A common claim is that home ownership is a good deal because the housing services it provides are untaxed. My simple point is that the property tax paid by a homeowner is in effect an annual tax on housing services. It is an income tax when the homeowner rents the house to somebody else. It's a...

Federal, state, and local governments are similar to nonprofits in that their labor inputs pay taxes, but they are otherwise tax exempt. Governments are involved in some activities special to them, for example, defense, police, and court systems, but many government activities overlap with those...

Political candidates on the left commonly propose an annual tax on wealth. There are lots of difficult questions associated with a wealth tax. For example, what counts as wealth and how is it measured? I put these important issues aside to focus on three simpler but central issues. (i) Since the...

Government does lots of redistribution along with expenditures for defense, education, etc. Government imposes income taxes to finance these activities. Income taxation can be done to raise revenue in a simple transparent way. Here's a suggested scheme