Economic Policy Forum — Policy Without the Noise Serious political analysis for readers who want to understand the system, not just react to it. Browse Latest Posts Political coverage has a problem: it’s designed for outrage. We do the opposite. Every piece we publish starts with primary sources, policy documents, and expert analysis. We cover […]
On July 21, 2010, Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act. Buried in Title IX, Section 956 ran nine paragraphs. It told six agencies—the SEC, the Federal Reserve, the OCC, the FDIC, and the FHFA—to jointly write rules prohibiting incentive-based compensation at financial firms that encouraged inappropriate risk. Congress gave them nine months. The clock started […]
Household formation is the least glamorous statistic in American macroeconomics and one of the most consequential. The Census Bureau counts a household every time one or more people occupy a housing unit of their own; formation happens when a young adult leaves a parent’s home, a couple marries and signs a first lease, a first […]
Healthcare spending is not a neutral transfer of resources from the healthy to the sick. It is a distributional machine that quietly moves wealth upward through the specific design of statutes, scoring conventions, accounting rules, and monetary facilities. The main entity here is the healthcare-finance complex: the interlocking system of Medicare, Medicaid, employer-sponsored insurance, tax […]
Housing costs are the most important economic indicator because they are the single largest line item in most household budgets, the primary store of wealth for the middle class, and the most direct transmission mechanism by which federal policy quietly redistributes income upward. The Consumer Price Index headline number averages together thousands of goods and […]
Universal Basic Services (UBS) guarantees every resident access to essential goods and services—housing, healthcare, education, transit, nutritious food, and digital connectivity—as a matter of right, funded through progressive taxation and delivered through public or publicly regulated institutions. It stands in direct contrast to Universal Basic Income (UBI), which distributes cash and leaves provisioning to markets. […]
On November 17, 1982, the Securities and Exchange Commission published a final rule in the Federal Register that attracted almost no public attention outside of securities law practitioners. The rule, designated 10b-18, created what the agency called a “non-exclusive safe harbor” from manipulation charges for companies repurchasing their own shares. SEC Chairman John Shad assured […]
Corporate tax avoidance is not a loophole in the law; it is a feature of the law. When a multinational corporation books profits in a low-tax jurisdiction, shifts intangible assets into a subsidiary, or times deductions against a favorable rate schedule, the arithmetic is simple: the revenue that does not arrive at the Treasury must […]
By Dr. Harold Finchley | April 7, 2025 When a multinational reports billions in profit and pays an effective tax rate that rounds to zero, the public conversation usually lands on fairness. That framing misses something more mechanical—and more unsettling. A dollar of tax liability that a large firm legally extinguishes through offshore structuring, accelerated […]
When a multinational reports paying an effective tax rate of 2.5% on billions in profit, the public usually cycles through a familiar mix of outrage and weary resignation. But the real story isn’t about corporate cleverness or government failure to enforce the rules. It’s about a quiet, institutionalized transfer—a shift that moves the cost of […]
When a multinational reports a low effective tax rate, shareholders may celebrate. What remains unspoken—and far more consequential—is the quiet transfer of that avoided obligation onto ordinary people. This is not a story about illegality. It is a story about legal engineering, institutional design, and measurement conventions that methodically shift the cost of public goods […]