Tag: tax policy

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free trade & free markets general freedom nannyism national politics & policies tax policy

Pass/Fail/Pass

November 2015 vote, Washington, Ohio, marijuana, legalization, illustration

While the Ohio measure to legalize marijuana did not pass, this week, the Washington State measure to wrest tax limitations out of a recalcitrant legislature did indeed succeed, with a 54 percent win.

Win some, lose some.

But in both these cases, there is some evidence for a general smartening up of the voting public.

With Ohio’s Measure 103, the support for cannabis legalization, a few weeks before Election Day, seemed strong. But the more voters looked at the measure, the more they caught a whiff of stink — and it wasn’t skunk weed. It was crony capitalism and insider favoritism. So, while a solid majority reasonably favors legalization — even in Ohio — it strikes most reasonable people that the measure’s secondary provision of setting up a monopolistic/oligopolistic production cartel is as anti-freedom as the legalizations is pro.

Smart folks saw through the proposal. Cannabis legalization is proceeding, state by state. Better results for legalization next time?

Perhaps, provided a better measure is offered.

Washington’s I-1366, on the other hand, had several levels to it, too, but they worked together. Voters seeking a constitutional tax limit, got it — or, if the legislature balks at delivering it as a future referendum (as the measure instructs) then the initiative’s main feature would kick in and the sales tax would be lowered. Low-tax voters get low taxes either way, legislature cooperating or resisting.

As I’ve explained some time back, repeated legislative betrayal had forced Evergreen State super-activist Tim Eyman to concoct this rather clever ploy.

In both Ohio and Washington, what voters voted against was against politics-as-usual — and that is good, no?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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November 2015 vote, Washington, Ohio, marijuana, legalization, illustration

 

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crime and punishment general freedom nannyism national politics & policies tax policy too much government

Not Plutonium

marijuana, legalization, Ohio, law, crime, illustration, Common Sense

If Ohioans pass Issue 3 today, the days of pot prohibition will disappear like the smoke from a wild night’s last bong hit.

That’s sorta what Nick Gillespie of Reason argued yesterday, anyway. “[I]f marijuana can be legalized in Ohio,” he wrote, “it can — and will be — legalized everywhere and the war on pot is effectively over.” Why?

Ohio is the ultimate embodiment of mythical “middle America” and a state that once plastered “the Heart of It All” on its license plates. It’s poised to become just the fifth state to legalize weed — before liberal blue states like California, Maryland, New York, Massachusetts, and perhaps most importantly, before its dark twin in college sports and economic dissipation, Michigan. Given its paradigmatic normalcy, Ohio can be the place where the drug war . . . finally goes to die.

But there is a disturbing aspect to Issue 3: “Crony Capitalism.”

The constitutional amendment would not simply legalize growth and sale, subject to regulation similar to alcohol or tobacco. Though it would legalize home growth, it stakes out a complicated limited licensing system for commercial sale, allowing for only a handful of growers in the state.

Gillespie quotes one pro-legalization activist who objects to the very idea that “any group or corporation has the exclusive right to grow marijuana and sell it. It’s not plutonium. It’s an agricultural commodity that should be regulated like one.”

A recent poll shows voters evenly split on Issue 3, but increasingly troubled that the measure creates an un-free market, a lucrative marijuana monopoly for those funding the initiative.

Today’s balloting may determine only whether voters like marijuana more than they dislike monopolies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom tax policy

Gold Leaf

cannabis, marijuana, legalization, tax, taxes, federal, Colorado, illustration, Jim Gill, Paul Jacob, Common sense

The experiment in legalized marijuana begun by citizens in the states of Washington and Colorado has, from the beginning, faced a huge obstacle: marijuana is still illegal, federally. State nullification of federal law is not merely “problematic,” it’s hard to “get away with.”

Take Colorado’s experience. The Centennial State, which has made the swiftest and most extensive progress regarding marijuana retail sales, has come up to an inevitable problem with the federal government.

Over banking.

