Tag Archives: taxes

Worrying about the Wrong Time Frame

Posted on by
Reply

A Wall Street Journal opinion piece subheadline well summarizes the piece itself:

the Speaker pushes Democrats to take votes that will end careers in 2022

The WSJ‘s Editors write this as if they take the matter seriously. But they, and far too many others who also should know better, are taking far too short a view.

“Career ending” votes were taken in favor of Obamacare, too. Obamacare survives, and here is the Progressive-Democratic Party back in power.

So it will be with the Progressive-Democrat reconciliation bill and the pre-amendment to it that is the “infrastructure” bill. A few Progressive-Democrats might lose their seats as they vote to force passage, but these two destructive bills will live on.

And, dangerously, the Progressive-Democratic Party will recover.

More Taxing Foolishness

Posted on by
Reply

This time, it’s on plastics and plastic production. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D, RI) each have their schemes for generating a national tax on plastic production as part of their $3.5 trillion reconciliation spend- and tax-a-thon.

Such a tax would be intended to discourage plastic production and sale as part of the Progressive-Democrats’ move to eliminate carbon from our economy.

Here are some uses to which plastics are put, though, products of which Progressive-Democrats’ move would greatly increase the cost for average Americans.

  • piping
  • plumbing
  • vinyl siding
  • gutters
  • automobiles (up to 20% plastic)
  • furniture
  • toys
  • polymer implants and other medical devices
  • food and medical packaging
  • clothing
  • seals and washers
  • gears, plain bearings, valve seats
  • shatter-resistant alternative to glass
  • insulation
  • flotation devices
  • waxed cardboard containers (20% plastic)

The list goes on and on.

Progressive-Democrats truly are waging war on our economy.

Because

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s a short list of the ways President Joe Biden (D) and his Progressive-Democrat syndicate in Congress intend to take your money away from you.

  • Raise the top individual income tax rate to 39.6%

This applicable to the group of Americans at the top of our economic ladder: single individuals with taxable income of more than $452,700 and married couples with joint taxable income of $509,300. Never mind that these folks, far from just sitting on their money, (re)invest it, which facilitates innovation and job support and creation. Notice, too, that this tax restores the marriage penalty to our tax code.

  • the top capital gains tax would climb to 39.6% from 20% for Americans earning more than $1 million

This applies—Biden and his Progressive-Democrats claim—only to the very top. But it spills over. Preferential treatment of capital gains, which in the main are price increases that occur between when an asset is acquired and when it is sold, has under our non-flat tax code facilitated investing. That investing includes acquiring physical property and developing it for more valuable use for more people (housing development comes to mind), acquiring partial ownership of existing companies (which purchase money increases the value of those companies, which in turn increases those companies’ ability to raise money—for innovation and job support and creation), funding startup companies (which supports their innovation and job creation).

Capping interest in such investing limits all of those follow-ons.

  • Increase levies on inherited assets

Increase the death tax, they mean. They want to do this in two ways. One is to lower the death tax exemption threshold to $1 million from the current $11.7 million. Think about how many small businesses and farms will be destroyed by this lowered threshold.

The other way is to eliminate altogether the step up in basis of inherited assets. The basis step up means that, whatever the value of the asset was at the time it was acquired, its basic value is reset to its market value at the time of the owner’s death. Without the step up, whether those assets are stock share or the physical property of those small businesses and farms, this move, apart from the lowered exemption threshold, will force the (taxable!) sale of the assets just so the cash necessary to pay the tax vig can be raised. And that ignores the costs and litigations that will occur as heirs are forced to reach years, decades, often generations into the past to locate that original acquisition cost.

It’s almost like Progressive-Democrats don’t want us to pass anything on to our heirs.

  • End the private-equity tax break

This is the carried interest income that gets so much bad press. Carried interest is paid to partners beyond the value of their initial investment and is a payment for their efforts in increasing the value of the partnership (and in the value of each partner’s investment). While it’s accrued as an additional “fee” in real time, carried interest is retained by the partnership to support further investment and partnership growth and is paid out only when a concrete event occurs—an oil well comes home and is sold, or a hedge fund partnership is dissolved on reaching a preset milestone.

As such, carried interest is closely akin to capital gains, and the destruction of this has the same negative outcome for future investment as does damage to capital gains.

  • Hike taxes on corporations

Biden his syndicate want to raise the corporate tax to 28% from the current 21% level. This will reduce American business’ competitiveness and encourage them to resume their move to lower, foreign, tax rate jurisdictions—at the expense of American innovation and jobs. It’s also part of the syndicate’s effort to get a minimum corporate tax level set globally by an international consortium, which itself is designed to reduce national sovereignty over fiscal matters.

It’s all because Progressive-Democrats insist they Know Better how, and on what items, to spend your money than you do.

Tax Gaps

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Unfair to Whom?

Posted on by
Reply

The subheadline to Mick Mulvaney’s op-ed in The Wall Street Journal drives the salient question:

The “global minimum tax” battle may set an example for those who consider low US state levies “unfair.”

This comes against the backdrop of President Joe Biden’s (D) and his Congressional Progressive-Democrat cronies’ drive to give our domestic economic sovereignty over to an international “agreement” concerning the proper levels of business taxes. That international gang, centered on the OECD, insists that more is better, more is fairer.

Fair to whom, though? Nor Biden, nor his cronies, nor his OECD BFFs are willing to say, beyond insisting that Government needs more and that tax competition is somehow unfair.

Into that void, I have to ask: what’s unfair about leaving more money in the hands of those who earned it? What’s unfair about leaving more money in the hands the private enterprises whose production produced the business incomes that are being taxed?

In the absence of those Betters’ answers, I’ll supply my own.

It’s eminently fair to leave those monies in the hands and coffers of those who generated the income.

What’s fair is the Progressive-Democrat Yellen-disparaged race to the taxing bottom. That’s the most money left in the hands of the economic generators.