Tag Archives: taxes

Team Kimberlin Post of the Day

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Hogewash! has taken note of Brett Kimberlin’s shoddy financial accounting at his not-for-profits. The TKPOTD for ten years ago today was about another organization noticing as well.

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I don’t really have much use for Anonymous. However, we sometimes wind up on the same side. Take Neal Rauhauser, for example.

Your right to be stupid does not change the fact that you are in fact . . . stupid. More importantly your right to be stupid does not subvert the rights of others to speak publicly or privately –whether you agree with them or not. It’s about a little thing called Free Speech. Perhaps you have heard of it.

Oh, and speaking of 501(c)(3) charities, there seems to be some question on how Neal is getting funded since he is apparently unemployed. Perhaps that money is coming from Brett Kimberlin’s 501(c)(3) charity “Justice Through Music” aka “Velvet Revolution”. Well Neal, you’ve now brought a spotlight to that organization. I’m sure the IRS and others will be most interested in the discrepancies we’ve already found and the implication that unlawful threats are potentially being funded through this organization.

popcorn4bkWho know? Maybe Anonymous will wind up publishing some of the stuff that the Vast Hogewash Research Organization has turned up before we’re ready to run it. On the one hand, it would be disappointing to be scooped. On the other, the goal is to bring Team Kimberlin to justice.

Stay tuned.

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Gentle Reader, I doubt that any of those tens of thousands of new IRS employees will be allowed to audit Kimberlin or his not-for-profits.

A Common Sense Tax Proposal

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My neighbors with plug-in electric vehicles are getting a free ride not paying the fuel taxes that pay for roads and highways. Perhaps it’s time to put a tax on electricity used to charge EVs and to require EVs only be charged from properly metered connections to the electrical grid. After all, it’s illegal for me to fuel my diesel VW from a pump for non-road (farm and construction) equipment.

I’m So Old …

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… I remember when they taught this sort of stuff in ECON 101.

What happens when people are out of work and lots of stores are closed? Income tax and sales tax revenue drops. Bloomberg is reporting that New York’s tax collections have dropped by over two-thirds. Meanwhile, over on the left coast KPIX reports that Governor Hairgel is proposing pay cuts for California state workers because state revenues are down over 20 percent.

As the old Russian proverb says, “Го́лой овцы́ не стригу́т. (One doesn’t shear naked sheep.)” I suspect that we’re about to see a large portion of the bureaucracy begin to favor an expeditious reopening of the economy.

TANSTAAFL

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Andrew Yang wants the government to give every adult in America a thousand bucks a month. There are around 250,000,000 of us, so that works out to about $3 trillion a year and would not quite double federal spending. (That’s roughly $3.8 trillion.) He would pay for it with a value added tax that he estimates would bring in less than a trillion dollars a year.

Math is hard, so I’m not sure how that works out in the real world, but I was able to do the math necessary to see the federal government already costs the average adult American over $15,000 a year.

Let’s assume that we’re willing to give kids a free ride until they reach 18. In that case, the average adult’s fair share (that is, the average tax rate) should be whatever proportion $15,000 is of the average income. Average income is about $47,000, so that implies a combined federal (FICA, income, excise, VAT, whatever) tax rate in the range of 32 percent. There aren’t enough rich to soak with the 70 percent max rate proposed by one of the B-Card Democrats won’t pull the average up that high.

Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them.

—Margaret Thatcher

There’s Good News, and There’s Bad News

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The Foundation for Economic Education has a post up explaining how the rich could pay for that list of Progressive freebies: $47 billion on free college tuition; $1 trillion for new infrastructure; $1.4 trillion to write off student loan debt; at least $7 trillion on a Green New Deal; $32 trillion on “Medicare for All.” We can simply adopt tax schemes similar to those used in countries such as France, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland.

If Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Warren want the federal government to collect European shares of national income, they will have to adopt European tax systems. That means higher income taxes on the middle class, higher payroll taxes, and higher consumption taxes. According to the Congressional Budget Office, raising $32 trillion in tax revenue would require adding 36 percentage points to the marginal tax rate of every federal income taxpayer in the United States. Not just the rich—everyone. The single woman earning $82,500 and the couple earning $165,000 would see their rates soar from 24 percent to 60 percent.

To borrow from P. J. O’Rourke, the good news is that the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that you’re rich.

Finland collects about 43 percent of GDP in taxes, and that isn’t enough. Fuzzy Slippers reports at Legal Insurrection that Finland’s government has collapsed because of the cost of universal health care: #Bernie2020 hardest hit.

Finland has long been touted by American socialists as the socialist Nirvana, where everything is free and everyone is happy, happy, happy.  Sadly, fiscal reality hit Finland’s government as it collapsed Friday due to the rising costs of its universal health care.

The warning signs were on the wall last spring when Finland … ended its experiment with “universal basic income.”

Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who has been hanging his socialist mantle on the “success” of Finland’s socialist structure, may be the hardest hit.

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Math and Facts are Harder

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I’m sure Paul Krugman thinks he made a morally justifiable argument in his recent NYT article supporting ¡Ocasio! She Guevara’s proposed higher tax rates, but he’s dead wrong on both the facts and his math. He wrote,

The controversy of the moment involves AOC’s advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right? I mean, who thinks that makes sense? … And it’s a policy nobody has ever implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II — including the most successful period of economic growth in our history.

It’s a fact that World War II ended in 1945. You can look it up.

It’s also a fact that the top U. S. personal income tax rates were cut from 70 percent to 50 percent in 1964. Paul Krugman could have looked that up in the NYT’s archives.

1964 – 1945 = 19 and 19 < 35.

Also, the peak period of post WWII economic growth in America was after that tax cut, a fact that Krugman would have also found if he researched his paper's own archives.

Space prohibits a full discussion of the impact of the tax cut, but current data show that inflation-adjusted G.D.P. increased 5.8 percent in 1964 after a 4.4 percent rise in 1963. Growth improved to 6.5 percent in 1965 and 6.6 percent in 1966. These were the three best back-to-back years for economic growth in the postwar era, and economists generally credit the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut for much of it.

Sometimes Truth just refuses to fit The Narrative.

UPDATE—To be fair to Paul Krugman, the Kennedy/Johnson tax cut became law just before his 11th birthday, so he probably has no real memory of the economic conditions he was writing about.

Don’t Know Much About History Meets Math Is Hard

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Jeff Dunetz has a post over at The Lid about ¡Ocasio! She Guevara’s “tax fairness” proposal. He quotes her as saying.

You know, you look at our tax rates back in the ’60s, and when you have a progressive tax rate system, your tax rate let’s say from zero to $75,000 may be 10 percent or 15 percent, etc. But once you get to the tippy-tops on your 10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent …

Uh, wrong! The 70 precent top rate on incomes above $100,000 was a holdover from the ’40 and ’50s. One of the key accomplishments of the Kennedy Administration in the ’60 was to get the top rate lowered to 50 percent as a means of stimulating economic growth. Even corrected for inflation, her imagined threshold income for the top rate is an order of magnitude higher than the ’50s value. She’s set her definition of rich too high.

In any event, her numbers don’t add up with the current distribution of incomes. Jeff includes the following table—The top marginal rate is now about 40 percent. If doubling the rate didn’t result in the rich moving more of their their assets offshore and the taxman could take twice as much money from them, one could expect about a 20 percent increase in revenue. Personal income taxes would increase 40, but personal income taxes are only about half of the government’s take. That would provide roughly 800 billion dollars a year, which would not quite offset the deficit expected before implementing She Guevara’s Green New Deal. In fact, doubling everyone’s taxes wouldn’t provide enough money to fund her schemes.

TANSTAAFL!

UPDATE—With her congressional pay, Ms. Occasional-Cortex will be entering the upper 5 percent of income earners. Perhaps this will provide her with the same sort of practical education experienced by other who have climbed the income ladder.

Team Kimberlin Post of the Day

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I sometimes wonder if Brett Kimberlin knows how to tell a story without having at least one lie in it. Take a look at the TKPOTD for two years ago.

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I’ve mentioned that VelvetRevolution.US is running another promotion centered on a reward for information concerning voting machine hacking again this year. One new twist is asking for donations to fund the reward.vrusrewardbleg

Hmmmmm.

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The Dread Deadbeat Prevaricator Kimberlin has changed VelvetReveolution.US’s corporate name to Protect Our Elections/EMPR Inc., but the entity was and still is a 501(c)4 organization as far as the IRS is concerned. While a 501(c)4 entity does not have to pay federal income taxes, donations to such an entity are not tax exempt. (Well, they may be if they’re legitimate business expenses, but good luck convincing the taxman that donations to TDPK’s “reward” fund qualify. Nothing in this post should be taken as tax advice.)

Lying liars gotta lie.

UPDATE—This is currently on the DONATE page of the Protect Our Elections website.The IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File Extract shows that Protect Our Elections-EMPR Inc. is a 501(c)4 entity and that donations to it are not tax deductible.

Tax Cuts in the Left’s Alternate Universe

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Sarah Hoyt has taken many of the Democrats’ prediction concerning the effects of the recent tax cut legislation and created  Diaries from Taxmaggedon.

I have ventured to compile an imaginary diary from a world in which the left’s ideas are reality.  I also have ventured to make it five days, because frankly, they are extrapolating the end of the world, and even I – with my experience of fiction writing – can’t make that happen in two days.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE—Oh, look! A down twinkle! Given when it came in and what the connection log shows, I’ll bet it came from someone who won’t have to pay any federal income tax under the new law.