Posted by Tina
A Forbes article today demonstrates truth behind the old joke that if you want less of something you should tax it. In this case the thing we get less of is sales of medical devices and the tax revenue that was supposed to freely flow from those sales. Since the Obamacare medical device tax kicked in sales in the U.S. have dropped 1.5-2%.
I always thought this was a ghoulish tax anyway. Think of it…old ladies and men hobbling around on a deteriorating knees become a cash cow for government when their medicare insurance is forced to pay more for the surgery in order to pay the government it’s device tax. And it isn’t just old folks. It’s babies born with birth defects and people involved in terrible accidents. Think of the suffering that will be exploited so that government can rake in enough cash to make Obamacare work! Don’t these people deserve a certain amount of sympathy rather than a sledge hammer to their wounds?
Another downside. Companies that make these devices must find ways to deal with the increased cost of doing business. Some have chosen to acquire a business in another country and incorporate there to avoid the tax and the hassle of record keeping and reporting. Some device makers are small businesses and report this tax could cause them to lay off workers or close their doors…per Forbes:
Early studies suggested that the medical device tax would eventually cost the industry 43,000 jobs. According to a survey of its members by industry trade group AdvaMed, the excise tax has cost 33,000 jobs in the first year alone.
Because it’s assessed on sales, even unprofitable companies have to pay it. That’s a hefty blow to the 80 percent of the industry comprised of smaller start-up companies, which may be years away from posting profits.
Investment in these businesses, according to Forbes, is also down. Tax something and we et less of it.
Bernie Sanders just reintroduced the notion of death taxes, another ghoulish tax in which our government plays grave robber to confiscate big piles of cash from the accounts of the dead:
“A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much while so many have so little,” Mr. Sanders said at the Vermont AFL-CIO annual convention.
“We need a tax system which asks the billionaire class to pay its fair share of taxes and which reduces the obscene degree of wealth inequality in America,” said Mr. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
According to Mr. Sanders, taxing the top .25 percent of wealthiest Americans is the fairest way to reduce wealth inequality, lower the $17 trillion national debt and pay for investments in infrastructure, education and other neglected national priorities.
Bernie is too dim (socialist) to realize that the wealth he wants for government to spend, when left in the private sector, is used to fuel the economy, create jobs, and create even more investment wealth. It is not used just for luxury items but also for the prosperity of our nation as a whole. Taxing wealth, taking a persons property at death, will eventually lead to less wealth, less investment, less innovation, fewer job opportunities, less given charitably and philanthropically. Meanwhile, our government will spend and create debt and spend and create debt…it NEVER gets smaller only less efficient, less strong, less credible.
Private property is one of the pillars of our free nation. Every citizen has the potential to become a wealthy person if he chooses. But once the government decides has the power over us to take half or more of what someone has accumulated over his life the fundamental tenet of freedom and property rights will be broken. What is to stop government from taking all wealth from every citizen and handing out our shared daily bread?
Our government has become an enemy of the people. Our government has become nothing more than a confiscation and redistribution machine. None of us is left unharmed by its ghoulish, covetous taxing arm. The tax laws are complex, contradictory, overlapping and impossible to file with certainty. Forbes, once again, points to the mess in medical device reporting and administration:
In the four years since Obamacare became law, the IRS hasn’t been able to figure out who actually has to pay the tax.
Many of the forms that companies have submitted have been rife with errors. One set of companies paid $41.6 million too much. Another paid $76 million too little.
The IRS has made its share of mistakes, too. More than 200 companies have been hit with more than $700,000 in wrongful penalties.
Our economy is suffering because of the big government gobblers and ghouls who think we can tax our way to prosperity. Six years have shown their taxing and regulating policies have the opposite effect. If we want prosperity and opportunity we need a tax policy that is simple and that frees investors and consumers to save, spend and invest in private business, private jobs, private products, and private ownership.
God bless America. God save us from the ghouls of bog government!
It is very hard to believe we have such incompetent people in charge of our country. Or is this all by design to take us down and out as a supper power nation? How could they not know by taxing something more would raise the cost? Who’s going to invent the future life-saving products if the businesses are gone, the government? Is that where we’re headed? More government sponsored/supported/bailed-out with more taxes from our pockets?
