Category Archives: Taxes

A Sinking Ship of State Drowns Everyone, by Lawrence Kadish

Debt is always weakness. As the US government flounders under its mountain of debt, other countries will take advantage of its fiscal weakness. From Lawrence Kadish at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • To be clear, the spending bill is actually the creation of a national debt so massive that it has the means to destabilize a democracy dependent on a functioning economy.
  • For the Chinese Communist Party, seeking to master the 21st Century as the one global superpower, it represents a strategic victory without so much as firing a single bullet. They know that an economically weakened America cannot possibly sustain its military leadership when it is burdened with paying down a massive debt. Our allies and unaligned nations recognize this threat as well, and will reinvent their relationship with China if they believe America’s best days are in the past.
  • What makes the Administration believe that Corporate America would not respond with massive restructuring to avoid a confiscatory tax bill — or passing the added cost on to the consumer, or moving the company’s headquarters offshore to a country with a lower corporate rate — to avoid the threat of losing its international competitive edge? Corporations have good accountants, too.
  • Few debate the idea that our nation’s infrastructure is in need of serious attention but the level of political dishonesty in characterizing the Biden plan as “infrastructure” has even made many in his own party queasy. Significant portions of the bill are earmarked for “environmental” agendas and seeming favors to campaign donors, such as billions in subsidies for electric vehicles. The proposed bill cries out for more sunlight and vast quantities of disinfectant.
  • This recipe for an economic apocalypse comes at a time when new job creation has stagnated and the specter of a serious inflation has begun to emerge…. As historians will tell you if we have the wisdom to listen, no one escapes the devastation of a debtor nation. No one.
(Image source: iStock)

One suspects that historians and economists will consistently agree on one irrefutable fact: nations that allow their economies to bathe in red ink are destined to fail. This failure takes many roads and differs in timing, but massive, uncontrolled national deficits eventually reduce a nation state to being a pauper, a pariah — and pathetic.

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Welcome to Walley World! by MN Gordon

Several Democrat-controlled states are running big surpluses, thanks to payments from Washington, but they’re still trying to pass tax hikes. From MN Gordon at economicprism.com:

One of the fringe benefits of Washington’s stimulus program has been inflated stock portfolios.  This has delivered a great boon for certain state governments.  In Connecticut, for example, a state that taxes capital gains as regular income, this year’s budget surplus is projected to be $470 million.

That’s quite an achievement.  Especially when you consider the state’s rainy-day fund will hit an all-time high of $4.5 billion.  Federal coronavirus stimulus is also bringing $6 billion into the state.

Yet for the greedy fellows in the Connecticut state legislature the budget surplus is not nearly enough.  They want to soak the rich for the noble purpose of helping people.  Lawmakers are proposing a “surcharge” on high earners; single filers making more than $500,000 will be subject to a combined capital gains rate of 8.99 percent.

But that’s not all.  The state legislature also wants to create something it calls a “consumption tax.”  People earning more than $500,000 would pay 0.7 percent of their adjusted gross income.  That rate would rise to 1.4 percent for those earning $2 million, then 1.5 percent over $13 million.

The dillweed state planners already have grand plans for these coercive funds.  The money would go into a new Equitable Investment Fund that would be managed by an Equitable Investment Council.  The intent of the fund, in addition to collecting fees, is to reduce income inequality and redistribute wealth to certain disadvantaged groups.

Democratic Governor Ned Lamont recently had the gall to oppose the proposed taxation schemes.  And for that, hundreds of protestors showed up at his house and staged a mass ‘die-in’.  In this novel protest, freeloaders pretended to die in front of Mr. Lamont’s house because they want more free stuff…and he doesn’t want to give it to them.

This behavior, no doubt, has been conditioned in numerous states across the USA…

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Inflation: Your Role as a Milk Cow, by Jeff Thomas

Shut up, ask no questions about the government inflating its money supply, and continue to produce so that the government may tax you. From Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:

milk cow

Traditionally, inflation has been defined as “an increase in the amount of currency in circulation.” Such an increase almost always causes an increase in the cost of goods and services, since, more plentiful currency units lowers their rarity, as compared to the supply of goods and services, which remains roughly the same. Therefore, it shouldn’t be surprising if a 20% increase in the amount of currency units translates into a 20% increase in the price of goods and services.

Unfortunately, in recent decades, even dictionaries have been offering a revised definition of inflation, as “an increase in the price of goods and services.” This is a pity, as it makes an already confusing subject even more difficult to understand.

This is especially true for the average guy who has a minimal understanding of economics, but does realise that, even if his wages increase (which he regards as a good thing), he never seems to get ahead. In the end, he always seems to be worse off.

