Category Archives: Taxes

Shot In The Dark: Today’s News, Delivered In 2013. As Usual.

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Remember when “Electronic Pull Tabs” were going to get the taxpayer off the hook for paying for Zygi Wilf’s big real-estate upgrade? Yeah, someone pointed out that that was baked monkey doodle, and it wasn’t someone with a tin “Journalist” badge.

Of course, Minneapolis and Minnesota government has been busy rationalizing riots and carnage in nursing homes lately, so the ongoing – and utterly predictable disaster – of the Vikings Stadium has slipped from the headlines.

But, as predicted, Minneapolis is going to be going to the state taxpayer because it just can’t afford to pay for Helga Braid Nation’s entertainment anymore.

However, now that the city’s first debt payment of $17 million is about to be due, DFL state Rep. Mohamud Noor says his city can’t pay, according to the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.

Noor, who was recently appointed chair of the House Workforce and Business Development Committee, said the coronavirus pandemic makes it impossible for his city to afford the stadium.

“That was then,” he said, speaking on the payment deal Minneapolis signed eight years ago, “this is now. We’ve got a global pandemic.”

If you recall, the city was on the hook forl about 13% of the cost of the stadium – about $150 million (emphasis added by me):

Who’s got two thumbs, writes a blog and hosts a weeken talk show and predicted this about the time the stadium opened?

“I’m just kind of surprised that they’re taking this approach,” remarked Republican state Sen. Julie Rosen, according to the Star Tribune. “It [the original agreement] was a very good deal for Minneapolis.”

Arguing economics, finance or logic with the Minneapolis City Council is a little like arguing hip-hop technique with Mitch McConnell. Neither party is equipped to play the game.

Biden Ad – Part 3

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Joe Biden’s really plastering the airwaves with ads. Saw another one. Did you know Trump gave tax cuts to the rich? Yep. Said it right in the ad, so it must be true.

I wonder . . . what are the qualifications to get that tax cut? My wife and I got a check earlier this Spring – $1,200 apiece – was that the tax cut for the rich? I think we also got a bigger refund last year. Maybe that was it?

I have my taxes done by HR Block. You’d think they would have mentioned if I could take advantage of a tax cut. Maybe I’m not rich enough? How rich do you have to be? If Biden is going to take away tax cuts, that means somebody is paying higher taxes. Is it going to be me?

You know, Joe, before I fill in the box next to your name, I’m going to want a few more details on which tax cuts you’re taking back. Care to be more specific?

Joe Doakes

It’s true because shut up.

This Is War

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Shizzle just got way too real:

This is getting personal.

Keegans was where I met some of the favorite arcs in my social circle: the NARN guys (Brian, Chad, Ben, Ed Morrissey, King Banaian, Michael Brodkorb), John Stewart and Marjorie Farnsworth Stewart and their kids Patience Stewart and Faith Worley , who at least started the process of meeting her husband Ben Worley (long story) there at a Trivia night one summer. It’s where I first met (socially, at least) David Strom and Margaret Martin, and Christopher K. Senn and Chris Neugent, where we were trivia regulars with Brad Carlson and Nancy LaRoche and Bill Charette and Guy Collins and Peg Kaplan and so many more, a place where Gary M. Miller and Bob Collins shared a table over a couple beers and some sports talk, where I met the likes of Tracy Eberly and Julie Hanson and Mark Heuring and Jacq Smith and Sean Michael and Diane Napper and Bridget Cronin, where I met Don Lokken after 20 odd years. where celebs like Mike Nelson and Lynn McHale’s husband rubbed elbows with a bunch of my other closest friends, and the last place I saw Joel Rosenberg and Sarah Janecek before their untimely passings, and…

…well, so many memories, it’s hard to catalogue them all.

Keegans – and the Savoy next door, both owned by the redoubtable Marty Newman – is closing after Tuesday night. Marty, like Terry (a Marine vet from Vietnam) and Virginia Keegan before him who founded the place, is a classic small businessman, is pretty much SOL.