Here’s a good video that gives a visual on a trillion dollars. Just picture what 17 trillion looks like now and 20 trillion in a couple of years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5y8r2MXYpY
Yeah, what kind of bearded Marxist would support something as anti-freedom as the estate tax?
Oh.
“The idea of using an inheritance tax to raise revenue occurred to the nation’s first politicians, too. In 1797, the Congress voted and President John Adams signed into law an estate tax to fund the building of a federal navy.
Today’s debate echoes that of the nation’s founders in another, more profound way. Does allowing a small number of families to accumulate great wealth — increasing from generation to generation — harm democracy? The United States Constitution’s ban on inherited titles met with unanimous approval because of the perceived threat posed by lords and earls to a democratic republic. Similarly, Americans have always understood that establishing a small group of families with seemingly unlimited wealth, social privilege, and political power undermines a fundamental American principle: that all citizens are legally and politically equal.
Some founders wanted to eliminate inheritance entirely. In a letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson suggested that all property be redistributed every fifty years, because”the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” Madison gently pointed out the plan’s impracticality. Benjamin Franklin unsuccessfully pushed for the first Pennsylvania constitution to declare concentrated wealth”a danger to the happiness of mankind.”
At the other end of the spectrum, the Constitutional Convention decided to forbid the English practice of allowing the government to seize the entire estate of a person convicted of treason. They reasoned that the property even of citizens who had committed the highest crimes against the nation should not be wholly confiscated.
But, again like today, most people held views in between. By the 1770s, because of the practices of primogeniture (requiring all property to go to the deceased’s first son) and entail (allowing families to will property that could never be divided or sold), along with rich families’ penchant for land speculation, about three-quarters of Virginia’s good land was owned by only a few hundred families, out of a population of around 400,000. Pressed by the small farmers and landless men on whom it depended for military service, Virginia banned primogeniture and entail in 1777. Virginia reached a compromise: Rich families didn’t lose their land, but large estates got broken up over time, thereby loosening the richest families’ grip over Virginia’s economy and politics.
So, as with other political issues—even independence itself—Revolutionary-era Americans held a range of views on how much property people should be allowed to pass on to their children. But one thing is certain: They hoped to prevent the emergence of a small group of people with perpetual wealth and thus perpetual privilege. Keeping a robust estate tax today would further that goal, and it would be consistent with a long-standing tradition of American democracy.”
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/134453#sthash.dbzsPqPV.dpuf
More:
“If there was one thing the Revolutionary generation agreed on — and those guys who dress up like them at Tea Party conventions most definitely do not — it was the incompatibility of democracy and inherited wealth.
With Thomas Jefferson taking the lead in the Virginia legislature in 1777, every Revolutionary state government abolished the laws of primogeniture and entail that had served to perpetuate the concentration of inherited property. Jefferson cited Adam Smith, the hero of free market capitalists everywhere, as the source of his conviction that (as Smith wrote, and Jefferson closely echoed in his own words), “A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural.” Smith said: “There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death.”
The states left no doubt that in taking this step they were giving expression to a basic and widely shared philosophical belief that equality of citizenship was impossible in a nation where inequality of wealth remained the rule. North Carolina’s 1784 statute explained that by keeping large estates together for succeeding generations, the old system had served “only to raise the wealth and importance of particular families and individuals, giving them an unequal and undue influence in a republic” and promoting “contention and injustice.” Abolishing aristocratic forms of inheritance would by contrast “tend to promote that equality of property which is of the spirit and principle of a genuine republic.”
Others wanted to go much further; Thomas Paine, like Smith and Jefferson, made much of the idea that landed property itself was an affront to the natural right of each generation to the usufruct of the earth, and proposed a “ground rent” — in fact an inheritance tax — on property at the time it is conveyed at death, with the money so collected to be distributed to all citizens at age 21, “as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property.”
Even stalwart members of the latter-day Republican Party, the representatives of business and inherited wealth, often emphatically embraced these tenets of economic equality in a democracy. I’ve mentioned Herbert Hoover’s disdain for the “idle rich” and his strong support for breaking up large fortunes. Theodore Roosevelt, who was the first president to propose a steeply graduated tax on inheritances, was another: he declared that the transmission of large wealth to young men “does not do them any real service and is of great and genuine detriment to the community at large.”
