Tag Archives: taxes

Tax, Tax, Tax

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That’s the position of European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.  With Great Britain going out from the European Union, Juncker says the remaining nations will have to pony up yet more money “if we are to pursue European policies and fund them adequately[.]”

Currently, the EU budget is capped at 1% of the total of the EU members’ aggregated GDP.  However, it’s not enough, though, that the remaining nations will have to fill the large-ish gap created by the British departure.  Juncker wants yet more.

Yet, even that “have to fill” bit remains unjustified in any concrete terms.

Some of those new [policy] demands include building a common European defense, the fight against terrorism and protecting borders as more and more refugees and migrants seek to enter Europe. There are also calls to increase spending on research and making the bloc’s economy more competitive in the digital age.

Never mind that these are individual, sovereign nation needs.  Nor is there need for any EU-level taxes—much less increased taxes—in order for the members to coordinate those programs among themselves.  Ordinary trade agreements could achieve most of those, were EU legal requirements not in the way.  Even the fight against terrorism and protecting borders: the US and Canada handle that between us, as do Mexico and us for the most part, and we don’t tax each other for the purpose.

Unspoken among those policies, too, is the demand for money to bail out individual member nations that have differing ideologies, for instance, about the purpose of money and of government.  This at bottom is a diversity demand that’s driven by a concomitant too-great diversity of national political and social philosophies.

Juncker has pointed out that his tax demands amount to the price of a daily cup of coffee for the average taxpayer, while eliding the fact that that average taxpayer has little to no say regarding whether he’d rather have that daily cup than send his money off to Brussels.

I am of the opinion that Europe is worth more than a cup of coffee a day[.]

Europe, certainly.  The EU, not so much.  (Notice, too, Juncker’s mindset regarding national sovereignty with his careful conflation of the EU with Europe.)

Uninformed

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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is upset because his enormously high taxes are going to be exposed in all their fiscally painful glory by the just-passed tax reform bill.

We’re going to propose a restructuring of our tax code. I’m not even sure what they [Republicans] did is legally constitutional and that’s something we’re looking at now.  You can change the tax code. You can’t penalize my state because of its political affiliation. There’s never been a double taxation before in the history of the nation.

Cuomo and his fellow Progressive-Democrats in the State’s government have been needing to “restructure” how much they’re overcharging the good citizens of New York for some time.  That’s a separate issue.

Passing a tax law that applies the same criteria to each of our 50 States equally?  That equality is unconstitutional only if Cuomo can make the case that New York is somehow special and doesn’t deserve equal treatment under law.

Andrew Cuomo: the canonical uninformed voter.

Deficits as Cudgel?

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Gerald Seib says that’s what the Progressive-Democrats in Congress fear the Republicans will use them for.

Democrats worry that Republicans will simply use the rising deficits they are creating as an excuse to cut government spending on domestic programs important to Democrats—in the vernacular, that the tax bill will “starve the beast” of the federal government of the money it needs to keep spending at current levels.

I certainly hope those deficits will be used as the reason for cutting government spending.  The Federal government spends way too much of our money, and it does so without regard for whose money it is and without regard for the amount of revenue that taxes bring in—deficit spending is enthusiastically pursued regardless of tax rates or revenues.

Federal spending needs to be cut back drastically, not just on domestic programs important to Progressive-Democrats, but on all domestic programs (other than defense, which already is so low that our military cannot reliably win a war against a regional power like Russia, much less a rapidly expanding one like the People’s Republic of China.  We’ve even had to abandon our Cold War mission of being able to fight and win two separate wars simultaneously).  A good start would be a 10% across the board cut on all extant programs, and then begin cutting seriously from there.

And yes, that includes privatizing Social Security and Medicare and block granting Medicaid transfer payments to the States without strings—they know better than the Feds how to spend those funds State-domestically, anyway.  After conversion, the Feds then should reduce those Year Zero block grants by [10%] per year after that until there are no more Federal Medicaid transfers.

An additional step for Federal spending curtailment is to consolidate all current Federal transfers into a single block grant for each State and then reducing the size of that grant along the schedule above.  In this way, States like New York, California, and the rest of the dozen or so States that send more of their citizens’ tax money to the Federal government than they get back could keep all of their citizens’ money and spend it within their State in accordance with those citizens’ imperatives.  Surely even Progressive-Democrats could get behind a program that lets their constituents keep their money local—that’s more for the local Progressive-Democrats to spend.