The place was always jam packed – always – so let’s hear none of this “bars and restaurants close all the time” bullsh*t. This place was killed by the Governor’s ham-fisted quarantine combined with Minneapolis’ unicorn-driven small business policies.

This is a kick in the teeth.

I will be heading there Tuesday night. I guess that would be tonight…

Shot In The Dark – Today’s News, Five Months Ago

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We noted earlier this year that Philadelphia’s tax on pop was taking down soft drink sales, and jobs and stores with it.

And it turns out that that’s true – pop sales are down by half in Philly.

But people are healthier – right?

Er…right?

While researchers found that sales of sugary beverages fell in Philadelphia after the tax, beverage sales in nearby towns and counties without the tax went up. That suggests people may have been traveling to get their soda at a reduced price.

But…but…Revenue! Right?

Jazz Shaw did the math that I thought about, but didn’t, since Jazz did it…:

So, let’s look at this assuming one million ounces of soda was sold anually before the tax went into effect. If sales had remained the same, the city would have realized $62,400.00 in revenue instead of $54,300.00. But with the volume cut in half, they managed to slash their revenue to $31,200.00. (I was told there would be no math. Apparently City Hall in Philadelphia was operating on the same assumption.) Great job, guys. You gutted your revenue stream, caused layoffs in the beverage industry and depressed sales in the city’s retail outlets, likely impacting entry level jobs.

Of course, this is “unexpected” only if you haven’t followed similar stories from coast to coast, including here in Minnesota, where the rapacious and punitive increases to the cigarette tax enriched a lot of North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin convenience stores a few years back.

A New Tradition

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The MN Department of Revenue points out that Governor Walz’s Tax Orgy is going to hit…

…wait for it…

…wait for it…

…the poor hardest.

Unexpectedly, natch.

Gov. Tim Walz’s plan to increase taxes would hit the lowest-income Minnesotans the hardest, according to a new analysis by his own Department of Revenue.
Minnesotans on the bottom half of the income ladder would absorb an average 9.9 % tax increase. For every $100 they earn, these Minnesotans would pay well more than an extra dollar in taxes. The poorest 10 % of Minnesotans would pay an extra $2.37 in taxes for every $100 they earn.
The upper half of Minnesotans would pay an additional 5.9 %, although the wealthy would wind up paying far more in actual dollars than lower-income Minnesotans.

This is of course exactly what happened under Dayton, although the media didn’t bother reporting that beyond the most basic lip service, either.

An Idea Whose Time Should Not Come

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When you’re a Republican, especially in a bluish-purple place like Minnesota, you hope you can vote for Republicans who’ll hold the line on taxes – even to the minimal level of not proposing new ones.

Sadly, we’re disappointed – as I discussed with Liz Mair on the show over the weekend. Senator Howe is proposing a tax on electric vehicles.

Here’s the interview:

I get the logic, sort of – it’s to replace some of the gas tax revenue lost by the increasing efficiency of cars the greater number of people driving electrics, and the people dropping out of the commuting force as telecommuting picks up speed.

But a Republican should be proposing fewer, not more, taxes.

And if we could see to some of that unsustainable spending, that’d be a cherry on the sundae.

More Crumbs

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Chipotle rolls out bennies, bonuses to hourly employees:

The company is rolling out benefits reaching all of its 71,000 employees, including special cash and stock bonuses and enhanced paid and parental leave.

Qualified hourly employees and salaried restaurant employees will receive a special one-time cash bonus of up to $1,000, and some staff employees will receive a one-time stock grant.

Other offerings will include accelerated training programs, and additional paid parental leave for everyone, from hourly managers to salaried employees.

Didn’t they get the word from Pelosi?

I Can’t Wait…

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…to see how the Democrats and the media (pardon the redundancy) try to paint this as a tile toxic side effect of the Republican tax reform plan.

The headline from Apple is that it will make a $350 billion “contribution” to the U.S. economy over the next five years, although it’s unclear exactly how the company came to that number.

The company also promised to create 20,000 new jobs and open a new campus.

