Monthly Archives: September 2017

Tax Incentives and Taxes

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New York City is offering almost $10 million in tax breaks to get Aetna Inc to move from Connecticut to Manhattan, and this is in addition to $24 million the state is offering.

It’s a good deal, for Aetna, but it’s not a good deal for the people of New York City, or for the citizens of New York State or for the citizens of the United States.  The reason is hinted at by Anthony Hogrebe, Senior Vice President of Public Affairs for the New York City Economic Development Corporation:

It’s actually the kind of investment that we want to make in the larger healthcare and life sciences ecosystem[.]

It’s about government picking winners.  It’s also about using the tax code to influence business decisions and otherwise to execute social engineering.

Hogrebe actually has illustrated the crying need we have for serious tax reform, which must include eliminating loopholes, subsidies, credits, whathaveyou in our tax code as well as moving to a low, flat income tax for individual citizens and a similarly low, flat tax (if not eliminating it altogether) for corporations.

One beneficial outcome of such reform is that businesses, including Aetna, could locate or relocate to this or that locale based on the business usefulness of being there rather than on how much money taxpayers could be dragooned into paying the business for locating there.

Imagine that: businesses making actual business decisions, rather than decisions that Government wants them to make.

False Premise

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Budget mavens, politicians, and the NLMSM have one regarding our national tax code.  The Senate is considering a budget that sets an outer bound on the size of Federal tax cuts.

A budget with a tax plan that is revenue-neutral would effectively pay for itself, meaning any reduction in tax rates would be offset by reducing breaks or other revenue-raising measures.

No.  “Revenue neutral” must also consider what’s done with the revenue collected.  Revenue neutrality can be achieved, also, with sufficient spending cuts so that revenue collected meets or exceeds spending outflows.

Additionally, there is an underlying assumption that is carefully ignored by the politicians, budget mavens, and the NLMSM.  That is that the Federal government needs the revenue collected.  None of these worthies deign establish that need.

Antifa, a Gang

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David Pyrooz and James Densley had some thoughts on this in Monday’s Wall Street Journal.  They’re on the right track in that they urge Antifa be formally designated a gang with all the social—and legal—ramifications that would flow.

There are a couple of points I’d like to make or emphasize.

[D]on’t be fooled by Antifa’s diffuse structure. Conventional street gangs are pretty disorganized too.

Diffuse isn’t, of necessity, disorganized: the Bloods and Crips, which Pyrooz and Densley cite in their piece; the Black P-Stone Nation; al Qaeda; and the Daesh all are diffuse, by design, and well organized.

The emphasis:

Which brings us to the caveat: most gangs are apolitical. The line between domestic extremist groups and gangs is blurry at times. Antifa’s agenda sets it apart to the extent….

No, Antifa’s agenda doesn’t set it apart. Antifa meets the definition of “gang” laid out by Pyrooz and Densley. There’s no need to cloud the question with concern about motive.

Aside from that, we convict criminals for their behavior, not for their alleged motives. Motive is a concern only for sentencing.

Further aside: much of Blood, Crip, and Black P-Stone Nation behavior is domestically terrorist in nature; they consciously use terror to control their territories. We don’t waste time on irrelevant labels on their members; when they behave criminally, we convict them for that behavior, not for their “purposes.”

The irrelevancy of a “domestic terrorist” label was correctly dismissed by Pyrooz and Densley.

Just apply the “gang” designation, and move on from there with the full force of the law and the courts.

The PRC and Bitcoin

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The behavior of the People’s Republic of China regarding bitcoin has purpose far beyond controlling bitcoin.  As background, The Wall Street Journal had this assessment of the PRC’s financial industry:

China has digitized its financial sector faster than any other nation.

The reason for their rapid pace is this according to Li Lihui, a spokesman for the National Internet Finance Association of China, and it has nothing at all to do with a sovereign nation’s legitimate desire to control its own currency and money supply:

A goal of China’s monetary regulation is to ensure that “the source and destination of every piece of money can be tracked[.]”

That end-to-end tracking, to the extent it can be done, guarantees that the PRC will know who is spending and for what.

And that means that the PRC, a nation that rules by “law” (rather than operates under rule of law) and that brooks no dissent from the pronouncements of the Communist Party of China, can control whether any given individual or organization will be permitted to spend for any particular purpose—or even whether that person or individual will be allowed access to his money at all.

Our Pledge of Allegiance and God

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A Detroit teacher is forced onto leave now because she forced a student to stand for the class’ routine recital of our Pledge of Allegiance.  Used to be, such disrespect was handled in exactly this way, and quite properly so.

The boy actually had a good reason, though, even if he misunderstood what the pledge of allegiance is about:

God said don’t worship anything other than me, don’t worship any idols, and pledging to a flag would kind of be like worshiping it[.]

It’s certainly true that our pledge opens with a pledge of allegiance to our flag, then moving on to our Republic.  However, it’s no violation of God’s injunction to have no other gods before him, nor is it a violation of His injunction to worship no graven images.

The pledge demands no worship, only loyalty, allegiance, to our nation.  The flag is no graven image; it’s a symbol of our nation—for which it stands—not of any god.

This is a missed teaching opportunity.  It was missed by the teacher, who was inarticulate in this particular moment, and it was missed by a stupefying margin by the school’s administration, which plainly doesn’t even understand the question.

This also is an illustration of the shabby condition of our public schools today.