Taxation has several significant excess burdens, including enforcement costs, compliance costs, and deadweight losses. Most estimates find that raising a dollar of tax revenue costs much more than a dollar. Unfortunately, commonly used public finance textbooks do not integrate these costs into...

Inflation worries the general public much more than it does the economics profession, and economists remain perplexed as to exactly why. The costs that concern economists are inflation’s deadweight loss. But that is only a part of the losses that concern the public, because inflation...