Category Archives: Taxes

The only options for Illinois millennials: fight or flight, by Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

Posted on November 21, 2018 | Leave a comment

We are going to be seeing a lot of stories like this in the not very distant future. From Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner at wirepoints.com:

Don’t expect Illinois millennials to ignore the state’s collapsing finances for long. They’ll soon be asked to bear more and more of the financial and economic costs, from higher taxes to diminishing job prospects to cuts in funding for their kids’ schools. That’s when Illinois’ millennials will either fight back, as they’ve done on many national issues, or they’ll simply leave the state. It’s that simple.

A first sign of that fight came in a recent Crain’s opinion piece – A millennial’s call for fiscal sanity in Illinois. The author Thomas Dowling says “Our generation’s economic future will largely depend on Gov.-elect Pritzker’s ability to balance the state budget, which means solving the state’s pension crisis.”

Dowling seems to get how bad things are. He realizes that even the best-case pension scenario will still be painful for everyone. “Even with reform, residents under the age of 30 – my peers and the children of many of Pritzker’s transition team members – will pay for their parent’s unfunded liabilities for the rest of their lives. We will face the consequences of higher taxes and reduced government services. We are the ones that will shoulder the $129 billion for the foreseeable future.”

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Posted in Business, Collapse, Debt, Economy, Government, Pensions, Politics, Taxes

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America Should Have Skipped the War, Not Just the Ceremony, by David Stockman

Posted on November 14, 2018 | Leave a comment

World War I set up most of the devastation and madness that is still going on, and Woodrow Wilson was America’s worst president. From David Stockman at antiwar.com:

This weekend the Donald took some heavy duty flack from liberals, Dems, the MSM and harrumphing patriots for canceling his appearance at a wreath laying ceremony at the famous WWI battle site at Belleau, France owing to inclement weather. For instance, former Secretary of State, John Kerry got himself worked into high dudgeon:

Mr. Kerry criticized the president’s decision on Twitter, saying that the weather “shouldn’t have stopped an American President”.

“President @realDonaldTrump a no-show because of raindrops?” he wrote. “Those veterans the president didn’t bother to honor fought in the rain, in the mud, in the snow – & many died in trenches for the cause of freedom.”

We truly wonder whether Mr. Kerry gets the monumental irony. In his youth he was a courageous leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement based on the insanity of America’s role in a needless war in Southeast Asia of which he was a veteran.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Debt, Economics, Economy, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Imperialism, Intelligence, Media, Military, Politics, Society, Taxes, Uncategorized, War

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United We Fall, Divided We Stand, by Robert Gore

Posted on November 11, 2018 | 34 comments

Unity is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Everything I said is contained in a single word—collectivism. And isn’t that the god of our century? To act together. To think—together. To feel—together. To unite, to agree, to obey. To obey, to serve, to sacrifice. Divide and conquer—first. But then—unite and rule. We’ve discovered that one at last. Remember the Roman Emperor who said he wished humanity had a single neck so he could cut it? People have laughed at him for centuries. But we’ll have the last laugh. We’ve accomplished what he couldn’t accomplish. We’ve taught men to unite. This makes one neck ready for one leash. We found the magic word. Collectivism.

Ellsworth Toohey to Peter Keating, The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand, 1943

Countless commentators have decried disunity. They fret about our divided nation, warn of impending civil war, and implore us to come together to avert it. Unity’s desirability is taken as given, but what if the longed-for unity is that of passengers on a jet plunging into the ocean? A reappraisal of disunity is in order.

Unity was doomed with the passage of the 16th, or Income Tax, Amendment. It’s hard to feel any goodwill towards a government that forcibly relieves you of what you’ve produced, benefitting itself and those to whom it redistributes. The income tax divides the country into makers and takers, a division that cannot be bridged.

For the productive, “Unite!” is a poisonous bromide, code for: support your own slavery. For a long time they bit their tongues and holstered their weapons as perpetually expanding government and its partner in crime, the Federal Reserve, took an increasing portion of what they produced, made it increasingly difficult to produce, loaded the country with a pile of debt and unfunded liabilities that cannot be paid, and depreciated the unit of exchange. Boxed in, a shrinking minority, the country they and their productive forebears built circling the drain, some are finally realizing they are underwriting their own servitude.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Cronyism, Debt, Economics, Economy, Foreign Policy, Government, Imperialism, Insurrection, Law, Military, Morality, Politics, Taxes, War

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The Nation’s Fiscal Doomsday Machine is Now Unstoppable, by David Stockman

Posted on November 10, 2018 | Leave a comment

The inexorable forces of mathematics and compound interest are creating their own ugly budgetary realities. From David Stockman at economic policy journal.com:

Earlier this year the Donald provoked a bleep-hole moment per the Fox “family channel” or what was otherwise known as the shit-hole moment across the rest of the MSM.

