Free Republic

Reagan Economic Advisor Arthur Laffer explains what we need to do in order to beat 9.1% inflation

The federal government has always required large personal bank transactions to be reported, just in case. I remember that number being $10,000… Somewhere along the way, it was increased to $20,000. With inflation, that makes sense. Why the requirement? Because large cash transactions might be an indicator for black market activity, such as drug dealing, contract hits, political bribery, etc. Americans have a healthy distrust of government. We don’t want every personal transaction reported to the feds, but we understand the need to report some. With inflation, we expect such numbers to be periodically revised upward. We certainly do not...

As the war on the rich continues to escalate on both coasts, it's the middle-class residents of blue states that will be stuck with the tab.The war on the rich is escalating on both coasts. While Democrats argue they’re righteously demanding the wealthy pay their fair share, it’s the middle class who will pay the biggest price. Legislation labeled a “wealth tax” targets the wealthy. In Washington state, billionaires would be hit with a 1 percent tax on intangible assets. New York’s legislation includes tax hikes on income, capital gains, inheritance, and even stock trades. Seattle state Rep. Noel Frame...

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz's plan to impose a flat 10 percent tax on all personal income and greatly lower the corporate tax rate would cost the federal government at least $8.6 trillion over a decade, according to a new analysis. The plan would be the second most expensive tax proposal in the GOP presidential field, with only businessman Donald Trump offering a proposal that would add more in government debt over the next 10 years, according to data released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center. Trump's plan would cost the government $9.5 trillion in lost revenue....

Donald Trump will unveil a series of position papers in early September, he said in an interview Friday, beginning with a plan to address immigration policy that was crafted with the counsel of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a favorite of conservative activists and an outspoken border hawk. That document will be followed soon after by his proposal for revamping the U.S. tax code. “My immigration paper, my tax paper — they’re pretty much done. But I don’t want to do them in August. I’ll wait until September, when everyone is back, in all fairness,” Trump told The Washington Post. “We’ll...

It’s “the single most important committee in Congress,” one former Representative tells WTMJ in Milwaukee, with its fingers in practically everything the federal government does. Tax reform? Ways and Means. Health care? Social Security? Ways and Means. And now the most visionary of the Republican fiscal reformers will chair the panel as all of these issues come to a head in the final two years of the Obama administration: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Ryan already is taking aim in all of these areas in his statement yesterday after winning the post in the House Republican leadership discussions:...

One thing that united both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, around 2009, was their opposition to corporatism/crony capitalism. Someone had committed some very big crimes, and they were getting away with it. Immense sums were being stolen from taxpayers, mostly by big banks, around the world. Companies that should have gone bust instead were bailed out and became even more dominant. Politicians were bought and paid for by Big Business – not all big businesses, but a relatively small group of companies whose names we all know well. This issue has strangely disappeared from official discussion. Now we...

What are the tax implications of the zombie apocalypse? The only certainties in life are death and taxes, but how do you handle the taxes when death doesn't go quite as planned? Law professor Adam Chodorow takes a stab at estate planning for the undead in perhaps the only legal paper to cite both the Internal Revenue Code and Weekend at Bernie's II. Chodorow, a professor at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, authored the paper "Death and Taxes...and Zombies," which will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Iowa Law Review. Chodorow notes that, while the...

Democrats have been having a field day with the cry of "tax cuts for the rich" — for which Republicans seem to have no reply. This is especially surprising, because Democrats made the same arguments back in the 1920s, and the Republicans then not only had a reply, but one that eventually carried the day, when the top tax rate was brought down from 73 percent to 24 percent. What was the difference then? The biggest difference is that Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon took the trouble to articulate the case for lower tax rates, in articles that...

President Obama’s two biggest “achievements” since taking office are the so-called stimulus and government-run healthcare. But neither one of those policies are popular, so the President largely ignored them during his state-of-the-union address and instead focused on using the tax code to promote “fairness.”But fairness doesn’t mean treating everyone equally by adopting a flat tax. Instead, it means a class-warfare policy of higher tax rates. The President’s home state of Illinois is a good test case of this approach. The politicians rammed through a big tax increase early last year, supposedly to stabilize state finances.Unfortunately, Obamanomics isn’t working very well...

