Category Archives: Taxes

California Set To Pass The Nation’s First Wealth Tax Targeting The Ultra Rich, by Tyler Durden

Posted on August 17, 2020 | Leave a comment

This is an idea that will catch on like wild fire among cash-strapped governments. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

It was about about nine years ago when consulting company BCG first suggested that in a time of out of control spending and soaring debt loads, the only fiscally sustainable “solution” was to implement a wealth tax (see “There May Be Only Painful Ways Out Of The Crisis“).

While the idea was well ahead of its time in 2011, and was quickly shut down in the court of public opinion, several years later none other than the IMF resurrected the idea of a wealth tax, which has only gained momentum in recent months, and despite widespread grassroots pushback, the concept of a “wealth tax” has moved front and center and most recently the chairman of Capital Economics, Roger Bootle, said that the world’s wealthiest could be subjected to higher tax rates as governments scramble to fund spending and repair their economies amid the coronavirus crisis.

Fast forward to today when the ultra-liberal state of California is now ready to take this “socialist” idea from concept to the implementation phase, with the SF Chronicle reporting that a group of CA state lawmakers on Thursday proposed a first-in-the-nation state wealth tax that would hit about 30,400 California residents and raise an estimated $7.5 billion for the general fund.

The proposed tax rate would be 0.4% of net worth (most likely ended up far higher), excluding directly held real estate, that exceeds $30 million for single and joint filers and $15 million for married filing separately.

Oakland Democrat Rob Bonta, who is the lead author of the wealth tax proposal AB2008, justified the wealth expropriation by saying that California is facing a big budget deficit because of the health and economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus, and “we can’t simply rely on austerity measures,” to close it. It wasn’t immediately clear why austerity doesn’t work considering that California has never actually tried it, but in any case the Democrat’s proposal was clear: “We must consider revenue generation.”

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Economy, Government, Taxes

Tagged ,

New School: Plastic bubbles, 8 year old arrests, and woke math, by Simon Black

Posted on August 14, 2020 | 2 comments

Simon Black’s weekly chronicle of the absurd, at sovereignman.com:

Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, risks to your prosperity… and on occasion, inspiring poetic justice.

NASA to rename insensitive cosmic objects

You may think NASA’s mission is to take humanity to Mars and beyond.

But remember, we no longer live in a society which prioritizes actual advancement.

Far more important is making sure no one is offended.

So we may not make it to Mars, but at least the Innuit people will not be offended.

NASA announced that it will rename the “Eskimo Nebula” as well as the “Siamese Twins Galaxy” because they include racially insensitive terms, apparently rooted in colonialism.

But what about the constellation Orion– named after a Greek mythological hunter god who is alleged to have raped the Princess Merope.

Or the constellation Gemini– named after Green twins Castor and Pollus, who were part of that Argonaut band of capitalist swine who terrorized ancient civilizations in search of the Golden Fleece. . .

And isn’t the name Mars also offensive– because it celebrates the patriarchal, heteronormative violent God of War?

What about Jupiter– a notorious rapist who slept with his children?

In fact, every planet named after a Roman god should be considered offensive– Rome was the biggest colonizer of its day and routinely enslaved captives and lower class Romans.

Luckily the Visogoths held a ‘peaceful protest’ in Rome in the year 410 which resulted in much more equality– everyone was equally impoverished and defeated.

Click here to read the full story.

California to raise income taxes RETROACTIVELY

Continue reading→

 

2 Comments

Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Government, Horseshit, Taxes

Tagged ,

Escape From New York: Wealthy Residents Flee In Droves As The City Degenerates Into A Hellhole, by Michael Snyder

Posted on August 12, 2020 | Leave a comment

New York is the most prominent, but many people, especially highly productive people, are leaving urban areas that have been misruled by Democrats for decades. From Michael Snyder at themostimportantnews.com:

Hundreds of thousands of wealthy residents have already left New York City, and more are leaving every day as America’s biggest city rapidly degenerates into a hellhole.  This is incredibly sad to watch, because in many ways New York had been an incredible success story over the past several decades.  The 1970s and 1980s were nightmarish times for the city, but over the past several decades it was transformed into a virtual paradise for the wealthy and famous.  Crime rates absolutely plummeted, the city was given a dramatic facelift and a booming financial community brought an unprecedented amount of wealth into New York.  But now many of the old problems are starting to come back again, and a lot of wealthy New Yorkers have decided that it is time to look for greener pastures.

