Author Archives: eehines

A Flat Tax

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Steve Forbes, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media, and Stephen Moore, a Heritage Foundation economist, proposed last Monday.

Collapsing the personal-income and corporate tax rates to 15% would have huge economic benefits. America would suddenly have one of the lowest tax rates in the world, resulting in trillions of dollars of new capital flow and a spike in take-home pay.

And this:

The simplicity of a flat tax would reduce the deadweight costs associated with tax compliance—and the headaches. The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs calculates that Americans spent almost eight billion hours filling out tax forms in 2024.

Using a naïve estimate of 97.2 million households (and even more naively assuming all households pay taxes, which provides an upper bound on the number of households relevant here), that works out to over 80 hours per household—two working weeks—of tax compliance labor.

This, too:

The Tax Foundation estimates that this cost the economy $413 billion in lost productivity, and the Internal Revenue Service estimates that we spent $133 billion on out-of-pocket compliance costs.

That’s $4,250 per year in lost productivity for each household, with an added $1,370 per year per household of unreimbursed spending just to comply with current tax law. Most households could find other uses for those $5,620.

Still, I don’t think Forbes and Moore go far enough.

I’d add getting rid of the corporate income tax altogether. Business’ customers pay the bulk of those taxes, anyway, rather than the taxed business; for the taxed business, the tax is just another cost center to be covered proximately through product/service pricing and indirectly through reduced spending on innovation, expansion, hiring, and raises.

Forbes and Moore suggest getting rid of some deductions, but I’d go farther here, too. Get rid of all deductions, subsidies, and credits, too, and tax all income from all sources as ordinary income. Let businesses make their expansion and financing decisions based on purely business and market criteria instead of having to game the tax implications of borrowing or stock issuances. Individuals also would go back to making their spending and investing decisions based on what’s good for their individual/family situations instead of having to game a byzantine tax system in the course of their decisions.

And those optimal decisions would include how to use those $5,620.

Indeed There Is

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River Page, writing for The Free Press last Sunday, objected to any proliferation of “Tiger Moms.” However, she’s wholly misinterpreted the concept of and the goals of tiger moms.

There are more important things in life than making a six-figure salary and going to Yale goes her subheadline. She concluded her piece with this:

There’s no point in living in a prosperous country if you can’t enjoy it[.]

The one is not the aim of tiger moms, and the other isn’t possible without achieving their goal. Vivek Ramaswamy, of DOGE, has laid out the situation, using the H-1B visa debate as the backdrop.

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

He added, as paraphrased by Page, that tech companies prefer to hire foreigners—and their offspring—because the children of native-born Americans don’t work hard enough.

That’s what tiger moms are working against, and we need more of them, not the coddled snowflakes of too many of our current offspring and their children.

That more important thing, toward which tiger moms try to raise their children, is a work ethic that prides work and that produces the overriding satisfaction of a job well done. The self respect that comes from that is what powers full enjoyment of leisure time and the full enjoyment of the plethora of leisures available in a prosperous country.

Indeed, there isn’t a prosperous country without the work required to produce, maintain, and defend it. Six-figure salaries fall out of all of that; they aren’t the goal of any of that. Neither is going to Yale instead of any other school. Students get out of their higher education institution—whichever it is, and it need not be a so-called elite school—what they put into it, and what they put into it is what they learn to put into it during their pre-school and K-12 years. That’s where tiger moms earn their stripes and the respect of us otherwise average Americans, their peers.

Pointless Resolution

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“Journalistic institutions” are being offered a New Year’s Resolution, by many of us average Americans, for how to execute their function in the coming year.

Americans across the country were united in their New Year’s resolution for the media: “Tell the truth.”

It won’t happen, though, not in any believable way, unless there’s a complete replacement of the current crop of editors and news writers. It’s the current crop that has been so blatantly biased and outright dishonest on their “news” pages and dishonest on what passes for their opinion pages. These incumbents have trashed their credibility far beyond repair with their determined and studied bias and dishonesty over the last decades.

And one more Critical Item criterion: the journalist guild must restore the erstwhile practice of at least two on-the-record sources to corroborate the anonymously sourced claims that news and opinion writers make. That was the original standard of journalistic integrity, and it’s instructive that the current crop of guild members have no concrete, publicly accessible and measurable standard in its place.

I, for one, am tired of those worthies masquerading the voices in their heads and their childhood imaginary friends as actual sources. I’ve had done with their “sources who were present” and “senior officials.” I’m especially fed up with these writers’ ubiquitous sources “who speak only with anonymity out of fear of blowback.” Such cowards—if they exist and aren’t just another set of imaginary sources—cannot ever be believed: they’re putting their personal welfare ahead of doing a right thing.

A Scenario

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Let’s assume the Chaos Caucus is successful in preventing the election of a Speaker of the House. We already have Congressman Thomas “Permanent No” Massie (R, KY) and Congresswoman Victoria “Toddler Tantrum” Spartz (R, IN) on record saying they’ll not vote for current Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA) for Speaker when the new House convenes on 3 January 2025.

That’s enough, given the Republican’s tiny majority in the House, to prevent a Speaker from being chosen. If the Chaos Caucus persists, the Electoral College vote can’t occur on 6 January. If the Chaos Caucus ego-driven obstruction persists through 20 January 2025, who would become the Acting President?

Currently the line of succession is this:

President of the United States—don’t have one
Vice President of the United States —don’t have one
Speaker of the House—don’t have one
President Pro Tempore of the Senate—serves in place of the President of the Senate, that non-existent Vice President of the United States.

The President Pro Tempore is elected by the Senate at large—one of which we will have on 20 January. With the Republican majority of 53 Senators (52 until Senator-elect and current Governor Jim Justice (R, WV) is sworn in, which he has said he’d delay until his successor Governor is sworn in), it’s less likely that a President Pro Tempore would not be elected promptly.

I speculate that the Senate Majority Leader-to-be, John Thune (R, SD), would be elected President Pro Tempore.

Which would make John Thune the acting President.

Is this what the Chaos Caucus is aiming for? Seems unlikely since Thune isn’t, and never has been, far enough right to suit the Chaos Caucus.