Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

More Tax Credits?

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Now consumer companies are looking to get in on the Federal climate tax credit scam, this effort centering on “clean” energy claims.

More than 40 companies, including consumer brands such as Airbnb Inc, Lyft Inc, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co, and IKEA, are calling on Congress to adopt federal energy legislation to provide additional financial incentives for clean-energy projects such as wind turbine farms and solar installations.

And

They called for federal tax credits for developers and suppliers of major wind, solar, nuclear, and energy-storage projects, as well as for electric vehicles and charging-station tax credits, which could benefit company-run fleets.

Here’s a thought—work with me on this; it’s a concept new to politicians and to the Left generally: eliminate corporate taxes altogether (their customers are the ones paying those taxes anyway in the form of higher prices) and lower individual income tax rates to a single, low flat rate on all income regardless of source. Get our tax code completely out of the social engineering business, and tax credits (along with subsidies, deductions, the rest of the froo-froo) become irrelevant.

Businesses and people then could go about their decision-making based on what’s best for each of them without having to worry about what’s best for them from a Government taxing perspective.

Those decisions, naturally, would include businesses’ and citizens’ own assessment of the importance of such things as climate concerns, instead of having those concerns and their spending choices dictated to them by Know Betters.

Corporate Tax Rate Cuts

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…must lead to Federal government tax revenue reductions. Or so Progressive-Democrats claim. Say it ain’t so, Joe. President Joe Biden (D) won’t say it, though, so I will. It ain’t so, as this table from The Wall Street Journal illustrates.

When you leave money in the hands of private economy operators—individual or corporate—they do productive things with their money. That productivity leads to more R&D, more innovation, more physical capital improvement, physical capital expansion, wage increases, more jobs (which represent the mothers of all wage increases, for many, from zero wage to an actual paycheck), the latter two leading to human capital improvement, which leads to greater private economy demand for goods and services, which leads to greater production of those goods and services, expanding the economic virtuous circle.

In comparison, Government merely redistributes from one operator—individual or corporate—to another its collected revenues, producing very little. Even the redistributions to noneconomic operators—individuals on welfare, for instance—the resulting production has less value than the transferred funds. The recipients of those redistributions have very small demand increases from the redistributions since they start out with small demands: they’re unemployed or employed only in low-wage, low-value jobs, and all those redistribution payments do is trap those folks in those two statuses.

All of that is even before any discussion of any need for the tax revenues Big Government Progressive-Democrats claim exists.

Skinflints

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President Joe Biden (D) and wife donated all of 2.8% of their income to charity in 2021. Average Americans in their income level donated 3.1% of their income to charity. Average Americans in the next lower income level donated 2.9% of their income—still more than the Bidens, despite their greater income.

Vice President Kamala Harris (D) and husband were just as tight. They donated 1.3% of their (higher than the Bidens’ by a factor greater than two) 2021 income to charity.

Just to emphasize how cheap these Progressive-Democrats are, average Americans with income under $50,000 and who still managed to itemize donated 8.4% of their income.

Keep in mind, too, the Bidens and the Harrises don’t have the expenses that us average Americans have. They get all expenses paid houses to live in, free transportation, and not only are their meals entirely free*, they’re catered by top drawer chefs.

But the Bidens, anyway, always have been chintzy with their charity. In 2007, while Joe was sitting in the Senate, he and Jill donated all of 0.3% of their income to charity.

*Free in this context means us American taxpayers are paying their expenses. And they’re still that chintzy.

Yellen’s Foolishness

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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is boycott[ing] some G-20 meetings this week that include Russian officials. This is idiotic and tends to send the signal that she is as afraid of “Russian officials” as her boss President Joe Biden (D) is of Russian President Vladimir Putin (or that Biden has ordered Yellen to hide away from those particular G-20 meetings).

The better signal, the stronger signal, would be for Yellen to attend all the G-20 meetings and simply to refuse to engage with the Russian officials, to turn her back on them and engage with others present instead.

Inflation and Wages

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In a Tuesday Wall Street Journal editorial, the editors talked at length and some depth about President Joe Biden’s (D) lies regarding today’s—actually, the last 15 months, the term of his Presidency—inflation as being all the Russian’s, Vladimir Putin’s, fault.

There’s an aspect of the Biden inflation that’s of particular interest though, and that’s the damage Biden is inflicting on us American workers.

[T]he overall price news is terrible for American workers and consumers. The March surge means that real wages fell 0.8%, or a decline of 2.7% in the last year. (See the nearby chart.) Real average weekly earnings fell a striking $4.26 in March alone, and they’ve fallen nearly $18 during the Biden Presidency.

The graph below illustrates the matter since March a year ago.

This is a lot like the previous Progressive-Democrat administration, that of ex-President Barack Obama (D). Real wages declined (though not as dramatically) during most of his time in office, also due to his and his Party cronies’ anti-business policies—which amounted to anti-worker policies.