For its 85th anniversary, Bloomberg Businessweek chronicles the most disruptive ideas of the past 85 years. In 1974, economist Arthur Laffer sketches his theory of tax policy over dinner with Wall Street Journal writer Jude Wanniski and Ford administration officials Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney,...
Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress are betting the future of the U.S. economy on a gamble that tax rates don’t matter: so raising income taxes, dividend taxes, and capital gains taxes in 2013, won’t hurt the economy. The evidence from the states, however,...
Chairman Mary Schapiro of the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Wednesday that she did not have the required votes among the SEC commissioners to proceed with new proposed regulations on money market mutual funds (MMFs). In her statement, she then urged other policymakers to act “to...
Tennessee is one of 19 states with a separate estate tax and one of only two states with a gift tax, which has caused the state to underperform in comparison to other right-to-work states and other states with no earned income tax, low corporate tax,...
Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 President Obama again pointed to Warren Buffett’s call for higher taxes on the rich in making the case for tax increases during his State of the Union address. Indeed, ever since Mr. Buffett’s August op-ed ran in the New York Times claiming that he...
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Laffer takes aim at class warfare rhetoric and proposals to raise taxes on the rich, explaining why such tax increases never raise the revenue or achieve the social justice that their advocates promise. In particular, Dr. Laffer focuses...
Tax compliance employs more workers than Wal-Mart, UPS, McDonald’s, IBM and Citigroup combined. There is a lot more to taxes than simply paying the bill. Taxpayers must spend significantly more than $1 in order to provide $1 of income-tax revenue to the federal government. To start with,...
The U.S. income tax system relies on taxpayers to self-report their income – the system only works if most taxpayers view the outcomes as fair and accurately self-report their income. As such, excessive tax complexity is undermining the very foundations of our current tax code....
