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Federal tax revenue increased 33% since Congress passed the Trump-era tax reform bill in 2017, while spending increased more than 50% over that same time frame. The data is contained in the Congressional Budget Office's recently released 10-year budget outlook. "Measured as a share of the economy, tax revenue averaged 17% of gross domestic product in the years since the TCJA was passed, the same share as in 2017, and would have been higher if not for the pandemic and associated economic shutdowns," wrote Alfredo Ortiz, president and CEO of the Job Creators Network. "The CBO projects the tax share...

Senator Mitt Romney and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan are holding a two-day summit that began Tuesday. It is described as a “closed-door” summit in Park City, Utah. The Republican presidential ticket from 2012, who lost an election that should have been winnable, brought together four current presidential candidates. The four are Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Chris Christie, and Doug Burgum. This is an 11-year-old summit called the E2 Summit. It focuses on foreign policy, tech, and finance/business. Those attending the summit are “well-heeled, well-wired Republicans” who want to find an alternative to Trump and fund that candidate.The...

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt indicated Friday that he would continue vetoing unrelated bills until the House and Senate agree on school choice and tax cuts. Stitt vetoed 20 unrelated Senate bills this week, all with the same message. "Until we get tax cuts, until we get parent choice done, we are not going to do all this other stuff for lobbyists and special interest groups," Stitt said at his weekly news conference. "Let's get those things done and then we will be happy to talk about some other things in the budget." The House and Senate have passed two versions...

How many times have you heard President Joe Biden or Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) berate the Trump tax cuts as “a giveaway to the rich?” Biden and congressional Democrats now want to let expire major planks of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, former President Donald Trump's signature domestic achievement, particularly the incentives for American businesses to invest more here at home. We now have incontrovertible evidence that after five years since they took effect, the Trump tax rate cuts of 2017 raised revenues over this time period. For full disclosure, I should note...

Liz Truss, the U.K.'s new prime minister, billed herself to the public as that, but the mess she's made of the British economy, which includes a cave-in on a proposed tax cut, is pretty much the opposite of What Thatcher Would Do. According to Fox News:The U.K. is canceling plans to impose a major tax cut for the nation's top tax bracket following widespread frustration and market chaos, U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss announced Monday.Truss' plan had called for eliminating the U.K.'s highest tax bracket, resulting in major cut for citizens making more than $168,000 annually. Truss and her government...

British Prime Minister Liz Truss is going big. Her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, has unveiled an aggressive program of permanent tax cuts. The Wall Street Journal likes the plan:Mr. Kwarteng axed the 2.5-percentage-point increase in the payroll tax imposed by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and canceled a planned increase in the corporate income tax rate to 26% from 19%. … Kwarteng also surprised by eliminating the 45% tax rate on incomes above £150,000. The top marginal rate now will be 40%.As a percentage of GDP, it shapes up as the biggest British tax cut since 1972. From the Telegraph:As you...

Meanwhile, excessive government entitlement spending facilitated by Federal Reserve money-printing will continue unabated. The “only way” to tackle rampant inflation in America is to raise taxes on the middle class and eliminate tax cuts enacted by former President Donald Trump, according to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D). “If you wanna get rid of inflation, the only way to do it is to undo a lot of the Trump Tax Cuts and raise rates,” Schumer said during a press conference at the Capitol building on Tuesday. “No Republican is ever going to do that, so the only way to get...

Dear Marylanders, Today I signed into law the largest tax cut package in state history—including the Retirement Tax Elimination Act—which will provide an additional $1.86 billion in long overdue tax relief for Maryland retirees, families, and small businesses. Combined with the gas tax suspension we enacted just a few weeks ago, we are delivering nearly $2 billion in tax relief during this legislative session alone. This historic, bipartisan agreement brings the total tax, toll, and fee relief that our administration has delivered to nearly $4.7 billion.When I was first running for governor eight years ago, I pledged that once we...

Democrats including President Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and most of the mainstream media have trotted out the claim that President Trump's tax cuts only benefited wealthy Americans. This dubious line has been used in attempts to justify the tax increases that will be necessary to fund President Biden and congressional Democrats' woke and expensive Build Back Better Act that now faces an uphill battle in the United States Senate. The only problem with their claim about Trump's tax cuts, not a rare one for Democrats seeking to force their agenda on the American people, is that it's just not...

President Biden and congressional Democrats' Build Back Better (BBB) Act is now in the hands of the Senate. That legislative body's 50-50 partisan split will undoubtedly make the bill's passage difficult. In order for BBB to become law, Democratic Senate leadership will need to convince moderates such as Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) that the legislation's $2.4 trillion price tag can be offset by expanding the IRS and its enforcement efforts while imposing substantial tax reform measures. Congressional Democrats have argued that one of the best ways to pay for the legislation is to raise taxes on...