It said it expects to pay about $38 billion in taxes for the horde of cash it plans to bring back to the United States. This implies it will repatriate virtually all of its $250 billion in overseas cash.

It will be an amazingly creative exercise, when it happens. But it will happen.

Charity

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A colleague predicts charitable giving will plummet next year.  Charitable contributions will not be deductible under the new tax law, but your personal exemption will increase to $10,000 per person.  No net effect on most people’s income taxes; but if you are effectively getting the charitable deduction without actually making a charitable contribution, why contribute?  Who’d be foolish enough to throw money away like that?

This is how Liberals view the world.  Liberals make charitable contributions to get tax breaks.  No tax break – no charitable contribution.

That is not how Conservatives view the world.  We make charitable contributions to help others and we consistently give more than our Liberal brethren.  The tax break is nice but even if we don’t get it, we’re still going to make our same contributions.

Charitable giving is not for the tax break, it’s for the soul.  Liberals failing to understand that, explains much of what’s gone wrong in America since they rammed through The Great Society.

Joe Doakes

Joe’s outlook is sunnier than mine.  The left at its core detests charity.  They want it socialized.

That Precious Moment…

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….when a “progressive” realizes that taxation, at its root, is essentially those who don’t create anything, extorting from those who do:

“Our Olympian and Paralympic athletes should be worried about breaking world records, not breaking the bank, when they earn a medal,” said ‎Schumer.

“Government is the things we all do together taking from net creators and giving to net consumers”.

Mixed Messages

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Being a liberal must be confusing.

Exhibit A:  This week’s City Pages.

On the one hand:  Mike Mullen complains that Mendards’ management training program urges the store’s staff to oppose tax hikes.  Because taxes are what makes life worth living, and by no means should Menards expect its management to support the store’s financial health, nosirreebob.

On the other hand:  Corey Zurowski bemoans a non-profit that presumably is no “happy to pay for a Better Minnesota” as it has been extincted by…taxes.

I’d imagine this’d cause some heads to explode, if any of the City Pages’ audience really thought about it.

But I jest.

Sometimes I slay me.

(Via regular commenter Chuck)

Dodging The Point

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Ever since Governor Dayton passed one of the highest taxes in the nation on people earning over about $150,000 a year, conservatives have been predicting an exodus of the productive class.

DaytonDustbowl

The Minnesota left is doing cartwheels over “data” showing it’s not happened…

…sort of.  I add emphasis:

The ranks of the very rich are growing in Minnesota, despite a controversial tax increase that singles out the biggest earners to pay more.

Critics predicted that the ultra-affluent would flee after Gov. Mark Dayton secured 2013 passage of a new income tax tier of 9.85 percent on individuals who make more than $156,000 a year. But the latest data show that the number of people who filed tax returns with over $1 million in income grew by 15.3 percent in the year after the tax passed, while the new top tier of taxpayers grew by 6 percent.

So many holes in this “story”:

People making over a million a year – the “ultrarich” – can live anywhere they want;  the Twin Cities are a great place to be rich; good quality of life with lots of bigger-city amenities, and your dollar, after taxes, still goes a ways.   That’s why so many big corporations have their headquarters in the Twin Cities, even though they haven’t hired a non-service blue-collar worker in Minnesota in decades; it’s a great place to be a CEO.

As to the number of people in the >$156K tax bracket rising?  So what?  As the value of the dollar drops, and inflation creeps in, more real estate agents, dentists, software architects, insurance salespeople and the like find their incomes creeping upward from $145K to $156K.

But you have to then ask:

  • How many of them hit that $156K mark, stew on it for a year or so, and decide to move to Hudson or Fargo or Superior?
  • How many more would have reached that threshold if it weren’t for the tax hike?

The answers, by the way are “anecdotally, many” and “the Strib, being Tina Flint-Smith’s waterboys, sure aren’t going to tell us”.

Capital Runs

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Carls Junior / Hardees corporate HQ flees California for Tennessee.