In her debate in Delaware yesterday, the Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell asserted that the estate tax is a “tenet of Marxism.” I’m not sure how much Marx she has read, but she might want to read the works of his fellow travelers Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore Roosevelt before her next debate.”
http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/10/estate_tax_and_founding_fathers
And I’m not buying the medical device industry’s claim that the tax is causing prices to go up:
“WASHINGTON — IN the last few days of negotiations in Congress, repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s tax on medical devices emerged as a key Republican demand. The medical-device industry waged an intense lobbying campaign — even garnering the support of many Democrats who favored the law — arguing that the tax would stifle innovation and increase health care costs.
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This argument is doubly disingenuous. Not only can the medical-device industry easily afford the tax without compromising innovation, but the industry’s enormous profits are a result of anticompetitive practices that themselves drive up medical-device costs unnecessarily. The tax is a distraction from reforms to the industry that are urgently needed to lower health care costs.
The medical-device industry faces virtually no price competition. Because of confidentiality agreements that manufacturers require hospitals to sign, the prices of the devices are cloaked in secrecy. This lack of transparency impedes hospitals from sharing price information and thus knowing whether they are getting a good deal.
Even worse, manufacturers often maintain personal relationships (sometimes involving financial payments like consulting fees) with physicians who choose the medical devices that their hospitals purchase, creating a conflict of interest. Physicians often don’t even know the costs of the devices, and individual physicians often choose devices on their own, which weakens a hospital’s ability to bargain for volume discounts.
Such anticompetitive practices help generate a wide variation in the prices of medical devices — and contribute to higher prices in general. For example, the Government Accountability Office found that prices for cardiac implantable medical devices in the United States vary by several thousand dollars. And even the lowest-priced devices in the United States are expensive compared with those in other developed countries. According to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, the United States spends about 50 percent more than expected on the top five medical devices, compared with Europe and Japan. McKinsey calculates that this amounts to $26 billion in excessive spending each year. Medicare, private health insurers and patients end up paying these inflated prices.
Excessive prices fuel enormous profits — profits that dwarf both the medical-device tax and the industry’s investments in research and development. Consider the device division of Johnson & Johnson, which in 2012 had an operating profit of $7.2 billion. By the company’s own estimate, the device tax would amount to at most $300 million, and its investment in research and development amounts to only $1.7 billion.
There are several ways policy makers could lower device costs. The first step would be to end the anticompetitive practices that prevent hospitals from getting the best deals. Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, has sponsored legislation that would foster transparency by posting online price information for implantable medical devices.
In addition, instead of simply paying hospitals based in part on what they have spent on devices, Medicare should force manufacturers to compete for business based on a product’s price and quality.
Medicare should also pay hospitals a single lump sum for all of the associated costs of a given procedure (like a hip replacement). This approach, known as “bundling” the costs, would create incentives for hospitals to lower device costs. Savings should be shared with the physicians, so that their incentives are aligned with the hospital’s.
Bundling has been used successfully in pilot programs. Under Medicare’s Acute Care Episode Program — which bundled payments for cardiac and orthopedic procedures — physicians worked together to choose high-quality, cost-effective devices. Baptist Health System in Texas, which participated in the program, used clinical evidence to choose devices and negotiated lower prices for both Medicare and non-Medicare patients.
States could adopt similar payment reforms for private insurance and their Medicaid programs. In Arkansas, the Medicaid program and private payers — including Walmart — have collaborated to adopt bundled payments for several procedures, including hip and knee replacements.
To complement these efforts, the new Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, a nongovernmental body created by the Affordable Care Act, should pay for research that compares the effectiveness of devices so physicians can make informed choices. (Three years into its existence, the institute has initiated few, if any, studies of medical devices.) Medicare or the Food and Drug Administration should also require the use of registries that track when devices fail.
Currently, medical-device manufacturers allocate only a sliver of profits to research and development and often focus on “tweaks” to existing devices, without providing any evidence that they are of better quality. Competitive pressures from public and private payers would provide incentives for the industry to become more innovative, producing technologies that actually lowered costs and offered truly advanced breakthroughs.
Instead of using its clout to lobby against the device tax — which helped foment opposition to the Affordable Care Act — the medical-device industry needs to share the responsibility of lowering costs for patients, businesses and taxpayers.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/17/opinion/the-myth-of-the-medical-device-tax.html?_r=0
A very good effort teach. I’m sure our founders had many philosophical discussions as they formed our Constitution and governed in the earliest years of the republic.