Net recipient States would be able to keep all of their citizens’ tax money, also, reducing the alleged “need” for Federal transfers.

Additional cost saving: the middle-man bureaucracies, with their inherent costs, would be eliminated, too.

The only deviation from eliminating such knee-jerk routine transfers should be in times of declared State or regional emergency.

The Disappointing Joe Manchin

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Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) seemed, initially, like a center-left Democrat and a man who was capable of bipartisan work when he came on the scene a few short years ago.  Recall, for instance, his firm support of our 2nd Amendment and his opposition to much of Obamacare and to then-President Barack Obama’s (D) war on coal.

Now, though, he’s a proud member of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s caucus in the Senate, and the conflict between his claimed values and his voting against the just passed tax reform bill is showing.

“There’s some good in this bill. I acknowledge that,” Manchin said, when West Virginia radio talk show host Hoppy Kercheval asked the senator why he opposed legislation that will benefit the “vast majority” of taxpayers and businesses in the state.

“The things that you mention are correct. Initially people will benefit and see some changes in their taxes[.]”

But

Manchin blamed his opposition on projections from some analysts that the tax overhaul would increase the national debt, and that cuts directed at individuals and married couples is temporary and sunset in 2025 without further action from Congress, versus the corporate cuts, which are permanent.

And

Why did the permanency have to go on the big end, and not on the individuals who really got left behind?

He’s carefully eliding a number of things, though, with his rationalization.  One is that if he’s truly concerned about the national debt, he should get out of the way of Congressional efforts to cut Federal spending.  But he’s a Party man.  And the only way those temporary cuts actually will expire is if he and his fellow Progressive-Democrats go against Party tenets and prevent their extension or being made permanent rather than demanding the tax increases expiration would create.  But he’s a Party man; so are Progressive-Democrats all, all Party men.

Further, businesses plan—must plan—farther into the future than do us individual citizens.  They are far less agile than we can be; their costs for things like production supplies and for labor, to name just two factors, have to be planned for far in advance.  Businesses need the stability of permanence far more than we do; eight years is close enough to permanent for us.  Manchin knows this, or he’s too economically ignorant for national office.

And

He [Manchin] also complained of a coming increase in health care costs because the legislation repealed Obamacare’s individual mandate to purchase insurance.

He’s eliding another fact here, too.  Health coverage (not care) costs have been skyrocketing under Obamacare since the first months after it was enacted.  All that repealing the penalty for disobeying the Individual Mandate is doing is freeing up 13 million Americans—especially those at the lower end of the economic scale—from having to buy an Obamacare plan they can’t afford or that the rest of us can’t afford to subsidize.  Those health care costs have been sky-high all along—due to the lack of a free market in that particular industry; Obamacare only exacerbated this.  Manchin knows—or should know—this, as well.

Keep this in mind as this Progressive-Democrat runs for reelection in West Virginia next fall.

There’s More To It

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As part of the (actually quite minor) snafu wherein the House and Senate passed trivially different versions of the tax reform bill, the Senate’s Parliamentarian ruled that 529 Savings Plans—modified by the tax bill to be usable for K-12 as well as secondary education expenses—cannot be used, on a straight majority vote, for K-12 homeschooling, even though formally schooled K-12 children and their parents can use the Plans.  Two icons of Progressive Democracy, Senators Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Ron Wyden (D, OR), had objected and raised the matter to the Parliamentarian.

The Senate passed its version of the tax reform bill minus the protection for homeschooled children, since there weren’t going to be eight (or even one) Progressive-Democratic Party Senators who would vote for tax reform or lower taxes in any form and sent it back to the House where the bill was passed again and then sent to the White House for the President’s signature.

Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX, and whose 529 amendment was cut back by this maneuver) expressed his dismay.

What the Democrats did is they carved out one group, they carved out just homeschoolers, and they cut homeschoolers out. It really was shameful.
…
The Democrats view is they want control. They want control over everything, whether it is control over regulating an industry, control over the internet or, in this instance, control in how you educate your students.  The reason the Democrats don’t like homeschoolers is if you’re spending the time, investing the time at home teaching your kids, they can’t mandate what you’re teaching them.

Cruz is right, but that’s not all of it.  The Progressive-Democratic Party also is in the tank for the teachers unions, and homeschoolers are beyond the reach of those unions.  The Sanders-Wyden move also was in service to their unions.

In either case, or both of them, the Progressive-Democrats used children as political weapons.  That’s despicable.