Taxes

Malthusian Indoctrination of Children Funded with Your Tax Dollars

by Lee Doren on October 20, 2010 · 1 comment

in Environment, Natural Resources, Private Conservation

Many people are familiar with Annie Leonard, creator of “The Story of Stuff,” a factually inaccurate viral video being shown in classrooms throughout America. In the video, Leonard argues that we are running out of resources, using too much stuff, destroying the planet and anti-capitalist values are the solution to the problem. It is bad enough that “Green Journalists” push Leonard’s falsehoods, and some teachers think her work has educational value, but now I just learned that your tax dollars are funding Annie’s latest project.

Loop Scoops is a new kids program on PBS where Annie is the content director. The cartoon is geared to children 6 to 9 years of age where they are taught that juice boxes are destroying the planet, consuming less is inherently good for society and we are using too many resources. Sadly, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Environmental Protection Agency provided the funding, which means your tax dollars are paying for it.

The video below highlights one of the videos within Loop Scoops.

I’ve heard some people ask me why we shouldn’t teach kids to recycle. The answer is because we are not running out of landfill space, we are not running out of resources and recycling is not always the right thing to do. Just read the Eight Great Myths of Recycling to understand why tax dollars should not be used to indoctrinate kids to fear their juice boxes.  Kids should be able to enjoy their childhoods without being bombarded with Malthusian propaganda.

San Francisco’s Mayor Opposed to Alcohol Tax

by Michelle Minton on September 15, 2010

in Health and Illness, Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation

It isn’t often that we get to praise politicians, but cheers to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom who vowed to veto plans for an increased alcohol tax. The tax “would add about 3 cents to a 12-ounce bottle of beer, 4.5 cents to a 6-ounce glass of wine and 3.5 cents to a drink containing 1.5 ounces of hard liquor.”

The so-called “charge for harm tax,” as it has been dubbed, would be a fee levied on alcohol wholesalers and distributors. It was proposed by John Avalos, a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in order to recoup the estimated $18 million a year San Francisco spends supposedly dealing with alcohol-related problems as well as to cover health care costs.
The proposal won approval with the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, but Newsom believes a “charge for harm” would do more harm than good, saying, “Pursuing this likely illegal new fee in this economic environment will impact thousands of businesses, cost jobs and put San Francisco at a competitive disadvantage with every other county in California.”

First, Newsom is right. This proposed tax is bad for the city and the state’s economy.

California’s wine and alcohol industry is a healthy and vital parts of the state’s economy. This, unfortunately, means it is a prime target for politicians who would rather raise taxes than cut spending.  But, while  the proposed tax may temporarily fill the coffers, it will result in those wholesalers and distributors charging restaurants, vineyards, and breweries and ultimately, consumers more.

This will result in fewer establishments, fewer jobs, less tax revenue for the state in the long-run.

Wine and beer production provide the U.S. with over 2 million jobs and represent around $60 billion in taxable wages. In California, a state known for its wine production, the stakes are particularly high. The wine industry in California provides tax revenue (about $15 billion in state and federal taxes) as well as bringing in tourists (about 20 million a year) who pour money into other parts of the economy.

The effects of increased taxes on wholesalers and distributors will ripple through the entire industry.

Second, if they charge for the harm alcohol does, are they going to pay for the benefits it also provides?

Alcoholic beverages have long been demonized in this country for the “social ills” associated with those who abuse the product. However, there are just as many if not more positive effects of alcoholic beverages that most do not consider when choosing to apply discriminatory taxes to the industry. Moderate alcohol consumption is widely associated with decreased risks of various age-related medical problems such as coronary heart disease, stroke, cancer, and cognitive disorders like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, and a new study indicates that alcohol consumers have lower risk of rheumatoid arthritis.

Studies also show that social interaction is more important to ones health than quitting smoking or losing weight. While it isn’t a requirement, much of modern social interraction is organized around the consumption of alcohol: drinks after work, dance clubs, football games and beer, a backyard barbeque. Alcohol isn’t necessary for social interaction, but there’s a reason they call it the social lubricant.

The point is, alcohol doesn’t make stupid people do stupid things. If someone chooses to get drunk and behave in a risky way, that is their choice and no fault of the farmer, bar, or retailer who sells them the bottle.

Whether the net effects of alcohol consumption are negative or positive, it shouldn’t be the government’s role to apply discriminating taxes one industry because it deems the effects “undesirable.”