Interesting Reason reporting tells us that “Marijuana-related businesses in Colorado are so profitable that the government doesn’t know what to do with all of the tax revenue they’re generating. But business owners face a more immediate problem: Where to stash their own profits when banks won’t take it.”

Congress has been very active making banking less and less private and less and less free for decades now, in part because of the War on Drugs. Existing banks refused to take new cannabis clients.

So a new credit union was formed, to handle the cash.

And now, NBC News tells us, our central bank, the Federal Reserve (dubbed by NBC “the guardian of the U.S. banking system”), said “that it doesn’t intend to accept a penny connected to the sale of pot because the drug remains illegal under federal law.” Which makes modern banking difficult, even for a credit union, apparently.

What are “weed” businesses to do . . . other than what they are doing, hiring security guards for all the cash?

Maybe Bitcoin will step in. Or old gold-warehouse banking, as was not unheard of even in the 19th century.

Or, maybe, the federal government will cease its over-reach?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies responsibility tax policy

Raising Taxes & Truth

tax, taxes, debt, national debt, truth, collage, photomontage, JGill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

Sheila Weinberg wants to raise your taxes. So fervent is her money-lust that she even threatens to run for president, and only half-jokingly, on that single issue.

More surprising: I would enthusiastically vote for her.

What gives?

Well, Weinberg isn’t demanding a tax increase or a spending cut, per se — just one and/or the other until accounts are balanced. She points out that tax increases tend to concentrate the minds of taxpayers to oppose greater spending by government. Otherwise, as long as governments — local, state and federal — can hide the true costs of their “services,” more will be spent, and more debt incurred, than the people can afford, or want.

That’s why this friendly CPA founded Truth in Accounting, a nonpartisan, non-profit group working to “compel governments to produce financial reports that are understandable, reliable, transparent and correct.”

Too much to ask? No, if you ask me, or you, or Sheila, or anyone else . . . until we inquire of politicians, and then, well . . . apparently, yes. And not merely at the federal level.

“For years, citizens have been told that their home state budgets have been balanced,” Weinberg recently told Watchdog.org. “If that were true, state debt would be zero . . .”

Yet, last month, Truth in Accounting issued its 2014 Financial State of the States report disclosing that state governments are truthfully — whether they admit it or not — a cumulative $1.3 trillion dollars in arrears. Individually, all but 11 states are carrying debt.

Lies won’t set us free. Or pay the bills.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense folly general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies political challengers tax policy too much government

Weekend with Bernie: Fairy-Tale “Free”

Bernie Sanders, Free, Fairy Tale, promises, collage, photomontage, James Gill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense, illustration

Bernie Sanders is many a progressive’s fairy-tale candidate.

Well, yeah.

Not “once upon a time,” but today . . .  the federal government’s public debt is in the double-digit trillions. The total debt — consisting also of unfunded/underfunded welfare state “promises” — may be in the triple digits. Still, politicians pat themselves on their backs when they deliver annual deficits under half a trillion per year.

Meanwhile, Senator Sanders, former member of America’s Socialist Party and current caucuser with the Democrats, is running on the “freebie” platform: let’s spend more!

He serves as the pusher of a very old folly: thinking that good things come to us without cost.

But the costs have to be paid.

And will be.

That’s the essence of common-sense wisdom since ancient times. Usually I conjure up an accountant or an economist to explain this, but why not go back to folklore? Folk and fairy tales, along with myths both ancient and modern (remember Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings?), tell us that magic powers come at a price.

And those costs can be killer.

Far-left-of-center magic pretends that not only can Bernie provide “free” stuff for everyone (including those of us in his “hard-working middle class”), but also that the wherewithal for these goodies (college, medicine, food, shelter, meaningful work) can easily come from . . . three pot-of-gold sources: “the rich,” “print more money,” and that least plausible sprinkle of fairy dust, “government efficiency.”

We tell children fairy tales not to make them wish for magic solutions, but to illuminate the logic of responsibility.

