My French is rusty, but I’m pretty sure the Fresh Prince just flipped out at the idea of a 75-percent marginal tax rate like that advocated by France’s new socialist president.

Some politicians say that banks need more regulation because JPMorgan Chase lost $2 billion, about 2 percent of its annual revenue.

Meanwhile, the federal government will have a deficit of about $1.3 trillion this year, more than half its annual revenue (and about a third of its annual spending).

Is there some sort of regulation that might remedy that?

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

Did foes of Scott Walker make a bad bet on the recall?

My response:

We’ll know soon enough whether foes of Scott Walker made a bad bet on the recall, but either way, Wisconsin made a bad bet years ago in initiating America’s public-sector union movement.

The incentives thus established — with concentrated benefits for state employees and dispersed costs for taxpayers — have made it all too easy for politicians to cave in to union demands, resulting over time in government workers with benefits far exceeding anything a rational market would afford — or those who pay for the benefits (taxpayers) can afford. Not surprisingly, therefore, states with strong public-sector unions — California, Illinois, New York — are today in economic disarray.

Bad enough that private-sector unions make businesses less competitive, the remedy for which is moving to right-to-work states or abroad. States can’t move. But their businesses and citizens can — and they do. Witness California over the past decade, and New York for several decades. Scott Walker has done us all a favor by crystallizing the issues facing so many states today.

The Washington Times today discusses whether Mitt Romney’s political and policy team is looking too much like George W. Bush’s team. The reporter quotes me in his article:

Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank, offered glowing reviews of Mr. Romney’s troika of advisers—Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Mankiw and Kevin Hassett, another former member of the Bush team—on issues of taxation and economic policy.

“These are brilliant economists,” Mr. Edwards said before cautioning that Mr. Romney shouldn’t look to Mr. Bush’s team on the spending side.

“A key failing of Bush was that he spent far too much money. Bush’s Office of Management and Budget chiefs, like Joshua Bolten, were not spending cutters. Indeed, they were believers in big government like Bush was,” he said.

“So,” he said, “Romney needs spending-cutting experts to complement these tax experts. Our giant $1 trillion deficits and huge Obama spending increases will be the key thing Romney needs to tackle if he is elected.”

“So he needs experts on how to cut, privatize and downsize federal departments like Housing and Urban Development, Energy and Education. If elected, he needs a hard-line spending-cutting OMB chief. He needs Cabinet secretaries who believe in cutting their own departments.”

As Tad has noted, Thumb​tack​.com in cooperation with the excellent Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City has produced this attractive, clickable map of the 50 states displaying the results of a survey of small-business friendliness. It’s worth checking out your state’s standing, as well as that of states with which it competes for new business. To a large extent the findings come in just about where one would expect:

• California plus the Northeast (aside from New Hampshire) are the most unfriendly overall. Add in the trio of Midwest industrial states (Illinois, Michigan, Ohio) plus Washington and Hawaii and you get the full list of seriously unfriendly states, with “D+” or worse grades.
• The list of best states also includes few surprises: Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho, Utah, Virginia and several other Southern states.
• Virginia (grade of A) far outdistances Maryland (C-), notwithstanding the views of Washington Post business writers who often chide the Old Dominion for not emulating the economic policies of its neighbor to the north.
• Other states, even in the Northeast, tend to do OK in one or two areas—New Jersey and Vermont avoid piling costs onto new hiring, Connecticut and Illinois are not entirely hopeless on zoning, and so forth. The exception is California: it’s awful on everything.

There are also some data available on the city level.

Tad and Econlog’s David Henderson pick up on the following remarkable sentence from the study:

Small businesses care almost twice as much about licensing regulations as they do about tax rates when rating the business-friendliness of their state or local government.

Everyone knows high taxes depress business activity; it is libertarians who go on to offer a critique of licensure laws, and never has it seemed so relevant.

It is very sad that America’s tax system is so onerous that some rich people feel they have no choice but to give up U.S. citizenship in order to protect their family finances.

I’ve written about this issue before, particularly in the context of Obama’s class-warfare policies leading to an increase in the number of Americans “voting with their feet” for places with less punitive tax regimes.

We now have a very high-profile tax expatriate. One of the founders of Facebook is escaping to Singapore. Here are some relevant passages from a Bloomberg article.

