Hello it's Thursday almost Friday welcome to Cato Daily Podcast for January 25th. I'm

Anastasia Glova your host. Daniel Mitchell formerly with the Heritage

Foundation joined the Cato Institute this week as Senior Fellow.

Dan is one of America's leading experts on the flat tax and has been an influential voice

here and overseas in the fight to preserve tax competition and fiscal sovereignty.

Today he talks about his work at Cato.

Why is tax competition part of your work here?

Politicians want more power.

They want more of our money so they can spend more and buy their way to re-election.

That's what public choice economists like James Buchanan became famous for, was analyzing the bad incentives that politicians have to make government bigger.

The beauty of tax competition is that governments have to worry about what other countries are

doing or if we're on the state level what other states are doing and a

great example would be California. California

Californian politicians would probably love to raise taxes even further but they

can't because people are escaping to Nevada. French politicians

would love to raise taxes further, but they can't because people are escaping

to Switzerland. And so tax competition is the notion that if the geese that lay the golden eggs can fly away,

politicians have to curtail their normal impulses to over-tax and over-spend.

And I'm delighted to be at Cato with Cato's international reputation

to wage this fight to preserve tax competition

because a lot of international bureaucracies,

like the European Union, the Organization for Economic

...