Articles

Invention and innovation are disruptive. Just ask the makers of typewriters, rotary-dial telephones, or –increasingly – desktop computers. Economist Joseph Schumpeter called this process creative destruction.

Oklahoma prides itself as a place where people are free to do business. We should know better than to increase regulations in the name of “fairness” and a false kind of “competition”.

Looking at the performance of the nine states with no income taxes versus the nine states with the highest income taxes, the performance results are fairly clear: no-income-tax states are vastly outperforming their high-tax counterparts and the national average.

No question, HB 2562 is a tax cut because the effective date of the new 2-percent rate doesn’t take place until the rate would have reverted to 7 percent. Those opposed to SQ 640 will have to find another angle to attack.

In 1992, Oklahoma voters approved State Question 640 to add a taxpayer-protection provision to the State Constitution. Everyone — supporters and opponents alike — understood the provision would make it harder to raise taxes.

Recall the saying: “Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Such wisdom is particularly true regarding the doom and gloom often predicted by those fixated on raising taxes and fees in order to increase revenue for government.

President Obama has repeatedly called for the so-called rich to pay their “fair share” as he strives to attain his stated goal of tax fairness. He defines as wealthy those individuals making $200k or married couples making more than $250k. But these earners are far from the millionaires that most would envision as America’s elite.

The most recent fiscal year ended on June 30, and the data show that for state government revenues and spending, it’s a time of all-time highs.

Imagine the outrage if a government agency started collecting contributions from its employees to support the Repub­lican Party. Some would say, with justification, that government should not help fund a political advocacy group.

The political left is aflutter over Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a book by French economist Thomas Piketty, who argues that the much-maligned wealth gap between the haves and have-nots is largely the result of higher returns from capital investment rather than from ordinary wage earnings. His remedy for the gap, not surprisingly, seems to be more confiscatory taxation of the “rich” with further wealth redistribution via government fiat.