Monthly Archives: July 2014

Define “Fair”

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Some think the mortgage interest deduction from our income taxes is unfair. After all, says one such,

I can easily construct a situation in which a taxpayer essentially enjoys no [mortgage related] tax benefits whatsoever. How about the single individual or possibly a married couple without children, who make just enough to make ends meet but still cannot save to buy a house? Or possibly, they prefer renting to the onerous commitment of home ownership. There doesn’t appear to be any tax breaks for them.

Although this person offers no definition of “fair” whatsoever, she seems to think that “fair” means everyone gets the same benefit, even though by her own construction, they’re not in the same situation as those who’ve “earned” that benefit. Because, equal outcomes.

One gets this grade on an assignment, another gets that grade, that’s unfair? One gets a first place prize in a contest and another doesn’t, that’s unfair? One earns more money than another, that’s unfair? One has a more fortunate endowment of work ethic, talent, luck, than another, that’s unfair? One made better use of his equal opportunity and so becomes better off than another, that’s unfair? How, exactly?

Of course, this particular question easily could be begged with a proper reform of our tax code, a reform that brings us to a single flat rate with no deductions, credits, etc. What is truly unfair is using our tax code for social and economic engineering and thereby picking winners and losers by government fiat rather than by actual performance and merit.

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Keep in mind that the sole purpose of taxes under our Constitution is to fund the government, not to control how free men interact with each other in a free market, not to say, “This is a worthy enterprise, but that is not.”

Moral Equivalence Pollution, Second Installment

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The Obama administration accused Israel on Thursday of failing to do all it can to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza during cross-border attacks.

Of the Gaza beach attacks that killed four cousins on Wednesday, [Jen] Psaki called the attack “horrifying.”

“The tragic event makes clear that Israel must take every possible step to meet its standards for protecting civilians from being killed,” Psaki said. “We will continue to underscore that point to Israel.”

Asked whether the US believes Israel has not done enough to prevent civilian casualties, Psaki said: “We believe that certainly there’s more that can be done.”

Never mind that Israelis, openly and publicly, are warning the civilians in the area that an attack is imminent and encouraging them to leave. Never mind that this also gives the terrorists warning and allows those who were in the target zone also to leave and so to survive to attack Israel again, a few hours later.

Never mind that Palestinian civilians wouldn’t be in danger if the Palestinian Authority terrorists didn’t use them for shields, didn’t hide their weaponry in civilian buildings—homes and mosques, for instance—or didn’t fire their rockets from within those civilian buildings. Never mind that Palestinian civilians wouldn’t be in danger if the PA didn’t insist on attacking Israel.

Not to be outdone, the UN is adding to this moral equivalency sewage.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also urged Israel on Thursday “to do far more to stop civilian casualties,” calling the killing of four boys on a beach in Gaza City “appalling.”

On the other hand, maybe the UN really isn’t engaging in moral equivalence. They’ve been utterly silent about the PA’s rocket firings against the Israeli nuclear power plant in Dimona, even though the UN itself defines attacks on nuclear facilities as nuclear terrorism. This bit of naked terrorism is fine, apparently.

Flagrant UN Treachery

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Some 20 rockets were found Wednesday in a school in Gaza operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the organization confirmed Thursday.

Israel is being generous in its characterization of the situation. Yigal Palmor, of the Israeli Foreign Ministry said this:

Yet again, Gaza terrorists abuse UN facilities to carry out their violent activities. Hamas and other terror groups are determined to put civilians in harm’s way and will respect nothing in their violent frenzy. We expect the UN and the international community to condemn and to act strongly against this brazen violation of international humanitarian law, which endangers children and UN humanitarian activities.

Of course.

But larger questions remain unanswered: how could those missiles have been placed without UN complicity? How could those missiles have been placed without UN knowledge? It was the UN’s facility, after all.

And the UNRWA is the same agency that, during the last Israeli entry into the Gaza in response to then-Hamas terrorist rocket attacks, falsely claimed Israel had murdered Palestinian children in a hospital.

Redlines and Deadlines

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The currently about to expire “temporary” easing of sanctions on Iran over their nuclear weapons program is about to be extended. Recall that the sanctions were to be reapplied, were these negotiations unsuccessful by the next week. President Barack Obama “promised” this when this latest round of talks began last winter.

Alternatively, this Obama and his administration are so desperate for an agreement—any agreement—concerning the Iranian nuclear weapons program by the deadline that

[B]oth US Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif have signaled through their carefully worded statements that they are now moving toward agreement….

That agreement includes something along the lines of Zarif’s latest centrifuge proposal (centrifuges are necessary for purifying uranium to weapons grade) at 9,400 centrifuges. This is a far cry from the Obama administration’s original position that Iran must dismantle its nuclear weapons program altogether, which would necessarily include taking down all of its centrifuges.

It would appear that an Obama deadline means about as much as an Obama redline. And it’s about the same color.

“Inversions”

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US corporate income is taxed at the highest rate in the world. “Inversion” is the process of American companies packing up, usually through merger with foreign entities, and reincorporating (if not physically relocating) in a foreign country in order to avoid US corporate income taxes.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew wants the inversions stopped. Writing to the Senate and House tax-writing committees, he said he said those two bodies “should enact legislation immediately…to shut down this abuse of our tax system.”

His letter went on:

What we need as a nation is a new sense of economic patriotism, where we all rise or fall together. We should not be providing support for corporations that seek to shift their profits overseas to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

Prior to that,

the Obama administration in its budget…proposed tightening the rules to substantially limit inversions.

Of course, it’s utterly inconceivable to this administration that the abuse is our tax system itself. It’s utterly inconceivable to this administration that what is patriotic is lowering tax rates.

More fully, and contrary to the nonsense Lew is spouting, the proper tax action for preventing inversions is to lower corporate income, and related, taxes so as to remove the incentive to go overseas in the first place. Lowering the current rate to 20% would be a good start, especially if done with a view to eliminating corporate income, and related, taxes altogether in just a couple more years.

I’ll ignore, for now, the New Nationalism, Teddy Roosevelt Progressivism in Lew’s letter.