Bernie didn’t get that lesson.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Bernie Sanders, Free, Fairy Tale, promises, collage, photomontage, James Gill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense, illustration

 

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Accountability Common Sense initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

Evergreen Eyman

Stubborn Beast

“Initiative 1366 is blackmail,” one plaintiff charged.

No; it’s just political hardball.

Washington State voters have cast their ballots five times (by initiative measure) to require a two-thirds vote of both houses of the state legislature, or a vote of the people, to increase taxes.

Though the rule is neither hard to understand nor difficult to implement, legislators have repeatedly overruled the people they supposedly serve, overturning the measure and then, finally, suing to overturn the repeatedly re-enacted two-thirds requirement.

The Washington Supreme Court ruled that only through a constitutional amendment could citizens place upon their representatives the two-thirds mandate. And — you guessed it — the state’s initiative process doesn’t permit constitutional amendments, only statutes.

As I reported back in June, Tim Eyman and Voters Want More Choices haven’t skipped a beat. Their grassroots army collected over 335,000 voter signatures to place a new initiative on the ballot. This measure would cut a penny from the state sales tax unless legislators propose an amendment to the state constitution establishing the rule that taxes can only be raised via a two-thirds legislative vote or a popular vote.

The day after the signatures were verified and the measure placed on the ballot, a group of legislators and various special interests sued to block the measure from going to a vote. Last Friday, the court declared that Initiative 1366 would remain on the ballot for voters to decide.

So, whether “blackmail” or ingenious hardball, it looks like voters will have a chance to send a very direct message to their representatives: Do what the people want or else.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Stubborn Beast

 

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Common Sense crime and punishment free trade & free markets general freedom judiciary nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Legalize, But Prohibit?

Pot Pot, legalization, collage, photo-montage, Paul Jacob, Jim Gill

Last week, I warned of marijuana legalization.

Not that I’m against it. But how much will actual freedom be increased?

Note: I’m not bemoaning, as one activist friend argued, that “if you can’t toke up and celebrate in public when it passes, it’s not legalization.”

One cannot now legally smoke tobacco in most public buildings (meaning those open for business as well as government-owned structures) or drink a beer in most public parks or while navigating sidewalks. But you can smoke and drink at home or on certain types of private property.

Ending the drug war and treating newly legalized marijuana pretty much as we treat alcohol and tobacco seems like a long overdo common sense approach.

There’s also the freedom of home cultivation. I have friends who make wine at home, for private consumption. It’s legal; it’s proper. It should also be legal to grow cannabis at home. Yet, many a politician thinks otherwise.

And they are inspired, in a sense, by the popular legalization mantra, “legalize, tax and regulate.” That sends an ominous signal: in order to maximize revenues, politicians see the revenue advantage in forbidding hard-to-tax home cultivation — cultivation that is, let’s face it, a traditional freedom, a right “retained by the people.”

The excuse for this continued prohibition could be “think of the children.” But it’s probably just greed for revenue . . . and the even more hidden enticements of “crony capitalism,” which plagues almost all industry.

You should be able to grow a plant. And self-medicate. These are basic human rights, and the state should work around those.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Pot Pot, legalization, collage, photo-montage, Paul Jacob, Jim Gill

 

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Common Sense education and schooling folly general freedom tax policy

Money (for Us) Good, Profit (for Them) Bad

Teacher's Union

“One thing that we’ve done,” Dennis McBride of Support our Schools-Wauwatosa told a crowd at a free event hosted by the non-profit Wisconsin Public Education Network, “is we’ve made sure every time one of our legislators pops up his or her head above the foxhole, we’re there to shoot at them.”

The crowd laughed, reports the watchdog John K. MacIver Institute, which ran the story under the headline, “Panelist Jokes About Shooting Legislators at Public Education Summit.”

No worries, though: it was just a metaphor.

The genuinely kooky thoughts were less figurative.

One speaker encouraged the audience never to say the two words, “Scott Walker,” for fear of giving “the Wisconsin governor” higher name-recognition.

