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The FairTax is a proposal to reform the federal tax code of the United States. It would replace all federal income taxes (including the alternative minimum tax, corporate income taxes, and capital gains taxes), payroll taxes (including Social Security and Medicare taxes), gift taxes, and estate taxes with a single broad national consumption tax on retail sales. The Fair Tax Act would apply a tax, once, at the point of purchase on all new goods and services for personal consumption. The proposal also calls for a monthly payment to all family households of lawful U.S. residents as an advance rebate, or "prebate", of tax on purchases up to the poverty level.

The economy of Sweden is a highly developed export-oriented economy, aided by timber, hydropower, and iron ore. These constitute the resource base of an economy oriented toward foreign trade. The main industries include motor vehicles, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, industrial machines, precision equipment, chemical goods, home goods and appliances, forestry, iron, and steel. Traditionally, Sweden relied on a modern agricultural economy that employed over half the domestic workforce. Today Sweden further develops engineering, mine, steel, and pulp industries, which are competitive internationally, as evidenced by companies such as Ericsson, ASEA/ABB, SKF, Alfa Laval, AGA, and Dyno Nobel.

Sweden is a competitive open mixed economy. The vast majority of Swedish enterprises are privately owned and market-oriented. There is also a strong welfare state, with public-sector spending accounting up to three-fifths of GDP. In 2014, the percent of national wealth owned by the government was 24%. (Full article...)

"The feature of actual business to which, like Professor Sraffa, we draw attention, and which does not seem to have been generally taken account of in economic theory, is the existence with reference to each seller of groups of buyers who will deal with him instead of with his competitors in spite of a difference in price. If a seller increases his price too far he will gradually lose business to his rivals, but he does not lose all his trade instantly when he raises his price only a trifle. Many customers will still prefer to trade with him because they live nearer to his store than to the others, or because they have less freight to pay from his warehouse to their own, or because his mode of doing business is more to their liking, or because he sells other articles which they desire, or because he is a relative or a fellow Elk or Baptist, or on account of some difference in service or quality, or for a combination of reasons. Such circles of customers may be said to make every entrepreneur a monopolist within a limited class and region and there is no monopoly which is not confined to a limited class and region. The difference between the Standard Oil Company in its prime and the little corner grocery is quantitative rather than qualitative. Between the perfect competition and monopoly of theory lie the actual cases"

—Harold Hotelling, Stability in Competition, 1929

• ... that American business executive William M. Ellinghaus helped rescue New York City from bankruptcy in the late 1970s?
• ... that environmental economist V. Kerry Smith has been described as a "Renaissance Man of Economics"?
• ... that the economy of Reineh, now in northern Israel, was so strong in the Mamluk era that they could afford imported pottery from Syria and Italy?
• ... that the Chicago Community Bond Fund sought to put itself out of business by eliminating cash bail?
• ... that the economy of Tolkien's Middle-earth has been described as a mix of feudalism and capitalism, with one scholar even suggesting it had communist elements?
• ... that Home Depot CEO Ted Decker ran his own landscaping business in high school?

May 14:

• 1984 - Mark Zuckerberg, American computer programmer and businessman, co-founder of Facebook, was born on this day.

• ... that Italy is the third largest producer of wine in the world?

• ...that Calouste Gulbenkian was known as Mr. Five Percent because he retained 5% of the shares of Royal Dutch/Shell, the second-largest corporation in the world by revenue, which he participated in the formation of in 1907?

• ...that prospect theory was developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979 as a psychologically realistic alternative to expected utility theory?

• ...that Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's publications in the 1960s and 1970s helped develop social choice theory, which first came to prominence in the work by the American economist Kenneth Arrow?

• ...that Harvard economist Susan Athey was the first female recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal?

• ...that N. Gregory Mankiw left law school after earning his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984?

• ...that "Stagflation" is a term generally attributed to British politician Iain Macleod, who coined the term in a speech to Parliament in 1965?

Wikinews Economy and business portal

• July 21: Technological University Dublin senior lecturer Dr Lorcan Sirr speaks to Wikinews on housing market in Ireland
• July 15: California governor signs new state budget, eligible Californians to get stimulus payments
• July 4: 130 OECD countries agree to back global corporate tax rate
• June 30: 'Each makes the other more difficult to recover from': University of Sussex professor L. Alan Winters speaks to Wikinews on trade, COVID-19, Brexit
• June 16: Wikinews interviews Victor Kline, leader of newly registered The New Liberals party in Australia
• April 23: Irish Finance Minister Donohoe criticises OECD's global minimum corporate tax rate
• April 17: People protest in Berlin against German Court overturning five-year rent cap
• March 5: Chancellor Rishi Sunak announces UK budget 2021
• February 10: Disney to shut down Blue Sky Studios, animation studio behind 'Ice Age'
• January 24: World Trade Organization declares US tariff hike illegal, rules in South Korea's favour