Note: image via wortblog.blogspot.com

Obama Aides Cheat on Taxes, as Obama Administration Raises Taxes and Violates Constitution

by Hans Bader on September 10, 2010 · 1 comment

in Politics as Usual

Forty-one aides to President Obama owe $831,000 in back taxes.   Meanwhile, as noted earlier, unpaid taxes have risen 37 percent among Capitol Hill staff, to $9.3 million.  Taxes, it seems, are only for the little people, not their liberal overlords.  Even the Treasury secretary, who oversees the IRS, has cheated on his taxes.

At Reason, Peter Suderman describes seven false promises made to push Obamacare through Congress.  In passing Obamacare, the president broke his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, by raising taxes on middle-class patients and the uninsured.

Obama’s HHS secretary is now seeking to gag insurers that disclose how Obamacare’s mandates are increasing the cost of health insurance, even though such speech is clearly protected by the First Amendment.  Previously, the Obama administration attempted to gag insurers from disclosing how Obamacare harms Medicare Advantage participants, drawing criticism from First Amendment experts like constitutional-treatise author Professor Eugene Volokh.

Pennsylvania’s IRS Knows Where You Live

by Evan Banks on May 6, 2010

in Bureaucrash, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

The IRS might have a lot of dirt on you…but do they have to be so creepy about it?

The incredibly Orwellian video below has been making the rounds lately, but I thought it would be worth a repost.

What makes this video so chilling for me isn’t the simulated satellite camera feed or the narrator’s synthesized voice, but the notion that the IRS knows the power it has over the taxpayer and openly flaunts it to a degree approaching parody. The truth is, there’s nothing funny about paying taxes. Taxes are an act of force initiated by government against an individual.

If you think about it, there are basically three ways of making money:

(1) It’s given as a gift.

(2) It’s earned by trading a good or sevice.

(3) It’s stolen or taken under threat of force.

Think about what happens if you don’t pay your taxes and then tell me, which method does government use?

“Nearly Two-Thirds of Americans Say the Stimulus Isn’t Working”

by Hans Bader on April 29, 2010

in Economy, Employment, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere

“Nearly two-thirds of Americans do not believe the $787 billion stimulus package the president passed last year has helped create jobs, according to a new Pew Research Center poll.”

As the Washington Examiner notes, “a recent survey of business economists showed they didn’t think the stimulus was creating jobs, either.”  President Obama falsely claimed that virtually all economists supported his stimulus package, but this was patently untrue at the time he made this claim, when at least 200 economists publicly opposed it, and it  is even more untrue now.

Obama falsely claimed that the $787 billion stimulus package was needed to prevent “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that it would actually shrink the economy “in the long run”.  The stimulus package has since destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, and subsidized countless examples of government waste and corruption.

Unemployment has skyrocketed past European levels, as big-spending countries have fared worse than thrifty ones.  As the Examiner notes, “If his stimulus program was approved, Obama promised, unemployment would not go above 8 percent . . . The reality is that it passed 10.3 percent.”

Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker says that Obama’s policies are delaying economic recovery.

“How is stimulus money allocated? Unemployment isn’t a factor, but politics is,” found George Mason University researcher Veronique de Rugy in a recent study.

Districts where people are struggling and unemployment is high are not receiving any more money than those in which unemployment is low, even though a stated purpose of the $800 billion stimulus package was to help the unemployed.  But politics mattered in doling out federal funds.  And “Democratic districts also received two-and-a-half times more stimulus dollars than Republican districts.”

There are three trillion dollars in tax increases in Obama’s proposed budget, yet it would still borrow 42 cents on the dollar, resulting in colossal deficits.

Obama’s policies would raise the national debt by $9.7 trillion, noted the Congressional Budget Office.

Earlier, one of Obama’s own advisers worried that the “barrage of tax increases” in his budgets could harm the economy and prevent a “sustained” economic recovery.

In 2008, Obama promised a “net spending cut,” but as soon as he was elected, he proposed massive spending increases.

ObamaCare Vastly Expands IRS Red Tape and Power, Raises Medical and Insurance Costs, Taxes, and Deficits, and Harms Very Sick People

by Hans Bader on April 27, 2010 · 1 comment

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Health and Illness, Healthcare, Insurance, Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

“Billions of more documents” will be have to be filled out by small businesses for the IRS so that a “spendthrift Congress can shake a few extra bucks out of” them to pay for ObamaCare. They will have to spend countless hours to “gather information,” such as about the person they buy a used car from, and the mom-and-pop landlords who lease space to them, even if the small business has to spend more money gathering the information than the IRS will collect in taxes as a result.  (The new health care law will raise far more revenue by taking away medical tax-deductions from “15 million very sick people” with “major medical expenses” starting in 2013.)

The health care bill vastly expands the power of the IRS.  The Washington Examiner says that “16,500 more IRS agents” will be “needed to enforce Obamacare.”  That’s “the biggest expansion of the IRS since World War II.”

