Tag Archives: taxes

What Emails?

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They can’t be there, because I didn’t look for them. If they had been there, I’d have looked.

Attorneys for the IRS have told a federal court that they have not searched various “other sources” for the missing emails of former agency official Lois Lerner, claiming that doing so would be fruitless.

… The IRS has said that potentially thousands of emails belonging to Lerner, a central figure in the agency’s targeting of conservative groups, were lost in a hard drive crash in 2011.
…
[T]he IRS said that it did not search the agency’s servers for the emails because it determined doing so “would not result in the recovery of any information.”

So there.

And

In addition, the IRS said did not search the agency’s disaster recovery tapes because the tapes are reused or destroyed every six months, therefore rendering them useless in the hunt for Lerner’s emails from or before 2011.

It’s time to impound the servers and conduct a forensic search. Time, also, to arrest the IRS officials involved. This willful destruction is a violation of the Federal Records Act, which

requires executive branch departments and agencies to collect, retain, and preserve federal records, which provide the Administration, Congress, and the public with a history of public policy execution and its results..

It’s also evidence tampering.

Outcomes

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Tuesday’s mid-term elections have the potential to be a sea change in the governance of our country and in the direction we take as a nation. The elections have resulted in a sharp change of control of the Senate to the Republicans, giving them both houses of Congress for the last two years of President Barack Obama’s term; an expansion of House control by 13 seats; a net gain of three (so far) governorships; and an increase in Republican control, depending on how too-close-to-call local races come out, to between 67 and 69 out of 99 of State legislatures. The governorships are especially telling given some particular victories: Scott Walker in Wisconsin, John Kasich in Ohio, Rick Scott in Florida, Bruce Rauner in Illinois, and Larry Hogan in Maryland, among others.

Together, these outcomes represent a stark and clear repudiation by Americans all across our country, in Red States and Blue, of the policies of President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats. This is demonstrated not only by the broad swath of States involved in the Senate and Gubernatorial elections, but especially by the fact that every Representative in the House was up for election—Americans in every district of America had something to say on the matter—and by those state legislature results: Americans in every local district had something to say on the matter.   It’s also demonstrated by the fact that Obama put his policies on the ballot—every single one of them—and the voters said, “No.”

Now Republicans need to do things.

In short order, they need to organize and publish a coherent legislative agenda, as House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R, CA) said on the night of those elections that he wanted them to do. Then, just as quickly, they need to pass legislation with specific, simple, coherent requirements. A good set of bills with which to start would include tax reform, jobs (re-execute, for instance, the 40+ jobs bills the House passed and sent to the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) personally killed them); immigration reform; repeal of Obamacare; a series of bills to restore health insurance and to improve the operation of health insurance and health care systems; approval of the Keystone XL pipeline; and elimination of “green” subsidies (and subsidies for oil and gas companies).

It’s entirely likely that Obama will veto most, if not all, of those bills.

However, if the Republicans in Congress put forward a coherent plan and then act with specifics in the first days and weeks of the new Congressional Session, three things will occur: Republicans will demonstrate that they can govern better, with more coherence, and less intrusion into Americans’ lives than the Democrats have done; our economy finally will take off; and whatever Obama does—sign or veto—will enable the Republicans to shape the 2016 elections on terms favorable to them.

In the meantime, Congressional Republicans need to be alert to, and able to stop, Obama and Reid shenanigans during the Democrats’ lame duck next couple of months. The Senate Democrats, don’t forget, have judgeship confirmations to approve, and they have an Attorney General to confirm, and they have cover for Obama’s immigration travesties to provide, and they have….

Another Case for Tax Reform

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British Prime Minister had this to say Thursday (if that link doesn’t work, the Daily Mail has a good summary and paraphrase):

We know the economic case for cutting taxes: in a competitive world we cannot afford to carry on as a bloated, high-taxing, welfare-heavy nation.

We have to direct our resources to incentivising work through tax cuts and not incentivising welfare through extra benefit entitlements.

We have to fight the notion that you can endlessly suck more taxes out of businesses and bite the hand that feeds…. For me, the simplest way to help with living standards is this: allow people to take home more of their own money.

And

Every single pound of public money started as private earning. Every million in the Treasury represents a huge amount of hard work: early morning alarms, long commutes, hours spent on the factory floor, the office, the hospital ward, or the classroom.

The Wall Street Journal rightly offered kudos for this awakening, but they missed a key point.

[T]he case for tax cuts is as much about freedom as it is about spurring growth.

True enough. But freedom is what allows those spurs to exist. Freedom is what allows economic growth to occur. Freedom is what allows prosperity.

European Taxes

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…and, by extension, the goal of this administration’s Europe-wannabe tax schema.

Matthew Karnitschnig and Robin van Daalen, in The Wall Street Journal, interviewed the newly retired Marius Kohl, who was for 22 years the Attendant—head—of Luxembourg’s Sociétés 6, or Companies 6, the Luxembourg government agency that, among other things, determines the annual tax owed by each of roughly 50,000 Luxembourg-registered holding companies.

It’s a wide-ranging interview and well worth the read, but I want to focus on one small bit of it.

One outcome of Kohl’s stewardship is that Luxembourg became a corporate tax haven: companies registered there generally paid little in the way of taxes. This especially stands out against the EU average headline corporate rate above 21%, rates running as high as France’s 33%, and Luxembourg’s own 29%.

Naturally, the EU is dismayed with this, and with Kohl’s departure, it’s pushing Luxembourg to “fix that.” Luxembourg is being unfair, say the EU’s functionaries, and it should raise its corporate tax to be more in line with the rest of the EU.

Notice that. The EU declines to compete with Luxembourg (or with Ireland, whose official rate of 12.5% is being raised with the Irish government surrender to EU pressure) for business and associated employment. Instead, Luxembourg must make itself less competitive, must lower itself to the EU’s plain.

Because, it really isn’t people’s money, its government money that government kindly lets people use some of. Because, people are just piggy banks for the men of government, we’re not really in this for our own benefit.

This is where the US is headed, for all that President Barack Obama is talking about lowering our own corporate rate from 35% to 28%.   Obama, after all, is holding out for more taxes raised elsewhere in return.

Who Pays for Political Campaign Travel?

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In the case of some Democrats, like President Barack Obama, it looks like us taxpayers pay a significant fraction of the costs. As Mark Knoller of CBS News noted the other day,

Under Federal Election Commission (FEC) rules, the government must be reimbursed for parts of presidential political travel.

“When a trip is for political or unofficial purposes, those involved must pay for their own food and lodging and other related expenses, and they must also reimburse the government with the equivalent of the airfare that they would have paid had they used a commercial airline,” states the Congressional Research Service in a 2012 analysis of “Presidential Travel: Policy and Costs.”

Further, when a presidential trip includes both political and official appearances, the White House is permitted to prorate the reimbursable costs.

However,

As President Obama embarks Thursday on a three-day Democratic fundraising trip to California, the White House again refuses an umpteenth request from CBS News for the political travel information.

[R]epeated requests are turned down for a breakdown of the costs and an explanation and specific examples of how the White House calculates how much is paid by taxpayers and how much must be reimbursed to the government by the Democratic National Committee or others.

The Obama White House justification? They insist that prior administrations also have refused such disclosures.

There’s that Democrat morality with which we’re all so familiar: the rightness or wrongness of a thing isn’t inherent in the thing; it’s entirely in whether someone else did first, or is doing it also.