Yes, we know that CKE’s official line is that the firm is relocating because it has less need for office space as it consolidates operations. But the company executives say this with a wink. Tax savings are a big factor, as is the stifling regulatory environment on the left coast, where businesses are treated like villains and rich people as cash dispensers for big government programs. It’s not a coincidence that CKE’s CEO Andy Puzder has been one of the leading critics of high taxes and onerous rules in Washington D.C. and Sacramento.

The next time some liberal hamster asks “what’s the matter with Kansas?”, one might respond “the usual.  What’s the matter with California?”

The state legislative group ALEC finds in its latest “Rich States, Poor States” rating of the states on business climate that California ranks 44th of all the states in business competitiveness.  California has lost roughly 9,000 companies over the last decade, with most of them moving to Texas, Florida, and Tennessee. Last year, in a major loss, Toyota moved its North American headquarters from the Golden State to North Texas.

And that’s just the headquarters – although with many small-to-medium companies, the HQ and the production/distribution/retail is all under one roof.

But with bigger companies?

Minnesota liberals love to hide behind the fact that the Twin Cities is home to a lot of Fortune 1000 companies.  The part they omit (or don’t understand) is that the Headquarters  – with its staffs of senior executives and high-level technocrats, with their taste for the lifestyle and ameniities and central location of major metro hubs like the Twin cities – is a small part of the organization.

Quick – when was the last time 3M or Ecolab built a manufacturing or distribution facility in Minnesota?

(Don’t use Target for an example; it manufactures nothing. It’s employees are all white-collar headquarters workers, and red-collar service employees out in the retail world).

But when things get bad enough?   Even the headquarters staff can move – or, as 3M did during the tax-happy Perpich and Carlson eras, start thinning out the central HQ and moving people to Austin.

Harbinger?

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Off-year election results around the country were a mixed bag.

And by “mixed”, I mean generally good for conservative Republicans nationwide, and six of one, half a dozen of the other in Minnesota.

Tinkering With Leviathan:   Saint Paul’s elections yesterday, were a victory for DFL zealots over DFL extremists.

The City Council gained two councilors who ran on an agenda critical of Mayor Chris Coleman.   This can, in some ways, be read as a very mild moderate win – Jane Prince, who ran unopposed in Ward 7, and Rebecca Noeker (who is currently leading by a razor-thin margin as the “Instant Runoff” counting slogs on and on in Ward 2) ran in opposition to Mayor Coleman’s profligate subsidies of favored businesses via “Tax Increment Financing”, as well as his botched plan to install parking meters on Grand Avenue to try to chisel revenue out of shoppers in Saint Paul’s only successful mid-market retail district.

But I wouldn’t count on much change from the Council on the larger issues that are sandbagging Saint Paul; the stifling regulatory environment, the obeisance to the Met Council’s lust for 19th-century transit, and the crime problems that are percolating along University and out on the East Side.

Meet the New Boss, Same As The Old Boss:  The Saint Paul School Board election, as predicted, installed the four union-backed wholly union-owned candidates over the four formerly union-owned candidates. Whatever residue of independence from the Teachers Union that might have existed in the Saint Paul public schools will be hunted down and buried in concrete shortly.

While changing Superintendent Silva’s intensely unpopular disciplinary policies may be one of the upshots of yesterday’s elections, look for the fiscal profligacy and unaccountability to accelerate.

The election will be a great boon to charter schools – if Saint Paul parents are smart.

Schools Dazed:  The referenda in the various school districts around the east metro went about 50-50; the pattern seemed to be, broadly, that voters approved the bond levies for maintenance and repairs, but voted down the big additions to infrastructure and programming.

Which may show – who knows? – that voters are still manipulable by demands “for the children”, but they have their limits.

We’ll see.

The Gathering Storm?:  Around the country, the news was less ambiguous.  A Republican not only won the Kentucky governor’s race. but so did his black Tea Party Republican Lieutenant Governor.  In VIrginia, Michael Bloomberg, hoping in his ghoulish way to capitalize on the deaths of a couple of TV reporters, pumped a ton of money and a lot of agenda into a couple of key races, with control of the Virginia state senate on the line.  It flopped; just as in Colorado a couple of years ago, only in the most addlepated coastal hothouses can gun control get any popular traction.

