It’s the Government’s. Never mind that Government didn’t build and earn that wealth, the family did, along with their associates.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would impose a 65% tax on the largest estates and make it harder for wealthy households to pass appreciated assets to their heirs without paying taxes, according to an updated version of her tax plan released Thursday.
This is the Progressive view of property rights and property ownership.
The Daily Caller has some numbers on the Clinton Foundation, which is pleased to refer to itself as a charity. The Clinton Foundation spent, according to its 2014 Form 990 (the latest available)
And
Despite taking in an additional $30 million in 2014, the Clinton Foundation spent 40% less on charitable grants in 2014 than in 2013. Even as it slashed charitable spending, the foundation increased the amount spent on salaries, employee benefits and compensation by $5 million in 2014.
Here are those 2014 vs 2013 numbers, taken from lines 8-19 of the Foundation’s 990 (rounded, in dollars):
| Item | 2013 | 2014 | Change |
| Contributions and grants | 142,900,000 | 172,600,000 | +29,700,000 |
| Grants and similar amounts paid | 8,900,000 | 5,200,000 | -3,700,000 |
| Salaries, compensation, employee benefits | 29,900,000 | 34,800,000 | +4,900,000 |
| Other expenses | 45,300,000 | 50,400,000 | +5,100,000 |
“Other expenses” include things like “legal” and “accounting” (small amounts); “occupancy,” “travel,” and “conferences” ($25 million); “other program expenses” (nearly $3 million), and so on.
Wait, what did the Clinton Foundation spend on actual charity? Those “grants and similar…”: $5.2 million, down 42% from 2013, despite a 21% increase in revenue (those “contributions and grants”) over 2013.
Of the total Foundation spending of some $91.3 million (I’ve omitted some minor spending in my table above), the Foundation only spent those $5.2 million on “grants and similar….” That works out to less than 6% of the money spent going to actual charities. The rest went to the Foundation’s and Foundation personnel’s personal benefit.
There’s also this curious datum from the Clinton Foundation’s 990:
Under Liabilities (Part X, Line 18): “Grants payable” is $0.00 for both 2013 and 2014. It’s an unusually efficient “charity” that has all of its charitable commitments fully paid by the end of every year.
TDC says that a well run charity spends only about 25% on administrative costs. Take that with a grain of salt; I’ve seen numbers as low as 10% on admin, and numbers above 30%. In any event, the Clinton Foundation doesn’t even come close to a decent or proper charity to expense ratio.
As Rick Moran, of PJMedia, put it in his description of these data,
If there’s a better definition of “pay for play,” I have yet to hear it.
It isn’t enough that unions demand the “right” to raid honest citizens’ pocketbooks for union dues—demanding that non-union members pay up as a condition of being allowed to work. Unions also are demanding the “right” to raid honest citizens’ pocketbooks for tax money with which to plus up union “pensions.”
See, for instance, the United Mine Workers of America and their pet Democratic Party Senator, Joe Manchin (whom we had thought was more honest than this).
The Miners Protection Act of 2015—sponsored by Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) and co-sponsored by eight Republicans—would bail out the underfunded pension plan of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).
This potential for legalizing theft also has the unfortunate support of eight allegedly Republican Senators and the Senate Finance Committee Chairman, Orrin Hatch (R, UT), who most assuredly should know better.
This bill would raid a mine reclamation fund to the tune of $490 million for the sole purpose of feeding the union maw. Never mind that the unreclaimed mines would remain uncleaned up (which, by the way, Democrats, having successfully defunded mine reclamation, will rend and wail about those same unreclaimed mines for their personal political gain).
Manchin is disingenuously arguing that the Federal government has an obligation to bail out the union and its funds. It’s a familiar refrain: Government has to do this, Government has to bail that out, because private enterprise—of which the UMWA is one, make no mistake about that—cannot be trusted to see to its own affairs.
Manchin is disingenuous in another way: as Diana Furchtgott-Roth (lately Labor Department Chief Economist and currently a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute) pointed out in her piece at the above link,
UMWA knows how to fund a pension plan.
The UNWA needs no government help in this.