It would be wise to remember that private property rights became a pillar of our government and were of particular importance given the aristocracy of Europe.
Some background history for context at What Would the Founders Think:
Small business franchisees are not aristocrats with absolute power over the lowley serfs who beg for crumbs in America.
The average American franchise owner is a regular American, probably in debt for the franchise, working to make a decent living for his family, working to keep his business going and growing, and happily able to offer others a job. His ability to offer jobs depends on his cash flow which can ebb and flow like the tides and which will be significantly impacted by adverse conditions like rises in food prices, energy prices, employee benefits, and other insurances and fees. During the non-recovery economy these businesses have been hit by all of the above. and what do Democrats propose to do? They propose hitting this small business owner again with a wage increase for each minimum wage employee from about $2.00 more and hour to $.50 more an hour. His payroll taxes and workers comp taxes would also increase…if he keeps all of his workers and continues to work them the same number of hours. What would you do if you owned the business?
Chris says the business owner can cut his expenses in other areas. Okay that means smaller food portions, fewer items on the menu, cheaper packaging, or the elimination of some ingredients. or it could mean that your customers aren’t quite as comfortable as the weather gets cold or heats up. Remember you still have to get people to come in and relinquish their hard earned money for your burger…and you have to compete for their business with others in similar businesses, sometimes less than a block away. Chris’s idea might work…but if it doesn’t? It will help the bottom line to work a few extra hours yourself in the morning and in the evening and cut the hours of a couple of employees. It’s not what you would rather do….but it is a very real possibility that it is what you will have to do.
Teenagers, college students, and people without skills often work these jobs. They face very high unemployment struggles already. Chris’s studies by people that don;t actually work these businesses aren’t much comfort to anyone hoping to get his foot in the door with an entry level position at minimum wage. If the government manages to force the issue jobs will be lost and the first people to lose will be those who most need to work.
America is not a land of aristocrat land owners. Millions of people own businesses and property and all of us have the right and the freedom to work hard to grow wealth for ourselves.
I’m against government artificially deciding what someone must pay or a job is worth.They are not in a position to know. The business owner does know and must compete with other like businesses for the best workers. The market, and the value of the worker to the business, is a better measure of compensation.
Finally a few quotes from Alexis de Tocqueville at <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville".Wikipedia:
I want every American to do well but I realize that how well a person does depends mostly on how he applies himself, how much he is willing to sacrifice and risk, and frankly in some ways on luck. I don’t know why some people rise to prominence and wealth without hardly trying and others seem to struggle and never get anywhere. I do know that the vast majority of us are willing to apply ourselves enough to make a fairly decent living for ourselves.
Raising the minimum wage is an idea that seems good on the surface. What could be wrong with people being paid a little more this week for the same job they did last week? Nothing if you are the recipient of the money. But if you have to give up that money and more it looks a lot different. It looks different when you make out the checks, when you deposit the payroll taxes, and when your floor manager comes to you and says he’s doing more than the new guy at the counter and shouldn’t he make a little more now too?
Our government could do many things to improve conditions so that there would be greater opportunity for everyone. Raising the minimum wage, especially in a crappy economy, isn’t one of them.
Tina: “It would be wise to remember that private property rights became a pillar of our government and were of particular importance given the aristocracy of Europe.”
…Yes, and the desire not to allow a permanent aristocracy to arise also became a pillar of our government and were of particular importance given the aristocracy of Europe.
These were conflicting goals. The Founders had to somehow reconcile them: how to establish a fair way of ensuring that a permanent aristocracy did not arise, while still respecting property rights? The estate tax looked fair to them.
It looks fair to me, too. The burden of the estate tax is small and easily manageable by those wealthy enough to enjoy the pleasure of paying it. In 2013, only about 0.14% of estates owed any estate tax.
http://www.cbpp.org/files/estatetaxmyths.pdf
The notion that this is somehow a grave threat to our freedom is ridiculous, and shows how bought out the Tea Party and the current Republican party are by wealthy interests. Fighting the estate tax does nothing to help the common man; it only protects a very small number of rich people from having to pay a small percentage more in taxes. But that’s the worst possible scenario for Republicans, who consider the rich to be the only minority worth protecting.
The Founders were not absolutist thinkers. It’s a shame today’s Republicans are.
