Flat Tax

It seems that when Chief Justice John Marshall was preparing the opinion for McCulloch v. Maryland he tapped into an eternal truth. “The power to tax is the power to destroy,” he wrote on behalf of a unanimous Supreme Court. Those words are no less true in 2014 than they were in 1819. Taxation appropriates money from one person or group of people in order to give it to others. There is no way to escape taxes. But there is a way to make taxes somewhat fairer. One way is to make taxes flatter and expand the tax base.

The collecting of taxes is always a sticky subject for proponents of the free market to address. This is due to their natural tendency to spurn taxes in general. Yet, if change to the current unfair, prosperity-stifling tax regime is to occur, we need to offer a meaningful solution beyond the simple call to reduce taxes and spending (appealing as they might be). One solution that might go a long way toward improving how the government collects taxes is the Automated Payment Transaction Tax (APT tax).

Steve Staneck interviews Ben Van Metre, Senior Budget, Tax and Policy Analyst at the Illinois Policy Institute, regarding Illinois’ movement from Flat tax to Progressive income tax. This movement is…

[First published at The American Spectator.] It seems like everyone is piling on my college friend Grover Norquist because they can’t wait to abandon the tax pledge not to raise…

I have been on record numerous times as being very strongly against the idea of implementing a Value Added Tax (VAT) both here and here. So my initial reaction to…