Financial Transparency Coalition

In December of last year, I wrote a blog post on Gibraltar, a British Crown Dependency and tax haven, which is making a tidy profit from the growing online gambling community. I noted that the tax haven has used its low tax rates to attract a sizeable online gambling industry. This industry now employs 12% of Gibraltar’s 19,000 person workforce. Online companies in the tax haven currently pay a measly 1% tax, which raising this rate to 10% to placate the EU, but has still attracted a plethora of online gambling sites, and has furnished Gibraltar...

The United States Chamber of Commerce is one of the largest lobbying groups in this country. It has enormous clout on Capitol Hill, both because of the size of its membership and the depth of its pockets—the Chamber spends more money on political ads and campaigns than any other organization in the country, save the Democratic and Republican parties. To the public it describes itself as “the world's largest business federation representing the interests of more than 3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions 96% of U.S. Chamber members are small businesses with...

As I’m sure you’re well aware, last week’s tense debates on the U.S. federal budget threatened to result in a government shutdown. If this had happened, 800,000 “non-essential” federal employees would have found themselves on mandatory unpaid leave as of Friday at midnight. National parks and passport offices would have been shuttered; people who filed tax returns by mail would have waited indefinitely for their refunds and consumer spending would have stalled. About one million essential workers—those in security or air traffic control, for example—would have been asked to come to work without pay and without...

Financial incentives are used in almost every context where the public good is at odds with individual utility. As I poured over my tax returns last weekend I discovered that other than the fact that the U.S. tax system is massively complicated, it is also the perfect example of financial incentives gone awry. As an economist, I feel fairly strongly that I should be mathematically and logically competent to do my taxes the old fashioned way—with pen and paper. I had to repeat that method to the “second look” guy at H&R Block about 13 times,...