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Courtney Michaluk Joslin

  • Commercial Freedom Fellow at the R Street Institute

Courtney Michaluk is an alumna of the Mercatus Center MA Fellowship at George Mason University and a Commercial Freedom Fellow at the R Street Institute. Previously, she was a policy analyst at the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University. Her work has been published in Politico, The Huffington Post, Washington Examiner, and a number of other outlets. She has also worked with state legislatures on prison reform and occupational license reform. She currently works on occupational licensing and birth control deregulation in the states.

Courtney received a BS in accounting from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where she conducted research on ethics education in undergraduate accounting programs while completing the Chancellor’s Honors Program. She then spent a year in the Koch Associate Program before becoming an MA Fellow. Her research interests include tax policy, development economics, and public perception of economic ideas.

Publications & Appearances

Locking Out Prosperity: The Treasury Department’s Misguided Regulation to Address the Symptoms of Corporate Inversions While Ignoring the Cause

Over $2 trillion of US corporate profits have been systematically locked out of the US economy by an outdated tax system. One major symptom of the poorly designed worldwide corporate tax rules in the US is the rise of corporate inversions, where a domestic firm merges with a foreign firm and moves the new corporation’s headquarters abroad.

Corporations Are Trying to Escape from High US Taxes

Pfizer Inc. recently became the largest US firm to move to a lower-tax jurisdiction by combining with a foreign competitor. In this so-called “inversion,” Pfizer will merge with Allergan PLC, and the new headquarters will be located in Ireland. Inversions are a symptom the United States’ broken, outdated, and uncompetitive corporate tax system. The United States has the single highest corporate tax rate in the developed world—the US combined corporate tax rate is 39.1 percent. The chart below shows that US peer nations have systematically lowered their high corporate tax rates, while the United States’ rate has remained unchanged.

To end prison gangs, it's time to break up the largest prisons

San Quentin State Prison, California’s oldest correctional institution, sits on a 432-acre compound overlooking the beautiful San Francisco Bay. Inside, in grim juxtaposition to the prison’s waterfront view, 701 men currently sit in the antiquated concrete cells that make up the largest death row in the Western hemisphere. In addition, the prison’s four cellblocks also hold minimum-, medium- and maximum-security inmates, supervised by a prison staff of more than a thousand.