Category Archives: Taxes

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.

Options

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Roughed out my taxes. Going to have to write a check to the IRS – not enough deductions.

I suppose I could
start a private charity to solicit giant donations – the blue arrowhead is helpful, find your friends! Or maybe just not pay the taxes.

But I’m not a Democrat. I need a side business where I can lose some money on paper and write off expenses such as bar association dues.

Any suggestions?

Joe Doakes

I got nothing for you, man.

Anyone?

More Words, More Problems

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Always hated Word Problems in Math class. What’s the point? When will I ever use that stuff?

“If the amount on Line 8 of Form M1 is over $36,080 but not over $143,350, then Enter on Line 9 of Form M1 $1,930.28 + 7.05% of the amount over $36,080.”

From Table Rate Schedule, Table 29, Minnesota Individual Income Tax Forms and Instructions, 2014

That’s it. I’m a Flat Taxer from now on.

Joe Doakes

what’s the old joke? “A conservative is a Democrat that’s been mugged; a libertarian is a conservative that’s been audited?”

Over-Theft

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If the cashier at Cub took my money then announced she had a surplus, I’d say she overcharged me. That’s a bad thing.
If the State takes my money then announces it has a surplus, I’m supposed to be thrilled?

In the private sector, a budget starts with a realistic expectation of income, then works in spending that can be afforded.
In government, a budget starts with special interest spending demands on paid-for politicians, who set the income to cover the payoffs.
The equivalent process in the private sector would be monopolistic price fixing by a crime syndicate.
Joe Doakes

Everything you really need to know about government budgeting, you learn from Henry Hill’s soliloquy about Jimmy Conolly from “Goodfellas”.

You know what I mean; the one that goes “business is been bad? F*** you, give me the money”.

The Proverbial Frog In A Pan

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails in re a recent Powerline article:

“Mandatory” [spending] does not include defense, it covers things the government must spend because people are entitled to them: i.e., welfare, medicare, social security, etc.

 

Entitlements are the big growth. Not a surprise. For my wife and me, it’s $22,000 worth. That’s an eye opener.

Joe Doakes

It’s amazing how conservatives can warn people about something for six years, and it can still be a surprise, even to smart people, how bad it actually is.

Thanks, Tea Party!

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Federal spending (as a percentage of US GDP) drops close to the historical average…

The federal budget is shrinking as a percentage of gross domestic product, falling just below 20 percent in the third quarter of 2014. That’s down four points from its peak of 24 percent in 2011, according to market analysis firm Strategas’ survey of recent Treasury Department data.

 

“That’s a pretty large drop in government spending,” said Daniel Clifton, head of policy research for Strategas.

 

The drop puts current federal spending close to the norm for the last half-century. While the budget has grown in absolute numbers — the omnibus spending bill passed earlier this month totaled more than $1 trillion — federal spending has averaged just over 19 percent of GDP since 1963.

 

The decline is due to a combination of factors, the main one being the restraints that were put on federal spending in 2011 as a result of the debt ceiling standoff in Congress

…for the past half-century.  Which, to be fair, is about when the Fed started its orgy of spending like a crack whore with a stolen gold card in peacetime.

Who’d have thought we’d be talking about the Johnson years as a positive baseline?

At any rate, it’s an incremental step in the right direction – thanks, in its entirety, to the Tea Party.