Here is new video from RebelPundit’s continuing coverage of Occupy the Dream, an event held at the Peoples[sic] Church of Chicago, Sunday January 15th. The following video reveals the overwhelming and until now, unseen tone of the event.

The event had little to do with Martin Luther King, Jr., or any of his larger than life accomplishments in the civil rights movement, or changing dynamic of the racial divide in America. Perhaps this is not very surprising. What it did have plenty to do with, however, was in fact, occupying the dream.

Progress Illinois even titled their coverage, “Occupy Chicago, Religious Leaders Use MLK Holiday As Means To Call For Change.” There could not have been a more appropriate description of the event.

Religious leaders, community organizers and local politicians joined Occupy Chicago to occupy the dream, occupy the church and occupy the state for one grand revolutionary extravaganza.

Community organizers even called elected officials of the Democrat Party to the pulpit to get their commitment to pushing forward the radical agendas of the groups participating in the event. State senator Heather Steans took to the pulpit to blast Republicans, with other members of the Illinois general assembly calling for progressive tax reform in Illinois. (video) And Jesse Jackson spoke of spending a “mere $900 billion” in taxpayer dollars for the federal government to directly hire 15 million workers at $40,000 per year. (video) Jan Schakowsky was also present and demanded that millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share. (video)

But what was not so present at the event was a celebration of the victories the King achieved and how different the landscape of this country has become since his death. The sermon, delivered by Dwight Gardner of the First Trinity United Baptist Church of Gary, Indiana, only referred to King periodically in his address, but only to emphasize the need to “occupy the dream of King” while making tremendous calls for revolution.

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I’ve written several times about a proposed IRS regulation that would force American banks to put foreign law above U.S. law. I’ve repeatedly warned that the scheme, which would force financial institutions to report the deposit interest they pay to foreigners, is bad economic policy, bad regulatory policy, and bad banking policy.

My arguments have included:

• Explaining that this onerous regulatory scheme will result in capital fleeing to other nations, needlessly harming the financial sector and putting American banks at risk.
• Explaining why the proposal is a threat to human rights since many foreigners keep money in the United States because they live in nations with unstable and/or repressive governments.
• Explaining that the IRS action is a gross abuse of the regulatory process since an executive branch agency does not have the authority to overturn laws enacted as part of the democratic process.
• Explaining that this proposed regulation is just the beginning, and that proponents hope to issue follow-up rules that would cripple policies making America a haven for global capital.

But these points don’t seem to matter to the Obama Administration, which is ideologically committed to the anti-tax competition agenda of Europe’s welfare states. This is why the White House supports all sorts of destructive policies, including not only this misguided regulation, but also the creation of something akin to a world tax organization that will have power to block free-market tax policy.

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I’m not a big fan of Mitt Romney. I hammered him the day before Christmas for being open to a value-added tax, and I’ve criticized him in previous posts for his less-than-stellar record on healthcare, his weakness on Social Security reform, his anemic list of proposed budget savings, and his reprehensible support for ethanol subsidies.

But I also believe in being intellectually honest, so I’ll defend a politician I don’t like (even Obama) when they do the right thing or when they get attacked for the wrong reason.

In the case of Romney, some of his GOP opponents are criticizing him for job losses and/or bankruptcies at some of the companies in which he invested while in charge of Bain Capital. But I don’t need to focus on that issue, because James Pethokoukis of AEI already has done a great job of debunking that bit of anti-Romney demagoguery.

In this post, I want to focus on the issue of tax havens.

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I’ve commented many times about the misguided big-government policies of both Hoover and FDR, so I can say with considerable admiration that this new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity packs an amazing amount of solid info into about five minutes.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation in the video, at least to everyone other than economic historians, is that America suffered a harsh depression after World War I, with GDP falling by a staggering 24 percent.

But we don’t read much about that downturn in the history books, in large part because it ended so quickly.

The key question, though, is why did that depression end quickly while the Great Depression dragged on for a decade? (more…)

Europe is in the midst of a fiscal crisis caused by too much government spending, yet many of the continent’s politicians want the European Central Bank to purchase the dodgy debt of reckless welfare states such as Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal in order to prop up these big government policies.

So it’s especially noteworthy that economists at the European Central Bank have just produced a study showing that government spending is unambiguously harmful to economic performance. Here is a brief description of the key findings.

…we analyse a wide set of 108 countries composed of both developed and emerging and developing countries, using a long time span running from 1970-2008, and employing different proxies for government size… Our results show a significant negative effect of the size of government on growth. …Interestingly, government consumption is consistently detrimental to output growth irrespective of the country sample considered (OECD, emerging and developing countries).

