TAX POLITIX
The Politics of Taxes
Brown University and Diversity?
To the President of Brown University, I read with interest your recent commitment to increasing diversity at Brown University spending $100 million over the next 5-7 years in order to hire 60 more faculty members is an immense undertaking. You wrote, “Many of the efforts detailed in our plan are focused on faculty diversity through targeted strategies such as early identification programs, postdoctoral programs and cluster hiring. By hiring the best and the brightest from a full range of...
The Federal Register is Racking Up Regulations
The Competitive Enterprise Institute periodically reviews the Federal Register and the amount of regulations that the Obama Administration churns out. Here's a snapshot of it; it's the daily publication of proposed and final administrative regulations of federal agencies. "The Federal Register once again topped 2,000 pages last week, and included a year-high 137 final regulations, ranging from eggs to groupers. On to the data: Last week, 137 new final regulations were published in the Federal...
Greg Ip Misses It Again on Interest Rates and the Economy
Here’s another ridiculous article by “economist” Grep Ip, wondering aloud once again why the economy isn’t doing any better, and why low interest rates haven't helped. Either he’s truly incompetent as an economist not to see the detrimental effects of government policies on businesses and the economy, or he’s playing dumb to give cover to the Obama Administration by pretending their policies aren’t harmful and looking the other way in his analysis. Ip writes, “One of the great mysteries of the...
Smith: What CEOs Should Be Saying About Inequality
My friend Fred Smith over at Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) wrote a nice piece on the subject of income inequality. Smith discusses the common beliefs and untruths of the topic, reminding us that "to the extent that inequality is a problem, it is because people are kept from working, saving, and investing in ways that make the most sense for them by bad government policies." I have reprinted his piece in its entirety below: "Despite living at a time of unprecedented decreases in...
Obamacare Uninsured Numbers Continue to Miserably Miss Targets
A few weeks ago, the Feds trotted out a statistic aimed to bolster support for the fledgling Obamacare legislation amid steep premium hikes and costly non-compliance fines. While the Obama Administration celebrated the fact that the uninsured rate was finally below 10%, in reality, this same statistic actually represents the most colossal failure of any government program in the history of this country. In 2010, we had nearly 307 million people living in the United States, with a 16.3%...
Era of Great Enrichment is on the Decline
Deidre McCloskey’s recent treatise (How the West (and the rest) Got Rich) on was a thoughtful essay on the power of liberty and its impact on economics. For the most part, McCloskey did a fine job explaining classical liberalism (“worthy of a free person”) and how the Great Enrichment -- our uplifting out of poverty -- really came about only when man began to have the liberty to think new ideas and create them. There was one section, however, where Ms. McCloskey was incorrect. She indicated in...
Dave Brat Gets It Wrong on Jobs and Immigration
Congressman Dave Brat wrote a stunning Op-ed in the Richmond Times Dispatch ("Immigration is killing Americans' job prospects") in which he blames immigrants -- both legal and illegal -- for the current anemic economy. Rightly citing “meager job growth” and “stagnant wages” as symptoms, he then makes a crass and erroneous conclusion that the problem is immigration. Immigration is not killing Americans' job prospects -- government policy is. We all know that. Why does Congressman Brat ignore...
Social Security Reform, Part II: The Payroll Tax and Retirement
Entitlement reform is necessary for the fiscal health of this country, but it is something that no one wants to talk about, much less tackle. How can we begin? How can we open up the conversation and the possibility to reform and improve our social security system? One step in the right direction would be to treat Social Security as a true retirement plan, and not as a wealth transfer system that it currently is. This could begin with reclassifying the payroll tax. The majority of the payroll...
Social Security Reform, Part I: The Accounting
Our Social Security System is bankrupt. In fact, there is not enough money in the entire world for the United States to make good on its entitlement promises to its present and future retirees. And one of the key reasons for this is that the government uses a fraudulent, incompetent accounting method to report its costs. As a CPA, it is frustrating to hear Social Security repeatedly being described as a pay-as-you-go (“PAYGO”) system, which gives credence to something that is terribly...
Obamacare Uninsured Number Still Not on Target
A few weeks ago, the Feds trotted out a statistic aimed to bolster support for the fledgling Obamacare legislation. While many Obamacare exchange groups have discontinued coverage or announced double-digit premium rate hikes, federal officials announced that the uninsured rate is now below 10% in the first time in history. What the Obama Administration failed to announce and Wall Street Journal writer Louise Radnofsky did not know or mention, is that a reduction from 16% to 9.1% falls below...
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