Tag Archives: economics

Kind of the Purpose

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The European Union’s antitrust bureaucrats demur from Apple’s seeming dominance in the no-contact payment market, and they may or may not have a case. They don’t, though, have one based on this sham argument from EU Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, who also serves at the EU’s Executive Vice President of the European Commission for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age (because if the title is long enough the incumbent can be made to feel important enough):

Apple has built a closed ecosystem around its devices and its operating system. Apple controls the gates to this ecosystem, setting the rules of the game for anyone who wants to reach consumers using Apple devices.

That’s kind of the purpose of copyrights and patents—allowing the inventor or developer of the product to control its use. In addition to which, no one is required to use Apple products to do contactless paying—or even to make telephone calls.

Neither does Apple control the ecosystem of contactless paying—it only controls its own devices, which have a, not the, contactless paying capability.

A Small Tweak and a Large…Tweak

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In his Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, Travis Nix reminds us of this tidbit regarding IRS private letters that’s buried in President Joe Biden’s (D) latest budget proposal:

IRS private letter rulings—the agency’s written answers to individual taxpayers’ questions, which the IRS itself says cannot be relied on as precedent.

Here’s a small tweak: make the IRS stand by its rulings by making those rulings binding on the IRS, applicable to all taxpayers, and precedential. And require the IRS to answer the question that was asked—to issue its letter ruling—within 30 days of the question being asked, or failing to do so authorizes, as a matter of tax law, the questioner to answer the question (formally, via its tax return) in its own way.

Nix’ overall op-ed was centered on another item buried in that tax portion of the Biden-Harris budget: a lengthening of the time the IRS has to reach into the past to look at inadvertent tax errors in a taxpayer’s filing. The proposed time would be extended from three years into the past to six years.

However [emphasis added].

Since the IRS already has unlimited time to audit the returns of companies that seem to have deliberately omitted income they knew was taxable, the new regulation would largely target unknowing omissions that result from unclear regulations.

That brings me to a large tweak. The whole question could be entirely eliminated by rewriting our byzantine tax code to have no income tax at all on businesses and to have a single, low, flat individual income tax rate on all income regardless of source and with no subsidies, deductions, credits, or any other “adjustments.”

Such a code would allow individual tax filings to fit on the proverbial post card (but maybe stick it into an envelope for mailing, for privacy’s stake):

Line 1: How much income did you have this tax year? ______

Line 2: Insert income tax due ([10]% of Line 1):           ______

Count Me Unsympathetic

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As the US and our allies ramp up sanctions against Russia over that nation’s invasion of Ukraine, companies facing ransomware attacks think their ability to resolve the attacks is being complexified. Ed McNicholas, Co-Leader of Ropes & Gray LLP’s Data, Privacy & Cybersecurity Practice, has articulated the whine, as cited by the WSJ:

[E]nsuring that ransomware payments aren’t going to sanctioned Russian entities has gotten “much harder” recently.
“The overlap of the rise of ransomware and then these pervasive sanctions against Russia has created quite a firestorm in terms of the ability to pay ransoms,” he said.

No. It’s actually not that hard. These companies need to cut out the firestorm nonsense, and stop encouraging further ransomware attacks on themselves and on other businesses by paying the hackers for their crimes. It’s perfectly straightforward. Don’t make the payments at all.

Instead, do the near-term hard, but intermediate- and long-term high payoff work of taking corporate security seriously: fill the security gaps—both electronic and human—that allow the ransomware attacks to go forward, and learn how to counterattack to eliminate the attackers (not only the attacks), both through court channels and through electronic/virtual pathways.

Coveware Inc CEO Bill Siegel, as cited by the WSJ:

[C]ompanies should be proactive about beefing up their security and run tabletop exercises to try to avoid being caught off guard by an attack.
“Most companies approach this risk for the very first time when the incident happens,” he said.

That last is not just unacceptable, that’s willful negligence, and it should get the companies’ CEOs, COOs, CIOs, and their deputies fired for cause.

An Illustration

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…of President Joe Biden’s (D) and his Progressive-Democratic Party’s war on our energy production industry.

Their war has contributed heavily to our current strong rise in inflation, since energy underlies everything in our economy from industrial production to transportation (shipping and Americans’ travel to/from work) to food, both its production and Americans’ purchases for our families’ tables.

 

H/t: ralf

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.