Simplified.

Simplification in action: Gov. Bobby Jindal is proposing to eliminate Louisiana’s income and corporate taxes and pay for those cuts with increased sales taxes, the governor’s office confirmed Thursday. The governor’s office has not yet provided the details of the plan. “The bottom line is that for too long, Louisiana’s workers and small businesses have [...]

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"That's uncertainty."

Meet Jerry Gorski.  He owns a small business in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, not far from where Barack Obama will argue today that people who earn more than $250,000 a year need to pay their fair share.  Jerry owns his own business and employes 17 people, and has managed to weather the economic storms of the past [...]

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The 4:1 solution?

As Mitch McConnell laughed at Tim Geithner’s opening bid on resolving the fiscal cliff, some reporters could be heard applauding in the background.  The Daily Caller collected a few tweets from journalists in the wake of Obama’s 4:1 tax-hikes-now-to-spending-cuts-way-in-the-future offer: Washington political reporters on Thursday tweeted defenses of the White House’s opening proposal in the fiscal cliff negotiations [...]

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The other "holiday" season is almost over.

Thanksgiving and Christmas aren’t the only holiday seasons that will expire at the end of the year.  While the Obama administration and the Republicans both talk about protecting the middle class from the fiscal cliff, all sides have kept mum about the soon-to-expire payroll tax holiday.  This rebate on Social Security withholding was first implemented [...]

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“If we’re talking about math that doesn’t add up ..."

Fox News has one of Mitt Romney’s better moment of the debate last night, although Romney certainly had a number of good responses in the townhall debate.  Barack Obama had attacked Romney’s tax plan as a $5 trillion tax hike, a figure that even his deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter admitted a couple of weeks [...]

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New Flat Tax is the best way to fix our tax system

Republicans have promised to finally overhaul America’s tax code next year. Reform is long overdue. Now it’s a matter of what direction lawmakers should take. While some of the GOP’s pragmatists have already balked at being bold, now is exactly the time to take that message to the American people. They’re looking for solutions, not [...]

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"I thought something had to be done on the 'fiscal cliff' before the election."

Is this really the new spin? Bill Clinton, master of policy detail, is doing high-profile TV interviews in which he expounds on tax policy — and he doesn’t know when the Bush tax cuts are set to lapse? What? Two possibilities here. Either his “allies” are right and his mind’s starting to slip at the [...]

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Raking it in from the shadows.

An investigative report from Indiana television station WTHR highlights what they call a “loophole” in the tax code which may be costing tax payers billions by enabling illegal immigrants to claim tax credits for children not even living in the U.S. I’ve embedded the video package below, but for those of you at work there [...]

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Inclusion and progressivity.

The White House offered a white-board presentation on the need for the Buffett Rule, the surtax on the uber-rich — a term actually used by the White House in its presentation — that claimed that the effective federal tax rates on the wealthiest Americans falls slightly below that paid by teachers and cops.  As Douglas [...]

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The president gets an "F" for effort?

In a pre-recorded interview for CBS’ “This Morning,” House Speaker John Boehner called out the president for his incessant campaigning and confirmed that the chief occupant of the White House has lately made no effort whatsoever to work with Congress on any of the key issues that face the country. Boehner particularly noted the peculiarity [...]

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Plus, HHS mandate debate not having an impact.

With the blizzard of tax reform plans coming from Barack Obama and the Republican presidential candidates, The Hill decided to poll likely voters on what they think the proper level of taxation should be for higher-income earners and corporations.  Most voters want lower rates than currently assessed, although it’s unclear whether they know it or [...]

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Buying and selling.

Glenn Reynolds highlights this AP analysis of Barack Obama’s corporate-tax reform plan by writing, “Even the Associated Press isn’t buying this.”  Obama claims to close a large number of loopholes in order to create a “level playing field.”  However, the AP’s Christopher Rugaber discovers that Obama simply trades loopholes that favor those he dislikes for [...]

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Plus, a look at Romney's excellent tax reform plan.

I’m a bit of a history buff — not a historian on the level of a Doris Kearns Goodwin or even a Newt Gingrich, but a curious explorer of history nonetheless.  One fascinating figure is Aethelred (or Edward) the Unready, one of the pre-Norman kings of England, whose name belies his reputation, thanks to an [...]

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More symbolic non-action.

If Obama treats the recommendations of his jobs council like he did the deficit-and-debt-reduction recommendations of the Erskine-Bowles debt commission, then this matters not at all. Nevertheless, the ideas his latest council presented are worth considering for their own sake: Obama’s jobs council is calling for an overhaul of the corporate tax structure, expansion of [...]

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New packaging, same plan.

The Herman Cain campaign today released “9-9-9 The Movie,” an attempt to reassure conservative critics and convert independent skeptics to Cain’s much-mentioned economic plan. Among others, Politico and ABC reporters are already busy deriding it, wryly comparing and contrasting it with earlier admittedly weird and arguably insubstantial Cain campaign spots. First accounts of the video from these [...]

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Making the case.

If we taxed all millionaires in America at 100 percent, that money would run the government for just four months. Yet, to hear President Obama talk, we can solve the nation’s debt and jobs crisis just by asking “the rich” to “pay their fair share.” At a time when America’s competitors are lowering their corporate [...]

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"I don't know what their program will be."

Looks like Warren Buffett wants to be tainted by association with the president’s jobs bill about as much as Harry Reid does. “Are you happy with the way it is being described? Is the program that the White House has presented … your program?” the CNBC anchor asks in the video. Buffett replies in classic [...]

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"Class warfare makes for very bad economics."

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) agrees with the president that we need to close a few loopholes in the tax code. But whereas President Obama frequently refers to tax breaks in the same breath as he disparages oil company executives and corporate jet owners, Ryan has just one goal in mind: to lower tax rates to [...]

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Go ahead!

Donald Trump would be willing to pay more in taxes, he said today in response to Warren Buffett’s news-making op-ed in The New York Times and to President Barack Obama’s exhortation to “put country first.” But, unlike Buffett, Trump doesn’t think all tax hikes are a good idea, economically speaking, because less “patriotic” business “machines” would [...]

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