Tag Archives: taxes

Kamala Harris and a Smattering of History

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is proud of her record as California’s Attorney General. Here’s an example from that proud record of hers, against the backdrop of the Progressive-Democrat Biden-Harris administration’s lawfare campaign against their political opponent, former President and Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

As AG, Harris demanded nonprofits in her jurisdiction hand over their federal IRS Forms 990 Schedule B so she could pretend to be investigating self-dealing and improper loans involving those organizations and their donors. Her office then promptly “leaked” 2,000 Conservative cause-supporting organizations’ Schedules B to the public via Harris’ Attorney General Web site. Those organizations and their donors then began receiving threats of retaliation and death threats.

It won’t matter that the Supreme Court blew up her California AG case in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v Bonta. She’s already shown her disdain of the Court and complete disregard for its rulings; her demand for those Schedules B (much less her release of so many submittals) was in complete disregard of a much earlier, already long-standing Supreme Court NAACP v Alabama ruling which had held that similar demands violated the 1st Amendment’s right freely to associate as a critical aspect of the Amendment’s explicit Free Speech Clause.

Harris will continue Party’s lawfare campaigns against those of whom Party elite personally disapprove. This is the empirical practice and view of “law” that the highly experienced, and proud of that experience, Harris will bring to her administration, including the Department of Justice that she will build during her term.

That’s if we average Americans are foolish enough to elect her.

Tax Cuts are Costly

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Arkansas’ Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has signed into law the State’s latest round of individual and corporate tax cuts. “Finance officials” say that

the cuts will cost about $483 million the first year and $322 million a year after that.

Sanders also has signed into law a different tax cut, this one in the form of a tax credit increase. This one

increases the homestead tax credit from $425 to $500, retroactive to January 1.

“Finance officials” piped up again:

That cut will cost $46 million.

Cost whom, exactly? The money isn’t the State government’s after all. The money belongs to the citizens of Arkansas, they just remit it in the form of tax levies. It doesn’t cost the government a single copper penny to not get what doesn’t belong to it.

Beyond those “financial officials'” distortion, there’s another item missing from their pseudo-analysis.

Those officials are ignoring the impacts of the increased economic activity in the State’s private economy from all that money now being left in the private hands of the State’s citizens and private businesses. There are two primary impacts. One is the increased prosperity of those citizens both from their being able to hold onto more of their money and from that increased economic activity. The other is the increased tax receipts the government will receive, on net despite the reduced tax rates, from the increased aggregated revenues flowing from all that increased economic activity.

Spending vs Revenue

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…in the Progressive-Democratic Party’s world.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have this one right.

CBO projects that this year’s budget deficit will clock in at roughly $2 trillion, some $400 billion more than it forecast in February and $300 billion larger than last year’s deficit.
…
Notably, CBO’s revenue projections are little changed. Revenue is expected to total 17.2% of GDP this year—roughly the 50-year average before the pandemic….

So, whence the deficit explosion? Plainly, it’s in all that spending that the Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his Party syndicate in the House and Senate insist on doing.

CBO significantly revised up projections for federal spending. Outlays are now expected to hit 24.2% of GDP this year and average 24% over the next decade. Wow.

Mind you, that’s against a steadily, if slowly, growing GDP. That projection means that Party spending will be growing, too. All while revenue remains steady—which is to say, flat/not growing.

This is the politicians of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s utter inability to say “cut spending,” which plays into their inability actually to cut spending. After all, the money, in their minds, isn’t real; it’s only monopoly money, and if they need want more dollars, they have only to go to their Modern Monetary Policy money tree and pick more dollar bills from the branches.

The reality, though, is that the money Progressive-Democrats demand to spend is our money. Those politicians have no skin in the game beyond their political power. The skin us average Americans have in this game is real: our ability to get along in the real (and real economic) world in which we live, having as we do, only those real dollars that Party policies steadily devalue.

We need to remember that this November.

A Progressive-Democrat Governor and a Surtax

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New Jersey’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Phil Murphy once promised to let the State’s 2.5% surtax on businesses with incomes greater than $1 million expire and then, by implication, to leave it alone. He did the first part, and it did expire. But it turns out he dissembled on the second part.

Mr Murphy and his [Progressive-]Democratic Legislature are scrambling for money even though tax revenue has increased 35% over the past five years—faster than inflation.
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Mr Murphy now wants to re-impose it on income above $10 million, retroactively to the start of this year.

Progressive-Democrats are so addicted to taxing Americans and our businesses that their promises to lower taxes or to leave alone existing taxes are worthless. Which calls into question the value of any other of their promises. Indeed, their addiction is so powerful that they’re not capable even of saying the words “cut spending,” much less actually doing so.

Maybe Murphy’s renewed surtax will hit only the wealthiest businesses, many based in other states, hard enough to persuade those in New Jersey to relocate to more business—and average American—friendly locations and persuade those based in other States to reduce or forgo doing business in New Jersey.

There’s a Hint There

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The farm bill just passed out of the House Agriculture Committee contains a provision barring the Secretary of Agriculture from increasing, on his own alleged authority, SNAP spending above the amounts provided for in the legislation:

[c]orrects egregious Executive branch overreach and disallows future unelected bureaucrats from arbitrarily increasing or decimating SNAP benefits.

Austin Scott (R, GA):

The Farm Bill includes protective language that prevents extreme changes to SNAP benefits without Congressional input and continues the cost-neutral status that the TFP [Thrifty Food Plan] has maintained for over 40 years.

The Progressive-Democrat Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack claimed, though, that

the proposal would amount to a roughly $27 billion cut to SNAP[.]

This is the AgSec’s confession that he fully intended to spend—on his own and without any Congressional spending authority to do so—at least those $27 billion above his authorized level. He’s not alone in this. Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo (D, CO):

…it is necessary that we go back to the negotiating table and remove this provision[.]

Senator Debbie Stabenow (D, MI):

It…does not have the votes to pass on the House floor. And certainly not in the Senate[.]

This is the budgeting and spending paradigm of the Progressive-Democratic Party: Congressional appropriations and allocations are mere suggestions, and they are to be disregarded whenever inconvenient to Party. After all, it’s only your and my money they’re spending.

There’s an election coming up. Maybe us average Americans should vote our tax dollars.