Category Archives: Taxation

UPDATED: Thought Experiment in Statism (Economic Apocalypse?)

Debt, Economy, Government, Political Economy, Private Property, Taxation, The State

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told FoxNews anchor Chris Wallace repeatedly that to avoid the debt precipice, “tax reform that would generate revenue” [“now there’s a nice word for taxes”] must be considered. The “revenue we’re going to get through tax reform”: that’s how Geithner put it second time around, during the Sunday interview.

Let us assume, for a moment (as Secretary Geithner expects us to), that the solution to the debt is paying the people who incurred the debt more money; that the solution to the debt is seizing private property (through taxes) and placing it in communal ownership (state bureaucracies), where resources are never allocated efficiently and are always squandered.

Assuming all the above, do you have any guarantees that the money stuffed down the maw of the Federal Frankenstein will actually go to pay down the debt? Of course you don’t. Of course it won’t.

Money extracted from us by the Feds is fungible. Any additional revenues the Feds receive via taxes they will use to plunge private property owners deeper into debt.

UPDATE (July 25): The notion that not raising the debt-ceiling must necessarily result in the US defaulting on its debt is nonsensical. In so asserting, Tiny Tim is talking tripe. The US Treasury takes in enough loot to pay down the interest on the debt as well as a portion of the principal.

Meanwhile Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was upbeat about the US’s economic prospects. In a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, Clinton framed “the political wrangling in Washington” over the debt as a function of America’s “open and democratic society.”

Clever. I noticed that CNN, in its reporting today, had taken the same tack: Markets across the world were worried over political wrangling in the US, rather than the debt. It was essential for the Demopublicans to arrive at an agreement for markets’ sake. The fact that there is no money in the coffers: that’s of no concern. Why, the awful Gloria Borges, a banal mind if ever there was one, ventured that legislation ought to be passed to automate the raising of the debt ceiling so that “We don’t have to go through this again.”

Darker Clouds On the Horizon

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Economy, Race, Taxation, Welfare

The dynamics Pat Buchanan describes in his latest column, “Black America vs. Obama?,” might very well be borne out: African-Americans will likely turn on the black president who was forced to slash the oink sector in which they are overrepresented.

Though 10 percent of the U.S. civilian labor force, African-Americans are 18 percent of U.S. government workers. They are 25 percent of the employees at Treasury and Veterans Affairs, 31 percent of the State Department, 37 percent of Department of Education employees and 38 percent of Housing and Urban Development. They are 42 percent of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., 55 percent of the employees at the Government Printing Office and 82 percent at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency.
When the Obama administration suggested shutting down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants whose losses of $150 billion have had to be made up by taxpayers, The Washington Post warned, in a story headlined, “Winding Down Fannie and Freddie Could Put Minority Careers at Risk,” that 44 percent of Fannie employees and 50 percent of Freddie’s were persons of color.
In Washington, D.C., we have also seen the result of government cuts on African-American leaders who had to approve those cuts.
When Mayor Adrian Fenty stood behind schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who fired hundreds of teachers, most of them African-American, the wards east of the Anacostia cut him dead. In 2010, Fenty was thrown out by many of the black voters who elected him

Is this is a welcome development? Hardly. (And I fully understand that Mr. Buchanan is hardly making such a claim.)

While coalitions of the aggrieved are good, where here is there a coalition for freedom-loving Americans to pursue? Fifty percent or so of Americans—those who pay the taxes—want the excesses of the oink sector curtailed. The African-American cohort Buchanan cites wants these programs to carry on in perpetuity.

It’s possible that Mr. Buchanan is simply warning that African-Americans are just going to get angrier and angrier.

The Uncertainty Chant

Barack Obama, Business, Debt, Economy, Inflation, Regulation, Taxation

In “You Can’t Fix Stupid,” I counted the ways of Barack Obama’s stupidity, as far as the natural laws of economics go. Today he did me one better, claiming that “uncertainty over the debt ceiling has hindered hiring in the private sector.” The horrible jobs reports, in other words, were a function of market fears that the US would halt the borrowing and bankruptcy trends. That’s certainly novel. Let’s not forget that Republicans feed this folly by advancing, as a counterargument, the same tack: we have no certainty in capital and other markets, therefor no one will hire.

Nonsense on stilts: There is ample certainly; certainly about economic gloom-and-doom to come. Given the indicators in the US—OPD (Outstanding Public Debt) almost equaling GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the first is growing faster than the second—businesses have to become as lean as possible.

The uncertainty mantra is a mindless one. There is plenty of certainty: certainty about a dark future. A business that is to survive needs to streamline and become super efficient. It has to hunker down and stay in survival mode. So should you.

UPDATED: ‘You Can’t Fix Stupid’

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, Government, Intelligence, Political Philosophy, Reason, Socialism, Taxation

The following is from my new, WND column, “You Can’t Fix Stupid”:

“How stupid is President Barack Hussein Obama? Let me count the ways.

Judging from the philosophical pose he struck during Wednesday’s “debt-reduction” address, the president is so stupid as to believe that the “rugged individualism,” “self-reliance,” and “healthy skepticism of too much government”—all qualities he attributed to the American people in that speech — can survive in the shadow of his government.

During his two years in office, Mr. Obama has accrued more debt than any president in American history. Why, in the month of March alone, his souped-up civil servants spent eight times what they collected in tax receipts and revenues.

For every year their honcho has been in office, the Obama officials have devoured over a trillion dollars, and will put Americans in hock to the tune of $1 trillion in interest payments alone, by the end of this decade, if not sooner.

How stupid is our president? So stupid as to believe that the governmental juggernaut over which he presides is what connects us a nation, and ensures that “we … do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.”

How stupid is Obama? So stupid as to believe that America became a great country in 1935, which is when the earliest of the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security entitlements was signed into law. Dummy did, after all, declare yesterday that, “We would not be a great country without [these programs]”? …

… But, as Ron White, that great satirist from the great State of Texas, teaches, ‘You can’t fix stupid.’

‘There is not a pill you can take, not a class you can go to. Stupid is forever.'”

Read the complete column, “You Can’t Fix Stupid,” now on WND.COM.

UPDATE (April 15): An Ivy-League education is increasingly not indicative of intelligence. What with affirmative action, one can hardly assume that Obama’s admission to these institutions bodes well for his IQ. It certainly does nothing of the sort for his wife’s; anyone who has read her graduation thesis will confirm what I’m saying. This effort is written on a high-school level. Obama’s transcripts remain well-concealed. Despite being appointed as an editor for the Harvard Law Review, Obama has never written a serious jouranl article for this publication.

Obama’s easy passage through this country’s finest schools shows just how worthless these once-proud institutions have become, and how worthwhile it is to be a privileged minority. (Or, in the case of Bush, McCain’s mindless daughter, and the likes—to belong to an American political dynasty.)

By the way, I agree that BHO has the cunning of a fox. But that’s a far cry from the brilliance with which he has been credited.