Tag Archives: political economy

Land of Taxes

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New York City is suffering from loss of reduction in tax revenue as a result of the city’s and the State’s economic shutdown by government fiat during the Wuhan Virus situation.

One 49-year-old tech entrepreneur told The Wall Street Journal he and his family have moved permanently to their second home in the Hudson Valley from Manhattan. …
For tax purposes, he says, he and his peers are aware that if their children still attend school in the city, it is hard to argue the family has left. The man is considering pulling his children from the city’s elite private schools and is looking at public and private schools in the suburbs. He estimates that if he can persuade the city he is no longer a resident he will save more than $100,000 a year in city taxes alone.

This guy, to be sure, is one of the Evil 1%, so he lives more expensively than the rest of us. Even so, that city tax bill says all there is to say about progressivism in America. His bill compares with a national median income of $63,700 and a New York State median income of $82,200 in 2019.

“The US Doesn’t Need a New Cold War”

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So says Robert Zoellick in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

We truly do not need another Cold War. But this one is being forced on us, anyway, by the People’s Republic of China and the economic war it’s prosecuting against us. The environment for this one also was facilitated by the multi-polar world so enthusiastically built by ex-President Barack Obama (D).

Baker also is operating from a defeatist proposition.

The New Cold Warriors can’t contain China given its ties throughout the world; other countries won’t join us. Nor can the US break the regime, though the Communist Party’s flaws could open cracks within its own society. The US can impose costs on China, but to what end, and at what price to Americans?

So were the Soviet Union’s ties throughout the world, yet we, in turning Nikita Khrushchev’s words back on his nation, buried them.

Other nations are joining us in the struggle against the PRC, as the PRC’s military acquisitiveness has grown more blatant and the bloody deadliness of its transgressions along with its utter lack of concern for the lives of other nations’ citizens (much less those of its own citizens) made more obvious by its performance with its Wuhan Virus and its behavior in the aftermath of the international spread of the virus.

Nor is regime breakage a goal of our government—as our government has repeatedly and openly said. Only behavioral change. And that is our overall, clearly and repeatedly stated, end.

I have to wonder, too, in what world Zoellick thinks he lives that conflict is always bloodless and costless for either side—or is Zoellick back-door suggesting we should just be quietly accepting lest our enemy become perturbed with us?

And this:

The New Cold Warriors expunge the successes of past US cooperation with China. Beijing was once a wartime enemy, a supplier of proxy foes in North Korea and North Vietnam, and the world’s leading proliferator of missiles and nuclear weapons technology. Beginning in the 1990s, China reversed course and worked with the US to control dangerous weapons. It turned from proliferation partnerships with Iran and North Korea to helping the US thwart their development of nuclear arms. From 2000 to 2018, US diplomacy prodded Beijing to support 182 of the 190 United Nations Security Council resolutions that imposed sanctions on states.

There never has been cooperation of the PRC with us, merely an occasional alignment of interests. Beijing has made itself an overt enemy of Vietnam, beginning with its attempted invasion of Vietnam shortly after the close of the Vietnam War.

It continues to supply northern Korea with needed supplies and technologies, even as the PRC pays lip service to the empty resolutions of the UN.

It continues to supply Iran with needed supplies and technologies, even as the PRC pays lip service to similar empty resolutions of the UN.

It continues to develop its own nuclear weapons, in secret and in underground low-yield test sites.

And those costs to us of defending ourselves in the PRC’s Cold War? Those costs surely will accrue, but the tariffs imposed, to date, have imposed little cost on American producers or consumers, the chatter of the nattering class notwithstanding: the PRC has been devaluing its currency in pace with our tariffs in order to keep their export prices—what Americans and other importers actually pay—relatively unchanged.

No, we don’t need this Cold War—but that’s merely to state the obvious: no nation needs war. But sometimes a war must be fought in defense—the survival of our nation as a free and independent polity, rather than one subservient to our enemy, depends on it and on winning this one.

A Tale of Two States

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A Wall Street Journal editorial provided the comparison.

Since 2010

  • New York’s population has grown from a skosh under 19.4 million to a skosh over 19.4 million
  • Florida’s population has grown from 18.8 million to 21.5 million
  • New York’s spending has increased by $43 billion—about $570,000 for each additional person
  • Florida’s spending has increased by $28 billion—a $10,400 increase per new resident
  • New York’s spending on worker retirement benefits has nearly doubled
  • Florida’s spending on worker retirement benefits has grown by one-sixth of that
  • New York’s Medicaid consumes 40% of the state budget—twice as much as education
  • Florida spends about the same on schools as on Medicaid—and has an older population—retirees don’t flock north to New York
  • Florida’s private job growth has been about 60% higher than in New York
  • Florida’s finance job growth has been 25%
  • New York’s finance job growth has been 9.7%—and New York is supposed to be our financial city

Currently,

  • New York’s 2021 budget was for $177 billion
  • Florida’s 2021 budget (albeit not yet signed by the governor) is for $93 billion
  • New York’s spending is 35.9% Federal (taxpayer nation-wide) dollars—$63.5 billion
  • Florida’s spending is 32.8% Federal dollars—$30.5 billion

And after all this, New York still is demanding more Federal dollars—$61 billion worth—not just from the good citizens of Florida, but from the good citizens of all of the other States in these United States.

There’s one more difference between the two States: one is run by Progressive-Democrats, the other by Republicans. You know which is which.

Aside: both States use Federal dollars—the dollars of taxpayers from all the other States as well as those two—for enormous portions of their budgets. It’s time to do away with Federal transfers of taxpayer dollars from one State to another, except in time of declared regional or national emergency. Leave all those transfers in the originating States for their own use.

Backwards

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The transportation departments of a number of States are backing away from transportation projects, infrastructure projects that they have been claiming are desperately needed. Their excuse? They “need” more Federal aid. The already allocated $15 billion isn’t enough, they’re bleating.

The States have this backward. They don’t need Federal aid—the dollars of taxpayers in other States—they need to let their own citizens get back to work, including, perhaps beginning with, infrastructure projects like these road projects.

The States will then get all the “aid” they need: directly, in the form of income and business tax revenues from those businesses and employees working on those projects, and indirectly from the general, vast pickup in overall economic activity that would result from releasing American citizens from homebound gaol.

Active Dependency

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The Transportation Security Administration is looking into the prospects and processes for taking passenger temperatures among all of TSA’s actual security duties.

Airlines have been pushing for the Transportation Security Administration to start taking passengers’ temperatures as part of a multifaceted effort to keep potentially sick people from boarding planes and to make passengers feel more comfortable taking trips again.

Such a thing is supposedly to cost under $20 million, and it won’t cost passengers anything. Instead, all of us taxpayers will be paying for the passengers’…concerns. To the extent those exist; it is, after all, the airlines pushing, not pax.

There are better uses for the money, though. One would be simply to pass the bucks along to me, and I’ll undertake to not travel by air. That would net out to considerably less than the twenty mil, though, as I’d owe a heft tax bill, even after the 2017 tax cut.

Seriously though: nothing is keeping airlines from taking passenger temperatures themselves. The foolishness of this actively seeking dependency on government to do for us is getting old and tired.