Of course the COVID-19 pandemic has been the primary motivation for a lot of the wealthy individuals that have been fleeing the city.  According to the New York Times, there was a mass exodus of 420,000 New Yorkers between March 1st and May 1st…

Roughly 5 percent of residents — or about 420,000 people — left the city between March 1 and May 1. In the city’s very wealthiest blocks, in neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, the West Village, SoHo and Brooklyn Heights, residential population decreased by 40 percent or more, while the rest of the city saw comparably modest changes.

Can you imagine 40 percent of your neighborhood leaving in just two months?

Wealthy people can often pick up and move a lot more easily than the rest of us, because many of them are not tied to traditional jobs and a lot of them already own second homes.  And it is definitely understandable that a lot of them would have wanted to leave during the peak of the pandemic in the New York area, but now that infection rates are a lot lower they still aren’t coming back and this has become a hot political issue for New York politicians.

Continue reading→

 

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Debt, Governments, Morality, Taxes

Tagged

Jubilee, by Robert Gore

Posted on August 9, 2020 | 11 comments

The debt dam is crumbling as central bankers and government officials frantically refill the escaping lake with eye droppers.

As background to this article, it would be helpful to read an article I wrote in 2015, “Real Money.”

The foundation of the world financial system is debt. Every currency in the world is debt whose value is not tethered to any real value. In a rare display of official truth-in-packaging, right there on the instrument itself a US dollar bill tells you it’s debt: Federal Reserve Note. A note is a debt. What do holders of Federal Reserve Notes, officially creditors of the Federal Reserve, get for repayment of the debt they hold?

Federal Reserve Notes have no maturity date, pay no interest, and can never be redeemed. If you go to a Federal Reserve branch and try to redeem one, they will either not accept it or they will exchange it for an identical Federal Reserve Note. Why would anyone accept this peculiar instrument? Because you cannot refuse it. Also right there on the dollar bill it says: THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE. For American transactions, it’s reject the dollar, go to jail. The American government even levies punitive measures on foreign governments that just say no.

Because central banks and governments can repay their debt with more of their own debt, they have been unconstrained in the amounts they produce. You and I would do the same thing if we were so empowered. Governments, central banks, and debt are a ménage à trois from hell. The US ménage has debased the currency’s value against real goods and services at least 95 percent since the establishment of the central bank in 1913. The ménage’s ill-gotten gains are someone else’s loss—gullible savers and creditors who believe promises by politicians and central bankers that they will not engage in the debasement they have every incentive to promote.

Amazon Paperback Link

Kindle Ebook Link

Continue reading →

11 Comments

Posted in Academia, Banking, Business, Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Debtonomics, Economics, Economy, Financial markets, Governments, Politics, Taxes

Tagged , , , , ,

The Dirty Secrets Of ‘Clean’ Electric Vehicles, by Tilak Doshi

Posted on August 5, 2020 | Leave a comment

Clean and green is nowhere near as clean and green as they’re cracked up to be. From Tilak Doshi at forbes.com:

The widespread view that fossil fuels are “dirty” and renewables such as wind and solar energy and electric vehicles are “clean” has become a fixture of mainstream media and policy assumptions across the political spectrum in developed countries, perhaps with the exception of the Trump-led US administration. Indeed the ultimate question we are led to believe is how quickly can enlightened Western governments, led by an alleged scientific consensus, “decarbonize” with clean energy in a race to save the world from impending climate catastrophe. The ‘net zero by 2050’ mantra, calling for carbon emissions to be completely mitigated within three decades, is now the clarion call by governments and intergovernmental agencies around the developed world, ranging from several EU member states and the UK, to the International Energy Agency and the International Monetary Fund.