And
Required filings with the Labor Department show that the pension plan for the officers of the UMWA—the president, vice presidents and treasurer—is solvent.
UMWA leadership has been careful to take care of themselves. It’s on them—not honest American citizens—to take care of their membership, too. Again, no government involvement is needed or appropriate here.
No, this whole sordid affair is just another Progressive effort to take money from honest Americans and redistribute it to their cronies.
Apple Inc’s aggressive response to a €13 billion ($14.5 billion) tax ruling by the European Commission shows the U.S. technology company doesn’t understand the moral obligation on big companies to pay taxes, according to the leader of the eurozone’s finance ministers.
Because it’s terrible that a company which has played by all the rules should see its money confiscated—or the attempt made—anyway.
Jeroen Dijsselbloem [President of the Eurogroup, the collection of Eurozone finance ministers] said Apple had “failed to grasp” the public outcry over tax avoidance by large companies.
Perhaps Dijsselbloem has failed to grasp the public’s dismay over excessive taxation and Europe’s refusal to allow competition—especially on taxes.
And just to emphasize Dijsselbloem’s disingenuousness, there’s this comment by him:
The Apple response shows that they don’t grasp what’s going on in society and they do not grasp what’s going on in the public debate. This is a very strong moral issue and large companies, even if they’re this large, can’t say “this is not about us, there’s no problem here.”
American companies or any company that uses all these different tax plans and at the end of the day pays no tax, that’s not fair.
No, the moral issue is the EU bureaucracy’s demanding to impose its concept of morality in place of the morals of sovereign peoples’. What’s not fair is being punished even though all the rules, all these different tax plans, have been satisfied. What’s not fair is demanding all these different tax plans to be normalized in accordance with an EU bureaucracy’s diktats, in complete disregard of constituent nation sovereign imperatives.
Or perhaps Dijsselbloem’s just pettily jealous of having been outgamed by a better man. If Dijsselbloem, or his cronies in that EU bureaucracy, don’t like the gamesmanship here, they should work to eliminate the incentives associated: they should work to get the rest of the EU’s tax plans‘ tax rates reduced to competitive levels, so such gamesmanship becomes irrelevant.
But that’s inconceivable to folks like the Eurogroup, so all they have is their inchoate demand that dissenters just sit down, and shut up.
Notice that: invasion.
EU antitrust regulators ordered Apple on Tuesday to pay up to 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) in taxes plus interest to the Irish government after ruling that a special scheme to route profits through Ireland was illegal state aid.
The problem, in the EU’s eyes, is that Apple headquartered its European operations in Ireland, which has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the EU (and which EU Know Betters keep hammering on the Irish to “correct” because its tax rates are, somehow, unfairly low), and then Apple funneled most of its European revenue through that Irish branch so as to pay—legally in their and Irish eyes—low taxes.
“Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years,” said Competition Commission Margrethe Vestager….
Ireland agrees with Apple and will appeal the EU’s demand. As Finance Minister Michael Noonan said,
This is necessary to defend the integrity of our tax system; to provide tax certainty to business; and to challenge the encroachment of EU state aid rules into the sovereign member state competence of taxation.
Ireland is quite clear on the invasion matter.
The EU may well be on the right side of its law, but it’s on the wrong side of morality and the wrong side of economic principle. It’s not the EU’s money. It’s not even Ireland’s government’s money. It’s Apple’s money, and it’s the money of the 6,000, or so, Apple employees in Ireland, which they allocate to the Irish government (not the EU governance) as taxes. If Ireland is charging Apple a lower tax rate than continental members of the EU, the latter should compete, not run from competition by presuming to dictate to a fellow member what that member must do.
It’s also the case that the lower tax rate leaves more money in the hands of those who earned it—those Irish employees and the Apple corporation—which means those employees have more money with which to take care of their families and to spend generally and Apple has more money with which to hire employees and to engage in product development—all of which are good for the Irish economy.
How Ireland takes care of its domestic economy is of no legitimate concern to the rest of the EU, and that Apple paid all the taxes required by Ireland is just a bit of too bad for the EU Know Betters.