Category Archives: politics

The Snub

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Much is being made (still!) about President Donald Trump’s seeming snub of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) offered handshake as Trump handed up copies of his SOTU speech to the Vice President of the United States/President of the Senate Mike Pence and to Pelosi. Ample video shows Pelosi accepting the copy of his speech with her right hand, then switching hands in order to offer her right hand to shake and Trump turning away to begin his speech without taking the handshake.

There are three possibilities for this.

One is that Trump did, indeed, snub Pelosi.

Another is that Pence did not offer his hand, which the videos also clearly show, and Trump was not looking for or expecting any offered handshake.

Another is that Trump was only handing up the copies and, as the videos show, was turning back to his podium to begin his speech when Pelosi offered her hand: whether mentally focused on the beginning of his speech or merely insufficiently observant, he didn’t see the hand, just as he didn’t see the hand not offered by Pence.

Which possibility an observer focuses on—especially to the exclusion of the others—says volumes about the observer, and it says not a syllable about the event itself.

Taxes

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It seems Amazon isn’t paying enough corporate taxes to suit Progressive-Democrats.

In its annual regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jeff Bezos’ sprawling e-commerce empire said it paid $162 million in federal income taxes on $13.3 billion of US pre-tax income, an effective tax rate of 1.2%. It deferred more than $914 million in taxes.

All perfectly legal, too, yet the hue and cry is loud. Matthew Gardner, Senior Fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, for instance:

This means that instead of avoiding 100 percent of its income tax liability, Amazon appears to have avoided only 94 percent of its tax bill last year[.]

Not at all.  Amazon, unless Gardner is going to allege actual tax fraud, paid 100% of its actual tax liability, after accounting for all of the credits, deductions, and other loopholes our byzantine tax code allows corporations.  Amazon just didn’t pay its “fair share,” whatever carefully nebulous sum that amounts to.

The hue and cry is accurate, though not in the way the Left would have us believe.  As someone almost said once, the fault is not in our corporatoins, but in our tax code.

Everything Amazon did was legal, and it would have been an abuse of the company’s fiduciary duty to its owners not to take advantage of the opportunities—Amazon’s tax bill and overall tax rate are an illustration of the failures of a tax code that has all of those vasty loopholes, gaps, deductions, credits, etc.

A single low, flat tax rate that treats all income identically, regardless of source, and that has no loopholes, gaps, deductions, credits, etc, would do wonders for our economy, increase the revenues ultimately remitted to Government, and enhance both private citizens’ and Government’s (in that order) ability to see to the least among us.

Mind you, that low, flat tax rate should be applicable only to personal income. Corporations should be assessed no income tax at all; they don’t pay those taxes anyway, not even that 1.2%: their customers, ultimately us individual persons, do in the form of higher prices.

Bipartisanship and Unity

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…Progressive-Democrat style.

The leader of the Progressive-Democratic Party in the House—formally and having regained it from a claque of freshman Representatives—demonstrated her willingness to work with Republicans at the beginning and at the end of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech.

At the beginning, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) walked away from the traditional and protocol introduction of the President of the United States

Members of Congress, I have the high privilege and distinct honor of presenting to you the President of the United States.

She abbreviated her office’s introduction to

Members of Congress, the president of the United States.

Then, at the end, she tore up his speech and made a spectacle of it.

This is how Party intends to work with Republicans and with Americans in general who have a different view of things.

A Good Start

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But it’s only a start. The Trump administration is working with companies including Microsoft, Dell, and AT&T to develop 5G software in an attempt to break Huawei’s current dominance of the 5G market and to supplant it.

The plan would build on efforts by some US telecom and technology companies to agree on common engineering standards that would allow 5G software developers to run code atop machines that come from nearly any hardware manufacturer.

Software isn’t the only source or solution, though; we need to push hardware development, too. It’s too easy to bury malware in hardware’s ROM/PROM/EPROM chips; Huawei’s hardware will need to be excised as well.

Partially Right

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India has decided that the way out of its current economic doldrum is to cut its tax rates.

Oh, and to raise its government spending, too.

On Saturday the government unveiled a long list of measures to energize consumption and investment. It lowered income taxes and some corporate taxes and pledged more investment in infrastructure, rural development, education and health care.
To accommodate the spending, India decided to miss its own budget-deficit target.

Cutting taxes almost always is good—only almost because a government does need a minimum level of revenue in order to accomplish the goals set for it by the citizens employing it. Cutting taxes—and even given that threshold, there’s room for major cuts in India—leaves more money in the hands of private citizens. Those citizens will more accurately spend their money because their spending is tailored to their needs and wants; it’s not spending on one-size-fits-all goals or government-determined goals.

On the flip side, India needs to cut spending to fit within the revenues generated from those lower taxes, not increase it. Deficit spending only increases overall national debt. That national debt always and everywhere represents higher taxes.  Those higher taxes either will come as explicit taxes designed to raise revenues for paying the debt or as inflation to devalue the debt.

Beyond that, government spending competes with the spending of those private citizens and their enterprises for goods and services and the resources needed to produce them. That only reduces the resources available to the private economy, and it drives up prices, not just for those resources, but for the competed-for goods and services, also.

Doing that will drive economic activity, which will yield a net increase in revenues to the government within those lowered tax rates. That increase revenue will enable the government to spend more on infrastructure, rural development, education, and health care—the goals the Indian government claims.