Negative Space: taxes
- Abolishing the corporate income tax gains steam
- Megan McArdle on Bloomberg View has brought the “corporate income tax” into view again.
- All your income is the government’s
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You have got to be shitting me. A University of Florida professor in tax law complains that because Google lunches aren’t taxed, he’s paying for them.
- The austerity of the drunkard
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If you’re an alcoholic and you redefine “abstinence” to mean “drink more”, you might very well solve your drinking problem: by killing yourself.
- Beware the Austerity of the Politician
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Austerity, to politicians, doesn’t mean what you think it means.
- California threatens Amazon, kills affiliate programs
- By this time, California had to know that its new law would not bring in new tax revenue. The tax headaches aren’t worth the trouble of maintaining affiliate programs. The only reason to pass the law was to kill affiliate programs at places like Amazon and Overstock. I don’t understand; what is it about affiliate programs that states don’t like?
- A customer service model of federal spending
- “If we can put a moon on the man, why cannot we devise a system whereby every state is billed by DC annually, and let the states compete for citizens to pay the taxes?” Moving from a system where the federal government taxes individuals to one where the federal government taxes state governments makes all of our lives a lot simpler and solves a lot of thorny civil rights issues as well.
- Defaulting on our debt is an executive choice
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If we default on any debt payments, it is because the White House has made the choice to default. There is no need to default even if the debt ceiling isn’t raised for a long time.
- Eminent domain and withholding federal spending
- Kelo has brought out the worst in local governments and the federal government. Now the House is using what may tie with eminent domain as the power of government with the most potential for abuse.
- Essential revolution: lasting reform
- The most important reform is the reform that makes the reformer obsolete.
- Essential Revolution: The Return of the Republicans
- The crime of the day is when you do it again.
- Even the experts can’t do their taxes
- When even the head of the I.R.S. can’t do his own taxes, it’s time to simplify them.
- Exposing Social Security
- Step one to fixing Social Security is to make it obvious just what the problem is.
- The Family Cow
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If you kill the cow for steak today, you won’t have any milk tomorrow. We are digging deep into our national cash cows—taxpayers—and we’re going to soon run out.
- Five Million Times Easier!
- I’ve got a way to make the IRS’ job five million times easier. And your tax forms half as difficult.
- Flat tax
- Why no flat tax? Because most people wouldn’t pay taxes.
- Fred Thompson vs. Barack Obama
- What would a good election campaign be like? Is it possible to have an election season focussed on issues and principles? I think it is, and I think it will depend on which candidates we support during the primaries.
- Geithner-Daschle-Rangel tax simplification act of 2009
- Here’s a way for the Republicans to be bipartisan: help Democrats overcome their tax misfilings.
- Government-run insurance
- Government organizations don’t have any incentive to sell you shit. Their goal is to tax you. Providing services or products is only an excuse to tax.
- Growth does not pay for itself
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Growth that doesn’t pay for itself is cancerous growth. It isn’t the growth of population that gets more expensive, but the expanding grasp of government.
- How did Donald Trump qualify for a middle-class tax break?
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Trump qualifies for tax breaks because we have a complex tax system that encourages anyone who can afford to, to hire tax lawyers. Big government needs a complex tax system to survive.
- How to raise taxes in a Tea Party world
- If you want to raise taxes, you need to show that you can be trusted to cut spending first.
- Income tax vs. national sales tax
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There is no such thing as a fair tax. All we can do is try for the simplest, most unobstructive tax we can find.
- Lifestyles of the rich and obscure
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Tax cuts for the wealthy? I’d be happier about being wealthy if the lifestyle came along with it. Instead I’m stuck with Val-U-Rite vodka.
- My Pet Crisis
- Someone needs to send President Obama a copy of The Pet Goat. Panic is not the right response to a financial crisis.
- No corporation pays taxes
- Corporations don’t pay taxes. Their employees do, and their customers do. Every dollar that a company has to pay in taxes, that company must pass on to either their employees or their customers, if the company wants to stay in business.
- None of you has ever seen a dead donkey
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If Democrats won by shifting to the right, we may not see much difference in the next two years.
- ObamaCare: it’s a tax, bitches
- Circling closer to the bureaucracy event horizon: now we have to list all the things we don’t do and check to see if we have to pay taxes on not doing them.
- Only if you’re paying them
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If I lost my job, I’d be paying less in taxes, too.
- Progressive taxation static analysis
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Static analysis is one of the hallmarks of progressive analysis: make big changes, and then expect everything else to remain the same. It almost always fails, and fails big.
