“We’re Losing Taxpayers When We Need Them Most”

That’s what Congressman Tom Suozzi (D, NY) said on the House floor, with an absolutely straight face, as he was attempting to add the Progressive-Democrats’ current move to protect their rich constituents: repeal of the $10,000 SALT cap, which limits the State and Local Taxes that can be deducted from Federal income taxes.

The SALT limit only hits the rich, and it only hits those in Progressive-Democrat-run jurisdictions.

We’re losing taxpayers when we need them most.

They’re not human beings, citizens who pay taxes. They’re taxpayers. In particular, they’re rich taxpayers who happen to be human beings, citizens. Progressive-Democrats don’t care a fig about their citizen-constituents, and they’re especially not really protective of their wealthiest citizen-constituents.

They just want their money.

There’s this bit of cynicism, too, from Suozzi:

The people who can’t afford to move or just don’t want to move are the ones left behind holding the bag.

But the bag they’re left holding is the Progressive-Democrats’ spendthrift ways and usurious tax schemes.

It’s inconceivable that these folks should adjust their tax rates and their spending so as to not send citizens packing.

Tyranny of the Left

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D) says he’ll cut off the power and water to those homes and businesses

that are in violation of gathering regulations as a means to “shut these places down permanently.”
“By turning off that power, shutting off that water we feel we can close these places down, which usually are not one-time offenders but multiple-offenders[.]”

Never mind that draconian lockdowns damage the economy to the point of doing more harm than the Wuhan Virus. Garcetti, in addition to permanently destroying businesses—and the lives of those business’ owners, operators, and employees—fully intends to destroy homes and homeowners, also.

This is the tyranny we can expect from a Progressive-Democrat Federal administration, empirically demonstrated.

American Education

Our public school establishment has grown enormously over the last two-and-a-half generations, even as the public school student population has grown not so much, and public school performance as measured by student testing performance has not improved a single minim. The graph gives, as of 2017, the total change of the indicated personnel and student populations; you can see the changes year-by-year here [there’s a replay button at the top of that graph].

Mark Perry put his conclusion succinctly:

Bottom Line: Despite the significant increase between 1970 and 2017 in the number of public school teachers (57%) and non-teaching staff (151%) relative to the 10.4% increase in students, the significant 30% decrease in the pupil-to-[teacher] ratio in public schools and the significant 154% increase in inflation-adjusted spending per pupil attending public schools over that period, there was basically no change in academic achievement. More spending + more teachers + more administrators + no change in education outcomes = a failing public school monopoly that benefits entrenched unionized teachers who vigorously try to squash competition from charter schools and educational choice at the expense of taxpayers, parents, and students.

What he said.

Which puts a premium on two distinct, but each necessary, actions: defanging the teachers unions and expanding parental access to schooling alternatives like voucher schools and charter schools.

Critical to that second item is this: per-student school funding via taxpayer monies needs to stop being school funding and be transformed into student funding: the monies need to accompany the student to the school the parents select for him. If the parents choose home-schooling as their alternative, they should get, in lieu of full-up per-student funding, an allowance to cover teaching material and supply expenses. And, conditioned on performance on State-mandated testing, a serious honorarium for their teacher labor, with the allowance plus honorarium not exceeding the per-student funding rate.

The Biden Tax Plan

Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden thinks American businesses don’t pay enough taxes into Government’s coffers.

“Vice President Biden has been clear that it’s absolutely unacceptable for some of the biggest companies in America, like Amazon, to pay next to nothing in taxes,” Michael Gwin, a campaign spokesman, said.

This is a carefully misleading claim that Biden is making through his spokesman. Some of the biggest companies in America actually pay billions of dollars in taxes for all that each of those companies pay a net amount of close to zero. That, though, is an outcome of our byzantine tax code that lets companies—big and small; although it’s the biggest that are able to make the most of it—balance a tax bite here with a subsidy, write-off, credit, or what-have-you there in order to achieve low/zero overall liability while paying those individual billions.

