Tag Archives: taxes

Austerity

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Continuing the theme that other parts of the world still exist, this thought on Brazil’s upcoming presidential election.  In a Wall Street Journal piece about the Brazilian presidential candidates’—all 13 of them—big economic plans with no money to implement them, the item’s author offered this bit:

Mr. Bolsonaro has raised the most hopes in financial markets of tackling the endemic spending problem. …his top economic adviser, economist Paulo Guedes, has promised investors fiscal austerity….

It’s sad that “journalists,” whose interns surely know better, continue to insist that reducing government spending is somehow “austerity.” How is it austerity to leave more money in the hands of the people who earned it?  How is it austerity to leave the private economy free to spend its own money on its own imperatives instead of the Know Betters who populate government spending it for them on Know Betters’ “goals”?

Reduced government spending—and reduced tax rates, the two cannot work effectively in isolation from each other—far from being austere, allows an economy to grow.

The Brazilian government needs to get out of the way of the nation’s private economy.  Its high spending and high taxing are what constitute austerity.  Brazil’s citizens live austere lives because the government confiscates their money—to the tune of 40% of GDP—and it spends that confiscated money, not on those citizens’ wants or needs, but on government salaries and pensions, and on schools and hospitals that would be well supported and staffed in a free market economy.

Taxes and Caps

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Howard Gleckman, Senior Fellow at the Tax Policy Center, wants the $10,000 cap on the federal deduction for state and local taxes repealed.  After all, he worries [emphasis added],

what will happen to state budgets if high-income residents resist tax increases that are now less subsidized by the federal revenue code[?]

Further, Gleckman is arguing,

restoring the old distortion “may indirectly benefit low- and moderate-income households” by propping up state spending.

Because it’s a Good Thing for State governments to keep taking their citizens’ money away from them and spending it for them.  It’s a Good Thing for State governments to continue spending heavily and crowding out private enterprises by consuming resources and accesses to money that would be better and more efficiently used by those States’ citizens and their private enterprises.

Remember this, next month.

Budgets and Austerity

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The Italian coalition government (interesting in its own right, consisting as it does as a teaming up of the far left 5 Star Movement and the far right Liga) has decided to increase government spending and decrease taxes.  This has been projected to produce a 2.4% budget deficit.  For a government already badly in debt, this deficit isn’t good.

Cutting taxes has been decried by others as being the cause of such deficits and debts.  Spending cuts cannot be allowed, say the same folks, because that would be an austere measure.

They’re wrong.

Cutting taxes leaves more money in the hands of the citizenry, the folks best positioned and best suited to make decisions concerning how their money should be used.

Cutting spending—a necessary measure to stay within the taxes collected—far from being an austerity measure, would enable Italy’s economy to burgeon. Getting the government out of competition with the citizens and businesses of the Italian economy for that economy’s resources will reduce price pressure, and it will leave those resources more available to the private actors, who will use those resources more efficiently than any government can achieve.

Italy’s move to cut taxes and increase spending is a half measure.  Spending needs to be cut to fit within the revenue the taxes will produce. Make no mistake on a related matter, too: the burgeoning economy will produce a net increase in revenue to the Italian government.

Ignorant Voters

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Recall the erstwhile tax on job creation that the Seattle city government passed a while back, and then repealed.  The tax would have charged businesses making more than $20 million in annual revenue a per employee tax of $275.  Although, in response to business and public outcry, the city repealed the tax a couple months later, the commentary of the tax’s chief supporter is illuminating.  Seattle City Councilwoman Lorena González, the lead proponent of the jobs tax:

Sadly the policy is right.  Our timing, however, was off. It’ll occur but we need to socialize people to what we’ve done, what we could do, the need and the real lack of resources.
A replacement may be in the cards but not now. We need to get rid of this albatross and then quietly work to figure out what takes its place. I’m thinking this is a November 2019 strategy.

Yep.  Business owners are just being greedy when they object to being taxed for hiring people. Those people are just too ignorant to understand that having their jobs taxed out from under them is good for them; they need to be socialized.

And the Progressive-Democrats on the Seattle City Council now will work secretively to slip this…tax…by the city under cover of a noisy city election.

Foolish

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Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) has offered legislation, in coordination with Congressman Ro Khanna (D, CA), that is his latest bit of socialism.  His legislation would hit large businesses with a tax equal to 100% of the welfare payments any of their employees might receive while working.

Sanders and Khanna say—and they’re actually serious—that this would pay for the welfare programs involved.

Andy Puzder has a different view of such legislation.

[T]he first step on the path to financial self-sufficiency is finding a job. A tax on employing welfare recipients would discourage employers from hiring them. It would increase the cost of employing such people without an offsetting increase in productivity or employee satisfaction, since the extra payment would go to the government rather than the employee. Companies could avoid the tax simply by hiring people not on welfare, reducing job opportunities for the people most in need of jobs and opportunity.

This is the anti-business—worse, the anti-poor, the anti-single mom, and the anti-just-starting-out youth—position of the Progressive-Democrat Party and their Socialist confreres.

But, hey—votes.  Our youth, our single mothers, our poor, they aren’t human beings needing a start a or hand up in the eyes of the Party.  They’re just votes to be kept trapped in the Progressive-Democrats’ welfare cage.