I did not mention anything about the minimum wage or franchise owners in this thread, nor will I.
Chris: “The notion that this is somehow a grave threat to our freedom is ridiculous…”
I will say it again…naive child!
It is the principle…it is the sense of government entitlement to property…it is the lack of respect for any person’s property and wealth that we are talking about! If they do not respect a wealthy mans property they do not respect any mans property!
Confiscating wealth is what the government does! Once begun this tax platform would expand…what the government takes today is NEVER enough…and it’s particularly obscene now when you consider the debt our government has accumulated is nearly $18 trillion!
Our GDP isn’t as large at only $16.799 trillion! And a third of America is not working! Another portion is working part time.
NBC reminded us, right after Obama was elected, how little the federal government asked of its hard working citizens only 55 years ago:
The dirty little secret is that the government bureaucracy, and its hundreds of redistribution programs, cannot be paid for just by taxing the rich. They have to tap into the vast middle class! The middle class isn’t doing better today because the government has already confiscated the wealth building capability from the middle class. They can’t raise those taxes more so the only place left is the accumulated wealth of the rich. That wealth that has already been taxed. That wealth is the investment machine for the economy. That wealth, once consumed by government, will be diminished until its GONE!
My generation paid more, and then more, and then even more for all of this big government spending…and over fifty years the burden has taken its toll. Now the middle class is weaker rather than stronger.
This wealth tax is the last big door they can tap unless they decide to confiscate businesses outright. Unless people like you wake up that will be next. some in DC already think that’s a good idea. If you think the government would stop at taxing just a small portion of any persons wealth you are indeed naive. But you don’t have to be stupid too!
Wake up! Our government IS the big elitist aristocracy in America. IT is the greedy mouth that is never satisfied. It is a huge wealth and land grabber and the founders NEVER intended for the federal government to become the behemoth wealth grabbing monster that it is. To believe so is to deny freedom itself!
Government is already taking too much from those who work and from those who invest and it does not deliver much value for all it takes either! The more it takes the more the people are in need. At some point Chris, you are going to have to confront this reality.
Republicans are not absolutist thinkers.
Unfortunately you are unwilling to learn a damn thing from the experience of those who have seen that taxes never really go down and the government never stops at just this amount or that. Once they get their foot in any door it’s only a matter of time before they take more…and then more.
So no…the government does not need to confiscate the wealth that drives our economy!
The government needs to learn how to be efficient. The government needs to cut spending! The government needs to empower people to uplift themselves to grow their own nest eggs and wealth. The government is the problem it is not the solution
Tina: “taxes never really go down”
Even if we only restrict our conversation to the estate tax, this is obviously not true. The estate tax has gone WAY down over just the past decade and change:
“In 2001, the year George W. Bush became president, individual estates over $675,000 were taxed and the top rate was 55 percent. Now, the maximum tax is 40 percent and only individual estates worth more than $5.25 million are taxed (a figure that will now be automatically adjusted for inflation).”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/is-the-estate-tax-doomed/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
Clearly, taxes are lowered all the time.
The Constitution gives lawmakers the right to set reasonable tax policy. Citizens have the right to lobby and elect people who share their will represent their beliefs about what reasonable tax policy is. Those are facts. Turning the debate away from this specific policy to talk about “property rights” is a distraction. Again, you seem to want to re-litigate arguments that were settled long ago. The government has the right to tax you. You may find certain taxes unreasonable, but please don’t claim that those taxes are a violation of your rights.
Today’s Republican party is governed by the notion that supporting ANY new tax, and not properly opposing many that have already existed for decades, will inevitably lead to more and more taxes until we’re Venezuela. This attitude is irrational, and is nothing by an obstacle to reasonable debate. You don’t want to discuss whether or not this particular tax is reasonable or fair, because you’re too busy engaging in the slippery slope fallacy. It’s the same logic that makes conservatives say asinine things like “If we let gays marry, what’s next? Polygamy, incest, and bestiality?” This is a strategy devised to instill fear in people and make them forget the issue actually on the table. The wrongness of those things tells us nothing about whether gay marriage is right or wrong; similarly, the wrongness of the government taking ALL of our private property tells us nothing about whether the estate tax is right or wrong.
