Taxes and Spending

China's industrial policy has been marked by many failures and few successes. Rather, China's real growth has been fueled by the regime's limited turn to markets. 

The new proposal is framed as a tax on the ultrarich. The same was true of the new income tax in 1913. If given the power to tax unrealized gains, expect the feds to expand the tax to ordinary people.

The appropriate question is not “Who will build the roads?” but rather “Who will pay for them without taxation?” History suggests the answer is "lots of people" and the "public goods" theory is wrong.

If business owners could increase their prices without a loss in sales, they would have already done so. Yet many conservatives mistakenly claim tax increases are just "passed on" to consumers.

The appropriate question is not “Who will build the roads?” but rather “Who will pay for them without taxation?” History suggests the answer is "lots of people" and the "public goods" theory is wrong.

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Berkeley's David Card, MIT's Josh Angrist, and Stanford's Guido Imbens for their work on "natural experiments," a currently fashionable approach to estimating the causal impact of one economic variable on another. 

With default we restore trillions to the private sector and permanently reduce government’s ability to hog the resources we need to maintain prosperity. 

We have to go back to 1945 and the Second World War to find a time in which government spending is similar to today's panic-driven frenzy of spending in Washington. 

As government seek ever larger amounts of debt to finance more spending, they're embracing huge debt levels in the way a broke consumer might embrace payday loans. In the end, we're left with nothing but a flimsy promise to pay. 

The SALT tax deduction allows state and local taxes—like property taxes—to be deducted from federal taxes. To cap it is to pave the way for the federal government to tax income twice.