Free Talk Live

One of contenders for the most highly taxed country in the Western world has cut taxes significantly since 2006. Tight fiscal policy has pushed the public sector's share of GDP back down toward 50%. The economy is growing, the budget is balanced, unemployment is declining.
In five years in office, Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has repealed Sweden's wealth taxes and inheritance taxes. He has reduced the labor taxes that pushed almost all home repairs into the black market. He has championed a simple powerful idea: Work should pay better than benefits.

Economy of Medical Marijuana

Did you know that the United States government provides medicinal pot to only four citizens? Marijuana legalization measures have been appearing frequently in petitions and on ballots across the country and the world, but opinions vary. Currently 16 states and Washington D.C. have made medical marijuana available to certain patients. Learn about the medical marijuana market and where it might be heading.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that voters overwhelmingly prefer a free market economy to an economy managed by the government and think government economic control helps big businesses at the expense of small ones.

The World Bank has clued in to the fact that many Eastern Europeans prefer to work in the "shadow economy" — that is, off the books and out of sight of tax men, inspectors and other assorted bureaucrats. This has the World Bank very concerned, for a variety of reasons — some convincing, and others, not so much. By the way, World Bank Employees are exempt from income taxes.

determination to ‘move beyond anger to creativity’ is driving a strong barter economy in some places

I'm astounded that this article appeared in Time (or at least on their website). They rationally propose the fact that college might not be for everyone, as well as talk about the underground economy:

"Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias."

A woman from Spain said she had registered the star at a local notary public as being her property. There is an international agreement which states that no country may claim ownership of a planet or star, but it says nothing about individuals, she added.
She wants to slap a fee on everyone who uses the sun and give half of the proceeds to the Spanish government and 20 percent to the nation's pension fund, another 10 percent to research, another 10 percent to ending world hunger -- and would keep the remaining 10 percent herself.

WASHINGTON—The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.

For as long as there have been laws, there have been black markets to sell whatever those laws prohibit -- drugs, guns, whatever Han Solo was shipping on behalf of Jabba during his smuggler days. But not every law is as clear-cut as "machine guns and heroin are bad," and not every black market item is as menacing as those. In fact, you'd be utterly baffled to see what's getting traded in the shadows these days, considering it includes things like ...