IREF

Posters with pictures of Angela Markel and the financial minister Wolfgang Schäuble and the title “Wanted” have been put up in Swiss main cities. This is the way the Swiss…

Tax Policy Lessons from the 2000s brings together the most up-to-date research available on tax policy with trenchant analysis by America’s leading economists. The authors explore the role taxes should play in setting environmental policy; the effect of tax rate increases on labor supply and reported taxable income; the economic impact of deficit-financed tax reductions; and the effect of the tax system on businesses’ financial and investment decisions.

The renewed interest in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is premature. They are currently the mainstays of the U.S. housing market–more important now than they were before being placed in a government conservatorship in September 2008. Many observers do not believe the two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) can survive the immense losses they will cause taxpayers, but this is far from true.

If governments continue to pile on more and more debt, when will they reach the tipping point? The Greeks appear to be close to the tipping point, and it is only a matter of time before other European countries, and eventually even the United States, begin their fiscal death spiral. The Greek government’s unwillingness to make the hard choices necessary to put its fiscal house in order in the past few weeks has caused investors to demand a 2.5 percent premium on its government-issued Eurobonds over those issued by the German government.

The economic crisis could present an opportunity to harmonise taxation policy across european states, according to a major report on the future development of the EU published by the European…

There is a growing call by backers of bigger government for Congress to impose a value-added tax (VAT) on top of all the other taxes Americans already pay. A VAT is similar to a national retail sales tax but is collected at every stage of business production until its entire burden ultimately falls on the consumer.

There has been a rising academic debate on the sustainability of deficit spending and accumulated debt in governments across the globe. This correlates with a growing concern that excessive government deficits and accumulated debt will lead to unstable financial environments and a devalued quality of life for future generations. Varying economies with varying fiscal behavior have increased incentives to work toward more responsible fiscal behavior through reining in deficit spending and debt accumulation. The authors of this report seek to understand the process these economies undertook, the procedures they used, and the resulting effectiveness of those procedures on achieving fiscal stability. This paper takes a broad, case-study view of 26 countries and some of the plausible factors and motivations that have led them to aim for fiscal prudence. While case studies like this cannot be definitive on causation, they are certainly suggestive. The report is looking for for policy reforms that may cause better long-run fiscal performance.

In a joint report from the National Research Council and the National Academy of Public Administration, its authors, including AEI’s Joseph Antos, describe the United States’ fiscal outlook, asserting that the present budgetary path is unsustainable. If today’s policies, particularly those regarding entitlement programs, are left unchanged, Americans will face either a substantial erosion in their standard of living or an extremely severe crisis. The authors propose a choice of four policy paths that the United States could and should pursue to get itself back on track.

The Obama administration has just proposed a new fee — otherwise known as a tax — on the country’s largest financial institutions. The tax aims to recover the difference between the bailout funds provided to these institutions a year and a half ago and the amounts ultimately returned to the Treasury. In so doing, the tax will allegedly reduce the federal deficit by some $90 billion.

In a new Working Paper published by the American Enterprise Institute, Kevin A. Hassett and Aparna Mathur provide a brief overview of U.S. tax policy in relation to other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and in relation to world averages. They describe trends in ten different tax rates between 1981 and 2007 across all thirty OECD countries. The U.S. tax code emerges, in their analysis, as exceptional in many regards. Most countries have gradually moved toward collecting a large share of their revenue from value-added taxes.