tax code

It’s a day with a “Y” in it, which means in many places throughout $4-trillion-per-year Washington, D.C., there are recipients of massive cronyism – looking to keep their gravy trains a-rolling.

In the Left’s ongoing war against anyone who makes any money – the tax code is probably their best and most vicious weapon. It is a multi-thousand page combination shot and machine gun – firing clouds of buckshot in fully automatic fashion.

In this episode of The Heartland Institute’s weekly Budget & Tax News podcast, managing editor and research fellow Jesse Hathaway talks with Mercatus Center at George Mason University Spending and Budget Initiative program manager Adam Michel about a new study on which he collaborated, about how the U.S. tax code is holding back the nation’s prosperity-building power, and how common-sense tax reforms could unleash the nation’s economic beast and make America great again.

Should employees be allowed to pay for their health care with tax-excluded dollars? Dr. Roger Beauchamp, D.D.S., joined Michael Hamilton on the Health Care News Podcast to share his proposal for reforming the U.S. tax code to empower employees to spend their hard-earned wages on the health care solution of their choice.

With recent news about Burger King and medical device manufacturer Medtronic relocating their headquarters outside of the United States to avoid high corporate taxes, the subject of corporate inversions has been a big topic of discussion in the media. While President Obama and the Treasury Department condemn these moves and construct roadblocks to prevent inversions, they fail to see the reasons that drive these corporations overseas.

To paraphrase the knight who guarded the Holy Grail in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” Ireland has chosen poorly.
The Emerald Isle has decided to make itself decidedly less attractive to people the world over.

The politics of dramatically expanding the child tax credit entitlement (and yes, it is an entitlement) just don’t make all that much sense to me. Consider the landscape of America today, where more people are staying single longer and having fewer kids of their own volition, as they pretty much always do all over the world as cultures become more highly educated. These are not recent developments:

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).