The Bork Report is my weekly report for paid subscribers. This week I discuss the flat tax, the Peace Prize, consumer welfare, and Flock cameras.
Robert E. Hall of Stanford and the Hoover Institution has won the 2026 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, sharing it with Michael Woodford of Columbia. The committee honored the two for rebuilding macroeconomic models on a microeconomic foundation, grounded in how households and firms actually behave, and for giving governments and central banks better tools for managing booms and busts.
That is the work that won the prize. But anyone who lived through the tax fights of the 1980s knows Hall for something else. In December 1981, he and his Hoover colleague Alvin Rabushka proposed in the Wall Street Journal that the federal income tax be replaced with a single low rate. Their plan, developed in their book The Flat Tax, set that rate at 19 percent. It exempted a generous family allowance so that low-income households paid little or nothing, and it taxed every dollar of income once and only once. Individuals and businesses could file on a form the size of a postcard.