Mining out of sight, out of mind

Let’s start with Elon Musk’s Tesla. In an astonishing achievement for a company that has now posted four consecutive quarters of profits, Tesla is now the world’s most valuable automotive company. Demand for EVs is set to soar, as government policies subsidize the purchase of EVs to replace the internal combustion engine of gasoline and diesel-driven cars and as owning a “clean” and “green” car becomes a moral testament to many a virtue-signaling customer.

Yet, if one looks under the hood of “clean energy” battery-driven EVs, the dirt found would surprise most. The most important component in the EV is the lithium-ion rechargeable battery which relies on critical mineral commodities such as cobalt, graphite, lithium, and manganese. Tracing the source of these minerals, in what is called “full-cycle economics”, it becomes apparent that EVs create a trail of dirt from the mining and processing of minerals upstream.

Continue reading→

 

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Energy, Environment, Government, Taxes, Technology

Tagged ,

The United States Will Not Recover Raising Taxes Or Printing Money, by Daniel Lacalle

Posted on July 29, 2020 | 1 comment

Here’s a hint to what economic recovery will recovery: less government, not more. From Daniel Lacalle at dlacalle.com:

The dramatic economic decline due to the Covid-19 crisis and the unprecedented recovery spending plans approved by President Trump will drive the fiscal 2020 United States budget deficit to a record $3.8 trillion, or 18.7% of U.S. gross domestic product, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). According to the same estimates, the fiscal 2021 deficit would reach $2.1 trillion in 2021, and average $1.3 trillion through 2025 as the economy recovers from the impact of the forced shutdowns.

To finance this staggering fiscal effort, the Democratic Party leader, Joe Biden, is announcing a massive tax hike that will neither help the economy nor reduce the deficit.

The solution to the United States budget deficit is not more taxes. Even in the most optimistic receipt scenario, there is no tax hike program that would even start to address the structural deficit, estimated at one trillion dollars a year, even less with the above-mentioned estimates.

More taxes will hurt the recovery, damage the job improvement potential, and reduce investment in the economy. More taxes mean less growth and no deficit improvement.

The Obama administration learnt this lesson quickly, and extended the Bush tax cuts in 2020, adding a new tax cut in 2013. Other United States misguided tax hikes in 2013 did nothing to reduce the debt and kept the economic and job growth below potential.

Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in Banking, Business, Collapse, Economy, Government, Taxes, Uncategorized

Tagged

The Big Skedaddle, by Jeff Thomas

Posted on July 27, 2020 | 1 comment

Now, more than ever, productive people will go where they’re treated well. It’s a lesson the US government will learn to its sorrow. From Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:

Skedaddle
In the early twentieth century, there was an exodus out of Europe.

George, my paternal grandfather, looked around England, where the family had been since the eleventh century, and decided that a national fdecline had begun.

Although England was still very much an empire, it had fallen into the decline that ancient Rome had experienced before it. Where it had once expanded its possessions and profited from them, it was now spending millions of pounds maintaining them. The less profitable colonies were becoming a liability and the more profitable ones were breaking away.

In addition, the British class structure was beginning to break down. The ruling class were becoming lazy and unproductive and, increasingly, were bleeding the lower classes in order to continually expand their own idle privilege.

Worse, Britain had fallen into a seemingly never-ending series of wars. Wars have always impoverished countries, creating the necessity of increased taxation. And in the early twentieth century, all of Europe was spoiling for a war that was to become the “Great War.”

Historically, these conditions always have led to decline in a nation or empire, leaving the new generation of adults with a worse future than their antecedents had had. Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in Business, Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Economy, Government, History, Immigration, Imperialism, Taxes

Tagged , ,

Demolishing the Lincoln Myth, Yet Again, by David Gordon

Posted on July 25, 2020 | 1 comment

When the War Between the States began, Lincoln was far more concerned with collecting taxes than he was with ending slavery. From David Gordon at mises.org:

The Problem with Lincoln is the culmination of Tom DiLorenzo’s many years of research on Abraham Lincoln. It is a masterly summing-up and extension of his earlier classics The Real Lincoln (2002) and Lincoln Unmasked (2006). DiLorenzo is both a historian and an economist with an expert knowledge of Austrian economics and also of the public choice school. This background enables him to grasp what most other historians of the Civil War period miss, the centralizing economic plan behind Lincoln’s policies.