In Houston, a referendum on gay rights got swept away in a vote that would be hard to see as anything but a backlash against the creeping fascism of the Social Justice Warriors and their waves of lawsuits and coercion against supporters of traditional marriage.  And even in San Francisco, the sanctuary-city-promoting sheriff got sent packing.

It’s a year ’til the next election.  Look for “progressives” with deep pockets to spend a ton of money to try to iron out the wrinkles in the narrative.

Green Fizzle

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The much-lauded California program that jacked up taxes on out-of-state corporations and devoted half the proceeds to “green” projects has apparently fallen short of expecations

90% short.  At least, as far as they can tell; the program isn’t actually releasing details, which – let’s be honest – means they actually did worse than 10% of projections.

Three years after California voters passed a ballot measure raise taxes on corporations and generate clean energy jobs by funding energy-efficiency projects in schools, barely one-tenth of the promised jobs have been created, and the state has no comprehensive list to show how much work has been done or how much energy has been saved.

Money is trickling in at a slower-than-anticipated rate, and more than half of the $297 million given to schools so far has gone to consultants and energy auditors. The board created to oversee the project and submit annual progress reports to the Legislature has never met, according to a review by The Associated Press.

In other words, the law didn’t repeal human behavior – corporations curtailed California operations to avoid the tax – and, most damningly, the whole thing turned into a wealth-transfer program, moving money from the productive class to the rent-seeking parasites.

Thanks A Billion

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To:  Governor Dayton, the Minnesota DFL, and just enough Republicans to make it a community embarassment
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Thanks For Nothing, Idiots

All,

We – those of us on the real right – tried to warn you.  But you were too busy gettign yoru arm twisted by Zigi Wilf, or entertaining sentimental stories about families going to Met Stadium in -25 blizzard conditions, or wiping foam from guys in helga braids off your face, to pay attention.

So pay attention now; you were wrong, and we were right, and the deal you were browbeaten into or were too stupid to know better than to oppose “crafted” to build the new Vikings stadium is one of the worst stadium deals in the US.

However, I’m sure the Downtown Brotherhood has made their thanks known.

On behalf of the rest of us?   Oh, yeah – we don’t count, except if we don’t pay our taxes on time.

That is all.

 

Transit Is Painless

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SCENE:  Mitch BERG is mowing his lawn.  Avery LIBRELLE, fresh from a trip on the Green Line ,ambles up the sidewalk.  

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!  Societies that impose punitive taxes on cars, like Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, all have higher qualities of life than the US does!

BERG:  OK.  So?

LIBRELLE:  So we could do with fewer cars!

BERG:  Correlation does not equal causation.

LIBRELLE:  What are you talking about?

BERG:  All three of those countries have higher suicide rates than the United States.  Clearly high taxes and lack of cars make people want to kill themselves.

LIBRELLE:  Why do you hate science?

And SCENE

As Fuzzy As Rand Paul Is…

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…on foreign policy and defense, the more I see of this kind of talk, of a 14.5% flat income tax for individuals and businesses…:

So on Thursday I am announcing an over $2 trillion tax cut that would repeal the entire IRS tax code—more than 70,000 pages—and replace it with a low, broad-based tax of 14.5% on individuals and businesses. I would eliminate nearly every special-interest loophole. The plan also eliminates the payroll tax on workers and several federal taxes outright, including gift and estate taxes, telephone taxes, and all duties and tariffs. I call this “The Fair and Flat Tax.” . . .Even Mr. Obama’s economic advisers tell him that the U.S. corporate tax code, which has the highest rates in the world (35%), is an economic drag. When an iconic American company like Burger King wants to renounce its citizenship for Canada because that country’s tax rates are so much lower, there’s a fundamental problem.

 

…the more I want him to remain a contender.