Tag Archives: political economy

A Nanny State Pusher

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Pam Krueger, Founder & CEO of Wealthramp, wants employers offering 401(k) plans to provide access to a vetted network of independent, fee-only fiduciary registered investment advisers as a no-cost employee benefit.

This is because, dumb-asses that all of us Plan participants are, when we are confronted with conflicted advice, hidden fees, and unsuitable products, we’re wholly incapable of evaluating any of it on our own. We need safeguards, she insists, but who would do this vetting? She neglected to say.

Never mind that we already have access to such a network, vetted by independent fiduciaries: NAPFA, The National Association of Personal Financial Advisors. One impediment to employing one, though, is their fee structure, and many participants might be unwilling to pay the fee. Hence the insistence that the employer pay the advisor in our stead.

Have I mentioned, yet, that Wealthramp has its own stable of fee-only financial advisors?

Wealthramp has its own stable of fee-only financial advisors.

Hmm….

If It Moves, Tax It

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California Progressive-Democrat Congressman Ro Khanna has just clearly articulated his Party’s ideology regarding the valuables held by American citizens.

What I’ve said—and what Bernie Sanders [I, VT] said—is that we need a modest wealth tax on these billions of dollars that aren’t being taxed. They are just sitting there without ever paying income tax, and that funding could pay for the healthcare, childcare, and education of all Americans.

Contra Ronald Reagan, if it’s just sitting there, tax it, too. That money, that asset, that value—as Progressive-Democrats define it—belongs to a Progressive-Democratic Party-run government. That government will leave in us average Americans‘ hands what those men and women deem appropriate, and they’ll appropriate the rest.

Reducing Federal spending and reducing government’s overregulation of healthcare, childcare, and education would do far more for making those things, to coin a phrase, affordable for us average Americans than would raising taxes, confiscating ever more money from our pockets. And yes, those Evil Rich are Americans, also.

This is what we can expect from the reign of Progressive-Democrats.

It’s a Feature, Not a Defect

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In the race for Artificial Intelligence dominance—which isn’t necessarily existential, but it comes close—the US has a slight global lead, the People’s Republic of China is close behind, and the European Union is…not participating.

The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the Data Act, and the Cyber Resilience Act, among others, impose stringent and duplicative regulations that stifle innovation, drive up compliance costs, delay product launches, restrict access to data, and expose companies to billions in fines.
Before AI systems are even put on the market, the AI Act alone requires predeployment risk assessments and mitigation systems, high-quality data sets, detailed logs, documentation of system functionality, and human oversight.

All this is done in the name of what the EU thinks of as safety—protect the environment, transparency for the sake of transparency, protect the consumer from…something, protect…. It’s being done, too, with careful deliberation and full knowledge of the consequences, both of being right and of being wrong.

The EU has chosen, and it has long done so in a broad reach of milieus, what it views as safety over what it views as freedom—here, to innovate. As someone once more or less noted some years ago, those who choose safety at the expense of freedom will have neither. And from that, they will lose security.

This is the EU opting out of the contest, hoping that the winner will remember the EU with fondness and a willingness to share. Which is no security at all.

Taxes

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Progressive-Democrats’ limiting factors for Evil Rich’s fair share and for how high to raise taxes are converging to: all of it. Pay everything you have.

Here’s an enumeration of what they’re demanding currently, courtesy of the WSJ‘s editors:

  • California: Service Employees International Union affiliate is seeking to qualify a referendum for the November ballot to impose a 5% wealth tax on residents with more than $1 billion in net worth. This includes stocks, illiquid stakes in private companies, artwork, patents, and family trusts.
    The tax would even be levied on illusory assets. Silicon Valley investors who own super-voting shares in a company would be taxed on their voting rights, rather than the value of their shares. A startup founder could be required to pay tax on the 25% of voting rights he controls even if he only owns 5% of shares.
  • Washington: Democrats have passed a 9.9% income tax on millionaires, despite a state constitutional ban on a graduated income tax.
    [I]n 2022…Democrats enacted a 7% tax on capital gains exceeding $250,000…[l]ast year they raised the rate to 9.9% on capital gains over $1 million. Now they’re extending the 9.9% tax to all forms of income.
  • New York: Albany…Assembly wants to raise the top state-and-local income-tax rate to 15.9% from 14.8%, and the Senate to 15.3%. Democrats also want to raise the state top corporate tax rate and let New York City raise its rate. That would make the top business tax rate nearly 20% in New York City.
    New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani…wants to increase the estate tax to 50% from 16% and impose a two percentage-point city tax surcharge on incomes over $1 million. That would raise the top individual rate in the city to 16.8%. If Democrats in Albany don’t deliver, he’s threatening an across-the-board 9.5% property tax hike.
  • Rhode Island: [Progressive-]Democratic Governor Dan McKee is pushing a 3% surtax on income over $1 million, which would raise the state’s top rate to 8.99%.
  • Virginia: One bill would impose a 3.8% tax on investment income of taxpayers making more than $500,000, which would raise the top rate to 9.55%. Another bill would create two new individual top tax brackets of 8% (starting at $600,000) and 10% (more than $1 million).
  • Congress: Maryland [Progressive-Democrat] Senator Chris Van Hollen wants to add three new tax brackets on high earners, which would raise the top federal rate by 12 percentage points to 49%. New Jersey [Progressive-Democrat] Senator Cory Booker is proposing to raise the current 35% tax bracket (starting at $256,226 for individuals) to 41% and the 37% bracket ($640,601) to 43%.
    …
    This [also] is a gigantic tax increase on small businesses that pay taxes at the individual rate—$1.01 trillion over 10 years for the Booker proposal, according to the Tax Foundation.

This, and much more—dangerously more—is what we can look forward to when the Progressive-Democrats resume their reign over our republic.

An EV Mandate Lawsuit

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California has enacted regulations restricting automobile emissions that are far stricter than national requirements. The Federal government is suing on the theory that Federal regulations, along with Federal law, preempt State regulations. If successful, this would render California’s regulations illegal and without force. The Federal government should win this suit easily, even if California drags it out and into the Supreme Court: our Constitution’s Supremacy Clause—this Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof…shall be the supreme Law of the Land—is pretty dispositive.

On the other hand, no one is forcing the companies to build cars for sale in California in the first place. It’s expensive to do so, and those increased costs get spread across customers nationwide, because the car makers build all their cars to meet California’s requirements. Those car makers could both reduce their costs of production and so their prices charged the rest of their customers, if they simply built cars according to national standards and stopped selling in California. That would result in a increase in ex-California national sales that would swamp the per-car price reduction, which in turn would produce large aggregate increases in revenue, and profit.