O-Man my Taxes are High

"Great minds discuss ideas,
average minds discuss events,
and small minds discuss other people."

Eleanor Roosevelt


Greetings from beautiful Colorado Springs, Colorado where I am attending the annual Heritage Resource Bank, http://www.heritage.org, which is a conference of nearly 600 free market thinkers from around the world (45 different nations this year I think the Heritage staff announced). While I am attending this conference to complete client work I also personally love the work since I get to talk with "intellectual entrepreneurs" from around the world working to change public policies to create more personal freedom and economic growth -- I must say I feel very much at home with this community.

The Heritage Resource Bank actually ended this afternoon and was followed by the Atlas Foundation's, http://www.atlasusa.org, annual Liberty Forum which started with a dinner this evening. Sitting next to me was a young woman involved with a start-up think tank in Oman. Overall I find most US media coverage of the Middle East as lacking depth since the entire region does not get enough coverage to better educate Americans about the nations in this region. For instance, I was very interested in hearing that Oman's tax system is VERY simple as noted in these examples:

1.) Oman's corporate income taxes are capped at a FLAT rate of only 12%.

2.) Oman has NO personal income tax.

By contrast nearly 60% of Americans pay tax professionals to process their income tax which of course is a form of "secondary taxation" since we not only pay taxes all year we have to spend more money just to stay in compliance with the income police.

I have been attending this annual gathering for several years and always leave re-charged but also discouraged after hearing from the conference's speakers how much work we have left to do to overcome the nanny state we live in today.

Live free or die,

Todd