Taxes vs Charity

A common talking point on the right is that taxes can and should be lower because the social needs of the impoverished should ideally be met by private charity. It is worth noting that this is a very old idea, going back at least to the start of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s. The concept was vividly illustrated by Charles Dickens in “A Christmas Carol” in the person of Scrooge, where it was also...

Is the Estate Tax Double Taxation?

The general rule of money is that it is taxed when it moves. When you are paid a salary, some of that is taxed as income tax. When you use it to buy something, there is sales tax. People accept that both these taxes are valid, and you don’t hear a lot of argument that sales tax is “double taxation” because you already paid income tax on the funds. Likewise, when heirs get a windfall, the money is moving...

GOP Tax Plan VII

Republicans seem determined to demonstrate that, no matter how bad their tax bill, they can always make it worse. In this case by tacking on a repeal of the individual mandate tax. Of course they love the symbolism of “repealing” Obamacare. But this really proves that, on policy, they party is really nothing more than a gang of pestilential plunder monkeys. Because repealing the individual mandate does nothing at...

GOP Tax Plan VI: The Estate Tax

 “Even among high-income Americans, the plan seems designed to reward those who don’t work for a living — or more precisely, the less you actually do to earn your income, the bigger your tax break. Business owners would owe less in taxes than high-earning professionals; passive investors, who just sit there and collect dividends, would owe less than those who at least run their businesses. And wealthy heirs, who did...

On the Evolution of Fairy Tales

The headline: In The Original Sleeping Beauty, The King Is A Sexual Harasser Who Forces Himself On The Princess My thoughts: I guess this brings up the question of what constitutes the “original” of a fairy tale. Most people would say the Brothers Grimm versions are the original, but the Grimms were editors (at times quite heavy-handed editors) of stories, some of which had been in circulation hundreds of year...

How Obama and Hillary Clinton destroyed the Democr...

First off, some definitions. What is the Democratic Party? The Democratic a voluntary association of people who share political priorities. Because it exists in the US constitutional system, it serves as one of the two major parties in the US. The US constitutional system has a “first past the post” voting method which inevitably results in a political system with only two parties; such has it been since about...

GOP Tax Plan V

Fully parsing the Republican tax plan is going to take some time, since they only released it yesterday (they want it fully passed in two weeks, even though a lot of the details aren’t even written out yet). But a few things are very clear. There is no doubt who overwhelmingly benefits, even if people are still trying to figure out by how much. The very rich make out like bandits, and people whose parents are...

GOP Tax Plan IV

The US corporate tax rate is currently 35% (on profits of more than $335,000). That is before deductions and loopholes. The after loophole rate is effectively about 18%. 18% is what corporations are actually paying, on average. Some pay zero, or even a negative rate (GE is famous for this). Some pay the full rate. And many very large corporations pay nothing, because they book all of their profit offshore in a jurisdiction...