ObamaCare is also costing major employers who provide health coverage for retirees billions of dollars.  “When companies started reporting the write-downs they’d take as a result of the passage of ObamaCare,” congressional Democrats “reacted with outrage at the announcements, and scheduled hearings to demand answers . . . from AT&T, Caterpillar, Deere, and Verizon.”  But now, the massive costs of ObamaCare are so obvious and undeniable that even congressional Democrats have “admitted that CEOs who reported billions in losses due to ObamaCare were required to state those losses after all,” and that their “companies acted properly and in accordance with” federal “accounting standards.”

“Economic experts from President Obama’s own Health and Human Services Department have released a devastating report noting that Obamacare ‘will increase national health care spending by $311 billion from 2010-2019,’ according to the Associated Press. Even worse, ‘Medicare cuts may be unrealistic and unsustainable, driving about 15 percent of hospitals into the red and ‘possibly jeopardizing access’ to care for seniors.’”  This contradicts Obama’s claims that the health care law would “bend the cost curve down” and cut the cost of health insurance.

This report existed before Congress voted on the health care bill, but Obama’s HHS Secretary concealed it until after the bill’s passage.

“The administration’s own actuary reported on Thursday that millions of people could lose their health insurance, that health-care costs will rise faster than they would have if the law hadn’t passed, and that the overhaul will mean that people will have a harder and harder time finding physicians to see them.”

To try to offset and hide the increased cost of health care resulting from their ill-conceived health care law, the Obama administration and congressional leaders are now proposing a new bill to “impose price controls on insurance,” even though similar legislation is already backfiring in Massachusetts, where health care costs spiraled upwards after the state government adopted a prototype of ObamaCare several years ago, resulting in “explosive costs.”

The health care legislation backed by Obama contains many penny-wise, pound-foolish provisions.  It spends money on frills like “cultural competency,” while cutting spending on crucial things like anesthesia.

Fourteen attorneys general are challenging provisions of the new health care law in court.  Their lawsuits argue that forcing people to buy health insurance is not a valid exercise of Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce.

The new law imposes many middle-class tax increases, such as taxes on uninsured individuals, on cosmetic surgery, on medical devices, and on certain health care plans.  It also increases taxes on many investors and imposes marriage penalties.

The new health care law will reduce lifesaving medical innovation, raise taxes, drive up insurance premiums, break many campaign promises, and increase state budget deficits.  It  will jeopardize the quality of medical care, while imposing restrictions that failed when tried at the state level.  It ignores advice from doctors and federal experts, and lessons from countries with universal health care, about how to keep costs down.

While the CBO deceptively scored the health care bill as not increasing the federal deficit, thanks to the many tax increases in the bill, it did so only because it was required to accept many accounting gimmicks that even pro-administration journalists have admitted conceal the bill’s enormous cost and the fact that it will massively increase the deficit.  The New York Times‘ David Brooks, once a staunch supporter of President Obama, recently said that the bill’s drafters were “corrupted by power” and called arguments for the law “unbelievable” and “insane.”  The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, who also voted for Obama, wrote that the law “is a fiscal disaster waiting to happen.”

Arlington County Board Raises Taxes 10 Percent To Go On A Spending Binge In The Middle Of A Recession

by Hans Bader on April 26, 2010 · 1 comment

in Odds & Ends

The Arlington County Board raised taxes nearly ten percent yesterday in order to increase County government spending even further.  Real estate taxes will go up from a rate of 87.5 cents to 95.8 cents per $100 of assessed value, costing the typical Arlington County homeowner at least $500.

Although inflation has plunged to almost zero in the recession, and private sector employees are tightening their belts and taking pay cuts, “County employees will receive merit-based raises” and other increases under the County’s annual budget.

County spending “has more than doubled” since the start of the housing bubble, and shows no sign of decreasing now that the bubble has ended.  Arlington County’s all-liberal board has barely disguised its contempt for fiscal watchdogs who have questioned wasteful County spending.

County employees are paid better on average than the residents who pay their salaries.  Even teachers, far from the best paid public employees, typically receive compensation of around $100,000 per year in Arlington, even assuming they don’t work in the summer.  (A couple years ago, when their compensation was slightly lower, Arlington teachers’ salaries averaged $71,148, and their pension and other benefits averaged about $27,636, for a total compensation of about $100,000.  The value of their benefits has since increased.)

SAT scores are lower in Arlington than in neighboring Fairfax and Loudoun Counties, even though Arlington spends twice as much per student as Loudoun County and much more than Fairfax County.  (Unlike Arlington’s one-party government, those Counties have competitive political systems where incumbents risk losing reelection if they raise taxes, which gives them an incentive to reduce wasteful spending.)

