Daily Archives: 7 February 2020

The Snub

Posted on by
Reply

Much is being made (still!) about President Donald Trump’s seeming snub of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) offered handshake as Trump handed up copies of his SOTU speech to the Vice President of the United States/President of the Senate Mike Pence and to Pelosi. Ample video shows Pelosi accepting the copy of his speech with her right hand, then switching hands in order to offer her right hand to shake and Trump turning away to begin his speech without taking the handshake.

There are three possibilities for this.

One is that Trump did, indeed, snub Pelosi.

Another is that Pence did not offer his hand, which the videos also clearly show, and Trump was not looking for or expecting any offered handshake.

Another is that Trump was only handing up the copies and, as the videos show, was turning back to his podium to begin his speech when Pelosi offered her hand: whether mentally focused on the beginning of his speech or merely insufficiently observant, he didn’t see the hand, just as he didn’t see the hand not offered by Pence.

Which possibility an observer focuses on—especially to the exclusion of the others—says volumes about the observer, and it says not a syllable about the event itself.

Taxes

Posted on by
Reply

It seems Amazon isn’t paying enough corporate taxes to suit Progressive-Democrats.

In its annual regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jeff Bezos’ sprawling e-commerce empire said it paid $162 million in federal income taxes on $13.3 billion of US pre-tax income, an effective tax rate of 1.2%. It deferred more than $914 million in taxes.

All perfectly legal, too, yet the hue and cry is loud. Matthew Gardner, Senior Fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, for instance:

This means that instead of avoiding 100 percent of its income tax liability, Amazon appears to have avoided only 94 percent of its tax bill last year[.]

Not at all.  Amazon, unless Gardner is going to allege actual tax fraud, paid 100% of its actual tax liability, after accounting for all of the credits, deductions, and other loopholes our byzantine tax code allows corporations.  Amazon just didn’t pay its “fair share,” whatever carefully nebulous sum that amounts to.

The hue and cry is accurate, though not in the way the Left would have us believe.  As someone almost said once, the fault is not in our corporatoins, but in our tax code.

Everything Amazon did was legal, and it would have been an abuse of the company’s fiduciary duty to its owners not to take advantage of the opportunities—Amazon’s tax bill and overall tax rate are an illustration of the failures of a tax code that has all of those vasty loopholes, gaps, deductions, credits, etc.

A single low, flat tax rate that treats all income identically, regardless of source, and that has no loopholes, gaps, deductions, credits, etc, would do wonders for our economy, increase the revenues ultimately remitted to Government, and enhance both private citizens’ and Government’s (in that order) ability to see to the least among us.

Mind you, that low, flat tax rate should be applicable only to personal income. Corporations should be assessed no income tax at all; they don’t pay those taxes anyway, not even that 1.2%: their customers, ultimately us individual persons, do in the form of higher prices.