In this episode of “Biden Being Biden, DeSantis Being DeSantis”…The inept occupant of the Oval Office kills one major oil pipeline and talks about killing another one while driving up inflation and gas prices with it. The governor of Florida suspends the state’s gas tax, providing $1 billion in relief to drivers feeling the pain at the pump. Biden being Biden, DeSantis being DeSantis.Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is asking state lawmakers to “zero out” the state gas tax to push back against inflation https://t.co/tUb4470HSg— Bloomberg (@business) November 22, 2021Speaking to reporters at a gas station in Daytona Beach on Monday,...

Fox News host Chris Wallace repeatedly questioned Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) on Sunday’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday” for criticizing government debt but supporting former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts. On President Biden’s build Back Better plan, Scott said, “This has got to end this is this is causing inflation. I mean, this is hurting the poor families. This is not hurting the rich. It’s hurting families like mine growing up that had to struggle to put food on the table. This is ridiculous inflation. Solve that. We have to live within our means like every family does.

For several years I have advocated a Shallow Exponent Flat Tax. Instead of 4 or 5 tiers, there would be only ONE tier that we all face. But the more money you make, your burden goes up slightly higher than as a flat percentage. The tax would look something like: Tax = 10% X {[Income]^1.05} The exponent could be set by congress every 10 years or during wartime. The flat exponent perhaps should be on a longer timeframe for revisiting, because 10% is very easy to do in your head. As you go up higher in income, your tax burden...

Politicians have exploited the pandemic to override the rights of the people, cast themselves as heroes, expand government, and justify vast amounts of spending. Long before the pandemic, mechanisms to justify the government expansion were already in place. Consider, for example, the practice of tax withholding. Before World War II, notes Robert Higgs (Crisis and Leviathan), those Americans who owed federal taxes paid the following year in quarterly installments. That changed as the government geared up for World War II. Milton Friedman, then an economist at the Treasury Department, came up with a system of withholding workers' money from their...

Back in early 2016, when Larry Kudlow and I suggested that then-presidential candidate Donald Trump proposed a 20% business tax rate for U.S. companies (down from the highest in the world rate of 35%), he enthusiastically endorsed this "America First" policy -- not because he loved corporate America but because he realized that as long as small and large American companies were paying the highest tax rates, jobs and factories would continue to move offshore. We argued that the biggest beneficiaries would be American workers who would have access to more jobs and higher wages. The liberal economists we debated...

The highest earners paid a greater share of income taxes after the Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts than they paid after the Democrats’ 2013 tax increase.In a speech last week introducing his proposed $6 trillion 2022 budget, President Biden claimed that the benefits of the Republican Party’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act “went to the wealthiest 1% of America.” It’s not the first time he’s made this claim. In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, Biden described the TCJA as a “huge windfall” for “those at the very top.” To right that wrong, he proposes getting rid of...

During his address to Congress Wednesday, President Joe Biden made a statement that was immediately acknowledged by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) as alarmingly radical. "We the People is the government," the leader of the Republic told the legislative branch of government and the American people, signaling an intent to embrace the notion that the federal government should become a much more dominant cultural and economic force in American’s lives because it is what they are -- the people. Cruz took to twitter and responded: “No Joe, you seriously misunderstand the Constitution,” the senator wrote. “’We the People’ is not the...

Former President Donald Trump, in an announcement made through the Save America PAC Friday, gave Sen. Marco Rubio his endorsement for the Florida Republican's 2022 Senate bid for reelection. "It is my honor to give U.S. Senator Marco Rubio my Complete and Total Endorsement," Trump said in the statement provided to Newsmax Friday morning. "Marco has been a tireless advocate for the people of Florida, fighting to cut taxes, supporting our Second Amendment, our Military and our Vets, a strong national defense, and all of the forgotten men and women of America." He added that Rubio "worked with me to...

Three years after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act took effect, Democrats in Congress are ready to roll back some of the most critical reforms.The business tax cuts have been maligned as contrary to the interests of workers. In reality, the corporate tax cut succeeded at allowing new business investment, creating jobs, raising wages, and increasing the economy’s size.The economic history of the 2017 tax cuts should lead policymakers who are intent on raising the corporate income tax, or repealing parts of the individual tax cuts, to question their convictions.The tax cuts were intended to increase new investments in the...

The Democrats' $1.9 trillion stimulus bill is a monster of public spending with the prime aim of rewarding political cronies. Free-spending blue cities and states get bailouts, along with unions with mismanaged gold-plated pensions for their members. The losers, of course, are the savers and taxpayers. That's because it won't be long before Argentina-style inflation and Europe-style taxes kick in to pay for these benefits to leftists.The only hope is to grow the economy so that the debt can be paid, which is something Americans often know how to do.But unlike other bills, this one contains a poison pill, to...