Any attempt to analyze the economic programs of the Republican presidential candidates is fraught with danger. While some have some interesting ideas, none measure up in total. Certainly Ron Paul's desire to truly cut spending recommends him economically, Newt Gingrich presents an interesting plan for taxation (Mitt Romney's taxation scheme is certainly the weakest), and then many of the candidates at least pay lip service to the notion of ridding the Fed of our economic ball-and-chain of a Chairman, Ben Bernanke. And then there's Rick Santorum. While it's very likely that the Iowa caucuses will easily represent the high water...

It's been a long while since I posted at FR, so bear with me please. There has not been sufficient discussion about Governor Palin's superb tax policy she announced in Iowa this past weekend. So, before the other campaigns try to co-opt it, I think it's necessary to put our pro-Palin stake in the ground. Current Situation - As we are all well aware, the high unemployment is plainly nasty and long-standing. Much as President Obama would like any of several of his targets to take the blame for the economic fix we are in, it is his name that...

I don’t know if you saw this with all the news yesterday. Illinois lost 89,000 jobs since enacting the largest tax increase in the history of the state, as reported by the Illinois Policy Institute. It was the largest job loss of any state in the nation. Democrats will blame it on a poor economy. The truth is, higher taxes change behavior. Combine that with the fact that Illinois pols have given tax waivers to some large companies. John Deere ($JD), Motorola Mobility ($MOT, $GOOG), Sears, and others have gotten roll backs on the tax. So, like most tax levies...

Inspired by Cord's thought-provoking post on the per gallon prices of various liquids, and by Sarah Palin's ill-informed Facebook rant on the "$4-Per-Gallon President," I decided to take a closer look at gasoline prices around the world. Mrs. Palin might be interested to learn, that the world already has quite a few $4-Per-Gallon Presidents. In fact, the world already has $6-Per-Gallon Parliaments, $7-Per-Gallon Prime Ministers, and $8-Per-Gallon Presidents! We've collected a broad sample of gas prices from throughout the industrialized Western world in the chart below. Important to note: this chart includes only official data from throughout the European Union...

For those true believers out there who still accept whatever this Administration tells them, despite being caught in numerous lies, here is one to add to the list. Perhaps this will convince you that Barack Obama and his minions cannot be trusted. The Congressional Budget Office released figures that show that despite Obama's notion that his plan for America will reduce the national debt, the Obama agenda will actually add 9.7 trillion dollars to the debt over the next ten years, almost doubling the current debt-load of 12 trillion.

The economic news for January has been dominated by disappointing employment news released on January 8 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total non-farm payroll employment edged down by 85,000 in December from November, led by a loss of 57,000 construction jobs and 27,000 manufacturing jobs. Public dissatisfaction with the Obama administration's handling of the economy has been following employment levels down. A few days later, on January 12, the U.S. Department of Commerce reported that the trade deficit rose 9.7 percent in November. The media ignored the relationship of the trade deficits to the lost manufacturing jobs.

Educating For Failure Malcolm A. Kline, October 30, 2009 Every chief executive in the past 20 years has vowed to be, as one of them put it, “the education president.” All have failed for the same reason: as with most aspects of life, top-down government solutions to education just don’t work. “Between 1960 and 1990, spending on elementary and secondary education jumped from $50 billion to nearly $190 billion in inflation adjusted dollars,” Leslie Carbone writes in Slaying Leviathan: The Moral Case For Tax Reform. “During the same period, per student spending more than tripled—from $1,454 to $4,622.” “Between 1973...

Most people think they pay too much to Uncle Sam, but for some people it simply is not true. In 2009, roughly 47% of households, or 71 million, will not owe any federal income tax, according to estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

Compilation of Barack Obama's "No Middle Class Tax Hike" lie in speeches with Geithner's saying a middle class tax hike is possible.

Few subjects offer more grist for populists and more opportunity for demagoguery than that of U.S. companies, their foreign earnings and their taxes. Posturing by politicians on this subject revolves around the fact that American companies have increased their foreign investments over a period of time when domestic jobs have disappeared in certain industries, creating a facile (and misleading) correlation in the minds of many between overseas investments and U.S. job losses. President Obama drew on that popular misconception when he announced he would seek changes in our corporate tax code last week which he claimed were designed to ensure...