fiscal crisis, which has been mounting for years? Of course, writes Grant Nülle, taxpayers will have to atone for the enormous debts run up by bureaucrats, legislators and managers of GOCCs.

The government stumbles or runs into crisis after crisis, writes Gregory Bresiger.

King Solomon, king of Israel from 970 to 931 BC, lusted after women as he grew older. He had a thousand wives and concubines. Solomon spent tax moneys for luxurious palaces and his harem. His treasury was soon empty, so he found new ways to drain money from his people.

A tariff set the stage for the American Civil War. The quarrel between the North and the South was a fiscal quarrel, not a war over slavery. The tariff of 1828 was called the tariff of abomination. Nullification was a strong argument to void unconstitutional federal laws.

Adams begins with a few tidbits: taxation problems caused the end of Egypt and the taxes that the Greeks put on the Jews were an excessive one-third. Sulla of Rome created special tax agents, essentially IRS agents, to collect taxes. Cicero felt that the era of chaos made a military dictatorship inevitable, saying that, “And so in Rome only the walls of her houses remain standing… our Republic we have lost forever.”