Tag Archives: taxes

The Party of Expansionist, Acquisitive Government

Posted on by
Reply

That’s what we can see made plain in the incoming Congress’ House of Representatives.  Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman (D, NJ) had this on her Progressive-Democratic Party’s plans:

There are dozens of measures…that have been languishing with Republicans at the helm for years, and I expect to see many of them finally come to the floor under Democratic leadership[.]

Plans like rolling back the just enacted tax cuts and preventing the individual income tax cuts from becoming permanent.  Because the Progressive-Democrats know more about how to spend our money than we do.

Plans like Medicare for all, free education for all—paid for by raising those taxes.  So much for “free.”

Guaranteed jobs, especially, “green” jobs—at the Progressive-Democrat’s mandated minimum wage because, like all workers, “green” workers are just too stupid to be trusted with freely negotiating their own compensation package.  And hired by whom?  Not so much a free economy employer; “greenery” isn’t competitive, so the Progressive-Democrats intend to centrally plan our energy economy and require greenery along with subsidizing it.  That can be expected to work as well as the Progressive-Democrats’ centrally planned health economy.

Oh, and they want to deepen the central planning on that: as part of their “Medicare for all” bit, they intend for Uncle Sugar to be sole dispenser of and sole payer for each citizen’s (and illegal alien’s) health care.

Block border security by blocking any wall and by eliminating Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  And hamstringing US Customs & Border Protection generally.

It’s going to be an ugly, wasted two years with no serious legislation coming out of the House—only the Party’s nakedly socialist claptrap.  Socialist and Government-run because, these worthies insist, the average American is inadequate to the task of his democratic duty.

Tax Cuts Don’t Have Long-Term Benefits

Posted on by
Reply

That’s the claim of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.  It’s an accurate claim, too, when tax cuts are taken in isolation, as Furman took them throughout his piece.  That loneliness was emphasized by his closing remarks.

Going forward, policy makers should aim for a reformed tax system that is more stable, economically efficient, simple, and directly supportive of the middle class. Do this right, and the results could be higher economic growth and higher wages without the higher deficits. That’s a combination that’s proved elusive to date.

“Tax system,” not “tax and spend system.”  Leave it to an Obama staffer to miss the boat on this. The major reform remaining is to make the existing individual income tax cuts permanent (much less, lower)—an action the Progressive-Democrats in Congress will actively block. The necessary dual to tax cuts, though, is completely inconceivable to folks like Furman and his Progressive-Democrat cronies: cutting spending to fit within the lowered tax revenues.   After all, it’s those associated spending cuts in combination with the tax cuts, that produce the mid- and long-term benefits.

It’s true enough that feckless members of the Republican caucuses contribute to this failure, but their failure centers on how and where to make the cuts; they don’t have a mental block against even thinking about them.

France is Taxing

Posted on by
Reply

The Macron administration utterly failed in its cynical effort to raise its taxes on the French working class and poor with its “climate” tax on transportation fuels, so now it’s going to go after American tech companies with carefully targeted taxes.  And that administration is desperate to get going, and it’s going to do it unilaterally.

In early December, Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said France would give the EU until March to come up with a deal on taxing US internet giants. But ten days later he announced the tax would be introduced on January 1.

Wait, what?

France said at the start of December it would start taxing Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, the big US technology companies known as GAFA, if European Union finance ministers failed to agree on a bloc-wide digital tax next year.

And here’s the game, as confessed by Le Maire.

The digital giants are the ones who have the money.

So he intends to rip off uniquely tax our American companies for the heinous crime of outcompeting his precious French companies and then of being better tax managers than his precious French government.

Our companies need to think very carefully about the value they get from doing business in France compared with the French government’s imposition of wholly artificial costs for the privilege of doing business there.

Taxing Speech

Posted on by
Reply

California has decided to kill two birds with one stone.  The State thinks it needs more money, so it’s going to raise a new tax.  The State is anxious to…manage…speech of which it disapproves, so it has chosen its target for its new tax.

California state regulators have been working on a plan to charge mobile phone users a text messaging fee intended to fund programs that make phone service accessible to the low-income residents, reports said Tuesday.

Here’s Jim Wunderman, Bay Area Council President, on the plot, though:

It’s a dumb idea. This is how conversations take place in this day and age, and it’s almost like saying there should be a tax on the conversations we have.

Wunderman understated the problem.  It’s not just a dumb idea, it works out to a naked attack by Government on its citizens’—its employers’—speech.

In the event, when the FCC decided to designate texting to be  an “information service,” and not a telecommunications service, the State decided to withdraw its proposal to tax it.  The State rationalized it decision by claiming “text messaging was not a classified service under federal law.”

However.

The FCC’s designation is a quibble that’s meaningless in this context. Taxing speech directly is the beginning of an effort to manage permissible speech by artificially driving up the cost of it.  The medium used for making speech–a “telecommunications service,” for instance–is just as critical to the freedom of speech as are the utterances themselves. Taxing the service is an opening toward managing speech indirectly by artificially driving up the cost of using a medium for speaking.

Beyond that, the State’s excuse that text messaging hadn’t yet been designated is disingenuous. Not every activity in which an American citizen engages needs Government designation in order to be engaged.  Only those activities to be explicitly proscribed or managed need designation.  That’s at the core of our founding principles of limited government that works for us and of individual liberty and individual responsibility.

As a result, questions arise concerning this Progressive-Democrat- run State’s move to use taxes to manage speech.

What other forms of speech will California try to tax?

Whose forms of speech will California try to tax?

What can we expect regarding speech–and any other individual liberty and responsibility–can we expect a Progressive-Democrat national government to attempt?  Especially in their universe of “you didn’t build that,” and “we’re a collectivist society in which it takes a village to most anything?”

Still a Foolish Tax

Posted on by
Reply

The EU’s usurious digital tax on international tech companies that they had proposed has met with sufficient resistance from low-tax member nations—Ireland and several northern European nations—that France and Germany, the drivers of the proposal, have offered a modified version.  This new effort would

  • limit the tax to a 3% levy on online advertising revenues rather than all online revenues
  • effectively exempt Amazon, AirBnB, and Spotify—a sop to non-EU administrations, especially Trump
  • run until 2025

The beef underlying this drive to tax techs centers on tech firms paying less tax than putatively traditional firms on their EU earnings.

The European Commission estimates traditional companies pay 23% tax on profits—compared to just 8 to 9% for internet firms, with some paying effectively none.

Given that low tax rate nations like Ireland and Luxembourg are attractive to businesses, including tech firms, the foolishness of this new proposal is exposed.  It tries to get a common, high, tax imposed on tech firms at least.

Maybe not foolishness, so much as cynicism.  It remains inconceivable to the EU to lower its overall taxes to competitive levels rather than trying to suck those low-tax members into raising theirs to uncompetitive levels.