There are two very interesting takeaways from this new research. First, the evidence shows that the problem is government spending, and that problem exists regardless of whether the budget is financed by taxes or borrowing. Unfortunately, too many supposedly conservative policy makers fail to grasp this key distinction and mistakenly focus on the symptom (deficits) rather than the underlying disease (big government).

The second key takeaway is that Europe’s corrupt political elite is engaging in a classic case of Mitchell’s Law, which is when one bad government policy is used to justify another bad government policy. In this case, they undermined prosperity by recklessly increasing the burden of government spending, and they’re now using the resulting fiscal crisis as an excuse to promote inflationary monetary policy by the European Central Bank.

The ECB study, by contrast, shows that the only good answer is to reduce the burden of the public sector. Moreover, the research also has a discussion of the growth-maximizing size of government.

… economic progress is limited when government is zero percent of the economy (absence of rule of law, property rights, etc.), but also when it is closer to 100 percent (the law of diminishing returns operates in addition to, e.g., increased taxation required to finance the government’s growing burden – which has adverse effects on human economic behaviour, namely on consumption decisions).

This may sound familiar, because it’s a description of the Rahn Curve, which is sort of the spending version of the Laffer Curve. This video explains.

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“I’ll say this plainly, I’ve said it before – Taxation is theft. It presumes the government has a higher claim on our property than we do,” says Judge Andrew Napolitano, the host of Fox Business’ Freedom Watch and the author of the new book, It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong: The Case for Personal Freedom.

Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with the outspoken libertarian commentator to discuss topics ranging from abortion (the judge is fiercely pro-life) to Occupy Wall Street (he welcomes the protest against corporatism) to Rep. Ron Paul (“the Barry Goldwater” of our moment) to the role of religion in the quest for freedom.

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On Twitter last week, people started a ‘Questions you don’t have to ask Tea Partiers’ hashtag in response to everything that’s going on at the ‘Occupy’ protests. We took a couple of them and made a video out of it.

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I’ve criticized the Congressional Budget Office for generating biased and inaccurate numbers. These are the clowns, after all, who say deficit spending stimulates the economy in the short run but they also rely on a model which seemingly predicts 100 percent tax rates maximize growth in the long run.

About the only nice thing that can be said about this collection of bureaucrats is that they’re consistent, though I’m not sure being wrong all the time is something to brag about – especially when even cartoonists start to make fun of CBO’s flawed approach.

This is why I’ve argued it may be best to shut down CBO and also written that – at a minimum – sweeping reform of the Capitol Hill bureaucracy is a test of GOP seriousness.

I’m not alone in my disdain for CBO. In a column for The Hill, Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center makes two excellent points about the Congressional Budget Office: 1) the general inability of economists to predict (we’d be rich if we knew how to do that) and 2) the use of inaccurate models.

The CBO’s consistently flawed scoring of the cost of bills is used by Congress to justify legislation that rarely performs as promised and drags down the economy. Whether it scores the recent healthcare bill or the cost of the Capitol Hill Visitor Center, an ambitious three-floor underground facility, the price for taxpayers always ends up larger than originally predicted. …Like many economists, its analysts suffer from a misplaced belief in their forecasting prowess. …CBO relies heavily on Keynesian economic models, like the ones it used during the stimulus debate. Forecasters at the agency predicted the stimulus package would create more than 3 million jobs. …But unemployment stubbornly remained around 10 percent. What was wrong with the CBO’s numbers? …the stimulus and the ACA should serve as yet more evidence that Congress should take budget scores and economic projections with a grain of salt. What looks good in the spirit world of the computer model may be very bad in the material realm of real life because people react to changes in policies in ways unaccounted for in these models.

Let’s now move from the general to the specific. Peter Suderman reports from Reason on new research suggesting that costs for just one provision of Obamacare may be far higher than predicted by the jokers at CBO.

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The simple proposition that no one should be forced to pay tributes to labor bosses or they will lose their job, is not a conspiracy.  It is freedom from tyranny.  Using forced dues to finance politicians who vote to force citizens against their will to pay union bosses in order to keep their own jobs, is a conspiracy.

The fact is, until 1935, the United States Government did not force people to pay tributes to union bosses in order to get or keep a job.  If there was a conspiracy, it was between the AFL, CIO, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and a Democrat Congress passed the Wagner Act, selling the concept as “workers rights.”  The Wagner Act foisted union servitude on millions of working Americans overnight.  We see the AFL-CIO, the president, and Congress attempting the same scam today.

