Tag: wealth

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general freedom media and media people national politics & policies

Awkward for Ideologues?

Congress, taxes, wealth redistribution

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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Accountability general freedom

The S-Word in California

California, immigration, socialism, spending

Frédéric Bastiat called it “spoliation”; California’s Democratic politicians call it social justice.

A bill went into effect last week, offering complete medical coverage to an estimated 700,000 undocumented — illegal — immigrants.  The price tag? 3.1 billion dollars.

Well, not “price tag”: call it a subsidy tag.

California taxpayers will pay for it. Or perhaps U.S. taxpayers will end up with the bill, as Dagen McDowell insisted on Fox News, prophesying that the program “will turn into a national issue” that will, inevitably, “swamp the federal budget.” 

Ms. McDowell also noted that the state’s targeted sugar daddies, the wealthy, “are going to other states, so much that they’ve lost a congressional seat,” all of which must lead to insolvency.

Indeed, the state is running far into the red — the color of the ink on budget columns, not voting columns. The state faces not merely annual deficits and a huge debt, there is also this looming trillion-dollar debt implied by the unfunded liabilities of the state employee pensions.

There is an old pattern here, which is why I brought up an old author in the first sentence.

First we subsidize the poor. Then we extend the subsidies up the income ladder. Now we give huge subsidies to those who enter the country illegally.

It’s as if Californians have forgotten the nature of income redistribution: you have to have income to redistribute. At some point the wealth being taken from the productive vanishes, as society becomes unproductive and descends into ruin.

There are two meanings of Bastiat’s “spoliation”:

noun
1 the action of ruining or destroying something.
2 the action of taking goods or property from somewhere by illegal or unethical means.

The two are linked. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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individual achievement

The Division of Adventure

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson

On Sunday, billionaire Richard Branson became the first person to ascend into space in his own spacecraft — assuming that myth, old rumors and sci-fi stories of god-kings and mad scientists going to the Moon or Mars remain just that, myth and rumor and fi.

“The launch with Branson marked the 22nd test flight of Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity space plane,” writes Alex Veiga for MSN. “The company has planned at least two more space test flights this year.”

Thus Branson beat Jeff Bezos into space — depending how you figure. Later in the month Bezos’s Blue Origin spacecraft is set to launch Amazon’s less-than-beloved billionaire even higher above the planet.*

The billionaire space race is on, with the next level to be reached when regularly scheduled flights become the norm, ticket sales and all.

This is really “just” thrill-ride fare we are talking about here — and likely when commercial space travel first becomes normalized. Neither man is aiming to rocket into orbital space.

Yet.

Which is not to say this is not of great significance.

Of course, the fledgling industry receives criticism. Why go to space now, some say, when we have so many problems on Earth?

Well, explorers and adventurers did not wait till Europe’s problems were solved to explore and settle the Americas. They pushed forward.

Just as there is a division of labor in society, there is a division of ambition, of venture.

I will likely never go into space. But I am happy Richard Branson got there.

And I’ll applaud if you, too, jaunt upwards.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 * Branson and Bezos publicly squabble about what “space” is. Virgin Galactic went above the American standard of about 50 miles, while Bezos aims for the worldwide “accepted” standard of 62 miles.

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Jeff Bezos| Elon Musk | Richard Branson

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tax policy

Just Never Satisfied

taxes, wealth, poverty, freedom

The top federal income tax rate is currently 37 percent.

It’s been higher — 94 percent at one point during the Second World War, 91 percent in the 1950s . . . on income above a certain threshold.

Back in the 1890s, the federal government briefly taxed income at 2 percent. It was quickly struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court as unconstitutional. 

Those were the days.

In 1913, the 16th Amendment was ratified, giving Congress “power to lay and collect taxes on incomes” overriding the constitutional provisions that the high court had cited in 1895. The first federal rates were 1 percent for the lowest income bracket, 7 percent for the top bracket, on income above $500,000.*

By 1916, the lowest percentage was 2, the highest 25, on income above $2,000,000.

