Tag Archives: taxes

In a Contest of Tariffs

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In a piece purporting to show Where the Trade Battle Hurts the Most, Julie Wernau and Ira Iosebashvili had this comment:

Renegotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement are being closely watched in Canada, too. The Trump administration has used threats of auto tariffs to win concessions from Canada and Mexico, a strategy that hasn’t sat well with the two countries.

President Donald Trump also offered them, and the rest of the G-7, a regime of no tariffs at all. Their refusal even to discuss the offer doesn’t sit well with those of us outside the NLMSM.

Capital Gains Taxes

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Folks styling themselves conservatives want Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to index capital gains taxes for inflation—and to do it by Executive Branch fiat.  Mnuchin, though, is reluctant to do so, not least because he’s unsure whether Treasury actually has the authority.  He’s also not convinced that Congress shouldn’t set such a requirement.

Mnuchin is right, though—this sort of thing should be determined legislatively rather than by Executive Branch regulation, Executive Order, or other diktat.  That’s the Conservative position.

Too, Congress should not be allowed to duck the matter: put the Congressmen on the record with their words and votes—every single one of them.

Regarding any allegedly lost revenue, Government must first demonstrate it needs the money rather than reducing spending by those $102 billion.

It’s Not Your Company

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Seattle wants to charge a head tax on businesses operating in the city, a tax whose amount would be just what it sounds like—a tax based on the number of hours worked by each employee the business has on its payroll.

In response to the proposal, Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, paused construction on a 17-story office tower in downtown Seattle.

In response to Amazon, the Left in Seattle, spearheaded by the Service Employees International Union-backed activist gang—Working Washington—wants Amazon charged with a felony.

Amazon, after all, doesn’t belong to its investors, and it’s not run by Bezos.  No, the activists, the SEIU, and the city’s governing machine that wants the tax, all insist that Amazon is public property, and it must do what they demand, not what its owners want.

Because those owners don’t own that.  They only hold it in conditional fee from these city Know Betters.

Is Seattle as much a harbinger of future Progressive-Democrat demands as is Jerry Brown’s California?

Update: The Seattle City Council on Tuesday voted 9-0 to impose the head tax, although rather than being based on hours worked per employee, it’s a flat head tax: $275 per employee per year.

Taxes and Deduction Caps

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New York thinks it’s found a way around the tax reform act that cut Federal income taxes and capped the deduction taxpayers can take for State and Local Taxes (vis., State income and property taxes).

The idea, which became law last month, creates a new optional payroll tax that shifts the state and local tax deduction from individuals who can no longer fully take it to businesses that can.

However,

Employers are worried about compliance costs, interactions with union contracts, complexity across state lines, and the difficulty of explaining to workers how a plan that might lead to smaller pay raises still puts more money in their pockets.

In response,

The Wall Street Journal asked the 10 largest private employers in the state and in New York City, along with all Fortune 100 companies based in New York state, whether they would opt for the new payroll tax. None that responded said they would do so

Hmm….

Here’s an alternative idea; work with me on it, it’s simple and not very nuanced.  The State jurisdictions should simply lower their income and property tax rates.  That would bypass the SALT cap by making it less important (and as a happy side effect it would leave more money in the hands of the State’s citizens).

It Still Is

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The Supreme Court is hearing a case, South Dakota v Wayfair Inc, wherein South Dakota is looking to overturn a generation-old ruling that exempts out of state retailers from State sales taxes unless the retailers also have a physical presence in the State.  I wrote about one aspect of the matter here among other places.

Here’s another, more critical aspect of the matter [emphasis added].

In a 1992 mail-order catalog case [Quill Corp v North Dakota], the court held that, absent congressional approval, states could impose tax-collection duties only on retailers with a “physical presence” within their borders. Congress, with its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, was the place to balance state revenue needs with burdens on business, the court said at the time.

Congress still is the place for such a decision.  This is a political matter, not a judicial one, and the Supremes, by overturning their “precedent”—which was nothing more than a recognition of who has law-making authority and who has only law-applying authority—would be usurping law-making authority to themselves.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there.  South Dakota’s Attorney General, Marty Jackley, argued with a straight face that

the states—45 impose sales taxes, and nearly all support South Dakota’s case—wouldn’t make draconian demands of remote sellers….

Never mind that it’s already draconian to demand that retailers pay taxes they don’t owe.

And this from our favorite Living Constitution Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

If time and changing conditions have rendered it obsolete, why should the court, which created the doctrine say, “Well, we’ll let Congress fix up what turns out to be our obsolete precedent?”

Except for the small matter that the Court didn’t create this “doctrine,” our Constitution did.  That document says, in so many words, that all law-making authority resides in the Congress and nowhere else, and it says further that regulation of interstate commerce is one of the enumerated tasks of that same Congress and not any business of the judiciary.