The only workers who can escape from Wagner Act compulsion work in the 22-states which chose a Right to Work law to protect their citizens from this tyranny.  This Wagner Act forced-dues tyranny can be clearly blamed on Big Labor Bosses.

Then-A.F.L. president William Green boasted of Big Labor’s role in the Wagner Act in Liberty Magazine: “We helped write it. We thought of it as ‘Our Baby’.”  And at a union convention Green said, “The A.F.L. is wholly and fully responsible for the Wagner Labor Relations Act.”

Mr. Hoffa, freedom is no conspiracy.  Freedom is an ideal that both men and women aspire to obtain.

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The folks from the Koch Institute put together a great video a couple of months ago looking at why some nations are rich and others are poor.

That video looked at the relationship between economic freedom and various indices that measure quality of life. Not surprisingly, free markets and small government lead to better results.

Now they have a new video that looks at recent developments in the United States. Unfortunately, you will learn that the U.S. is slipping in the wrong direction.

The entire video is superb, but there are two things that merit special praise, one because of intellectual honesty and the other because of intellectual effectiveness.

1. The refreshingly honest aspect of the video is its non-partisan tone. It explains, in a neutral fashion, that Bush undermined prosperity by making government bigger and that Obama is undermining prosperity by increasing the burden of government.

2. The most important and effective argument in the video, at least from my perspective, is that it shows clearly that a larger government necessarily comes at the expense of the productive sector of the economy. Pay extra-close attention around the 2:00 mark.

It’s also worth pointing out that there are several policies that impact on economic performance. The Koch Institute video focuses primarily on the key issues of fiscal policy and regulation, but trade, monetary policy, property rights, and rule of law are examples of other policies that also are very important.

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Yesterday, Barack Obama’s official Twitter account announced a new Obama for America website, AttackWatch.com. Billed as a way to “get the facts” and “fight the smears,” Attack Watch is the latest in a long line of attempts by the Obama administration to crowdsource snitching and keep tabs on its critics. Unfortunately for Obama, the site’s overdramatic design (complete with a Nazi color palette) and Big Brother vibe turned the site into an instant laughingstock on Twitter.

I’ve been lucky to be part of an upcoming comedy site run by young conservatives called Misfit Politics. No, our site’s not live yet, but the schadenfreude of last night’s #AttackWatch jokes proved too big a temptation to sit on our hands and wait to make the video you’re about to see. I present to you the very first (fake) commercial for AttackWatch.com:

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Being the world’s self-appointed defender of so-called tax havens has led to some rather bizarre episodes.

The bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development threatened to have me thrown in a Mexican jail for the horrible crime of standing in the public lobby of a hotel and giving advice to low-tax jurisdictions.

On a more amusing note, my efforts to defend tax havens made me the beneficiary of grade inflation and I was listed as the 244th most important person in the world of global  finance – even higher than George Soros and Paul Krugman.

But if that makes it seem as if the battle is full of drama and (exaggerated) glory, that would be a gross exaggeration. More than 99 percent of my time on this issue is consumed by the difficult task of trying to convince policy makers that tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy should be celebrated rather than persecuted.

Sort of like convincing thieves that it’s a good idea for houses to have alarm systems.

And it means I’m also condemned to the never-ending chore of debunking left-wing attacks on tax havens. The big-government crowd viscerally despises these jurisdictions because tax competition threatens the ability of politicians to engage in class warfare/redistribution policies.

Here’s a typical example. Paul Vallely has a column, entitled “There is no moral case for tax havens,” in the UK-based Independent.

To determine whether tax havens are immoral, let’s peruse Mr. Vallely’s column. It begins with an attack on Ugland House in the Cayman Islands.

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Just last week, I made fun of Paul Krugman after he publicly said that a fake threat from invading aliens would be good for the economy since the earth would waste a bunch of money on pointless defense outlays.

Yesterday, there were rumors that Krugman stated that it would have been stimulative if the earthquake had been stronger and done more damage, but he exposed this as a prank (though it is understandable that many people – including me, I’m embarrassed to admit - initially assumed it was true since he did write that the 9-11 terrorist attacks boosted growth).

But while Krugman is owed an apology by whoever pulled that stunt, the real problem is that President Obama and his advisers actually take Keynesian alchemy seriously.

And since President Obama is promising to unveil another “jobs plan” after his vacation, that almost certainly means more faux stimulus.