The good news: skyward tax rates aren’t set in stone. The bad news: once a precedent for a new tax has been established, you can expect worse to come.

So what happens if California Assemblyman Rob Bonda gets his way? He seeks a tax of “just” 0.4 percent on the accumulated wealth of “just” “the top 0.15%” wealthiest Californians, “about 30,000 people.” If these wealthiest leave the state, they would still be subject to the tax for ten years(!). 

Presumably, this latter, and quite brazen, aspect of an already brazen tax would be subject to constitutional challenges.

If Bonda’s proposal is enacted and upheld, would the scope of its reach stay put at 0.4 percent of holdings and 0.15 percent of Californian taxpayers?

It would not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* That was a lot of money back then — worth $13 million today.

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ideological culture political economy

Cash Machine Cachet

cash machine, ATM, money,

Shutting down capitalism almost worldwide may prove to be the grandest disaster of all time. Folks on the margin of poverty in poor countries are already starving. Though scads of people seem to think we could ride out a lockdown indefinitely just by cashing government checks, the problem is that if we don’t produce, we cannot buy and consume products. 

It’s not about money, or profits as such: “It’s the productivity, stupid!” 

Elon Musk put it this way: “If you don’t make stuff, there’s no stuff.” 

A “universal basic income” won’t help if the re-distributed money chases few-to-no goods.

So how did we come to believe that we can just shut down most business activity and still survive?

Maybe the idea seems plausible because many people already do not work to survive. As their numbers have increased, our civilization has forgotten that they survive upon the work of others. 

We guffaw at young children who, when their parents say something they want is too expensive, they innocently respond, ‘well, just go to the cash machine!’ But the more people rely upon checks and bank deposits from the government — for any reason — the harder it is to remember that the power to buy stuff doesn’t ultimately come from government. With taxation, redistribution and inflation thrown into the mix, even adults think of government as Cash Machine. 

And the Cash Machine as a model for the economy.

To fight a virus, the world has shut down production — as if we do not survive by producing goods in order to consume them.

Government has reduced capitalism — and us — to absurdity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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cash machine, ATM, money,

Photo by Tax Credits

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Accountability folly general freedom moral hazard porkbarrel politics property rights responsibility tax policy too much government

No Rich No More

Connecticut, taxes, revenue, budget, tax and spend, wealth, common sense

Connecticut has a budget problem. There’s not enough money to spend.

WTNH-TV in New Haven paraphrased the situation along with the response of Connecticut’s very progressive governor: “Income tax revenue collapses; Malloy says taxing the rich doesn’t work.”

The news story explains, “Connecticut’s state budget woes are compounding with collections from the state income tax collapsing, despite two high-end tax hikes in the past six years.”

Hmmm. Despite the tax increases? Or . . . “because the state of Connecticut depends too much on its wealthy residents,” as the report continued, “and wealthy residents are leaving . . .”

A Yankee Institute report notes that “the exodus of wealth from the state as top earners and businesses relocate to more tax-friendly states” is a major problem. Institute President Carol Platt Liebau calls it a “terrible cycle of tax increases followed by deficits followed by even more tax increases.”

Yet, state legislative Democrats are back pushing more tax hikes on “the rich.” Senate legislation would jack up the tax rate — retroactively — on those with income of $500,000 or more. House legislation would slap a 19 percent surcharge on some hedge fund earnings. In response, the head of the Connecticut Hedge Fund Association testified that his “industry is populated by exactly that type of person that will move based on tax policy.”*

A song by Ten Years After comes to mind:  

Tax the rich, feed the poor
Till there are no rich no more

Doesn’t sound like a good idea even in song.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* It’s worth noting that Gov. Malloy is now “against raising taxes again to fill the deficits and is instead focusing on spending cuts . . .”

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