Biden knows this full well. It is, after all, his Senate and his Obama-Biden administration (and far too many Republican Senates and administrations) that have set up our present tax system.

That aside, though, the real, underlying, problem is that business taxes hurt consumers and our economic performance, and higher taxes would damage us and our economy even more.

Nevertheless, Biden wants to eliminate those tax breaks and impose higher rates. And more: Biden wants to

impose a 15% minimum tax on profits reported to investors….

That alone would raise somewhere between $166 billion and $400 billion over the next 10 years. Another way to look at it is that this minimum tax would take between $166 billion and $400 billion out of our companies’ treasuries and consumers’ pockets over the next 10 years.

Money taken from a business reduces its ability to fund R&D, market research, improve physical plant, and pay workers more or pay more workers.

Compliance with business tax requirements is an additional cost imposed on each business, not naturally by market imperatives, but artificially by Government fiat—that tax code.

In the end, businesses don’t pay those taxes or compliance costs anyway. We taxpayers pay for the offsets—money out of our pockets—and we customer/consumers pay the taxes not completely covered by the myriad offsets, as well as those compliance costs, in the form of the higher prices businesses charge.

Even a simple Just Gimme the Damn Money tax code that Progressive-Democrats seem so badly to want would only reduce compliance costs (maybe—they’d demand their own proofs of compliance and of revenue). It would not reduce the money taken out of businesses’—or consumers’—pockets.

Progressive-Democrats and Economic Recovery

Progressive-Democrats don’t seem to care about economic recovery, only about using the current Wuhan Virus situation and the economic dislocation the virus has spurred for their own political power gain.

This is made plain by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) in an interview she gave to CBS NewsFace the Nation Sunday.

…what we will not support is the following. What they’re saying to essential workers, you have to go to work because you’re essential. We’ve place no responsibility on your employer to make that workplace safe and if you get sick, you have no recourse because we’ve given your employer protection.

This is completely disingenuous. There already exist a plethora of labor law making employers explicitly liable for the existence of workplace negligence as well as any injuries resulting from that negligence. There already is responsibility on your employer to make that workplace safe.

There’s also this exchange between FTN‘s Margaret Brennan and Pelosi regarding the Federal addendum to unemployment insurance payments:

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well- but specifically on what has just expired, that- that boost of $600 to federal unemployment. Republicans and the White House are saying that they want to keep some money going, but bring it down to about 70 percent of prior wages. Is that something you can accept?
SPEAKER PELOSI: Well, let me just say this. The reason we had $600 was its simplicity.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Right.
SPEAKER PELOSI: And figuring out 70 percent of somebody’s wages. People don’t all make a salary. Maybe they do. They make wages and they sometimes have it vary. So why don’t we just keep it simple? Unemployment benefits and the- the enhancement, which is so essential right now and that’s really where we are starting and–

Seventy per cent of somebody’s wages might be a little bit more complex than a flat rate, but the arithmetic is something any third grader can do. And we have these neat, new machines—the technology for which was first developed almost 100 years ago and constantly, rapidly improved since—even the Federal government has them, computers, that can do the mass calculations and record keeping necessary.

No, this is just an excuse to justify another piece of Progressive-Democrat obstructionism.

And this:

MARGARET BRENNAN: Will you stay in session until a deal is negotiated?
SPEAKER PELOSI: We can’t go home without it.

After months of hiding out in their several basements instead of convening to conduct the nation’s business—which the Senate has been doing all along, in person, in the Senate chambers. Pelosi is just cynically virtue-signaling with that.

Pelosi and the Progressive-Democrats she leads are simply raising all of this obstruction because they do not want serious support for our economy, for getting businesses back into production, workers back to work, consumers back to spending and saving, our economy back to thriving.

Economic chaos works for the Left. Prosperity works for everyone else.