Tag Archives: political parties

Tax Reform and SALT

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There are, unfortunately, some Republican Congressmen who don’t get it.  One such is Congresswoman Claudia Tenney (R, NY).

I worry about the way this bill erodes the deduction for state and local taxes, which has been in place since 1913.  …  This would compound the already excruciating financial burden that my state’s lawmakers have placed on New Yorkers.

How long the deduction has been in place is only an indication of the age of the error, nothing else.

More importantly, the decision of New York’s politicians to have such a usurious State tax code in no way obligates the rest of us to support the foolishness of SALT. If New York politicians—including Tenney—and those of other high-tax States truly are worried about the fiscal welfare of their citizens, they’d work to reform their State’s tax code and reduce their State’s tax rates and thereby allow their State’s citizens to keep more of their money.

At the Federal level, politicians like Tenney would work to reduce—even eliminate—Federal transfers of the hard-earned funds of one State’s citizens to another State absent a regional or national emergency. New York, for instance, sends more of its citizens’ money to other States than it receives from other States’ citizens; such a reform would seem highly attractive to the State’s politicians.

Federal Tax Reform and SALT

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Included in the Federal tax reform plan now on offer is the elimination of the deduction for State And Local Taxes (primarily income and sales taxes; property taxes would remain deductible up to a cap).  Republican Congressmen from high-SALT States object to that elimination, and they base their objection on the premise that these high-tax States actually send more of their States’ citizens’ money to DC than they get back from DC in other funds.

That seems a fair beef to the extent that it’s accurate, which raises a question in my pea brain.

What are these Congressmen proposing in the way of tax reform and spending reform to reduce the amount of their constituents’ money—and the money of all States’ citizens—that gets sent to DC?  Surely, they can think of ways to reduce such regional redistributions (they are Republicans, after all), or even eliminate them absent a national or regional emergency.

These Congressmen’s silence on that bit strongly suggests that their objections are not principled, but simply personal power and ego stroking.

The Democratic National Committee

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On a different matter, this time, from information in Donna Brazile’s piece in Politico.  Brazile’s article is centered on the control Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign organization exercised over the DNC and how they got that control, and the article is worth reading in that light.

But there’s another matter that Brazile only mentions in support of her description of Clinton’s seizure but that wants a bit more emphasis.  First, the allegation:

Debbie [Wasserman Schultz] was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was.

Then an event, typical of the DNC’s financial machinations and illustrative of DNC leadership:

On the phone Gary [Gensler, Chief Financial Officer of Hillary’s campaign] told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which the campaign had arranged.

“No! That can’t be true!” I [Brazile] said. “The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers.”

“Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?” I asked.

And

She [Wasserman Schultz] seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided….

And

I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

The outcome:

…in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

This arrangement was agreed a year before Clinton had “won” the Progressive-Democratic Party nomination.  In other words, the DNC remade itself into a satrap of the Clinton machine, and done so well in advance of serious campaigning.

The Party chair not being overly involved?  The management team quietly letting the chair make decisions in a vacuum, including those that required team input?  Her replacement being stonewalled by the Party’s—her—management team?  It boggles the credulity to think these grown, highly experienced and talented men and women atop the Party didn’t understand what they were doing, or were in any way forced into doing it.  No, they all knew what they were doing.  All along, the Party’s leadership was in the tank for Clinton and did not want an honest, balanced primary contest.

It’s rich, too, that all of this is decried by the woman who herself was so far into the tank for Clinton that she fed Clinton debate questions before primary debates.

This is the level of integrity we can expect out of the Progressive-Democratic Party and so of any of its nominees unless and until there is a complete turnover of all of the Party’s leadership on down into the middle management ranks.  Every single one of them.

Centralizing Power

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China’s Communist Party granted President Xi Jinping authority on a par with Chairman Mao, revising its constitution to inscribe a political theory bearing Mr Xi’s name and endorse policies to make the nation a world power.

A weeklong party congress that ended Tuesday appeared to give Mr Xi unassailable power as he begins a second five-year term.

The move was unanimous, with not a single Party member out of 2,336 willing to vote no—an indication of Xi’s already present overweening power.

Adding to the significance of this power grab, only two other People’s Republic of China leaders have had their “thoughts” added to the nation’s constitution: Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, and both of these were dead before the CPC codified their “thoughts.”  Xi is alive and well and in a position to build on this move.

It seems as though the running dog is, indeed, the permanent leader of the pack.

A couple of questions come up in my pea brain: Will he get his own statute, too?  Does anyone in the Communist Party of China have the stones to ask Xi about his caldrons?

Federal Deductibility of State Taxes

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The current Republican Federal tax reform plan on offer, at least as described by the NLMSM, includes elimination of the deductibility of State taxes on our Federal tax returns.  Naturally, Progressive-Democrats object.  Here’s New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D), as a canonical example:

This is probably one of the most destructive policies to the state of New York I’ve heard proposed in 30 years[.]

What Cuomo and his ilk carefully ignore is that with significantly lower tax rates and a doubling of the standard deduction the value of a state tax deduction—even for high-tax States—is markedly lowered.  What they also carefully ignore is that it’s primarily their hated rich who use the deduction at all—most of the rest of us don’t incur enough expenses to be able to itemize our deductions, even (especially) medical expenses, which must exceed 10% of our AGI, anyway (and which threshold those same Progressive-Democrats want to preserve).

That doesn’t seem very destructive.

Guys like Congressman Peter King (R, NY), on the other hand, simply misunderstand the situation.  King insists, for example,

The deduction is essential for these people to get by.

His beef and that of his fellows in high-tax States, though, is with those State governments, not with the tax reform plan.  What’s essential is that those States’ usurious tax rates be lowered, so “these people” can get by with more of their own money left in their own pockets.  King and his fellows should be working to lower their States’ taxes, not preserve them.