Taxes

On the Fox Business Network on Tuesday, Happening Now host Melissa Francis would not let her Democratic Party guest get away with refusing to answer her question about tax reform. Eventually, she goaded former Clinton adviser Simon Rosenberg into acknowledging that he was refusing to answer her question (then why did he appear in what he knew was a discussion segment?); when she wouldn't move on…

One of the most challenging and important jobs for an economics professor is to teach students how little we know and can possibly know. My longtime friend and colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell says, "It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." Nobel laureate Friedrich August von Hayek admonished, "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little…

On Friday, ABC’s Good Morning America touted a new ABC News/Washington Post poll claiming that a majority of Americans oppose the Republican tax plan that was announced on Thursday. The only problem was that the survey was conducted October 29 through November 1, meaning that any questions about tax reform were asked before the GOP actually released the legislative proposal.

On Sunday's Fareed Zakaria GPS show, the host peddled the long-discredited mythology that the Reagan and Bush 43 supply-side tax cuts caused annual budget deficits to explode. Zakaria interviewed former Treasury Secretary and Obama economic adviser Larry Summers and current Trump administration Council of Economic Advisers head Kevin Hassett, but he did so separately, thus teeing up Summers to go…

Federal income tax was first introduced under the Revenue Act of 1861 to help defray war costs. Congress repealed the tax in 1871 when the need for government revenue declined, only to restore it in 1894 as part of the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act. The public policy debate surrounding the constitutionality of income tax has been going on ever since.

While covering Republican efforts to reform the tax system and the health care industry, on Monday’s CBS This Morning, correspondent Major Garrett turned to Democrats to tear down both GOP agenda items, claiming the Trump administration tax plan was “angling to benefit the wealthy” and that the President “caved to conservatives” by maintaining his opposition to ObamaCare subsidies.

On Friday, the Treasury Department reported that the federal government took in a record $3.315 trillion in revenue during the just-completed 2017 fiscal year. None of the broadcast networks bothered to mention the Treasury on any of their Friday evening or weekend broadcasts. Yet even as revenues have grown at an average of 14 percent annually since 1980, liberal journalists have spent that…

The journalists at CBS on Friday sounded more like DNC campaign operatives instead of reporters. Talking to Paul Ryan about budget issues, This Morning co-host Charlie Rose pressed, “How are you going to make the case that this is not a tax cut for the wealthy?” 

Politicians exploit public ignorance. Few areas of public ignorance provide as many opportunities for political demagoguery as taxation. Today some politicians argue that the rich must pay their fair share and label the proposed changes in tax law as tax cuts for the rich. Let's look at who pays what, with an eye toward attempting to answer this question: Are the rich paying their fair share?

In a series of bizarre comments on Monday’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough made the case that the recent Values Voter Summit in Washington D.C. had no true conservatives present. In order to support this assertion, Joe extensively used liberal talking points, including ones about the GOP’s tax reform plan. Joe ended up claiming that Trump’s administration might raise the national debt up to $35…

On Wednesday, "the Cook County (Illinois) Board of Commissioners repealed the penny-an-ounce levy on sweetened beverages it passed last November." The inflammatory "Big Soda" label appears frequently in press coverage of this reversal of what the government-always-knows-best crowd had thought was a major nanny-state victory, and reflects the fact that many in the media are quite unhappy with this…

The news media have long promoted left-leaning tax analysis by dressing up liberal tax groups as “nonpartisan.” Most recently, print media and the networks have appealed to the liberal Tax Policy Center (TPC) to criticize President Donald Trump’s tax plan.

The liberal media pounced immediately on the release of President Donald Trump’s outline for tax reform calling it “one big lie,” complaining about tax “cuts for the wealthy,” and saying the plan “stinks.” Columnists and editorials spewed the most venom, but news reports were also biased and often turned to “an early analysis” from the liberal Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. However, since…

In school, I liked math the least and history the most. Both can be useful in the coming debate over President Trump's proposed tax reforms. The one thing I learned in math class is that if the formula is wrong, the answer will be wrong. In history class, I learned we are not the first people to occupy the planet and that the experiences of those who came before us can be helpful when considering…