That you think it’s rational to leap from the estate tax–which, again, was supported by our founding fathers, a fact which you cannot contravene–to talking about the government confiscating all property shows that you are an absolutist thinker, without the capacity to deal with nuance. You haven’t once brought up the interest the government has in levying the estate tax: the need for our democracy to avoid a permanent aristocracy class.
The Tea Party and the Republican party work for the aristocracy, even if they don’t know it. Nearly all of their platforms are based on apologetics for corporations and the wealthy. Hating the estate tax is just another example of how the right is contributing to the increasing wealth gap.
D’Souza points out in his book “America” we have transformed into the serfs/share-croppers our ancestors were before coming to America. Serfs worked the land for half of the crops while the other half was taken by land owners.
American workers worked until April 21st, or 111 days this years to pay all of the taxes they owed.
Our government has become the land owners of our ancestors.
SERFS OR MODERN SHARE CROPPERS:
“Share croppers normally received a home, the necessary tools, farm animals, and sometimes even some education, for their labor. They also received a share in the profit — usually, about half — from the fruits of their labor.
This arrangement was somewhat similar to the arrangement of the serfs of England. Both groups were tied to the land owner. Both paid half of the product of their labor for the privilege of living and working on the land. And, with both, the amount of freedom allowed to the workers by the landowners was often quite arbitrary.
Usually, the land owner told them what they will do, how they are to do it and when they were expected to do it. For instance, the land owners wished to insure that everyone in the family would be available to work the fields during the growing season. To that end, they even suspended education every summer.
Today, few of us work the fields. Yet, are we less of a share-cropper? Clearly, half of all the proceeds of our labor is still paid to the ultimate landowner, the government. Unlike serfs or share-croppers, we must now purchase the land on which we live. Yet, the ultimate landowner — the government — still instructs us on what we may or may not do with that land.
There was a time in our common law when it was taught that “Every man’s house is his castle; and even though the winds of heaven may blow through it, the King may not enter.” That was, of course, to include the sheriff, the tax collector, and all other police officers too. However, the Lords and Ladies of Congress did not find this common law maxim expedient to the expressed goals of modern government. Consequently, they found ways to totally trash the concept.
Not to be outdone by the original land-barons of old, today’s government has decreed “servient estate” over our property to itself. That is, federal, state and local governments have passed laws allowing government agents easement to our private property. Consequently, not only can today’s government place restrictions on the use of private property, government agents may now search and seize private property almost at will.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1187052/posts
Tax Freedom Day® 2014 is April 21, Three Days Later Than Last Year: (This is an average with Calif’s being April 30th.)
“What is Tax Freedom Day®?
Tax Freedom Day is the day when the nation as a whole has earned enough money to pay its total tax bill for year. A vivid, calendar-based illustration of the cost of government, Tax Freedom Day divides all federal, state, and local taxes by the nation’s income. In 2014, Americans will pay $3.0 trillion in federal taxes and $1.5 trillion in state taxes, for a total tax bill of $4.5 trillion, or 30.2 percent of income. This year, Tax Freedom Day falls on April 21, or 111 days into the year.
Why is Tax Freedom Day later this year?
Tax Freedom Day is three days later than last year due mainly to the country’s continued slow economic recovery, which is expected to boost tax revenue especially from the corporate, payroll, and individual income tax.
When is Tax Freedom Day if you include federal borrowing?
Since 2002, federal expenses have exceeded federal revenues, with the budget deficit exceeding $1 trillion annually from 2009 to 2012 and over $800 billion in 2013. In 2014, the deficit will continue to decline to $636 billion. If we include this annual federal borrowing, which represents future taxes owed, Tax Freedom Day would occur on May 6, 15 days later. The latest ever deficit-inclusive Tax Freedom Day occurred during World War II on May 21, 1945.
When is my state’s Tax Freedom Day?” (See chart)
http://taxfoundation.org/article/tax-freedom-day-2014-april-21-three-days-later-last-year
The government has become our landlords in control of our property and freedom.
Peggy when individuals consider all of the other “hidden taxes” and fees they pay on milk, gasoline, wheat, and the sales taxes, property taxes, business taxes care and boat registration taxes, alarm taxes, fire taxes…taxes on water, telephone, electricity and gas…it’s a wonder we have any money left at all for our own use.
This is why It irks me when young skulls full o mush think more and higher taxes are better. They have no idea what they are talking about; they just want to be “nice”…makes me want to barf!
Chris: “Clearly, taxes are lowered all the time.”