Let’s say that you’re paid $4000 per month. You budget for housing, food, clothing, transportation, etc. Let’s say that that adds up to $3800 per month, and you’re hoping to put $200 per month into savings. Often that doesn’t happen, as unplanned expenses “pop up,” and must be paid for. So, in the end, you save little or nothing.

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Peter Schiff and Tucker Carlson: The Financial Crisis Will Be Worse Than the Pandemic

Much of the official coronavirus response, particularly lockdowns and closing businesses, has done irreparable harm to an already ailing economy and will help usher in a gargantuan economic crisis. From Peter Schiff and Tucker Carlson at schiffgold.com:

Consumer Price Index (CPI) data for April came in much hotter than expected. Year-on-year, inflation is up 4.2%. The big number even prompted Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Richard Clarida to say, “We were surprised by higher than expected inflation data.”

Peter Schiff appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to talk about the consequences of more printed money chasing fewer goods. Peter said inflation is going to hit the middle class harder than the pandemic.

Peter said this hot CPI print is a cause for concern and ultimately it is a tax.

It is the inflation tax. And if you look at how much the cost of living went up, measured by the CPI in the first four months of this year, it’s 2%. So, if you triple that to annualized it, we have consumer prices rising at 6% annually. But if you look at the monthly numbers, every month it accelerates. So, if you extrapolate the trend of the first four months of this year for the entire year, you’re going to get a 20% increase in consumer prices in 2021.”

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The Age of Fear: A Graduation Message for Terrifying Times, by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

Some good advice, and not just for graduates, from John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”—Hermann Goering, Nazi leader

With all that is crashing down upon us, from government-manipulated crises to the blowback arising from a society that has repeatedly prized technological expedience and mass-marketed values over self-ownership and individual sovereignty, those coming of age today are facing some of the greatest threats to freedom the world has ever witnessed.

It’s downright frightening.

Young people will find themselves overtaxed, burdened with excessive college debt, and struggling to find worthwhile employment in a debt-ridden economy on the brink of implosion. Their privacy will be eviscerated by the surveillance state. They will be threatened, intimidated and beaten by militarized police. They will be the subjects of a military empire constantly waging war against shadowy enemies and government agents armed to the teeth ready and able to lock down the country at a moment’s notice.

As such, they will find themselves forced to march in lockstep with a government that no longer exists to serve the people but which demands that “we the people” be obedient slaves or suffer the consequences.

It’s a dismal prospect, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, we failed to guard against such a future.

Worse, we who should have known better neglected to maintain our freedoms or provide our young people with the tools necessary to resist oppression and survive, let alone succeed, in the impersonal jungle that is modern America.

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The ‘Take This Job and Shove It’ Recession, by Charles Hugh Smith

A lot of people are walking away from the unsatisfying job, tax donkey, and debt slave merry-go-round. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

o hey there Corporate America, the Fed and your neofeudal cronies: take this job and shove it. This time it really is different, but not in the way the Wall Street shucksters are claiming.

Conventional economists, politicos and pundits are completely clueless about the unraveling that’s gathering momentum beneath the superficial surface of “reflation” because they don’t yet grasp we’re entering an unprecedented new type of recession: a ‘Take This Job and Shove It’ recession which is unlike any previous downturn.

Long-time readers know I’ve addressed the emergent class structure and systemic decay of the socio-economic order for many years. Just as a quick refresher, here are a few of the dozens of essays I’ve written on these topics:

America’s Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy 4/29/14

The Managerial/ Professional Class Is Burning Out 3/28/16

America’s Metastasizing Class Wars 8/27/20

This Is How It Ends: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air 9/10/20

This Is Why Inflation Will Rip Everyone’s Face Off 9/17/20

What the chattering class of apologists, toadies, lackeys, factotums and apparatchiks missed about the pandemic lockdown was the tidal change in perceptions of work and life enabled by a withdrawal from the deranging frenzy of work: once people had time to reflect on their lives, mortality, goals, identity and the soaring costs and dwindling rewards of their efforts to “get ahead” via slaving away in a dead-end job / career, the tune that began to haunt their subconscious ruminations was Johnny Paycheck’s timeless classic, Take This Job And Shove It (2:31).

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The Coming IRS Reign of Terror, by James Bovard

The IRS is probably the federal government’s most tyrannical agency, and it’s only going to get worse. From James Bovard at jamesbovard.com:

The power to tax has long conferred the power to destroy political opponents. But in the glorious era of President Joe Biden, all previous cases of government abuse of power are being expunged, at least by the media and Biden supporters. That is why it is supposedly safe to vastly increase the power of perhaps the most feared federal agency, the Internal Revenue Service.

After announcing his endless wish list for new federal spending, Biden told Congress last week: “I’ve made clear that we can do it without increasing deficits.” Biden believes he has found a goose that will lay golden eggs for federal revenue — a new army of IRS agents to hound Americans and corporations to pay far more taxes.

