Monthly Archives: August 2021

Tax Gaps

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And tax gaps.

Congressman Kevin Brady (R, TX) and Senator Mike Crapo (R, ID) are properly concerned about the gap between taxes collected by the IRS and taxes actually owed by Americans and our businesses.

Their concerns are entirely valid, but they’re secondary.

When asked where Brady would prioritize reforms within the IRS, he told FOX Business he would like to see the agency do better with the resources it has, including smarter auditing and better information gathering to target and win cases against taxpayers.
Secondly, he said he would like to see funds put toward customer service initiatives.

That’s all to the very important good. However, none of that will occur until a far more important reform, a far wider tax gap, is corrected: the replacement of all IRS bureaucrats, from IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig on down into middle management. Those bureaucrats think they’re a government unto themselves and not at all responsible to Congress or even the Executive Branch.

Look no further than Rettig’s own refusal to answer the questions Crapo has asked—

In a letter sent to Rettig in May, Crapo asked for clarification as to where the figure came from before Congress began making policy decisions based on it.
His office told FOX Business at the end of last month that it had still not gotten a satisfactory response….

—and to the behavior of Lois Lerner and the lack of action regarding her miscreancies.

That’s the tax gap that cries out for closing.

Gold Standard?

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William Luther and Alexander William Salter, Associate Professors of Economics at Florida Atlantic University and the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, respectively, argue that there are lessons to be learned from the days when the dollar was explicitly backed by gold. They’re right as far as they go, but they hang their hats on the premise that our current dollar—and only our current dollar—is a fiat currency.

“As far as they go” is this: there are lessons regarding fiscal discipline that must be learned and relearned, and relearned again. The learning is a generational matter as our population trends wealthier in our economy’s fits and starts of growth.

However.

Cue William Jennings Bryan and his cross of gold, I say.

Separately, what Luther and Salter missed is that gold/gold-backed currencies are every bit as fiat and arbitrary as are Luther’s and Salter’s fiat dollars. Governments set the price of their currency, regardless of their (metals) backing or lack, and they do so for political reasons at least as much as they do for economic reasons.

For this, we need look no further than FDR’s confiscation of everyone’s gold private property and the prompt, sharp change (by 75%!) he made in his fiat-determined value of that gold right after he’d paid just compensation for what he seized.

Rent Collections Moratorium

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Recall earlier this summer when the CDC’s interminable ban on landlords collecting the rent payments due them came before the Supreme Court.

Recall, further, the 5-4 ruling that upheld the ban, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh rationalizing his vote to uphold by saying that he’d be a fifth vote to bar the ban beyond the end of July—because the ban was due to expire then, anyway—absent Congress’ specific authorization by passing a law allowing a rent collection moratorium. He averred the CDC had no authority to issue a moratorium on its own authority.

Then the moratorium expired last weekend, and the House recessed with no action taken on the matter.

Now President Joe Biden (D) has instructed his CDC to figure out how to extend the moratorium, and the CDC has done so—into early October.

Biden and the CDC have played Kavanaugh for a chump.

It’ll be interesting to see what the Justice’s excuse will be this time for upholding the “moratorium” in the event the matter comes back to the Supreme Court.

Reading Between the Lines

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In an article centered on the relationship between law school student debt and law school graduates’ working income (short answer: law students, in the vast main, borrow far more than their subsequent incomes support), there appeared this statement by a University of Miami law school graduate on why she chose UM and huge debt over a “lesser” law school that offered her a significant scholarship:

You go to any courthouse in Miami and the judge went to UM, the judge is a teacher at UM, there’s some sort of connection to UM[.]

There is this expectation that judges will be swayed by personal relationships, by school tie relationships, far more than they will be by the merits of the case before them and text of the law(s) governing that case.

Sadly, that expectation is both widespread and at least partially valid.