Category Archives: Taxation

UPDATED: On Second Thought: Obama Is Stupid (More Communal "Ownership")

Barack Obama, Political Economy, Private Property, Taxation

Barack Obama does not understand the difference between a TAX CUT and a TAX CREDIT. He thinks cutting taxes is tantamount to cutting welfare checks. In an “hour-long town hall meeting sponsored by CNBC,” aimed at bamboozling “Boobus Americanus” with his “eloquence,” Obama declared:

“What the Republicans are proposing is that we . . . provide tax relief to primarily millionaires and billionaires. It would cost us $700 billion to do it. On average, millionaires would get a check of $100,000.”

“Tax credits” are not tax cuts, they are “subsidies disguised as tax cuts. In other words, they are spending in the form of direct transfers from the treasury to individuals, except that they are administered by the tax authorities rather than the agencies usually responsible for welfare.”

A better definition of tax credits is social tinkering or engineering, as they target certain politically desirable constituents to the detriment of others. “Taxpayers can receive a raft of tax credits if they engage in various government-specified activities,” confirms Peter Ferrara, director of entitlement and budget policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation.

A tax cut, of course, is a reduction in tax rates. It means letting a poor sod (or serf) keep more of his rightful earnings.

The man with the reverse-Midas touch—who cannot get his head around the idea of property rights—added that “his administration is looking at the possibility of a payroll tax holiday, in addition to research-and-development tax breaks for corporations.”

Taxes are private property plundered. The government has several ways to pay for its obligations, one of which is to seize private property in the form of taxes. The particular portion of the “stim” and bailouts that was not borrowed or counterfeited by the Fed once belonged to individual Americans. Thus, a tax cut for high-income earners, who also pay most of the taxes, is tantamount to a return of stolen goods.

The distinction between what is mine and what is thine evades the president.

The reason the line about soaking the rich “drew applause from the audience of about 200 or so gathered at the Newseum in Washington” is to be found in an experiment conducted at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford, which was more of a confirmation than an investigation of human nature.

“Ingeniously operationalized by Professor Andrew Oswald and Dr. Daniel Zizzo, the experiment demonstrated the lengths to which people will go to destroy the wealth of others, even if, in the process, they knowingly wipe out their own funds.”

“The economists approximated reality by distributing cash unequally among the subjects, who were then told they could anonymously ‘burn away other people’s money,’ with one caveat: in the process, they would be destroying some of their own. Naively, the researchers expected little ‘burning’ to occur, and certainly for it to stop once the destruction of the opponent’s money became too painful to the player’s pocket. They were flummoxed when 62 percent of the subjects continued to ‘burn’ the wealth of others even at crippling costs to themselves.”

Laboratory-to-life extrapolations can be problematic, but this experiment transports effortlessly.

UPDATE (Sept. 21): “What Should We Do With the Estate Tax?” is the title of a legit article in the War Street Journal. Evidently, an inheritance belongs to the royal “We.” “A huge amount of money hangs in the balance,” says the author of the piece. Whose bloody money is it anyway?

On the bright side: a slight deviation from rank utilitarianism is evident in questioning whether “such a tax is fair to heirs, not to mention the people who worked and saved over the decades to build up those assets.”

UPDATED: On Second Thought: Obama Is Stupid (More Communal “Ownership”)

Barack Obama, Political Economy, Private Property, Taxation

Barack Obama does not understand the difference between a TAX CUT and a TAX CREDIT. He thinks cutting taxes is tantamount to cutting welfare checks. In an “hour-long town hall meeting sponsored by CNBC,” aimed at bamboozling “Boobus Americanus” with his “eloquence,” Obama declared:

“What the Republicans are proposing is that we . . . provide tax relief to primarily millionaires and billionaires. It would cost us $700 billion to do it. On average, millionaires would get a check of $100,000.”

“Tax credits” are not tax cuts, they are “subsidies disguised as tax cuts. In other words, they are spending in the form of direct transfers from the treasury to individuals, except that they are administered by the tax authorities rather than the agencies usually responsible for welfare.”

A better definition of tax credits is social tinkering or engineering, as they target certain politically desirable constituents to the detriment of others. “Taxpayers can receive a raft of tax credits if they engage in various government-specified activities,” confirms Peter Ferrara, director of entitlement and budget policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation.

A tax cut, of course, is a reduction in tax rates. It means letting a poor sod (or serf) keep more of his rightful earnings.

