Category: tax policy

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free trade & free markets Popular tax policy too much government

Socialists and Capitalism

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio helped snag Amazon for his city. Yes, the long-awaited destination of Amazon’s HQ2 has been determined. Amazon is not putting all its eggs into the Queens borough, though: there’s another headquarters . . . to be placed near Washington, D.C.

The mayor seems quite proud of the deal.

I’ve not been de Blasio’s biggest fan; too often he sounds like a socialist. But this deal? It’s crony capitalism.

So it is with some satisfaction that I can make common cause with a self-professed socialist, newly-elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Claiming that her Bronx constituency is “outraged” by the Amazon announcement — I doubt that — she expressed her outrage at the “billion-dollar company” receiving “hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks.”

Exactly. No company, big or small, should get special treatment from a government.

Want to attract business? Make generally good business policy. Apply liberally, that is, equally.

Alas, the socialist-elect went on to complain that “our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less.”

Well, Amazon is investing in the community, providing jobs.

Then came the busybodyism, demanding to know, “What’s the quality of jobs + how many are promised? Are these jobs low-wage or high wage? Are there benefits? Can people collectively bargain?”

Uh, wages will be high enough to attract workers from their current employment or out of unemployment. And so on.

Socialists feel a need to meddle.

New Yorkers, anyway, can breathe easier knowing they sent Ocasio-Cortez far away, to D.C. — de Blasio as mayor being bad enough.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

The Green in the Evergreen State

money, global warming, carbon, tax, climate

We’re told of the scientific consensus on global warming. Whatever you may say about that consensus (I’ve expressed extreme skepticism), no such consensus exists for what steps would be best to take to deal with the identified problem — which is usually understood in terms of the “carbon footprint,” of carbon put into the atmosphere in excess of what is taken out.

Most proposals for curbing carbon emissions have been shown to be far more costly than efficacious.

Nevertheless, without such a consensus, activists in Washington State are pushing Initiative 1631, a measure to tax carbon.

They had pushed a very similar measure two years ago, as science writer Ronald Bailey notes at Reason. The measure failed, however, because environmental lobbies opposed it. You see, the collected funds were given back to taxpayers. Environmental groups didn’t get a cut of the action.

This time that defect has been alleviated, and those groups are on board.

Ah, money, money, money! 

The Evergreen State, indeed.

Would the tax be effective? The goal of the measure is “to reduce, by 2035, [the state’s] emissions by 25 percent below their levels in 1990,” Bailey explains. The state had “emitted about 88 million metric tons that year, so that implies a reduction of around 22 million tons by 2035. Assuming today’s emissions, that would mean that Washington State’s planned reductions would amount to 0.42 percent and 0.06 percent of U.S. and global emissions respectively.”

Not much bang.

Sure, the measure may win on hope . . . and bucks.

But will it do any appreciable good? I mean, other than creating a constituency with the green of dollars.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability local leaders moral hazard porkbarrel politics responsibility tax policy too much government

Panic in the Prairie State

Illinois, pensions, politicians, taxes, tax, theft, shake down

When your state has the lowest credit rating in the union, the highest population decline rate, and spends nearly a quarter of its annual budget on an out-of-control government-employee pension system, what do you do?

Raise taxes, of course!

That’s the advice of experts in Illinois, anyway.

You can see why they panic: The unfunded portion of Illinois’s public employee pension system amounts to $11,000 per person in the state. Something extraordinary must be done.

Yet, as Pat Hughes at the Illinois Opportunity Project insists, taxpayers need relief — not a statewide 1 percent property tax increase.

Besides, it is not as if tax hikes could solve the problem. “It was just last year that politicians raised the state income tax by 32 percent in a desperate attempt to balance the budget,” Hughes explains. “Despite over $5 billion in new taxes, the state was back in deficit spending in less than a year.”

Hughes mentions a number of tax limitation measures in the works. More power to them.

But what’s needed even more? Spending limitation measures.

No government can be trusted to offer anything but defined-contribution pensions — and no government, at any level, should ever manage a pension system. Politicians can’t help themselves. They just cannot resist the temptation to buy off the government-worker constituency by promising more in the future than financially feasible (or just plain old politically possible) to pay for now.

Other people’s money is theirs to spend. And a future financial bind? Some other politician’s problem.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

N.B. Congratulations to the Illinois Policy Institute for its Liberty Center, which won its case against forced unionization, Janus v. American Federation, on June 27. Commentary about this Supreme Court case appeared on this site in early May, “Post Blindfold.”

 

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Accountability crime and punishment folly general freedom government transparency local leaders moral hazard nannyism porkbarrel politics privacy property rights responsibility tax policy too much government

Progress, DC-Style

gentrification, renewall, Washington D.C., corruption, crony capitalism, housing, dirigisme

Is the black, Democratic mayor of Washington, D.C., actually a “racist”? What about the city council, which is 46 percent African-American, 85 percent Democrat, and 100 percent liberal/progressive?