Eduardo Saverin, the billionaire co-founder of Facebook Inc. (FB), renounced his U.S. citizenship before an initial public offering that values the social network at as much as $96 billion, a move that may reduce his tax bill. …Saverin’s stake is about 4 percent, according to the website Who Owns Facebook. At the high end of the IPO valuation, that would be worth about $3.84 billion. …Saverin, 30, joins a growing number of people giving up U.S. citizenship, a move that can trim their tax liabilities in that country. …“Eduardo recently found it more practical to become a resident of Singapore since he plans to live there for an indefinite period of time,” said Tom Goodman, a spokesman for Saverin, in an e‑mailed statement. …Singapore doesn’t have a capital gains tax. It does tax income earned in that nation, as well as “certain foreign-sourced income,” according to a government website on tax policies there. …Renouncing your citizenship well in advance of an IPO is “a very smart idea” from a tax standpoint, said Avi-Yonah. “Once it’s public you can’t fool around with the value.” …Renouncing citizenship is an option chosen by increasing numbers of Americans. A record 1,780 gave up their U.S. passports last year compared with 235 in 2008, according to government records. …“It’s a loss for the U.S. to have many well-educated people who actually have a great deal of affection for America make that choice,” said Richard Weisman, an attorney at Baker & McKenzie in Hong Kong. “The tax cost, complexity and the traps for the unwary are among the considerations.”

What makes this story amusing, from a personal perspective, is that Saverin’s expatriation takes place just a couple of days after my wayward friend Bruce Bartlett wrote a piece for the New York Times in which he said that people like me are exaggerating the impact of taxes on migration. Here are some key excerpts from Bruce’s column:

In recent years, the number of Americans renouncing their citizenship has increased. …This led William McGurn of The Wall Street Journal to warn that the tax code is turning American citizens living abroad into “economic lepers.” The sharply rising numbers of Americans renouncing their citizenship “are canaries in the coal mine,” he wrote. The economist Dan Mitchell of the libertarian Cato Institute was more explicit in a 2010 column in Forbes, “Rich Americans Voting With Their Feet to Escape Obama Tax Oppression.” …[T]he sharp rise in Americans renouncing their citizenship since 2008 is less pronounced than it appears if one looks at the full range of data available since 1997, when it first was collected. As one can see in the chart, the highest number of Americans renouncing their citizenship came in 1997. …The reality is that taxes are just one factor among many that determine where people choose to live. Factors including climate, proximity to those in similar businesses and the availability of amenities like the arts and cuisine play a much larger role. That’s why places like New York and California are still magnets for the wealthy despite high taxes. And although a few Americans may renounce their citizenship to avoid American taxes, it is obvious that many, many more people continually seek American residency and citizenship.

I actually agree with Bruce. Taxes are just one factor when people make decisions on where to live, work, save, and invest.

But I also think Bruce is drinking too much of the Kool-Aid being served by his new friends on the left. There is a wealth of data on successful people leaving jurisdictions such as California and New York that have confiscatory tax systems.

And there’s also a lot of evidence of taxpayers escaping countries controlled by politicians who get too greedy. Mr. Saverin is just the latest example. And I suspect, based on the overseas Americans I meet, that there are several people who quietly go “off the grid” for every person who officially expatriates.

The statists say these people are “tax traitors” and “economic Benedict Arnolds,” but those views are based on a quasi-totalitarian ideology that assumes government has some sort of permanent claim on people’s economic output.

If people are leaving America because our tax law is onerous, that’s a signal we should reform the tax code. Attacking those who expatriate is the fiscal version of blaming the victim.

Today, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) became the latest governor to throw sand in the gears of ObamaCare, issuing an eleventh-hour veto of a bill to create an ObamaCare Exchange in New Jersey. An excerpt from his veto message:

While I am unwilling to approve the establishment of a statewide health insurance exchange at this time, I am mindful that the requirements of the Affordable Care Act still stand today and I intend to fully oversee New Jersey’s compliance in a responsible and cost-effective manner should its constitutionality ultimately be upheld by the Supreme Court… My Administration will continue this work and stands ready to implement the Affordable Care Act if its provisions are ultimately upheld.

Christie suggests he isn’t yet convinced that Exchanges are per se harmful. He also seems to suggest that if the Supreme Court upholds the law, creating an Exchange might be the best course for the state and that refusing to do so would put the state out of compliance with federal law–neither of which is true. But the veto message contains enough wiggle room for Christie to come out hard against any future ObamaCare Exchange.

Here’s hoping the Supreme Court renders all of this moot.