Tag Archives: taxes

Empirical Socialism

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Bernie Sanders style. You remember him: the Independent Senator from Vermont, Democratic Party Presidential candidate, avowed Socialist, and as of Monday night’s Democratic Party Town Hall “debate” an avowed Democratic Socialist. In that “debate” (because it really wasn’t a debate; the three candidates appeared sequentially and answered carefully selected questions—and not even the same ones), Sanders assured us, one and all, that he really will raise taxes on us if he’s elected President.

From The Washington Examiner we get a list of just how bad his tax increase will be.SandersTaxes

To put that in perspective, the Congressional Budget Office projects that federal revenues over the next 10 years will be a total of $41.6 trillion, meaning that Sanders would raise taxes by 47% over current levels.

Guess what happens when Government takes that much money away from working Americans, removes that much money from the economy?

Yup.

The EU and Taxes

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Competition Commissioner [sic!] Margrethe Vestager called foul on a Belgian tax law the commission says unfairly saved 35 companies—most of them European—some €700 million ($763.3 million) in taxes since 2005. Belgium will now have to collect those taxes if it doesn’t appeal, or loses in court.

How terrible it is that a company should keep the money that belongs to its owners by following applicable sovereign law. For shame.

Here’s the thing, identified by the WSJ at the above link:

EU leaders and tax-happy populists are frustrated with slow political progress toward EU-wide, and maybe global, tax rules that would raise taxes on large companies. Ms Vestager thinks she’s found a way to push things along using antitrust law.

Indeed. Never mind that it isn’t the EU’s money. She and her EU government corporate cronies want it.

The Coercive Power of the State

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This is the Progressive Democratic Party of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as articulated by California Governor Jerry Brown (D). At the just concluded Paris “Climate” Summit.

Tom, you used the phrase “policy.” Good policy. But I want to unpack that term a little bit. Inside the policy, you need a law. You need a rule. You need the coercive power of government to say, “Do this.” Now, you have to be wise and don’t say something stupid or order something stupid but the fact is, the regulations supported by the laws drive innovation.

And

You do have to have, at the end of the day, a regulation, a law. Progress comes from well-designed regulatory objectives that business then follows.

You can be sure California is going to keep innovating, keep regulating. And, shall I say, keep taxing.

All for the very best of causes. This complements the Left’s drive to take our weapons.  All for the very best of causes.  All for political power.  And, we mustn’t neglect Mao Tse-tung’s position:

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

An Iron Curtain

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The USSR set up an Iron Curtain around its nation and its “sphere of influence” in Europe that was designed to keep its citizens from leaving for greener pastures. The Curtain became a real, physical barrier in the form of the Berlin Wall. To a large extent, it worked: even though citizens did manage to escape, the outflow was reduced markedly, and far too many citizens died on the Berlin Wall (or under it) attempting to escape.

Now the proud Progressive and Democratic Party Presidential candidate wants to erect an Iron Curtain around the United States designed to keep American businesses from leaving.

Hillary Clinton’s plan to deter companies from leaving the US will include an “exit tax,” her campaign said Monday, making it even more restrictive than President Barack Obama’s proposals.

Never mind that American business owners and managers have a fiduciary duty—embedded in our laws as well as our morality—to maximize profits for the company and its owners—partners, shareholders, Mom and Pop. Never mind that this mandate to maximize profits necessarily includes minimizing costs. Never mind that the US taxes its businesses at the highest rate in the world, and that these tax bills are significant costs.

Never mind that minimizing the tax bill is a necessary part of that fiduciary duty, and it must, then, include consideration of foreign tax environments—and tax inversions, the process of buying, or being bought by, companies in jurisdictions that have lower tax rates and then moving the company into that lower tax jurisdiction.

Mrs Clinton would…require[e] companies to pay US taxes on deferred foreign earnings if they attempt to “game” her new threshold….

The current “threshold” is current law that allows inversions so long as the American company’s shareholders will own less than 80% of the new, merged company. Clinton’s lower threshold is, carefully, not yet specified.

This is the sort of barrier to our economic freedom, the sort of increase in Big Government taxation, the sort of destruction of our individual liberties to which we can look forward if we get this Progressive Democrat for President.

This is only a precursor to additional barriers to free movement we can expect from this Progressive Democrat.

National Sovereignty

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There’s sovereignty, and there’s sovereignty. Michael Graetz, in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, talked about the European Union’s extra-legal tax crime creation and its retroactive application of its newly minted crime to a number of multinational corporations. Interestingly, the “felonious” multinationals are American, so far.

These companies’ offenses? Tax agreements they entered into with the governments of Luxembourg and the Netherlands (and with Ireland…).

Graetz went into considerable detail about the nature of the so-called crimes in his piece. What’s interesting to me, though, is that these agreements were entered into in good faith on both sides: the multinationals on the one side and supposedly sovereign nations’ governments on the other side. However, the European Commission says it’s sovereign over these nations, and their solemn agreements cannot be allowed to stand.

This is the price of doing business—or trying to do business in good faith—with a fundamentally socialist polity—even if that polity has not the sovereign superiority it purports to arrogate to itself. On the other hand, this is the damage done by erstwhile sovereign nations surrendering even a part of their sovereignty to a supra-national construct.