Tag Archives: political economy

Invasive IRS

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In an exchange between Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis (R) and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen that occurred during Tuesday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing, Lummis decried Yellen’s proposal to have banks report to the IRS the (allegedly aggregated) “inflows” and “outflows” to/from all accounts larger than $600.

Yellen’s response was to describe the already extensive invasion of personal financial data the IRS demands and to pooh pooh the added reporting because it’s only two additional pieces of easily ascertained information onto the 1099-INT form.

And:

the IRS has a wealth of information about individuals if you work at a job where you get labor income

Invasion, isn’t enough, though. Yellen added that Government has a $7 trillion tax gap between what Government will collect in taxes and what folks allegedly will owe over “the next decade.”

…there are a class of partnerships, businesses, high-income individuals who have opaque sources of income that the IRS doesn’t have direct information about, and that’s where the tax gap is, not low-income people.

Yellen then justified the $600 threshold with this—and she actually was serious:

so that individuals can’t game the system and have multiple accounts.

Sure. Because a family with a $400,000 annual income—President Joe Biden’s (D) threshold for being Evil Rich—is going to set up 650+ bank accounts just to hide that. Or a business in a cash-intensive industry—bars, restaurants, construction companies, et al.—are going to incur the added expense of setting up myriads of $600 accounts in order to disguise their finances.

This is the cynicism of the Biden-Harris administration regarding us average Americans.

“Unfair and Absurd”

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President Joe Biden (D), through his Press Secretary Jen Psaki (via her daily press conference), said that it’s unfair and absurd that businesses should pass on to their customers the costs represented by higher taxes that Biden and his fellow Progressive-Democrats want to impose on them.

There are some…who argue that, in the past, companies have passed on these [tax] costs to consumers. … We feel that that’s unfair and absurd, and the American people would not stand for that.

Why shouldn’t businesses pass on the costs represented by taxes?

Biden’s claim raises additional questions, too. What other costs does Biden consider unfair and absurd for businesses to pass on to their customers? What is Biden’s limiting principle regarding passing costs on to customers?

Ransomware Shame

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Corporate executives openly confess that they would aid and abet ransomware criminals by paying them for their crimes.

  • 78% of C-suite executives claim that they would be willing to pay a ransom
  • 56% would be willing to pay over $100,000 to resume operations

That’s deliberately hanging a target on their enterprises.

And this…

  • 74% of executives with hybrid work environments believe their in-house IT and security teams lack the capability to defend against ransomware
  • 60% of executives believe their employees could not identify a cyberattack

…indicates that those executives aren’t even trying seriously to train their IT and security teams or their employees, or to enforce security measures by their work-from-home employees.

Worse than that, they actively cover up their crime enabling:

well over half (61%) of business owners admitted to concealing a breach

This willingness to reward hackers for their hacking not only endangers their own companies, it endangers other companies, as well, by making the crimes routinely lucrative—which these executives are smart enough to know.

That willingness to pay the fee-for-hacking-services aggregates into a threat to our nation’s weal and security. After all, where are the hackers so willingly rewarded located? In our nation’s enemies: 82% of the attacks come from within Russia and the People’s Republic of China, split evenly between the two.

Worrying about the Wrong Time Frame

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A Wall Street Journal opinion piece subheadline well summarizes the piece itself:

the Speaker pushes Democrats to take votes that will end careers in 2022

The WSJ‘s Editors write this as if they take the matter seriously. But they, and far too many others who also should know better, are taking far too short a view.

“Career ending” votes were taken in favor of Obamacare, too. Obamacare survives, and here is the Progressive-Democratic Party back in power.

So it will be with the Progressive-Democrat reconciliation bill and the pre-amendment to it that is the “infrastructure” bill. A few Progressive-Democrats might lose their seats as they vote to force passage, but these two destructive bills will live on.

And, dangerously, the Progressive-Democratic Party will recover.

This is Backwards

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In a Wall Street Journal article on the difficulty of estimating ridership on roads and highways to be built in the future and so the need for them, and the poor allocations of costs and Federal dollars that result from the inaccuracies, there was this statement.

If lawmakers enact the $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill now before the House, state and local officials will have to decide which projects to spend money on.

This is backwards. State and local officials should have to decide first what infrastructure projects they want to complete, their cost, their priority, and have contracts already let contingent on receiving Federal dollars before Congress contemplates an infrastructure bill that would send taxpayer money to any of those States.

Those are critical first steps in getting to shovel-ready jobs to which to commit funds.