Category Archives: Taxation

Sign-Up For Food Stamps, Y’all

Democracy, Journalism, Morality, Taxation, The State, Welfare

Fox News Reporting does superb shoe-leather reporting on “the government’s startling attempts to get even more people to sign up for the ‘Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.'” However, that the state uses the private property of one segment of the population to buy the favors of another is not startling; it’s standard operating procedure (SOP).

The special uncovers startling statistics, including:

Food stamps cost taxpayers 78.4 billion in fiscal year 2012. In 2008, the figure was $37.6 billion.
(Source: USDA: SNAP Program Data)

Simply administering the food stamp program alone costs close to $4 billion annually.
(Source: SNAP, 2012 Annual Summary)

Almost 48 million people are now on food stamps — one out of every seven people living in America.
(Source: 2013 SNAP Program data)

That ranges from six percent in Wyoming to 22 percent Mississippi.
(Source: USDA, SNAP Participation statistics)

Still, not everyone who can sign up, does. A 2012 report said that 75 percent of eligible people in the United States received SNAP benefits in fiscal year 2010.
(Source: USDA State Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Participation Rates)

In North Carolina, seventeen percent of the population receive food stamps — more than double the number a decade ago.
(Source: USDA SNAP State Program Data and Census for NC population, 2012 and 2004)

According to a Fox News poll, the majority believe that Americans are too dependent on government

Had Fox News done its bit for literacy and for the written word, rather than provide big video clips—I’d have been able to excerpt Charles Murray speak to the saddest aspect of food-stamp recruitment: the undermining of the American pride and spirit.

MORE.

More snippets from “The Great Food Stamp Binge”:

With one in seven Americans now receiving food stamps, a Fox News investigative team traveled the country to expose the government’s startling attempts to get even more people to sign up for the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program”.
This documentary profiles a blissfully jobless California surfer who expects taxpayers to underwrite his life of beaches and booze, visits a Florida pastor angry over Spanish ads designed to convince reluctant immigrants to get on food stamps, and reveals how North Carolina social workers won a government award for breaking down the “Mountain Pride” that makes some Tar Heels unwilling to accept government handouts.
Reports by John Roberts and Peter Boyer also explore whether the food stamp program can ultimately make the poor dependent on government, and ask how many taxpayer dollars meant for the truly needy end up in the pockets of those able to fend for themselves.

To Moron-In-Chief, Tax Cuts Mean Moving Money Around For Votes

Barack Obama, Private Property, Socialism, Taxation

What is it about private property that Obama does not get? EVERYTHING!

Via USA Today:

“During a jobs speech at an Amazon shipping facility in Chattanooga, Tenn. Obama proposed cuts in corporate tax rates – a Republican priority – in exchange for more money for jobs programs, a priority of the president.
“I’m willing to work with Republicans on reforming our corporate tax code — as long as we use the money from transitioning to a simpler tax system for a significant investment in creating middle-class jobs,” Obama told Amazon employees. “That’s the deal.”

A tax cut is a reduction in tax rates. It means letting a poor sod (or serf) keep more of his rightful earnings, be he an individual, a shareholder or a group of them. That’s not what the Ass With Ears (AWE) is talking about. So if he proposes a reduction in tax rates on the condition that “The Money” gets moved to his pet, make-work, government schemes, what sort of tax cut is this?

Moving money around for votes is what the moron-in-chief is proposing.

To borrow from a great American, Frank Chodorov, Obama’s glib talk about property not his amounts to the following declaration:

“Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide.”

Oh For The Privileges Of A ‘Registered Provisional Immigrant’ (RPI)

Classical Liberalism, Government, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Nationhood, Taxation, The State, Welfare

“Immigration Bill A Statist’s Dream” is now on Economic Policy Journal, which, given its traffic rank and the intellectual vitality of its authors and editor, is fast usurping all others as the premier libertarian site on the worldwide web.

To the analysis offered by the column (always circumscribed by a word count), I’d like to add the following points for your consideration:

What is there to like about the fact that the new, privileged wards of the state will enjoy protections unavailable to nationals or to immigrants who’re in the US on merit?

Ask egalitarians of the libertarian and liberal left.

There is not much you and I can do—much less our corrupt representatives in the House—if General Keith Alexander’s National Security Agency and apparatus sics his spies on us. The same goes for our rights under the successors of Lois Lerner and Sarah Hall Ingram, at the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt division.

But woe betide the NSA or IRS agent who does unto a “registered provisional immigrant” (RPI) what he did to a tea-party patriot. The “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act” promises to name and shame this wicked government worker. Caught in the improper use of a registered provisional immigrant’s personal data, the agent will incur a criminal penalty.

The Bill (the lengthy summary of which is linked here) specifies that snooping on beneficiaries of S.744 will be permitted only for the purpose of determining benefits. These, to quote the EPJ column, are “carved out of the hides of taxpaying Americans, immigrants included.”

To prevent any “errant” law-enforcement officer from daring to quiz a suspicious registered provisional Democrat about his status, a “document of special protection while waiting” will be issued to The Protected One.

Oh for the privileges of a ‘Registered Provisional Immigrant’ (RPI).

I suppose that we-are-the-world libertarians can rejoice in the fact that the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act” makes “illegal alien” a thing of the past—not due to the promised defense of this country’s borders, but because of a near abolition of the legal versus illegal distinction.

As this column has written, “Would that the American Welfare State did not exist. But since it does and is, unfortunately, likely to persist for some time to come, it must stop at the Rio Grande.”

The same source has also done the work your US representatives won’t do—can’t we export them?—and that is: Read and honestly distill the Immigration Bill.

Seattle Parasite-To-Resident Ratio

Business, Government, Taxation, Technology, The State

In SEATTLE, the parasite-to-resident ratio (public-sector workers per population) is one to 56. To give you an idea of how big a government workforce Seattle labors under consider the bankrupt Detroit, at one to 61. I find this a remarkable statistic for Seattle. What it tells me is that despite the drag that is “the Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector”—an oink sector, in places, comparable to Detroit’s—there are other variables even more powerful, which, against all odds, overcome the economic drag imposed by the unproductive, “public” sector.

Washington State’s prosperity is a function of the quality of the state’s productive sector. The state attracts a highly productive cognitive elite that works in the high-tech industries of Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon and other great companies.

Public sector workers, of course, are net wealth consumers; they do not produce wealth. They do vote themselves exorbitant salaries (averaging $81,488 in Seattle) on the backs of the productive (one of whom is my own).

A breakdown of parasite-to-resident ratios in other cities, many worse than Detroit, is courtesy of EPJ (read my weekly column, also on the Economic Policy Journal).