Explain how it is that every budget ever written is larger than the last…explain the fact that the debt is as large as it is if the government doesn’t just keep increasing in size. They may shift the deck chairs around a bit (depending on which conditions can be exploited in the next election) but you can be sure that government always gets bigger and that requires higher, more, or different taxes!
Use this link to view revenue to government in any year going back to at least the fifties.
Find budget receipts and outlays going back to 1789 here.
“This attitude is irrational, and is nothing by an obstacle to reasonable debate.”
The position is the result of a generation that has been pushed to extremes and has decided its time to apply the brakes. This position is the result of several decades of liberals saying don’t worry everything is fine. (Barney Frank and the loan mess…SS being unsustainable…public debt…unsustainable budgets).
The attitude comes from attempting to deal with obnoxious dismissals fro your liberal cohorts that just keep lying about how things are and pretending they can continue to do the same unworkable things without something bad happening. The attitude is extreme frustration and fed-upness!
You are the one complaining about the lack of opportunity for your generation but you trust the party that screwed it up for everyone over the party with ideas that would create abundance and greater opportunity for everyone…that thinks we should all be more responsible and educated about how to succeed…personally, and at the levels of community, and state and federal levels.
“This is a strategy devised to instill fear…”
Democrats never do that….phfttt! Race baiters are out in droves…the President participates…sky is falling glo-warmers constantly use the fear factor. If we don’t raise taxes, start another program, help the poor, the kids, granny…they will die, starve, get thrown off a cliff! Your party wrote the book!
” You haven’t once brought up the interest the government has in levying the estate tax: the need for our democracy to avoid a permanent aristocracy class.”
And there you go. If we don’t support death taxes an aristocracy will take over…that IS FEAR MONGERING in case you didn’t notice!!!!!
In the last fifty or sixty years two groups have wielded tremendous financial power in our elections…education/unions and George Soros funded foundations/501c4’s. There is no real danger save from unscrupulous activism.
Our Constitution will prevent an aristocracy from taking power…at least it will if we will just follow it.
It would be even less possible or troublesome IF the people could keep more of what they earn and IF our schools actually taught students the value of saving and investing to grow personal wealth. The best counter to an aristocracy is a vibrant and well-to-do middle class with a very small needy population.
Liberals have been running our schools for at least fifty years and pushing progressivism, big government, and dependency…and now we are a sick, needy society.
Aristocracy…how many lefties would fit that caricature? George Soros certainly…Nancy Pelosi…the Clintons, John Kerry, Harry Reid. Bet you never think of them that way.
CNBC reports:
Had we reformed SS in the eighties like we wanted to this wouldn’t be happening. The financial meltdown hasn’t helped but that too didn’t have to happen and wouldn’t have had Barney Frank and company not been so arrogant and listened to GWB’s constant warnings.
We all pay dearly into social security. Imagine if a of that money were invested for each individual. A safe investment like the teachers have. Here’s an idea what money can do when you put it to work:
It would only take a generation or two for the poor to be lifted out of poverty.
But you keep buying into those distractions floated by elitists lefties (aristocracy) who try to scare you about the bad old republicans that are heartless, cruel, absolutists.
or…you might want to actually learn something that ill set you FREE!
I’m at the porcelain bowl with you. I do have to admit it cracks me up though to read a twenty year old try to convince everyone he’s an expert on everything. I remember I too thought my parents didn’t know anything until I grew up and realized how wise and smart they were and I was the one who didn’t know as much as I thought I did.
Life’s experiences has a tendency to make men out of boys and women out of girls. Some get the message and some prefer to put their fingers in their ears and refuse to listen.
Heard today the price of milk hit an all time record high. Now, lets see just how many things are made with milk? Hum, cheese, butter and a whole bunch of other things that too will cost more and more and more.
When people stop buying milk and products made with milk and other things because they can’t afford them any more there will be less taxes collected, right? Which means our local, state and the feds are going to be getting less from the tax collectors (aka: businesses cuz businesses don’t pay taxes, they just collect them from the consumer of their products.) Less taxes collected less services provided or increase taxes to take more out of the pockets of taxpayers.
So, the vicious circle goes around and around. Prices go up and people quit buying. Taxes go up because the people quit buying. Repeat..repeat..repeat..