The man with the reverse-Midas touch—who cannot get his head around the idea of property rights—added that “his administration is looking at the possibility of a payroll tax holiday, in addition to research-and-development tax breaks for corporations.”

Taxes are private property plundered. The government has several ways to pay for its obligations, one of which is to seize private property in the form of taxes. The particular portion of the “stim” and bailouts that was not borrowed or counterfeited by the Fed once belonged to individual Americans. Thus, a tax cut for high-income earners, who also pay most of the taxes, is tantamount to a return of stolen goods.

The distinction between what is mine and what is thine evades the president.

The reason the line about soaking the rich “drew applause from the audience of about 200 or so gathered at the Newseum in Washington” is to be found in an experiment conducted at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford, which was more of a confirmation than an investigation of human nature.

“Ingeniously operationalized by Professor Andrew Oswald and Dr. Daniel Zizzo, the experiment demonstrated the lengths to which people will go to destroy the wealth of others, even if, in the process, they knowingly wipe out their own funds.”

“The economists approximated reality by distributing cash unequally among the subjects, who were then told they could anonymously ‘burn away other people’s money,’ with one caveat: in the process, they would be destroying some of their own. Naively, the researchers expected little ‘burning’ to occur, and certainly for it to stop once the destruction of the opponent’s money became too painful to the player’s pocket. They were flummoxed when 62 percent of the subjects continued to ‘burn’ the wealth of others even at crippling costs to themselves.”

Laboratory-to-life extrapolations can be problematic, but this experiment transports effortlessly.

UPDATE (Sept. 21): “What Should We Do With the Estate Tax?” is the title of a legit article in the War Street Journal. Evidently, an inheritance belongs to the royal “We.” “A huge amount of money hangs in the balance,” says the author of the piece. Whose bloody money is it anyway?

On the bright side: a slight deviation from rank utilitarianism is evident in questioning whether “such a tax is fair to heirs, not to mention the people who worked and saved over the decades to build up those assets.”

Meet Mr. O. Moocher

Barack Obama, Political Economy, Private Property, Republicans, Socialism, Taxation

Thief-in-chief “insists the nation can no longer afford tax breaks for the wealthy, while Republicans say any tax increase is a grave mistake.”

The “nation” can no longer afford YOU, Mr. O. Moocher.

With a tax cut, the plundering class simply agrees to pilfer less. The notion that you must ‘pay for tax cuts,’ … is akin to a burglar promising to return the television he stole just as soon as he is in a better financial position.”

People who earn well are less equal under the “law”; their income is considered forfeit, up for grabs. For their part, Republicans are just repulsive power grabbers. What would happen if they actually stood up for Americans who earn more than average?

Is a man with earning power worth less than a man without? Apparently so, politically speaking, becasue he is a much maligned minority with no representation.

UPDATED: The 2 Parties' Question: How Much To Steal

Debt, Democrats, Federal Reserve Bank, Political Economy, Republicans, Taxation, The State, War, Welfare

The following is from my new, WND column, “The 2 Parties’ Question: How Much To Steal”:

“… If I understand the Republican line for the coming midterms, it is that, thankfully, there is a smart, economically stimulating way for the State to spend money it had lifted from the private economy (and, in the process, crowded out private, productive economic activity).

Time and again, Republicans will explain to us of the booboisie that the stimuli consisted of misguided spending so typical of Democrats, instead of precision-guided make-work projects, the hallmark of Republikeynesian economic ‘thought.'”

With few exceptions, Republican politicians, and their matching Tweedledim and Tweedledimmer cable personalities, seem incapable of countering the fiction that vests central planners with the ability to create viable jobs by appropriating private property, and redistributing it, based on bureaucratic and political considerations.

The unsparing critique the likes of dodo Perino, Newt, Dick, Karl, et. al, will invariably voice is that the Dems did not apply the stolen funds the way one ought to have; as the GOPers would have.” ….

The complete column is “The 2 Parties’ Question: How Much To Steal.”

Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

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UPDATE (Aug. 27): Wiley hereunder, in the Comments Section, clearly misunderstands an ad hominem argument. My column has some fun with Fox’s affirmative females, after which their “arguments”—“things go in cycles“/Republicans would ‘stimulate‘ better than the Dems”—were showcased for their profound folly. This is not ad hominem. Had I presented Dana dunderhead’s “case” for economic recovery without the spice, no one would read this column.