Utopia, you are standing in it!

In a new documentary film, Race to the Bottom, I had an opportunity to pontificate briefly about corporate tax and the Laffer Curve.

At the risk of understatement, I represented a minority viewpoint in the documentary. Most of the people interviewed had a negative view of tax competition, considering it to be (as suggested by the title) a “race to the bottom.”

By contrast, I view tax competition as a way of constraining the “stationary bandit” so that we don’t wind up with “goldfish government.”

For purposes of today’s column, though, I want to focus on the narrower issue of the relationship between corporate tax rates and corporate tax revenue.

In the above video, I asserted that lower rates did not result in lower revenue. Indeed, I even made the bold statement that revenues increased.

Is that correct?

Fortunately, I don’t need to do…

Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., or “Ted,” as his friends called him, lived up to the legacy of his father and namesake, President Theodore Roosevelt. The younger Roosevelt was a proven combat leader in both world wars, an aspiring politician, a successful businessman, an accomplished hunter and explorer, as well as governor of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., like his father, received the Medal of Honor, one of only two father–son duos to be awarded America’s highest honor (the other being Arthur MacArthur and Douglas MacArthur). Roosevelt rose through the ranks during the Great War, ending it as a lieutenant colonel commanding the 26th Infantry Regiment in the 1st Division. He participated in numerous engagements in 1918, which included Cantigny, Soissons, and the Meuse–Argonne campaign. He was cited for bravery, wounded in action, the first reserve officer to command a regiment in combat, and was the spearhead of the…

In the world of public finance, Ireland is best known for its 12.5 percent corporate tax rate.

That’s a very admirable policy, as will be momentarily discussed, but my favorite Irish policy was the four-year spending freeze in the late 1980s.

I discussed that fiscal reform in a video about 10 years ago, and I subsequently shared data on how spending restraint reduced the overall burden of government in Ireland and also lowered red ink.

It’s a great case study showing the beneficial impact of my Golden Rule.

Spending restraint also paved the way for better tax policy, and that’s a perfect excuse to discuss Ireland’s pro-growth corporate tax system. The Wall Street Journalopined last week about that successful supply-side experiment.

Democrats want a high global minimum tax that would end national tax competition and reduce the harm from their huge tax increase on U.S. business. But…

The Conservative government’s response to the IRAL report has raised plenty of alarm bells from UK constitutional scholars. The widespread observation that the government’s judicial review reform plans appear to go well beyond what the Independent Panel recommended points to a more fundamental problem: that the government seems to proceed from a very partial understanding (at best) of the UK ‘constitution’.

In this short blog post, which draws on the account of constitutional democracy I develop in a monograph to be published later this year by Hart, I argue that the government fundamentally misunderstands (or misrepresents) the UK constitutionalist model. It does so especially when it affirms (at paras 24-25 of its response) that the ‘historical developments’ of judicial review are not ‘in any way indicative of how the courts and the UK Constitution “ought” to evolve in the future’, with the result that Parliament is ‘completely free to…

It’s a bog-standard feature of every Labour government that the state will expand, not just in terms of money spent, but people employed.

So I’m not surprised to see this information from a recent post by Don Brash, Do We Need So Many Bureaucrats?:

• Land Information New Zealand, 25.5%
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 30.7%
• Ministry of Education, 32.4% (not teachers)
• Ministry of Defence, 35.3%
• Ministry of Primary Industries, 36.7%
• Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, 38.9%
• Oranga Tamariki, 40.7%
• Ministry of Transport, 40.8% (not including NZTA)
• Ministry for the Environment, 41.0%
• Public Service Commission, 42.6%
• Ministry for Women, 45.8%
• Ministry for Maori Development, 69.8%
• Ministry for Pacific Peoples, 81.1%

As Brash points out, this would not be so bad if there was evidence that the government was getting stuff done with all these extra people. But as is increasingly obvious to anybody who ignores the NZ MSM, it’s…

Two cousins fighting for the right to rule England during the 16th century. One was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn who fought tooth and nail to rule without a man by her side. The other was the daughter of Mary of Guise and King James V of Scotland whose marriage record would prove to be fatal. Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, may have been sister queens, but the way they were treated in their own countries differed completely. While Elizabeth I was praised and protected from harm in England, Mary was a scapegoat for so many in Scotland. The way that Mary was used as a pawn even though she wore a crown was nothing short of extraordinary. The story of how these two queens came on a collision course that would leave one queen beheaded and the other forever changed has been told in…

The anti-energy/anti-civilisation squad keep predicting the end of coal and coal-fired power. But in China and India the demand for the black stuff – and the cheap and reliable power it delivers – is insatiable, and rising.

Notwithstanding a global economic wind down during the Covid-19 outbreak, Chinese demand for coal is about to reach unprecedented levels, with a further 4.5% increase year-on-year expected during 2021. So much for all that cheap talk about China becoming a renewable energy superpower.

Sky News’ Chris Kenny reports on how, despite the pundit’s predictions, coal continues its dominance, as China’s energy source of choice.

Coal demand is ‘bouncing back’ from pandemic, IEA report finds
Sky News
Chris Kenny
19 May 2021

Demand for coal consumption will increase by 4.5 per cent despite green-left politicians and media arguing the phasing out of fossil fuels is necessary to achieving net-zero emissions, according to Sky News…