Sven Larson

The bill creates a new federal statistical agency: the National Secure Data Service (NSDS). Why? The answer is simple: not-yet-created entitlement programs for which we qualify based on our incomes.

Perhaps the ideological conversation needs to take a new route, one that cuts between the equally unrepentant libertarian and egalitarian camps, and maybe this third route can share the same goal as the libertarian camp.

The American welfare state is three reforms away from becoming a Scandinavian welfare state: universal child care, paid family leave, and single-payer medical care.

A hidden, extra 45.6 percent tax bracket, is tucked away inside the GOP plan. They are more concerned with recovering “lost” revenue than with stimulating economic growth. The great Art Laffer’s influence over Republican tax policy has definitively come to an end.

The tax reform fails to incentivize higher earners to be even more productive. It also increases the federal government’s reliance on those high-income filers for its tax revenue.

There is no macroeconomic data to show that a “good” business-tax index score is associated with a strong state economy. On the contrary, a review of state GDP data indicates that the opposite might actually be true.

Do taxpayers facing a new income tax have good reasons to believe that their states will have a brighter fiscal future? History suggests otherwise. Plain and simple, jobs migrate to where taxes are low, away from where taxes are high. And people follow.

After their chronic inability to move the needle on Obamcare reform, Republicans have now turned their attention to taxes. They have to give up show-and-tell politics for get-it-done legislation. Is that too much to ask? Hopefully, no. Probably, yes.

Paid family leave, President Trump’s new entitlement proposal, seems like an inconspicuous idea on the surface, but it is an enormous fiscal gamble: once the program is up and running, it could easily add hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal budget.