Tag: taxes

Less Oversight?

Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan, Audit, spending, taxes

There are long-standing debates among those who oppose big government. One is whether we should promote every budget cut and any tax cut, or whether we should more-or-less carefully support only some cuts — on the grounds that some possible cuts might scuttle future reforms.

This came to mind upon hearing Michigan Governor Gretch Whitmer’s plan to reduce the budget of one of her state’s bureaucracies by 28 percent.

Hooray!

But wait a moment: the department to be cut is the Office of the Auditor General!

Whitmer’s proposal is to take the $30 million budget and bring it down to a lean $21.7 million.

The point of an auditor is to make sure that government does not misuse the money taken from taxpayers, allegedly for the public benefit. Take that away, and what do you have?

Waste. Corruption — a recipe for it, anyway. Maybe an engraved invitation for it.

Is there any merit to this reduction? Democrats are not known to love budget cuts.

They say Michigan’s auditor’s office has been “too partisan” — and certainly said things about Democrat programs that don’t make those programs look good!

“If there is ever a place in Lansing where we should rise above petty partisan politics, it should be oversight and ethics,” Rep. Tom Kunse (R-Clare) said, expressing a perspective I share.

So what’s really going on here? Well, the state is facing a $418 million surplus. That’s a lot of money to play with. What’s the likelihood that the party in charge wants to reduce the Auditor’s Office for any other reason than to reduce scrutiny of how they plan to spend that money?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Audit, Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan, spending, taxes

crime and punishment free trade & free markets tax policy

What Pfizer Pfolks Got

Yesterday, a whole lot of people paid a whole lot of taxes. It was Tax Day — filing day — for most Americans.

Truth is, American workers pay income tax with every paycheck. And they pay other taxes too.

Somehow, though, Pfizer — one of the world’s most profitable companies — did much better than we did. “Drugmakers make big profits in the U.S.,” explains Sydney Lupkin at NPR. “But many pay taxes far below the 21% corporate tax rate. Pfizer’s effective tax rate is so low it’s getting a big refund despite booking $59 billion in revenue.”

Did you get a big refund on top of a huge wage hike? No?

Well, you should lobby Congress more.

Now, Pfizer’s long had a cushy/pushy relationship with the U.S. Government. The company’s had to pay loads of legal penalties for malfeasance, but it’s also received subsidies, immunities, and government-forced clientele — in the rollout of its most famous product. But through thick and thin it faces our byzantine tax code with ease, for it’s that tax complexity that really gives Big Pharma the advantage, compared to smaller companies.

I have never argued for more taxes. I wonder if corporations should even be taxed based on income, which gets complicated to figure since it’s based on profits and losses and investments etc., thus opening the door to corrupt insider politics. Plus, those taxes simply get passed on to us.

But if corporations are taxed, how indecent that small companies tend not to get huge refunds on years in which they make stellar returns.

Though I suppose if Congress keeps on awarding more to the bigger, that’s a problem that sort of solves itself.

With the smaller companies just dying out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom media and media people national politics & policies

Awkward for Ideologues?

There’s good news about inequality?

In late March, George F. Will argued that the truth about inequality in America, according to his op-ed title, is “awkward for the left and right.”

He points to the reality of transfer payments in the United States.

Ignoring that reality is what leads to awkwardness.

On the left, critics of capitalism portray low-income earners as a growing class of the impoverished . . . and high-income earners as a growing class of filthy rich.

But by “not counting about 88 percent of government transfer payments that enlarge the buying power of lower-income households, and not counting taxes that lower the wealth of higher-income households, government statistics purport to prove that the average income in the top quintile of earners is 16.7 times that of the average in the bottom quintile. Counting transfers and taxes, however, the actual ratio is 4 to 1.”

So leftists ignore the “successes” of the very system they set up, the better to complain and demand more of what has already been done.

But what do rightists ignore?

That’s where Mr. Wills’s Washington Post editors (a class of professionals who usually determine titles and blurbs) may have given us the wrong impression. Most of his column explodes leftist interpretations of contemporary reality. But he does talk about “the populist right,”: the “national conservatives” who mimic the progressive left in favoring “industrial policy” that, he notices (as I’ve noticed here at Common Sense) “regressively funnels money upward to corporations.

“The populist right advocates protectionism (tariffs to shield corporations from competition), and the populist left advocates hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies (for semiconductors, electric vehicles, solar panels, etc.).” Both favor the rich when it comes to regulations, while complaining about the rich in other contexts.

A poor way to help the poor.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Congress, poverty, redistribution, taxes, wealth

initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

Preparation HH Hornswoggle

Post author By Redactor
Post date November 7, 2023
2 Comments on Preparation HH Hornswoggle

Tonight, I’ll be anxious for election returns from Colorado on Proposition HH, a measure Democrats in the legislature placed on the ballot to both lower taxes and raise revenue.