In nearby Montgomery County, where public employees have a similar death-grip on County government, the County Council last year allowed public employees to collect inflated pensions based on non-existent earnings.  This was too much even for the liberal Washington Post, which has not endorsed a Republican for president since 1952, and a Post editorial today suggests that the County may be watering down this concession to the public employee unions as the County’s tide of red ink grows.

As the Post notes, “Montgomery County politicians have spent the past decade outdoing each other in lavishing favors on public employee unions, whose memberships are presumed to constitute critical voting blocs,” showing a  “deeply ingrained reflex of coddling public employees’ unions.”

Tax rates should be much lower in Arlington County than in other Counties in the region, because its natural expenses are much, much lower (it has far fewer school-age children to educate than do Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William Counties, as a fraction of its population) and because its tax base is much richer (due to lots of commercial property within its borders).  Yet its tax rates are not much lower than Fairfax’s, thanks to the enormous wasteful spending of the Arlington County Board.

Value Added Tax? Bad Idea

by Ryan Young on April 14, 2010

in Economy, Politics as Usual

Today’s Daily Caller has an article by Wayne Crews and I making the case against the VAT, which is becoming a popular idea in this age of trillion-dollar deficits. Our main points:

-It would require roughly doubling the size of the IRS. Enough said

-VATs are untransparent. Sales taxes show up on receipts. VATs don’t. Knowing how much we are taxed is a fundamental right that preserves our ability to challenge excess government in a constitutional republic. A VAT would take that away.

-VATs increase over time. At least they have in 20 of 29 OECD countries that have VATs.

-VATs are prone to special-interest abuse. Politically incorrect goods are easily hit with punitive rates. In Denmark, people pay roughly triple sticker price for cars, for example.

Do we really want to be like Europe?

by Fred Smith on April 13, 2010

in Culture, Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, International, Regulation

With the passage of ObamaCare, we’ve taken another giant step towards Europeanizing America. Tragically, our history shows a steady trend in that direction, with government spending as a percentage of GDP steadily increasing from 20% in the 1930s to over 35% in the last two decades. From the first success of the Progressives in the late 19th century, the United States has tended toward the European regulatory-welfare state model. Is this convergence wise?

Certainly European-style governance has many drawbacks. Consider Denmark. There, tax revenues are used to pay for health care expenses, all levels of education, child care, etc. Even students receive support grants while in school! Vacation policies are generous with employers required to grant at least 5 weeks of paid vacation per year. All this may seem great-you pay for nothing and get “free” vacation time. But, of ourse, there are no free lunches.

Danes pay a large price for all this. Minimum tax rates in Denmark are over 45%. In addition, Denmark pays the supra-governmental EU-imposed VAT (value added tax) of 15% on top of the national VAT of 10%. The VAT tax is essentially a sales tax raising the price of everything. Consumer goods are much more expensive with gasoline costing $6-8 per gallon, a beer over $10. European taxation shifts choice away from individuals and limits their ability to enjoy much of the world’s marvels.

Average take home income in Denmark is close to that of the United States, but Danes have a much lower purchasing power given these downstream taxes and the higher prices resulting both from the sales tax and the regulatory burdens. Home ownership in Denmark is more than 10% lower than in the United States.

Personal car ownership is discouraged in Denmark in favor of public transportation. The tax on a new car is over 100% of the sticker price, doubling the cost of car ownership. Danes also pay an annual ownership tax of anywhere from $1000-$4000. As a result, only about 400 individuals per thousand own automobiles in Denmark, compared to over 750 per thousand in the United States.

These aspects of European life are less well known to Americans. American tourists see a “nicer” side of Europe, staying in lovely hotels, enjoying beautiful scenery, and eating wonderful foods The reality of everyday life in Europe is less lovely.

While America is not perfect, allowing the government to control more aspects of our lives will not yield a better, healthier society. The government cannot wave a magic wand and rid the world of problems. We all want a healthier, safer, and wealthier society. Are free markets or bureaucracy the better path to those hopes? Indeed, if we continue down the current road, what will America resemble tomorrow? France without the good food?

Regulation of the Day 132: Fire Sprinklers

by Ryan Young on April 7, 2010

in Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Regulation of the Day

The U.S. tax code stands at well over 100,000 pages. All but the hardiest of souls hire professionals to do their taxes for them. Cries for simplification grow every year.

How does Congress respond? By introducing legislation to “amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to classify automatic fire sprinkler systems as 5-year property for purposes of depreciation.”

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →