Best of Right Opinion

• Walter Williams: Who Pays What in Taxes?
• Byron York: What’s Behind Trump’s Executive Actions
• Rebecca Hagelin: BSA: It’s Time to Look Elsewhere
• Michelle Malkin: Beware the Rape Allegation Bandwagon
• L. Brent Bozell & Tim Graham: Liberal Billionaires Are Never Villains

For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.

Opinion in Brief

Walter Williams: “Politicians love to trick people by suggesting that they will impose taxes not on them but on some other entity instead. We can personalize the trick by talking about property taxes. Imagine that you are a homeowner and a politician tells you he is not going to tax you. Instead, he’s going to tax your property and land. You would easily see the political chicanery. Land and property cannot and do not pay taxes. Again, only people pay taxes. The same principle applies to corporations. There’s another side to taxes that goes completely unappreciated. According to a 2013 study by the Virginia-based Mercatus Center, Americans spend up to $378 billion annually in tax-related accounting costs, and in 2011, Americans spent more than six billion hours complying with the tax code. Those hours are equivalent to the annual hours of a workforce of 3.4 million, or the number of people employed by four of the largest U.S. companies — Walmart, IBM, McDonald’s and Target — combined. Along with tax cuts, tax simplification should be on the agenda.”