Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

French Tax, Tax, Tax

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Now the French have decided to add another tax on American multinationals—a 3% “digital-services” tax on companies that do “targeted advertising or run[] a digital marketplace,” a tax aimed in particularly at Alphabet’s Google and Amazon.com.

Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire:

These giants use your personal data and make a significant profit from it, without paying their fair share of tax[.]

This, though, is a conflation of two separate issues, cynically done in order to obfuscate the French government’s drive for ever higher taxes and never lower spending.  It may well be that “these giants” take advantage of personal data for the sake of profit.  Whether that particular profit should be taxed especially, though, is a tax matter, not a data use/abuse matter.  Especially coming, as it does, against the backdrop of the government’s men continuing to decline to say how much is companies’ (or rich folks’, come to that) fair share.

Tax the Rich

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Of course, tax the rich, but tax everyone else, too.  The latest get (the) rich quick scheme, this one offered by Alan Davis, The Leonard and Sophie Davis Fund President and ex-founder and CEO of Conservatree Paper Company, though, falls into the same trap that all the other Progressive-Democrat schemes—Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D, MA) wealth tax, Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I, VT) estate tax expansion, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ (D, NY) 70% marginal tax—do.  What Davis is proposing is

a 10% surtax on the earnings (including both income and capital gains) of the top 0.1% of taxpayers

That’s the sucker trap.  Not singling out the rich for extra taxing, but maintaining the special treatment of capital gains, other than within his surtax.

Why should capital gains—or debt interest or any other form of income, or expense—get special treatment?  That’s just the social engineering distortion of our tax code that’s so badly counterproductive for our economy.

In 2007, the last year before the Panic of 2008, from which we’ve only begun a serious recovery over the last couple of years, we Americans earned $17.8 trillion dollars from all sources: wages and salaries, interest payments, dividends and capital gains, gambling earnings, pass-throughs from small businesses, and so on, and we paid, in aggregate, $1.15 trillion dollars in taxes on that income.

Of those taxes, the top 10% of us paid 70% while the bottom 50% of us paid little to nothing.

Take the social engineering out of our tax code.  Charge a flat 10% tax on all income regardless of source, and charge it to all who have income.  Americans will spend their money where they deem fit, not where Government dictates, and businesses will allocate their money according to sound business decision, not according to Government “desires.”

That will suitably tax the rich, as well as all of us.

Set our economy free.

Tax, Tax, Tax

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The Progressive-Democrats want more.  It’s almost like an OPM addiction.

Now they’ve proposed the Wall Street Tax Act of 2019, which is intended to charge traders and investors a price for the privilege (apparently) of investing in economic products.  Their bill would

impose a tax on the purchase of most securities—including stocks and bonds—and on transactions involving derivatives. The tax would be about 0.1% of the value of the security or 0.1% of all payments made under the terms of a derivative contract.

Because Progressive-Democrats just can’t get enough of our money.

And this from Senator Brian Schatz (D, HI) who intends to introduce a similar bill in the Senate, citing the need to discourage “risky, volume-based trading.”

Because Progressive-Democrats Know Better than us petty citizens how to invest or trade.

Cutting spending, on the other hand, is utterly inconceivable to Progressive-Democrats.  After all, they also know how to spend our money better than we do.

Never Worked…Doesn’t

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In Great Britain, unemployment is the lowest it’s been in over four decades, and employment is commensurately high.  But that’s a misleading datum.

[A]n astonishing 3.6 million adults have never been paid for work, official figures from the Office for National Statistics show.

That’s 10% of the (chronologically) adult population in Great Britain.  Of the “young adult” demographic—those in the 16-24 age range—a truly astonishing 71% have never worked for pay.  Not a single hour.

The British economy isn’t in the doldrums over Brexit or no-deal Brexit.  Not at all.

Guild Monopolies

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They live on in France, especially in the medical profession.

It seems that Thomas Mesnier, a La République En Marche! National Assemblyman, has committed the unpardonable sin of proposing that pharmacies(!—not even establishments like grocery stores) be allowed to sell over-the-counter medicines without the buyer first consulting a doctor and getting a prescription.  The medications Mesnier has proposed be salable without prescription include such dangerous drugs as paracetamol (the French version of acetaminophen), ibuprofen, non-codeine-containing cough medicines, cold medicines, allergy medicines, and the like.

The horror.

Here’s Guild Master National Order of Physicians President, Patrick Bouet:

We are not improving the health system by taking skills away from physicians and giving them to professionals who do not have their training. There comes a time when things have to stop.

No, what improves the health system is no longer wasting time and resources of guild members doctors on minor ailments that half the developed world considers their citizens smart enough and capable enough to deal with on their own, including purchasing minor medicaments for those minor ailments.  What improves the health system is leaving those otherwise wasted time and resources free to deal with the truly sick.  What improves the health system is no longer wasting time and money of those citizens—directly or through tax dollars—on consulting doctors in order to get access to minor medicaments for minor ailments.

What improves the useless sense of self-importance is the reservation of such trivial decisions to doctors.