DiLorenzo calls attention to a vital fact that demolishes the mythological view that Lincoln’s primary motive for opposing secession in 1861 was his distaste for slavery. Precisely the opposite is true. It is well known that, in an effort to promote compromise, a constitutional amendment was proposed in Congress that forever forbade interference with slavery in states where it already existed. Lincoln referred to the proposal, the Corwin Amendment, in his first inaugural, stating that he was not opposed to the amendment, since it merely made explicit the existing constitutional arrangement regarding slavery. Of course, Lincoln was not telling the truth; nothing in the Constitution prior to the Corwin Amendment prohibited amendments to end slavery, so this new proposal did not just make the existing constitutional arrangement explicit. Readers can judge the Corwin Amendment for themselves, in a helpful set of original documents that our author includes in the book. (The Corwin Amendment is on p. 217.)

Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in Book Reviews, Civil Liberties, Government, History, Nonfiction, race relations, Taxes, War

Tagged , ,

What a surprise– there’s a mass exodus out of New York City! by Simon Black

Posted on July 17, 2020 | 1 comment

The mystery isn’t why there’s an exodus out of New York, particularly its tax base, but why anyone would want to stay. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:

In the 1650s, European rivals like England and France were busy dividing up the New World in North America.

France settled much of modern day Quebec in Canada, and England initially settled colonies in the mid-Atlantic.

The English and French didn’t have much in common, and they were bitter rivals. But one thing they did agree on was their mutual hatred of Jewish people.

This was part of a long tradition in Europe. Jews had been expelled from England in 1290. France kicked out all its Jews on at least three occasions from 1192 to 1394.

Spain expelled its Jewish population the same year Columbus sailed for the new world, and Portugal followed a few years later.

And still in the 1650s, Jews were banned from the French and English colonies in North America.

The Governor of the Dutch colony, “New Netherland”, also tried to turn away a group of Jewish refugees in 1654.

But the West India Company, which essentially founded and ran New Netherland, intervened, and convinced him otherwise.

It’s not that the West India Company was into “celebrating diversity.” It simply came down to economics. They wanted productive, talented people to settle their colony.

So the West India Company gently reminded the Governor that a large portion of the colony’s capital had come from Jewish investors.

A small settlement on the tip of Manhattan called New Amsterdam was especially tolerant.

Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Economy, Government, History, Taxes

Tagged

The new deal is a bad old deal, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on July 13, 2020 | 3 comments

The Internet’s best economist explains why the New Deal was a huge mistake, and why we’re about to repeat it, except this time only huger. From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

So far, the current economic situation, together with the response by major governments, compares with the run-in to the depression of the 1930s. Yet to come in the repetitious credit cycle is the collapse in financial asset values and a banking crisis.

When the scale of the banking crisis is known the scale of monetary inflation involved will become more obvious. But in the politics of it, Trump is being set up as the equivalent of Herbert Hoover, and presumably Joe Biden, if he is well advised, will soon campaign as a latter-day Roosevelt. In Britain, Boris Johnson has already called for a modern “new deal”, and in his “Hundred Days” his Chancellor is delivering it.

In the thirties, prices fell, only offset by the dollar’s devaluation in January 1934. This time, monetary inflation knows no limit. The wealth destruction through monetary inflation will be an added burden to contend with compared with the situation ninety years ago.

Introduction

Boris Johnson recently compared his reconstruction plan with Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal. Such is the myth of FDR and his new deal that even libertarian Boris now invokes them. Unless he is just being political, he shows he knows little about the economic situation that led to the depression.

Continue reading →

3 Comments

Posted in Banking, Business, Currencies, Debt, Economy, Government, History, Money, Taxes, Trade

Tagged , , , ,