We don’t know what will be in this new package, but there are rumors of an infrastructure bank, which doubtlessly would be a subsidy for state and local governments. The only thing “shovel ready” about this proposal is that tax dollars will be shoveled to interest groups.

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Warren Buffett’s at it again. He has a column in the New York Times complaining that he has been coddled by the tax code and that “rich” people should pay higher taxes.

My first instinct is to send Buffett the website where people can voluntarily pay extra money to the federal government. I’ve made this suggestion to guilt-ridden rich people in the past.

But I no longer give that advice. I’m worried he might actually do it. And even though Buffett is wildly misguided about fiscal policy, I know he will invest his money much more wisely than Barack Obama will spend it.

But Buffett goes beyond guilt-ridden rants in favor of higher taxes. He makes specific assertions that are inaccurate.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

His numbers are flawed in two important ways.

1. When Buffett receives dividends and capital gains, it is true that he pays “only” 15 percent of that money on his tax return. But dividends and capital gains are both forms of double taxation. So if he wants honest effective tax rate numbers, he needs to show the 35 percent corporate tax rate.

Moreover, as I noted in a previous post, Buffett completely ignores the impact of the death tax, which will result in the federal government seizing 45 percent of his assets. To be sure, Buffett may be engaging in clever tax planning, so it is hard to know the impact on his effective tax rate, but it will be signficant.

2. Buffett also mischaracterizes the impact of the Social Security payroll tax, which is dedicated for a specific purpose. The law only imposes that tax on income up to about $107,000 per year because the tax is designed so that people “earn” a corresponding  retirement benefit (which actually is tilted in favor of low-income workers).

Imposing the tax on multi-millionaire income, however, would mean sending rich people giant checks from Social Security when they retire. But nobody thinks that’s a good idea. Or you could apply the payroll tax to all income and not pay any additional benefits. But this would turn Social Security from an “earned benefit” to a redistribution program, which also is widely rejected (though the left has been warming to the idea in recent years because their hunger for more tax revenue is greater than their support for Social Security).

If we consider these two factors, Buffett’s effective tax rate almost surely is much higher than the burden on any of the people who work for him.

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Senator Rubio continues to impress with his Reagan-like efforts to restrain government and promote growth. His latest initiative is legislation to curtail rogue IRS bureaucrats who are seeking to use regulatory edicts to overturn 90 years of law.

Here are excerpts from a report in The Hill.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and other Senate Republicans on Tuesday introduced a bill aimed at blocking pending regulations that would require banks to report to the Internal Revenue Service all interest deposits paid to nonresident aliens (NRA). Rubio, along with Texas GOP Sens. John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, introduced S. 1506 because they believe the pending regulations have the potential to drive billions of dollars of deposits away from U.S. banks. A summary of the bill provided by Rubio’s office argues that this could leave U.S. banks undercapitalized and less able to lend in the U.S. “Simply put, this rule will cause billions of dollars in important NRA deposits to be withdrawn from American banks and invested in countries with less onerous reporting requirements,” the lawmakers state in the bill summary. “A capital flight of any magnitude will hurt the lending capacity of community banks and damage local and state economies — not to mention endanger those who invest in U.S. banks due to corruption, inflation, and violence in their home countries, particularly in nations like Mexico and Venezuela.” The summary also notes that Congress has explicitly exempted NRA deposits from taxation… Rubio’s bill is a companion bill to H.R. 2568, which was introduced by Reps. Bill Posey (R-Fla.), Francisco Canseco (R-Texas), Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), Ruben Hinojosa (D-Texas) and Gregory Meeks (D-NY).

This may sound like a technical issue, but there are big implications.

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In June we attended the Printer’s Row Literature Festival in Chicago. City blocks were closed off for tents and booths full of all types of literature. We presented a board with a selection of well known book covers and asked visitors of the event if they could choose to ban any of the books on the board, which if any, they would in fact ban. They were allowed to choose any three of the eleven choices.

The authors of the books we offered to ban were Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Andrew Breitbart, Ayn Rand, Michael Savage, Bill Clinton, Michael Moore, Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler and Barack Obama. While there were in fact less than two handfuls of individuals who did tell us they don’t think any books should be banned, unfortunately there were a shocking amount of guests at this book fair who were quite open to the idea, and in fact lined up quite excited for the opportunity to voice their opinion.

Participants overwhelming chose Sarah Palin who received 53 votes putting her at 36% overall, Glenn Beck at 23% and Ann Coulter at 22%.