That’s what a lawsuit argues — the DC ‘powers that be’ are racist in their development and housing policies. Filed on behalf of several African-American DC residents, it alleges that Mayor Muriel Bowser and the council have been striving mightily, as the Washington Post reported, “to ‘lighten’ African American neighborhoods and break up long-established communities.”

“Every city planning agency,” states the complaint, “. . . conspired to make D.C. very welcoming for preferred residents and sought to displace residents inimical to the creative economy.”

Nothing that a billion dollars couldn’t make right, of course — for which the plaintiffs ask.

But is gentrification a crime?

As American University professor Derek Hyra told the Post, “Developers want to maximize their return. This is not a conspiracy. This is capitalism.”

But no, this certainly isn’t laissez faire “capitalism.” It could be described as dirigisme — or “state capitalism” or “crony capitalism” or just a bad old-fashioned mercantilism, revised to work at the city level, where governments partner up with particular groups to extract as much wealth for the insiders as they can. Professor Hyra acknowledges that Bowser and the council were “providing subsidies” to bring in richer citizens and push out poorer ones.

Most importantly, we discover yet again that the power politicians claim they need to help the poor, is used to help the rich.

Way to go, “progressives.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Note: The mayor is a Democrat and the 13-member council is composed of eleven (11) Democrats and two (2) independents. There are no Republicans.

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Accountability crime and punishment folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism privacy property rights responsibility tax policy too much government U.S. Constitution

Brave New Paternalism

Michael Bloomberg, tax, policy, nanny state, vice, social engineering, statist, technocrat

Michael Bloomberg is rich. He’s also in politics — a public health crusader.

And, for years, he “has personally funded and promoted all sorts of regressive taxes and regulations in an attempt to push people around,” the folks at Americans for Tax Reform tell us. “He uses the coercive power of the government to force people to live their lives as he sees fit.”

Onstage at a globalist event, One-on-One with Christine Lagarde — who is managing director of the International Monetary Fund — Bloomberg blurts out his approach to government policy regarding what he calls “those people.”

“If you raise taxes on full sugary drinks,” he says, “they will drink less and there’s just no question that full sugar drinks are one of the major contributors to obesity and obesity is one of the major contributors to heart disease and cancer and a variety of other things.”

Against the charge often made that such taxes fall heaviest upon the poor, he is forthright. Regressive? “That’s the good thing about them because the problem is in people that don’t have a lot of money.”

Notice that he is not talking about a public service campaign to help people learn how to drink (and eat) better. And he is not talking about removing all the government policies that have encouraged bad eating and drinking habits (as well as lethargy) — the government programs to encourage the overuse of high fructose corn syrup; the welfare state’s poverty trap that stifles life at the lower incomes; the subsidized consumption of food and drink — he wants to add another government program.

He can only see betterment by increased governmental bullying.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Michael Bloomberg, tax, policy, nanny state, vice, social engineering, statist, technocrat

Photo by Center for American Progress

Categories
Accountability free trade & free markets local leaders porkbarrel politics tax policy too much government

Selling Us Out

Maryland legislature, pork, Amazon, tax break, Jeff Bezos, Senator Roger Manno

Last week, Maryland’s Legislature enacted an $8.5 billion package of tax breaks and infrastructure improvements to lure Amazon into building its second corporate headquarters in Montgomery County, Maryland, bordering Washington, D.C.

State Senator Roger Manno, the only legislator from the county to vote against the subsidy, dubbed it “a $5 billion tax break for the richest man in the world. . . .”*

Today, the Montgomery County Council will consider a further proposal to streamline its zoning process, cutting in half the time the county takes to review a proposed development.

“We are trying to make sure our processes are consistent with everybody else,” County Executive Ike Leggett explained, adding that the county now “sometimes takes 100 to 120 days, while many other jurisdictions are much less than that.”

Did Leggett say “consistent with everybody else”? Well, the new zoning rules won’t apply to every business, just those planning to hire 25,000 workers. Or more.

“It’s neutral to the employer,” County Council President Hans Riemer slyly suggested. “It’s a proposal that would allow any really large employer to come in and build under certain terms.”

But only Amazon would be large enough.

“Really what it does is it creates predictability, reliability,” offered Riemer. But wouldn’t every other business also benefit from “predictability” and “reliability”?

“I think the Amazon proposal made the county realize . . . that it needed to look at some of its practices and where it has been criticized,” noted Bob Buchanan, chairman of the Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation. “We were more process versus results.”

And the county intends to remain that way . . . for “every” current business.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* He was referring, of course, to Amazon founder and owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos.

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