Tag Archives: taxes

A Good Idea?

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Progressive-Democrats are looking at “adjusting” Party’s proposed child tax credit in order to appease Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV).

Some Democrats have started exploring how to pare back their proposed expansion of the child tax credit in ways that are aimed at winning the critical support of Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), according to people familiar with the matter.
Among the possibilities: Reducing the size of the credit’s expansion and limiting which Americans are eligible for it, according to the people.

Tweaking to appease a single Senator. Never mind any effort at looking for bipartisan support.

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Monthly Child-Tax Credit Payments at an End

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The Wall Street Journal wrote about the end of the child tax credit payments and the impact on families’ financial cushion during last year’s Wuhan Virus-related dislocation. What Ensign and Rubin missed in their piece, though, is what those payments actually are, and their upcoming impact.

Those monthly child-tax credit payments were advances on 2021’s income tax refunds. In addition to the cash flow (not income) drop from the payments’ cessation, payback of those advances on or about mid-April (or later, should the IRS decide to delay the due date for tax returns, again) will be a cast iron bitch for those lower income families whom the Progressive-Democrats were pretending to help with the advances.

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Just a Thought

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California is running a very large budget surplus—$31 billion worth—and the men and women of that State’s government really and truly don’t know what to do with it. Especially since the voter-approved Gann Limit doesn’t let the government run that big a surplus.

Here’s a thought.

Maybe pay a tax refund to the citizens of California, and sock the rest of the surplus away in a State rainy-day fund.

Nah. Waste of money. Those citizens would only waste it on their own needs and wants, rather than spending it properly. And who needs a rainy-day fund? California has droughts.

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One More Reason

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The last two administrations have dumped $3.5 trillion of supposed Wuhan Virus relief funds into our economy since the virus situation began in early 2020.

Now we’re learning that almost $100 billion of it has been stolen. That doesn’t seem like a large per centage of the total. However, as numbers have a quality all their own, and while those $100 billion are a small per centage of the trillions, they would have had their own use. Fighting the Wuhan Virus’ entry into our nation via our southern border, for instance, by building more of the wall that Biden-Harris has been so desperate to stop. Generating more—many, many more—of the home tests that Biden-Harris has been lying about producing. Plusing up our police forces so as to reduce the rate of crime that Progressive-Democrats like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) insist are no big deal and that other Leftists insist is justified reparations. Plusing up our military. The list goes on.

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If It’s a Good Idea….

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One sub-bill in the Progressive-Democrats’ reconciliation bill would have removed a loophole that lets foreign purchasers of US real estate dodge a tax that could reach 30% on the profits generated by those holdings.

The loophole works like this:

Instead of buying a building directly, a foreign investor creates a shell company in an offshore location like the Cayman Islands.
That shell company then lends money to a US entity called a blocker corporation, which in turn buys the building. Instead of paying any profits from the building directly to the foreign investor, the blocker corporation sends interest on its loan to the offshore shell company, which then passes it on to the foreign investor. By taking this detour, the foreign investor avoids the tax on foreign real-estate owners.

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Taxes and “Give Backs”

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There is a surprisingly broad misunderstanding regarding taxes and to whom those taxed funds belong, even among those who should know better. One example is The Wall Street Journal editors’ mischaracterization of Arkansas’ tax reductions in an editorial, which they subheadlined

Little Rock returns some of its booming revenue to taxpayers.

The “return of revenue” was this:

Governor Asa Hutchinson recently signed legislation that reduces the top state income-tax rate to 5.5% from 5.9%, effective New Year’s Day. The rate will continue to drop in stages to 4.9% by 2025.

Along with this:

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Big Progressive-Democrat Government

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A Rasmussen poll suggests that a majority of Americans oppose the socialism in the policies of the Biden-Harris administration.

That’s encouraging, but I have some concerns about the policies anyway, given that they’re being jammed through without regard for the views of the government’s employers.

The socialism aspect of the Biden-Harris and Progressive-Democratic Party policies is less a matter of the raw spending and usurious taxes in them much more a matter of the strings attached to the spending and of who gets (punitively) taxed.

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A Rain Tax

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It’s back.

Recall the Maryland rain tax that Progressive-Democrats in that State’s legislature actually got passed into law. That…foolishness…contributed to the State’s Progressive-Democrat Governor getting tossed at the next election and replaced by a Republican. The State’s legislature then repealed the tax within the next couple years.

Now we see that the Progressive-Democrat City Manager for Fairfax (that Fairfax), Robert Stalzer, proposed

taxing local residents and businesses for the amount of rainwater that falls on their roofs, driveways, parking lots, and other “impervious surfaces” on their property.

Just the News opened its article on this with this bit from The Beatles:

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A Comment on Two Crises

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Tax revenues, in the main, rose slightly as a fraction of GDP in wealthier nations despite the existence of the Wuhan Virus situation.

That surprise outcome underlines the novel nature of the economic contraction that accompanied the first surge of Covid-19 infections, and contrasts with the global financial crisis, when revenues fell as a share of economic output, an outcome more typical of recessions.

Novel indeed. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,

revenues across its 38 members rose to 33.5% of gross domestic product in 2020 from 33.4% in 2019. In the wake of the global financial crisis, revenues in 2009 fell to 31.8% of GDP from 32.6% of GDP in 2008.

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SALT Debates

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Recall the SALT—State and Local Taxes—deduction, capped at $10,000 under the Trump income tax reform of a few years ago. Keep in mind the current debate among Progressive-Democrats about whether to raise the cap to $80,000, or higher, or eliminate the cap altogether. Set aside the debate centering on how much lifting the cap would aid essentially exclusively the Evil Rich vs most of those Evil Rich are heavy donors to various Progressive-Democrat politicians.

Consider instead that

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