- Punishing low-tax states
- An Internet sales tax that looks at the customer’s state instead of the seller’s state punishes states with low sales taxes and inhibits competition.
- Raising the debt limit is a major concession
- Raising the debt limit is a concession. It reduces the available revenue and makes it that much more likely that we’ll have to raise taxes.
- The return of voodoo mathematics
- Voodoo mathematics and tax philosophy. Nobody serious believes that tax increases increase economic growth.
- The rich get richer because of big government
- There aren’t enough rich to pay for the big government that the left wants. So they have to redefine rich to mean people like me. The rich can easily get around big government regulations; they can afford to higher lawyers and accountants. I, on the other hand, can’t.
- Robbing Peter to pay Peter… later
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Robbing from Peter to pay Paul? Government goes one better: robbing from Peter to pay Peter. As usual, Lewis Carroll is the best writer for the layman on taxes, because Lewis Carroll is the best writer for the layman on anything. “However legal it may be to pay what never has been lent, this style of business seems to me extremely inconvenient!”
- Ryan: End oil subsidies?
- Of course we want to end oil subsidies. Maintaining oil subsidies because gas prices might rise is crazy: we pay for those subsidies, too!
- San Diego’s proposition D: tax first, reform afterward
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San Diego’s proposition D is an attempt to raise taxes and then reform—which is, of course, an attempt to raise taxes and not reform anything at all.
- Simple, obvious, and unobstructive: minimize the value-minus of taxes
- There is no value-added in taxes, but we can minimize the loss of value.
- Simplifying taxes into complexity
- Most of us look at how complex taxes are, and want to simplify how taxes are calculated. But if you have the beltway mentality that our money isn’t ours, you’ll want to simplify how taxes are collected.
- Social Security reform and the polls
- Republican efforts on social security reform may pay off even if polls indicate people don’t currently support reform.
- Stephen Colbert’s Christian nation
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If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t enforce Christian values, then we should just give up and admit that… we don’t want to teach creationism in schools or to protect the unborn.
Oh, wait. Did you expect something about taxes and charity?
- Tax event horizon
- How close are we to a tax event horizon, where so many people’s income depends on complicated tax laws that they can never be reformed?
- Tax individuals, not organizations
- Taxes on businesses are just a way of hiding taxes so that people don’t know they’re being taxed.
- Tax me to the church on time
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The left wants to take the policies that are consolidating small businesses into larger ones, and use them to consolidate small churches into larger ones. They want to leverage milker bills and rent-seeking in religion.
- Taxing the rich to pay for preschool in California
- Yeah, okay, my bias is that I hate complicated tax systems. And I hate tax systems that pretend to be about taxing the rich and end up, in the end, taxing everyone. For that matter, while it beats the hell out of taxing the poor, I don’t particularly like singling out one class for taxes that benefit everyone. But I do love me some irony.
- Time is not fungible for writers
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Time isn’t fungible for writers; it’s not really fungible for anyone else, either. Time stolen can never be regained, because many of the things that would have been created during that time are lost forever.
- Twelve cookies on a plate
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There are twelve cookies on a plate. The left says that they can feed the poor by taking that rich guy’s cookies away, and leaving yours alone.
- Vodka Economics
- Stephen Green’s light bulb: “corporations don’t pay taxes. Not one red cent. They never have and they never will, even if you jack up the corporate rate to infinity-percent-plus-one.”
- What does 1.2 trillion dollars buy?
- What can you get for 1.2 trillion nowadays? How about two and a half years of no employer-side payroll taxes?
- What’s wrong with a national sales tax?
- When considering a new tax, consider how easily that tax is abused by the state and by the state’s good intentions.
- The withholding of the beast
- Does this prove that taxes are sinful? Or that the end of the world is nigh?
More Information
- Address to the Nation on Tax Reform
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President Ronald Reagan’s May 28, 1985 address on simplifying the tax code.
- Address to the Nation on Tax Reform
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“For the sake of fairness, simplicity, and growth, we must radically change the structure of a tax system that still treats our earnings as the personal property of the Internal Revenue Service; radically change a system that still treats people’s earnings, similar incomes, much differently regarding the tax that they pay; and, yes, radically change a system that still causes some to invest their money, not to make a better mousetrap but simply to avoid a tax trap.”
- The Forbidden History of Terrible Taxes
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“Your own government shouldn’t be the reason you struggle to make ends meet.”
“If the history of taxes tells us anything, it’s that we haven’t learned anything from history.”
- Europe’s Failed ‘Austerity’
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“Given Europe’s continued slow growth, Professor Krugman might have an argument to make—if there actually had been any austerity in Europe over the last two years.”