Prices go down when there is a surplus not when there is a shortage. When prices go down and people can afford to buy it generates tax revenues.
Remember this PP&M song from our day?
“Oh, when will they ever learn? ..Oh, when will they ever learn?”
Let’s hope they learn before it’s too late.
From elsewhere on the web—
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/jobs-friday-how-bubblevision-misses-the-epic-failure-of-the-us-labor-market/
The Beatles got it!
RHT447 WOW!!
Tina: “And there you go. If we don’t support death taxes an aristocracy will take over…that IS FEAR MONGERING in case you didn’t notice!!!!!”
So was Thomas Jefferson fear-mongering?
“A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural.” –Thomas Jefferson
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power (of money) should be taken away from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.”
– Thomas Jefferson
“I hope a tax will be preferred [to a loan which threatens to saddle us with a perpetual debt], because it will awaken the attention of the people and make reformation and economy the principle of the next election. The frequent recurrence of this chastening operation can alone restrain the propensity of governments to enlarge expense beyond income.”
-Thomas Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, 1820
Tina: “In the last fifty or sixty years two groups have wielded tremendous financial power in our elections…education/unions and George Soros funded foundations/501c4′s. There is no real danger save from unscrupulous activism.”
LOL! This is ridiculous. It is a fact that unions held more financial and political power during the 50s and 60s. Claiming that unions have too much power now, when the rate of unionization is at its lowest point in decades, is to engage in the most cynical form of scapegoating.
I agree that 501c4s have too much power and most of them should not have ANY tax breaks, but you only bring up the ones funded by Soros. Why? The Kochs fund a lot of these as well.
You completely leave out the power of corporations, which has grown to an absurd degree over the past few decades–this indicates a blind spot so big, you can’t possibly make a meaningful contribution to any conversation about power in government.
“Our Constitution will prevent an aristocracy from taking power…at least it will if we will just follow it.”
Does it matter that the Founders didn’t agree with you? Clearly they believed that the Constitution itself was NOT enough to prevent this, and more laws had to be passed to reign in the power of corporations and the wealthy. Modern Tea Partiers do not understand the positions of the Founders nearly as well as they think they do (hell, their entire name is a misnomer; the Boston Tea Party was a revolt against a corporate tax break, not a tax increase).
Peggy, “I’m old” is not an argument. I form my opinions based on facts and evidence. The fact that you and Tina have lived longer does not change the fact that both of you routinely spread lies and conspiracies from the worst corners of the Internet tell me; why should I take your word on ANYTHING?
“I’m old” isn’t the argument, nimrod!
You form your opinions in an adolescent bubble formed by propagandists. You are your own worst victim. There is none so stupid than he who will not learn from the knowledge and experience of others. How the hell do you expect to be an effective teacher? Or is it so bad that you believe YOU ARE original perfect thought!
I’ve told you before: DO NOT “TAKE MY WORD” for anything…do not believe anything I say. This is an opinion blog…expect opinions…expect different positions, points of view and yes, even facts. We EXPLORE here.
I don’t expect you to believe what I say. I do expect you to think…and to treat others with more respect!
I am also very tired of your petulance…poor baaaaaby…can’t handle someone posting a thought from a controversial website…even if the single thought is TRUE or expresses an interesting point of view. Nope, if its a controversial site it means the poster is automatically a serial liar, a racist, a flawed person. Who the hell do you think you are?
You’re an intolerant, judgmental, pc, fantic who can’t meet the harsh standard he expects of others. Back off.
Just a recent article about how America taxes people, even while earning their living abroad and its effects of their decision to become expatriates….
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101987302?__source=xfinity|mod&par=xfinity
Interesting. It isn’t the tax it’s the intrusive, combative nature of the administrations approach and the complexity and intrusiveness of the regulations!
I understand a couple of Swiss banks to us to go pound sand…they aren’t willing to cooperate with this intrusion into their customers private accounts.
This got me to thinking. Imagine if it was this hard to do other types of business. Imagine having to jump through this many hoops to buy underware or groceries. Retailers do whatever they can to make purchasing a simple, pleasant, satisfying experience.
Our government is stupid It makes law that is difficult to understand and compliance impossible without legal or professional help…even then the uncertainty that you’ve done everything right hangs over your head. If the audit comes you’re made to feel like a criminal…and politicians paint those who resist this complexity as unpatriotic or even criminal.