“Some of the first voucher supporters,” asserted Jonas Persson of the Center for Media and Democracy, “outside of this kind of new right core group of ideologues and wealthy entrepreneurs, were white supremacists. . . .”

Incredibly, he insisted that this movement “drew most of its support from, quote, ‘white flight areas*.’”

Somehow, no one mentioned voucher program successes, or the grassroots support for vouchers in African-American communities.

“The ultimate goal is about breaking down public schools and to be honest with you,” said Jennifer Epps-Addison of Wisconsin Jobs Now/Schools and Communities United, “it’s about profiting off of the education of our kids.”

Heavens! Making a profit by serving parents and children “consuming” education? Unthinkable.

Meanwhile, Epps-Addison pushed the “Wisconsin Freedom Compact,” which calls for doubling the tax dollars going to public education.

Will she guarantee that no one will profit from that?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

*Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article contained the term “white flight Aryans” in Jonas Persson’s quote. After review of notes and audio recordings, the phrase has been corrected to read “white flight areas.” The context and overall significance of Persson’s statements are not changed, but the quote is updated for accuracy.

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Teacher's Union

 

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Common Sense general freedom government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy term limits

Conflicts Perplexing Prominent Politicians

In Disguise

When does the same old song-and-dance, performed by yet another self-selected committee of the political elite, become “a unique process” that “Nobody’s ever done . . .”?

When the much-liberal Denver Post reports the “much-respected” Daniel Ritchie saying so.

Every election cycle for a decade, it seems, a cabal of big-spending politicians and big-receiving special interests form a “prominent” and “bipartisan” group to propose making citizen initiatives more difficult, weakening term limits, and circumventing the state’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (or TABOR, which limits spending and requires voter approval for tax increases).

This cycle’s iteration is “Building a Better Colorado,” now being formed for a September launch by Ritchie, the former Denver University chancellor.

Sunday’s Post provided the group of “prominent civic and business leaders [not to mention politicians]” ample coverage: “The project — developed behind the scenes for months and detailed in exclusive interviews and documents obtained by The Denver Post — is perhaps the most concerted effort in recent memory to address what organizers see as inherent conflicts in how the state is governed.”

Conflicts?

“Those conflicts, they say, are impeding Colorado’s ability to build new roads, put more money in classrooms, engage an increasingly disenchanted electorate and prepare for the future.”

“I’ve seen this game played too often in Colorado,” remarked the Independence Institute’s Jon Caldara. “It’s like a Kumbaya committee. We are going to get all these people who are marginally diverse and at the end of this long process . . . the conclusion is to raise taxes.”

While the “new” group isn’t “advocating any specific policy outcome” and plans to engage the public at town hall meetings, the meetings’ agenda has been pre-set . . . by “experts.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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In Disguise

 

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Accountability Common Sense government transparency national politics & policies porkbarrel politics tax policy too much government

The Spenders’ Eternal Excuse

Gluttony

Most modern welfare states have a huge problem: their politicians promise more than government revenue covers. So they borrow and borrow until they can borrow no more.

And then they go down. Like Greece has gone down. Banks are closed there, and the people suffer.

The problem is over-spending and over-promising (the latter being merely committing to future over-spending, so let’s just call it all over-spending). But when you confront a partisan of such extravagance — whether that person be a politician or a constituency beneficiary or an ideological socialist or social democrat — the most common defense is: THEY WOULDN’T LET US TAX ENOUGH.

The “they” in such defenses could be an opposition party, or a constituency, or . . . “the evil rich.”

But anyone with something other than a lump of coal for a brain knows the real truth: responsible people don’t make such defenses. If a political difficulty gets in the way of the extra revenue needed for something promised, it’s practically the same as an economic difficulty, so the excuse falls apart.

Say again?

If you cannot get enough revenue for your favorite program, it doesn’t matter whether the people who are the source of your “needed” revenue are broke — have nothing to give — or they simply balk at giving. The point is, you don’t have the revenue. The responsible reaction would be: cut back on spending.

Responsible people budget; irresponsible people blame others for not having the wherewithal to spend and spend and spend.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Gluttony