But whatever you called the contretemps spurred by the president’s crude utterance with regard to certain countries domiciled on the African continent, the claim this was evidence that he’s an incorrigible racist was risible. Actually, we already knew that the Donald is a semi-literate bully, who never got (read) the memo on racial comity—to say nothing of political correctness.

Still, there is a not inconsiderable share of Washington’s preening, self-important ruling class that indulges in that very same kind of gutter talk on a regular basis when puffing their chests and marking the objects of their displeasure. That’s why the shaming chorus which sprung up from all corners of the Swamp was enough to give hypocrisy a bad name.

But if we have to have a shaming of politicians, there is a far better reason for it than that unfortunate presidential slur.

To wit, Trump and the GOP deserve everlasting ignominy for literally shit-canning fiscal rectitude. So doing, they have completely abandoned the GOP’s fundamental reason for being— watch-dogging the US Treasury—in favor of immigrant-bashing, border hysteria and what boils down to crude nativism by any other name.

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Posted in Business, Collapse, Debt, Debtonomics, Economics, Economy, Government, Immigration, Investing, Money, Politics, Taxes, War

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The Demise Of Bubble Finance And The Folly Of Trump-O-Nomics, by David Stockman

Posted on November 8, 2018 | Leave a comment

Central banks are pulling the rug out from other bubble finance and other Wall Street fun and games. From David Stockman at davidstockmanscontracorner.com via zerohedge.com:

We are at a decisive pivot point and its far more consequential than the mid-term elections. Even then, we cannot but marvel at the utter complacency which still prevails in the casino.

We even heard one bubblevision talking head today suggesting that on the off-chance that the GOP retains the US House of Representatives (the Senate is virtually guaranteed to stay Republican), it will be mighty bullish for stocks. That’s because it would mean more fiscal stimulus, presumably another tax cut of the 10%/$200 billion cost variety that the Donald has been plugging out on the hustings.

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Posted in Business, Debt, Economics, Economy, Financial markets, Government, History, Investing, Money, Taxes

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Skin in the Game, by Walter E. Williams

Posted on November 8, 2018 | 6 comments

Cutting taxes doesn’t mean anything to people who don’t pay taxes. From Walter E. Williams at lewrockwell.com:

In describing the GOP tax cuts, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said that they and bonuses American workers were getting were “crumbs.” They were “tax cuts for the rich.” Some argued that the tax cuts would reduce revenues. Pelosi predicted, “This thing will explode the deficit.” How about some tax facts?

The argument that tax cuts reduce federal revenues can be disposed of quite easily. According to the Congressional Budget Office, revenues from federal income taxes were $76 billion higher in the first half of this year than they were in the first half of 2017. The Treasury Department says it expects that federal revenues will continue to exceed last year’s for the rest of 2018. Despite record federal revenues, 2018 will see a massive deficit, perhaps topping $1 trillion. Our massive deficit is a result not of tax cuts but of profligate congressional spending that outruns rising tax revenues. Grossly false statements about tax cuts’ reducing revenue should be put to rest in the wake of federal revenue increases seen with tax cuts during the Kennedy, Reagan and Trump administrations.

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America’s True Deficit: US To Borrow Over $1.3 Trillion In 2018, by Tyler Durden

Posted on October 30, 2018 | Leave a comment

In fiscal 2018, the US borrowed $400 billion more than the officially reported deficit. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Confirming recently reduced estimates of US debt borrowing needs – mostly as a result of new funds brought in via Trump’s trade tariffs – the Treasury Department today lowered its estimates of fourth-quarter borrowings to $425 billion from the $440 billion forecast it made in July, while assuming an end-of-December cash balance of $410 billion, up from $390 billion 4 months ago.

The revised Treasury numbers bring the total net borrowing needs for calendar 2018 at $1.338 trillion, while borrowings for fiscal year 2018 (which ended on Sept. 30) amounted to just under $1.2 trillion.

The Treasury also released its first estimate of borrowing needs for the January – March 2019 quarter, which it expects to hit $356 billion, well below the $488 billion borrowed in the same quarter of 2018, while assuming an end-of-March cash balance of $320 billion.

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Posted in Debt, Economy, Government, Money, Taxes

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