Republicans’ tax plan takes a quirky swipe at the little guys on December 11, 2017Republicans are supposed to be the party that cuts the job-killing capital-gains tax, not raises it. But because of a quirk in the Senate-passed bill, the tax on capital gains may go up – and for some types of long-held assets, fairly substantially. Most members of Congress don’t even know of this stealth capital-gains hike. […]
The false compassion of liberalism on April 3, 2017Last week on CNN I debated a liberal commentator who complained that the problem with the Trump budget blueprint is that it lacks “compassion” for the poor, children and the disabled. This woman went on to ask me how I could defend a budget that would cut Meals on Wheels, after-school programs, and special-ed funding, […]
The false compassion of liberalism on April 2, 2017Last week on CNN I debated a liberal commentator who complained that the problem with the Trump budget blueprint is that it lacks “compassion” for the poor, children and the disabled. This woman went on to ask me how I could defend a budget that would cut Meals on Wheels, after-school programs, and special-ed funding, […]
Striking budget gold on March 27, 2017What hypocrites liberals and the media are. For weeks on end they’ve been beating up President Trump for not taking the initiative on the $10 trillion debt build-up under Barack Obama or the runaway entitlement programs that could bankrupt our nation. Now that Mr. Trump has unveiled a budget that does both of those things, […]
Pleading poverty, demanding new taxes on March 6, 2017Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. Governors and state legislators are pleading poverty again and they are demanding tax hikes of every imaginable kind. More than half the states are facing big deficits this year and they are mostly blue states like California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois and New York and Oregon. (See chart.) […]
How Trump can create a bull market on February 13, 2017The stock market has risen about 9 percent since the election of Donald Trump with near a $2 trillion increase in wealth. Is this the start of a big bull market rally?Investors are rightly euphoric over President Trump’s pro-business/pro-investor policies. ButWall Street is coming to grips with the political reality that gridlock is the default […]
Trumps $10 trillion stimulus plan on January 30, 2017All of Washington seems to be in cardiac arrest over the news reports late last week that President Donald Trump is planning a budget with $10 trillion of budget cuts over the next decade. We can only hope and pray that the report is accurate. Let’s also hope that Mr. Trump has the backbone to […]
The case for a border adjustable tax system on January 16, 2017If America’s competitors were intentionally trying to design a tax system to destroy the American economy, they probably couldn’t come up with a dumber tax system than the way the United States currently taxes our own businesses. To fully appreciate the stupidity of the American corporate tax, consider this simple example: If you are an […]
The death tax is the unfairest of all on September 11, 2016It was in 1916 – 100 years ago this year – that America made a big, big mistake that has done significant damage to our economy and the fairness of our tax system for an entire century. We are talking about the estate tax, more popularly known as the death tax. The tax is in […]
The infrastructure illusion on August 15, 2016Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump don’t agree on much of anything, but there is one area where they have a meeting of the minds: they both want to spend way more on public works programs. Hillary Clinton says that her primary jobs stimulus will be a massive $275 billion-plus infrastructure spending binge. Donald Trump one-upped […]