Tag Archives: taxes

The IRS Is Going Broke?

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The IRS is in front of Congress, saying the $60 billion with which Congress plussed up its money pot last year—an addition that was supposed to last for 10 years—already is used up, and Commissioner Danny Werfel is in, pleading for an additional $104 billion. The Wall Street Journal editors are correct to wave a big, red BS flag on that, saying Congress should demand (and conduct, I say) an audit of the IRS and its spending instead.

I agree. But I also say there’s an alternative path to controlling the IRS, and its spendthrift ways, and that alternative would benefit all of us average Americans and our businesses. It’s a proposal I’ve offered before.

Congress should pass, and the President should sign, legislation that would vastly simplify our tax code. The new tax code should have no income tax levied on our businesses—which don’t pay much in the way of income tax, anyway; business customers pay most of it—and the new personal income tax should be a single flat rate on all income, regardless of source, and with no credits, deductions, subsidies, or other frou-frou gerrymanders on income.

A rate in the range of 10% to 15% would raise all the revenues for the Federal government it needs to provide for the only three Constitutionally mandated spending types: providing for our national defense, paying our Federal government debts, and providing for the Article I, Section 8-enumerated items of the general Welfare of the United States.

A vastly reduced IRS, consisting primarily of receiving clerks, would be all that’s necessary to manage the resulting tax code. It’d be hard for such a reduced agency, even a Federal government one, to waste $60 billion.

The Planned Racism of the Illinois State Legislature

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An Illinois legislatively created commission established…to come up with ways to make appropriations to state universities more “equitable” has issued a report delineating how to achieve that.

…lawmakers would determine how much funding a school deserves. They would do this using a variable called the “adequacy target,” which takes into account the school’s mission and enrollment as well as the programs it offers. … Larger amounts would be set aside for groups the commission considers underenrolled—say, with a $6,000 bonus for each enrolled black student, $4,000 for each enrolled low-income student, and $2,000 for each enrolled rural student.

And

The commission pretends that universities charge different prices for different races. Specifically, the plan wants lawmakers to assume that universities will charge minority students a lower tuition rate than whites and Asians, regardless of income.

And so on.

No. This intrinsically racist plan will only codify the inability of minority students to compete in higher ed and subsequently in the work force and in the managerial teams that manage enterprise work forces.

To increase minorities’ educational opportunities and improve their education in Illinois’ colleges and universities, these legislators must lose their DEI sewage. Beyond that, they must take the currently politically unpopular steps of divesting themselves of their teachers unions yokes, and then move decisively to expand parents’ school choices by making K-12—kindergarten, elementary, junior high, and high school—charter and voucher schools, whether privately or publicly run, ubiquitous throughout the State.

And this: to the extent that Illinois insists on using its tax code for social engineering purposes, it should reallocate its existing tax collections toward having school-directed taxes follow the student rather than remaining trapped—along with minority students—in failing public schools. Beyond that, additional existing tax collections should be placed into a fund for providing education scholarships to all students whose parents wish to transfer their children out of failing schools and into different, better performing schools.

Waiting until post-high school to begin even to pretend to address educational failure is far too late to have any serious effect.

For Illinois, I’m not holding my breath.

Give Us Money

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Trust us to figure out something useful to do with it. In a MarketWatch article centered on auditing the rich, this bit, early in the article, jumped out at me.

The Internal Revenue Service is getting specific about how many more audits it wants to spring on rich taxpayers and businesses, as the tax collector absorbs billions of dollars in funding in order to toughen tax compliance at the top.

This is backwards, for all that it’s too typical of the way Congress works. What should have happened, and what We the People can make happen if we finally get our own backs up and elect people who’ll represent us and not lobbyists, is that Congress should have responded to the IRS’ budget item request—here, expanded audit rates—with a requirement to show Congress IRS’ plan for carrying out those audits. That plan should have been required to lay out all the gory details and not filled with glittering generalities and vague goals.

There should have been no funds appropriated, much less allocated, until that detailed plan was provided and was satisfactory to Congress. Of course, the flip side of that, is Congress should appropriate and allocate the relevant funds, if the plan was sufficient: Congress should not micromanage the thing.

But Congress didn’t, and it won’t any time soon.

Timid is as Timid Does

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is upset that Russian President Vladimir Putin attacked, again and extensively, Ukraine’s power infrastructure. He said, through his National Security Council’s Spokesperson Adrienne Watson,

This bombardment—part of a series of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure— is a terrible reminder of Vladimir Putin’s efforts to break the spirit of the Ukrainian people and plunge them into darkness[.]

Here is our President yapping like a porch dog from the safety of his NSC porch, along with (to mix metaphors) furiously wagging his finger at the barbarian.

While doing precisely nothing material to help the Ukrainians.

Biden is, for instance, holding up transfer of badly needed air defense systems, including Patriot and Stinger, while only “soon” will F-16s start arriving in Ukrainian inventory. Biden has chosen to do nothing regarding delivery of drone and anti-drone systems to Ukraine, forcing them to use those expensive Patriots they do have on far cheaper inbound drowns and missiles. Biden has chosen to do nothing regarding paying for the transfers he has deigned authorize, the lack of which pay-fors are at the core of Republican objections to further expenditures in favor of Ukraine.

Pay Their Fair Share

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Progressive-President Joe Biden is busily trying to raise taxes in his never ending effort to get the Evil Rich to Pay Their Fair Share™.

Here are some numbers and a couple of graphs, via The Wall Street Journal‘s editors:

…for 2021 show that the top 1% of Americans reported 26.3% of the country’s adjusted gross income, while paying 45.8% of total income taxes.

This graph shows the trend of taxes paid and who pays them over the course of this century:

Yet Biden, Progressive-Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY), Progressive-Democrat Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (IL), and the rest of Biden’s Party syndicate, individually and as a group, flat refuse to say what they believe that fair share should be. Plainly, that’s because they’ve already defined among themselves, that fair share to be All of It.

This is illustrated by the tax increases that Biden is actively pushing this year. Per a Tax Foundation analysis,

The tax increases would substantially increase marginal tax rates on investment, saving, and work, reducing economic output by 2.2% in the long run, wages by 1.6%, and employment by 788,000 full-time equivalent jobs. On a gross basis, we estimate Biden’s FY 2025 budget would increase taxes by about $4.4 trillion over that period [of 2024 to 2034]. After taking various credits into account, the increase would be about $3.4 trillion[.]
[Biden’s] tax changes…include “additional taxes on high earners, higher taxes on US businesses—including increasing taxes that Biden enacted with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) —and more tax credits for a variety of taxpayers and activities[.]

As the WSJ editors asked,

Is this not a “fair share” to Mr Biden? Then what would be?

Plainly what would be to Biden and his Party syndicate All of It.

This is the central plank of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s platform this season. And they won’t stop with the Evil Rich as they define down what constitutes “rich” behind their DEI smokescreen.