Another Reason

Posted on by
Reply

The Straits Times, a Singapore-based e-newspaper, has an interesting piece regarding Europe and exit taxes. The lede bullets include these two items:

  • European countries like Germany, Norway, and Belgium are increasing exit taxes to retain wealthy residents and collect revenue on unrealised capital gains
  • These taxes, levied on individuals leaving with significant assets (e.g., over €500,000 in Germany)…

The e-newspaper is of unknown provenance and reliability, at least to me, so take this with a grain of salt. The claims are entirely plausible, though, given the European nations’ broad range of taxes and high tax rates, and the states’ basic assumption that the money citizens earn is for the state to tax and not actually for the citizens to earn and remit a portion.

If the description is true, though, this is just one more reason for successful folks (not just the wealthy: Germany’s Purchasing Power Parity per capita GDP is €61,800. Those €500,000 in assets is upper middle class) to push the pace on leaving Europe before doing so gets even more financially difficult. The Soviet Union erected an Iron Curtain—literally in some places—in order to keep folks from leaving, so as to keep them working for the state. It looks like Europe is erecting a Euro Wall to keep the folks who earn money from leaving, so as to keep them earning money for the state. How long before they erect a 100% tax Euro Wall?

Trump and Ukraine

Posted on by
Reply

President Donald Trump (R) says he’s “not happy” with Russian President Vladimir Putin following the latest telecon between the two. Even, I don’t think he’s looking to stop his war. NSS.

Mr Putin added an exclamation point by hitting Kyiv with one of the biggest drone and missile attacks of the war the same night as his conversation with Mr Trump.

Putin has followed prior telecons with Trump with heavy drone and missile attacks against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and residences.

Even so, Trump continues to dither regarding serious responses to Putin’s barbarism.

One possibility is that Trump is giving Putin every diplomatic opportunity to call off his barbaric invasion and war against Ukraine before Trump takes concrete action in Ukraine’s favor: serious sanctions against Russia and those persons, businesses, and nations that do business of any sort with Russia, coupled with unfettered arms deliveries to Ukraine in the amounts and times the UA says they need them.

That time is long past, though; Putin has responded militarily overtly negatively to those opportunities. It’s time to act.

The WSJ editors closed their piece with this:

Mr Putin thinks he can make President Trump look plaintive and weak, and then get away with it as Russia swallows Ukraine. If the Russian is right, much of the US deterrence benefit of the Iran strike will vanish.

That misstates the case. If Putin succeeds, all of our deterrence will disappear. And more: we’ll be actively inviting further moves by our enemies.

Yet More Disingenuousity

Posted on by
Reply

This time, it’s at the State level of education. As usual, the sham bellyaching comes from the Left. In a Just the News piece regarding the slowdown in dismantling the US Department of Education related to DoEd wins in a variety of education and court milieus, we got this from Leslie Babinski, Research Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience in Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy:

We’re looking at 7.4 million students with disabilities who could potentially be impacted by changes with funding through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act[.]
There are 9.8 million students in rural schools who depend on federal support for bridge funding in communities with more limited local tax bases.

This is hysteria hyping in education. Funding needn’t be impacted at all by anything DoEd does, including being disbanded altogether. That includes those rural school students. Education is, by design and overwhelmingly correctly so, local. The Federal government has no business being involved except at a top level—through Title IX’s protection of girls and women in sports and the elimination of DEI bigotry from school curricula.

Local means local, and the top of local in our federal construction is the States. Students with disabilities need extra funding, no doubt, and rural schools with limited local tax funds available also need extra funding. That funding, though, should—must—come from the States. They have no excuse for leaning on [in both sense of that phrase] the Federal government for those tax dollars remitted to the Federal government from other States. States need to do—and all they need to do, regardless of how hard State government politicians think it is politically—is to reallocate their existing spending to better treat their own schools.

That folks like Babinski don’t think of things like this is why politically oriented experts who are not actual politicians cannot be taken seriously.

Politicians in the Federal and State governments, on the other hand, who claim that State level spending reallocations are too hard to do are doing nothing more than holding our children hostage against those politicians’ personal spending wishes. That’s as disgusting as it is immoral.

Environmentalists and Technology

Posted on by
Reply

TL;DR, environmentalists don’t like technological improvements that don’t meet their climate funding industry’s approval. Typical of this is their objection to AI-centered data centers and those facilities’ demand for electricity. Especially typical is their hue and cry over the newly hated-by-the Left Elon Musk’s entry into the business with his Grok AI data center.

The facility [built in Memphis, TN] is partially powered by dozens of small natural-gas turbines—most of which are temporary. A relentless environmentalist campaign erupted, accusing the facility of polluting the skies over predominantly black neighborhoods. The city responded by conducting air quality tests, which showed no dangerous levels of pollutants.

The climatistas reject those test results because they refute—not merely contradict—the climatistas’ claims.

Denial isn’t a river in Egypt, but it does rhyme with climatistas’ dismissal of inconvenient truths.

Right On

Posted on by
Reply

Cliff Asness and Michael Mendelson, of AQR Capital Management, wrote in the Saturday Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section decrying Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s statement that we “shouldn’t have billionaires.”

The money part of their letter, though, is their closer:

We are tempted to end by saying, with considerably more evidence than Mr Mamdani, that “we shouldn’t have socialists.” The country would be better off without such noxious and destructive ideas. But unlike him, we know we don’t get to decide who exists and who doesn’t.

Right on.