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This new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity explains why Medicaid should be shifted to the states. As I note in the title of this post, it’s good federalism policy and good fiscal policy. But the video also explains that Medicaid reform is good health policy since it creates an opportunity to deal with the third-party payer problem.

One of the key observations of the video is that Medicaid block grants would replicate the success of welfare reform. Getting rid of the federal welfare entitlement in the 1990s and shifting the program to the states was a very successful policy, saving billions of dollars for taxpayers and significantly reducing poverty. There is every reason to think ending the Medicaid entitlement will have similar positive results.

Medicaid block grants were included in Congressman Ryan’s budget, so this reform is definitely part of the current fiscal debate. Unfortunately, the Senate apparently is not going to produce any budget, and the White House also has expressed opposition. On the left, reducing dependency is sometimes seen as a bad thing, even though poor people are the biggest victims of big government.

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One of the biggest threats against global prosperity is the anti-tax competition project of a Paris-based international bureaucracy known as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD, acting at the behest of the European welfare states that dominate its membership, wants the power to tell nations (including the United States!) what is acceptable tax policy.

I’ve previously explained why the OECD is a problematic institution – especially since American taxpayers are forced to squander about $100 million per year to support the parasitic bureaucracy.

For all intents and purposes, high-tax nations want to create a global tax cartel, sort of an “OPEC for politicians.” This issue is increasingly important since politicians from those countries realize that all their overspending has created a fiscal crisis and they are desperate to figure out new ways of imposing higher tax rates. I don’t exaggerate when I say that stopping this sinister scheme is absolutely necessary for the future of liberty.

Along with Brian Garst of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, I just wrote a paper about these issues. The timing is especially important because of an upcoming “Global Forum” where the OECD will try to advance its mission to prop up uncompetitive welfare states. Here’s the executive summary, but I encourage you to peruse the entire paper for lots of additional important info.

The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has an ongoing anti-tax competition project. This effort is designed to prop up inefficient welfare states in the industrialized world, thus enabling those governments to impose heavier tax burdens without having to fear that labor and capital will migrate to jurisdictions with better tax law. This project received a boost a few years ago when the Obama Administration joined forces with countries such as France and Germany, which resulted in all low-tax jurisdictions agreeing to erode their human rights policies regarding financial privacy. The tide is now turning against high-tax nations – particularly as more people understand that ever-increasing fiscal burdens inevitably lead to Greek-style fiscal collapse. Political changes in the United States further complicate the OECD’s ability to impose bad policy. Because of these developments, low-tax jurisdictions should be especially resistant to new anti-tax competition initiatives at the Bermuda Global Forum.

To understand why this issue is so important, here’s a video I narrated for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

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Under current law, Social Security is supposed to be an “earned benefit,” where taxes are akin to insurance premiums that finance retirement benefits for workers. And because there is a cap on retirement benefits, this means there also is a “wage-base cap” on the amount of income that is hit by the payroll tax.

For 2011, the maximum annual retirement benefit is about $28,400 and the maximum amount of income subject to the payroll tax is about $107,000.

It appears that President Obama wants to radically change this system so that it is based on a class-warfare model. During the 2008 campaign, for instance, then-Senator Obama suggested that the programs giant long-run deficit could be addressed by busting the wage-base cap and imposing the payroll tax on a larger amount of income.

For the past two years, the White House (thankfully) has not followed through on this campaign rhetoric, but that’s now changing. His Fiscal Commission, as I noted last year, suggested a big hike in the payroll tax burden. And the President reiterated his support for a class-warfare approach earlier this week, leading the Wall Street Journal to opine.

Speaking Tuesday in Annandale, Virginia, Mr. Obama came out for lifting the cap on income on which the Social Security payroll tax is applied. Currently, the employer and employee each pay 6.2% up to $106,800, a level that rises with inflation each year. …Mr. Obama didn’t hint at specifics, though he did run in 2008 on a plan to raise the “tax max” by somewhere between two to eight percentage points for the top 3% of earners. …most of the increase could be paid by the middle class or modestly affluent—i.e., those who merely make somewhat more than $106,800. A 6.2% additional hit on every extra dollar they make above that level is a huge reduction from their take-home pay. If the cap is removed entirely, it will also mean a huge increase in the marginal tax rates that affect decisions to work, invest and save. In a recent paper for the American Enterprise Institute, Andrew Biggs calculates that this and other tax increases Mr. Obama favors would bring the top marginal rate to somewhere between 57% and 68% when factoring in state taxes. Tax levels like these haven’t been seen since the 1970s.

Obama is cleverly avoiding specifics, largely because the potential tax hike could be enormous.

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