Policy
The Iron Law of Oligarchy: every field of human endeavor, every kind of organization, will always be led by a relatively small elite.
If the watchword of the market economy is profit, the watchword of bureaucracy is growth.
The child credit is income redistribution that does nothing to change incentives to work or invest.
... See moreThe method [super normal returns model] wrongly assumes that taxes on quasi-rents and other transitory earnings due to imperfect competition or risk premiums cannot be shifted to labor. Earnings in these sectors are clearly sensitive to tax. Taxes on returns in these sectors alter output, prices, and wages, and thus fall heavily on labor, and not,
High marginal tax rates and heavy average tax burdens -- the outcome of New York’s traditional emphasis on progressivity -- have discouraged job creation, ultimately hurting the very low-income workers that progressive taxation was designed to favor.
Since 1970, the U.S. has massively increased educational expenditures, mostly to expand school administration, which has vastly outpaced the growth of both students and teachers. Today, taxpayers spend more than $15,000 per public school student. Yet test scores have largely flatlined and, in some areas, even declined.
Hauser uncovered the means to answer these questions definitively. In a Wall Street Journal article in 1993, he stated that “no matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5 percent of GDP.” What a pity that his discovery has not been more widely disseminated.
The chart on this page, updating the... See more
The chart on this page, updating the... See more
W. Kurt Hauser • Hauser’s Law
... See moreSince the industrial revolution, the interests of states and people have been unusually aligned. To be economically competitive, a strong state needs efficient markets, a good education system that creates skilled workers, and a prosperous middle class that creates demand. It benefits from using talent regardless of its class origin. It also
“After the 1920s tax cuts, it was not simply that investors’ incomes rose but that this was now taxable income, since the lower tax rates made it profitable for investors to get higher returns by investing outside of tax shelters. The facts are unmistakably plain, for those who bother to check the facts. In 1921, when the tax rate on people making
... See moreThomas Sowell, Tax Cuts for the Rich
... See moreAs the complexity of civilisation, the destructive scale of technology and crises, and the speed of crises all increase, there is no greater multi-trillion dollar bill lying on the street than this problem: how to get the most able people — who don’t provide 50% more value than average leaders but many orders of magnitude — into the highest