Tag Archives: taxes

Lies of Government

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Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast—ADS-B Out—is an aviation safety aircraft transponder system that broadcasts, via satellite, an airplane’s location, altitude, speed, and identification number so that the FAA’s air traffic controllers can more readily track the airplane and its physical relationship with other aircraft in the vicinity. It’s an expensive addition to aircraft that was inflicted on sold to general aviation pilots on the government’s promise that the system would be used only for aviation safety and for no other government purpose.

The lie:

ADS-B gave them [government taxmen] an instant high-tech snoop tool, including the ability to claim owners are registering planes in one place but parking them elsewhere. Jeff Prang, the assessor for Los Angeles County, recently bragged to Politico that the county is using ADS-B to take the tax hammer to owners of 1,000 planes it claims have been “avoiding” “$35 million in local property taxes.”

Now we get ADS-B In, proposed in House and Senate bills, which allows pilots to see for themselves the aircraft around them.

House Republicans…used the revival of the [ADS-B] issue to remedy the original tax sin, forbidding any government agency from using ADS-B “for the purpose of obtaining revenue.”

And we get the response from the Left:

[S]afety means little to the tax officials wailing that they will lose this new “efficient” way to tax—as if Americans are obligated to make their jobs easy. It also means little to Democrats, who see a new front in the class war

It’s more than just petty taxman convenience, though. According to them, the money an employer pays an employee isn’t that employee’s money. It belongs to the government; the employee is merely a middleman on that road. Or, as that LA tax assessor implied, a highwayman needing handling.

Notice that it’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians who are defending ADS-B Out’s use as a tax collection facility and who are demanding to use ADS-B In for the same purpose.

Why Would Anyone Want To?

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New York’s legislature has passed the Mamdani Pied-a-Terre tax; it’s the Progressive-Democratic Party’s latest attack on those Evil Rich.

The pied-à-terre tax, which was passed on Wednesday as part of the state’s budget, takes aim at second homes valued at $5 million or more and is expected to generate as much as $500 million annually in new revenue. It goes into effect July 1 and could add hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to the tax bills of some high-end condo owners.

New York City imposes some of the nation’s highest taxes on people and businesses domiciled there; now it’s going after those only resident there (I’d hardly call it living there) part time.

I wonder: why would anyone with the fiscal wherewithal to leave want to stay in NYC, much less be there even parttime? It’s rapidly losing its status as the financial center, with areas like Dallas and San Antonio growing in that industry, even places like San Francisco and Chicago supplanting various aspects of financial-ness. Regarding cultural attractions, those in DC and, yes, Dallas again, along with San Antonio and Austin, and San Fran, again, and Chicago have attractions to rival anything in NYC.

To the extent folks want to be in the city parttime, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts all are right nearby as places to hang a hat; they’re each easy enough commutes into town.

A bottom, though, why maintain even a sometime abode in a city that hates you so much, whose ultimate idea of “fair share” is all you got?

“Politically Viable Tax”

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That’s what New York City’s Progressive-Democratic Party and Democratic Socialists of America Party mayor Zohran Mamdani is looking for in order to address the city’s budget shortfall.

This is yet another installment in Party politicians’ cynical (I say) effort to raise ever more taxes in order to cover ever more spending, or as so often is the case with Party’s resolutely profligate spending, to “chip away” at the budget deficits and resulting debts that Party’s habits create.

It’s instructive that Mamdani wants to raise taxes in whatever way he can get away with. It’s further instructive that he can’t—no Party politician can, it seems—conceive of cutting spending, if not overall, at least in those areas not part of his social(ist) program, in order to free up non-deficit and -debt inducing spending for his goals. Mamdani can’t even conceive of simply reallocating existing spending goals to achieve his social(ist) goals.

This ever-increasing taxing is what New York City voters affirmatively chose to inflict on themselves, and it’s a threat the rest of us face if we don’t choose more wisely in our own coming elections, from the national level on down to our city and village levels.

Don’t Mention Cutting Spending

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Don’t you dare. The newly proposed Australian budget contains some tax cuts here, some tax structural changes nearby, and some tax increases there.

The tax cuts and structural changes are small steps in the right direction. The tax increases, though, are rationalized in this way: Saul Eslake, ex-Chief Economist at Merrill Lynch in Australia is claiming, as paraphrased by the WSJ:

If the process of reform is to be extended from here, policy makers should consider increasing and/or broadening the country’s goods-and-services tax to repair the revenue side of the federal budget and help ease the significant tax burden faced by wage earners and companies[.]

“Repair the revenue side?” What’s to repair? It isn’t the government’s money; it belongs to the good citizens of Australia. Their government only takes the money away from them; any seeming shortfalls in collections are nothing less than more money in those citizens’ hands.

And this from Shane Oliver, AMP Ltd‘s Head of Investment Strategy and Chief Economist:

If you do one reform without looking at income tax, then you miss the bigger picture[.]

There are two things wrong with these criticisms. One is the utter lack of justification for the amount of money the government collects through its taxing regime, whether current or as proposed. That “need” is simply assumed as received wisdom. The other is the equally utter lack of consideration of government spending cuts. The supposed necessity of current (or increased) spending levels also is simply assumed as received wisdom, albeit the spending is occasionally weasel-wordedly justified by announced social need—but even that isn’t seriously justified, merely announced from on high.

If Australia—and others, including us—want serious, durable prosperity, it’s necessary to cut taxes and cut spending further. That’s not austerity, no matter how hysterically the Left generally proclaims it to be. Leaving more money in the hands of the citizens is not austerity being inflicted on them, it’s their prosperity being restored to them. And that’s the bigger picture that Oliver is missing.

He’s Right

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But not in the way he thinks. Joe Calvello, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdami’s Press Secretary, said this:

That does not negate the fact, however, that our tax system is fundamentally broken.

“That” was referring to Ken Griffin, his high-value secondary home in New York City, and his supposed failure to pay a deliberately, cynically undefined “fair share” of taxes. After all, Calvello says that the tax system “rewards extreme wealth while working people are pushed to the brink….”

“The tax system,” the city’s, the State’s, and the nation’s are, indeed, broken. The fix, though, is not to constantly raise taxes on those Evil Rich like Griffin. The fix is something so inconceivable to Progressive-Democrats, including Mamdani, that they can’t even say the words: lower tax rates on the middle class and poor, and more broadly, restructure the tax system and its taxing targets so that those middle class and poor pay the same low tax rates on the same things as the Evil Rich do.