Friday, August 27, 2010

Something Good in Hoover Digest

One cool article that appeared in the same pages as the piece picked on in the previous post was about how nations have increased revenue by hiring foreign firms to take control of revenue collection, written by Gancho pal Noel Maurer and Kris Mitchener. The nations mentioned were significantly less developed than today's Mexico, and I don't imagine that a wholesale outsourcing would be feasible, but from what I've heard anecdotally about dealing with hacienda, there's little question that a radical overhaul of the agency's collection practices would do a lot to increase revenue without raising taxes.

2 comments:

Noel Maurer said...

Thanks for the shout-out!

One of the major points of the article, sort of underplayed in the final edit (hum cough erm) was that the benefit derived from having a public foreign agency handle revenue collection. Contracting with private firms (aka the "PSI" mentioned in the article) does not produce such clean and beneficial results.

That will, of course, only surprise people on the left who have read too much Chomsky, and people on the right who have taken Econ 1 but nothing else.

pc said...

No problem, I enjoyed reading it. Bummer about the editorial changes. That may not be surprising, but it seems like a not insignificant detail that was lost.