Robert McIntyre

My friend and adversary Bruce Bartlett of the rabidly anti-tax National Center for Policy Analysis was tapped by Philadelphia public radio to defend President Bush’s enacted and proposed tax cuts. Bartlett spoke glowingly about the tax cuts’ sharp tilt in favor of the wealthy, and admitted that they’re being financed entirely by borrowing. But that’s […]

If, like our president and vice president, you strongly believe that cutting taxes leads to higher tax revenues, the past year and a half must have been very disappointing. Despite the huge tax cut enacted in the spring of 2001, personal income-tax collections have plummeted since George W. Bush took office, dropping from 10.1 percent […]

When George W. Bush hired a new economic team in early December, the press speculated that the change might bring a glimmer of fiscal sanity to the administration’s economic policies. Don’t bet on it. As Stephen Moore of the anti-tax, big-deficit Club for Growth cult put it, whatever their past records, the new boys will […]

There are some subjects I just can’t stop harping on. But there’s a rationale for my repetition. I hope that someday the mere mention of “Cato Institute” or “Heritage Foundation” or “Bush” will make people immediately think, “Yeah, those are the guys who support tax cheating.” Here’s the latest entry in the dossier. In the […]

Everybody’s annoyed at big American corporations that renounce their citizenship and move to Bermuda to avoid taxes. The public heat has forced even most Republican politicians to feign outrage. In recent months, PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting abandoned its plan to incorporate in Bermuda, as did the Stanley Works, the poster child for unpatriotic corporate behavior. Who could […]

In response to public outrage, congressional Democrats are clamoring for a crackdown on offshore tax dodges. They’ve focused particularly on the notorious Bermuda loophole, whereby unpatriotic companies such as Tyco, Stanley Works, Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) and PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting have or plan to set up mail drops in Bermuda to avoid taxes on their U.S. […]

Late in the fall of 1999, presidential candidate George W. Bush began talking up the idea of investing the Social Security Trust Fund in the stock market. What would have happened if his wish had immediately come true? Bush’s idea was — and apparently still is — that invested in stocks, Social Security could earn […]

Suppose you’re a governor and your staff has just informed you that most of the biggest corporations doing business in your state have cooked their books so severely that they pay virtually nothing in state income taxes. Do you holler, “Hallelujah! Hunt ’em up and have ’em over for a campaign fundraiser!”? Well, that would […]

You can hardly pick up the newspaper these days without reading about some freshly discovered corporate tax shelter scam, whether it’s an Enron-style tax-haven subsidiary or a Bermuda shell company. The Bush administration and House Republicans, who generally support these kinds of tax abuses, have been in full stall mode, hoping to ride out the […]