Huh?

Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist wrote recently in The Denver Gazette, that the proposition “would result in the largest tax hike in Colorado history.”

Yet, the ballot title begins: “SHALL THE STATE REDUCE PROPERTY TAXES FOR HOMES AND BUSINESSES, INCLUDING EXPANDING PROPERTY TAX RELIEF FOR SENIORS . . . ?”

“Democrats have advertised Prop. HH primarily as a property tax cut that will save homeowners hundreds of dollars per year,” explains Colorado Public Radio’s Andrew Kenney, “which is true.”

But Kenney goes on to plainly present the rest of the story, that HH would also “raise the state spending limits created by TABOR, allowing the government to eventually keep hundreds of millions, and then billions, of dollars more tax money each year instead of refunding it.”

TABOR stands for the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which voters passed by citizen initiative back in 1992. Under TABOR, government spending growth is limited, with excess revenue returned to taxpayers. Prop HH is designed to offer immediately small property tax relief attached to letting the legislature grab much bigger money from not providing refunds in the future.

Norquist correctly dubs it “a bait-and-switch tax hike scheme.”

It’s the usual stock-in-trade of the political class. The difference in Colorado, however, under the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, is that politicians are required to ask voters for permission . . . to hornswoggle them in this way.

Politicians have been asking for higher taxes again and again for years. (Not to mention going to court in a failed attempt to overturn TABOR.)

But voters have the final say. Today.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment election law initiative, referendum, and recall

Methinks the Mayor

petition, private property, taxes, schools

“So, Walmart has no rights?!”

The frustration flowed from Yakima Mayor Janice Deccio to a 911 operator. Her compassionate heart bled profusely for the long-suffering stockholders and executives of one of the world’s richest companies.

“Hi, this is Mayor Deccio. I know that this isn’t an emergency call, but I need to talk to somebody,” she told the dispatcher. “There are far rightwing petitioners at Walmart and they are not leaving after Walmart has asked them repeatedly to do so. And the police have not taken them off the premises.”

But, as the voice at 911 explained to the distraught officeholder, Washington State law requires that commercial property must make a public accommodation for First Amendment activity such as petitioning.

The mayor’s thirst for a police solution to these “far rightwing” petitioners went unquenched.

“Obviously, the extreme left is freaked out by these initiatives,” offers Glen Morgan on his We the Governed podcast.

He’s referring to six conservative-oriented initiatives being promoted by Let’s Go Washington and petitioned onto Washington State’s 2024 ballot.

“Four of these initiatives reduce taxes,” Morgan points out. “One of them allows the police to actually chase violent criminals once again. And the other one confirms that parents have the right to know what strangers are doing to their kids at school or in unsupervised medical settings.”

Deccio now claims that mystery constituents told her the petitioners were aggressive and threatening . . . something she didn’t mention that on the call. The fact that her 911 plea has been made public might have something to do with her change of tune.

And don’t even mention ideology! “I don’t care,” she contends, “nor even know what they were petitioning about.”

The mayor added: “No one told the group they couldn’t petition, and it was certainly not my intention to stop them.”

No, of course not — she intended for the police to stop them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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deficits and debt election law tax policy

Slasher Needs Slashing

A perennial bill in the California Assembly, Constitutional Amendment 1, would make it harder for voters to block local tax increases in accordance with the provisions of Proposition 13, which voters passed in 1978.

ACA 1 would shrink the percentage of voters who must approve certain tax increases from two thirds to 55 percent in cases where the money would purportedly be used for infrastructure or public housing.

Passage would further erode the legacy of Prop 13, which in addition to cutting taxes, limiting tax increases, and requiring a two-thirds legislative majority to increase state taxes, also imposed a two-thirds threshold for voter approval for special local taxes.

In 2000, voters accepted a lower threshold for approval of school bonds — 55 percent instead of two thirds — enabling billions more in property taxes.

That’s bad enough, but things could easily get worse.

Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association observes that if enacted, ACA 1 would be used to raise taxes repeatedly in local elections by dint of dubbing all government spending “infrastructure.”

The infrastructure exemption is an innovation of the 2023 version of the bill (the tricky tricksters never stop).

Moreover, if passed, the amendment would take effect immediately. “Billions of dollars in tax hikes will start that much faster.”

Coupal stresses that the new exactions would be added to property tax bills “above and beyond Prop 13’s one percent cap” on property taxes.

ACA 1 keeps getting reintroduced and, so far, keeps getting killed off, like the mad killer in a teen slasher movie. Only to be revived for the sequel.

Kill it again.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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