The Washington Post reported that “the single biggest source of new revenue in the plan comes from dramatically expanding the clout of the nation’s tax agency.” Slate reported, “Biden wants to fund a massive upgrade to the American welfare state by making the IRS great at audits again.”

But the agency Biden seeks to expand and unleash has an appalling record. As author David Burnham noted in “A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power” (1990), “In almost every administration since the IRS’s inception the information and power of the tax agency have been mobilized for explicitly political purposes.”

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This is not the time to procrastinate, by Simon Black

If you don’t have a Plan B, you have no time to waste coming up with one. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:

In early 387 AD in the eastern Roman city of Antioch, a local bureaucrat stood outside of the city council chambers to read a new decree that had just arrived from Emperor Theodosius I.

As the anxious crowd gathered, the bureaucrat began reading aloud–

Just as the crowd had feared, the new decree was a series of debilitating new taxes, ranging from heavy taxation on commercial activities, to mandatory donations to the Emperor himself.

The crowd became furious.

Antioch had already suffered immeasurably. The imperial government had depleted the city’s grain, killed off a large number of the youth from endless war, and already exacted heavy tolls and taxation.

These new taxes were too much to bear. And a riot ensued almost immediately.

People all over Antioch (in modern day Turkey) poured into the streets ripping down monuments of the imperial family, burned their portraits, and destroyed public buildings.

Naturally in our modern times we would call such activities “mostly peaceful”. But back then it constituted treason, and the rioters were ultimately put to death.

But the tax protests didn’t stop.

Throughout most of the next century, in fact, the Western Roman Empire was in a near-constant state of civil war and insurrection, quite often over the imperial government’s exorbitantly high tax rates.

Farmers, who were among the most heavily taxed citizens, abandoned their lands and sought refuge with northern barbarian tribes. Even soldiers and Roman noblemen fled the empire to escape the totalitarian regime, extreme corruption, and usurious tax rates.

Salvianus, a contemporary writer and historian at the time, wrote

“the name of Roman citizen, once not only much valued but dearly bought, is now voluntarily repudiated and shunned, and is thought not merely valueless, but even almost abhorrent.”

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Escaping Serfdom, by Jeff Thomas

Most of us would swap tax rates with the serfs in a heartbeat. From Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:

The concept of government is that the people grant to a small group of individuals the ability to establish and maintain controls over them. The inherent flaw in such a concept is that any government will invariably and continually expand upon its controls, resulting in the ever-diminishing freedom of those who granted them the power.

When I was a schoolboy, I was taught that the feudal system of the Middle Ages consisted of serfs tilling small plots of land that belonged to a king or lord. The serfs lived a meagre life of bare subsistence and were subject to the tyranny of the king or lord whose men would ride into their village periodically and take most of the few coins the serfs had earned by their toil.

The lesson I was meant to learn from this was that I should be grateful that, in the modern world, I live in a state of freedom from tyranny, and as an adult, I would pay only that level of tax that could be described as “fair”.

Later in life, I was to learn that, in the actual feudal system, some land was owned by noblemen, some by common men. The commoners typically farmed their own land, whilst the noblemen parcelled out their land to farmers, in trade for a portion of the product of their labours.

As a part of that bargain, the nobleman would pay for an army of professional soldiers to protect both the farms and the farmers. Significantly, unlike today, no farmer was required to defend the land himself, as it was not his.

There was no exact standard as to what the noblemen would charge a farmer under this agreement, but the general standard was “one day’s labour in ten”

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What’s Yours Is Now Mine: America’s Era of Accelerating Expropriation, by Charles Hugh Smith

The smaller the pie the higher the probability that somebody will resort to theft. That somebody includes the government. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

The takeaway here is obvious: earn as little money as possible and invest your surplus labor in assets that can’t be expropriated.

Expropriation: dispossessing the populace of property and property rights, via the legal and financial over-reach of monetary and political authorities.

All expropriations are pernicious, but the most destructive is the expropriation of labor’s value while the excessive gains of unproductive speculation accrue to the elite that owns most of the nation’s wealth.

In a nation in which the leadership has finely honed the art and artifice of legalized looting and financial legerdemain, it’s not surprising that the expropriation of labor’s value takes many forms. For the self-employed and small business proprietor, the list is practically endless:

1. Proliferating junk fees for permits, licence renewals, applications, late fees, penalties, fines for violating obscure regulations, etc. (Never mind if you’re losing money; by definition, as a business owner you’re “rich” and deserve petty expropriations. If you’re Amazon, however, we’ll shower you with subsidies and tax breaks.)

2. Sky-high liability insurance, disability insurance and workers compensation insurance, because all the fraud and friction in these systems adds expense and you’re the one who will pay for it all.

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