Category archive: Taxes
Taxpayers and Tax Spenders
By Chuck Roger • August 17th, 2011 12:00 am
By Chuck Rogér Let’s examine a stunning facet of human nature: When people get something free, they want more of that something even if it means hurting other people. A recent study conducted by the Mercatus Center finds that “when the tax-price of federally provided benefits is zero, people demand more, even when funded with [...]
Progressives and Their Taxes Kill Cities
By Chuck Roger • August 1st, 2011 12:00 am
Originally at American Thinker By Chuck Rogér High taxes are bad for cities. Low taxes encourage growth. In fact, between 1980 and 2007, compared to the ten most-taxed metropolitan areas, America’s ten least-taxed metropolitan areas experienced three times faster population growth, 2.7 times faster employment growth, and twice as great an increase in personal income. [...]
Democrats Ponder Kicking their ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Agenda into Overdrive
By Chuck Roger • April 8th, 2011 12:00 am
By Chuck Rogér Updated from post originally in American Thinker on April 7, 2011 The name for this post could have just as fittingly been “Economic Ignoramuses in Wonderland.” As you read, picture in your mind Ayn Rand’s mousey Atlas Shrugged character Wesley Mouch, the top dog at the novel’s Bureau of Economic Planning and National [...]
If it quacks like a liberal…
By Chuck Roger • April 7th, 2011 12:00 am
By Chuck Rogér Only about 20% of Americans see themselves as ideologically “liberal” (1, 2). In recent Rasmussen polls, surveys of likely voters found that: 22% think that tax cuts hurt the economy; 26% believe that less government spending hurts the economy; 23% claim that raising taxes helps the economy; 24% say that government spending helps the [...]
Liberals, taxes, and spending: There are no coincidences
By Chuck Roger • March 24th, 2011 12:00 am
If you are a person who believes in self-reliance, accountability, and facing the consequences for decisions and actions, then you probably believe as 80% of Americans do, that taxpayers should not be penalized for Congress’s irresponsible behavior. But liberals? Liberals are another matter altogether. A recent Rasmussen poll shows that 20% of Americans are willing to [...]
Extension of the Bush tax cuts is not a ‘stimulus’; producers need confidence to increase production
By Chuck Roger • December 16th, 2010 5:43 am
During a Fox News Channel discussion panel, columnist Charles Krauthammer claimed that extending the Bush tax cuts would provide a huge stimulus to the economy in 2011. My wife looked at me and said, “Wait a minute. Pause that,” referring to the DVR-recorded installment of Special Report with Bret Baier that we were watching. See, [...]
E. J. Dionne’s middle class ‘tax burden’ whining: Dishonest? Or blind progressive ideology?
By Chuck Roger • December 13th, 2010 6:04 am
Discussing the lame duck Congress’s tax rate debate, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne complains, Rather than allow the debate to focus on an old tax measure from the beginning of the decade, Obama and the Democrats should have sought early on to replace the Bush tax cut. Their proposal could have shifted the tax [...]
Go west and south, but not too far west, to find freedom from oppressive taxation
By Chuck Roger • July 1st, 2010 8:51 pm
Earlier this week, we looked at something called the Moocher Index and learned that the willingness of people who don’t need financial aid to accept aid anyway is concentrated on both coasts of the United States but is particularly strong in the Northeast. Curiously, the states who have the most unfriendly tax structures also lie [...]
Amerifornia, here we come
By Chuck Roger • June 4th, 2010 8:59 pm
In Chief Executive magazine’s survey of “Best and Worst States for Business 2010,” an introductory summary observes: Californians pay among the highest income and sales taxes in the nation, the former exceeding 10 percent in the top brackets. Unemployment statewide is over 12.2 percent, higher than the national average. State politics seems consumed with how [...]
Behavioral control of the people through the ‘value-added tax’
By Chuck Roger • April 19th, 2010 9:42 pm
Corporations pay zero income tax. Corporations send checks to Uncle Sam. But the checks simply reflect the additional revenues that the corporations must collect from consumers in the form of price adders required to fund those checks. If you’ve never thought about corporate taxes in this manner, now would be a good time to start. [...]
Daft enlightened people are here to stay: more wealth envy
By Chuck Roger • March 16th, 2010 9:58 pm
In “Super Wealthy Deathly Afraid Estate Tax Would Reduce Deficit,” überliberal Bill Scher spews wealth envy venom all over the Bush tax cuts, insisting that the wealthy must “pay their fair share. Wealth redistribution zealots like Scher take it on themselves to decree what is “fair.” In America today, one out of every ten taxpayers [...]
A tortured liberal mind takes on the economic crisis
By Chuck Roger • February 24th, 2010 10:08 pm
Even in my early misguided “liberal” phase I never bought into certain aspects of the liberal worldview. You are about to be exposed to the ramblings of a lost soul caught in full-bore emotional flail. I have tried to not sound nasty in this post. In a February 23 Financial Times article, one John Plender [...]
A brief history of the income tax–how progressives are screwing productive taxpayers
By Chuck Roger • January 28th, 2010 11:42 pm
Without outwardly intending to, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk describes the United States after 22 years of post-Reagan socialistic orgy laid atop the socialistic base set in place by Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and LBJ. The modern democratic state gradually transformed into the debtor state, within the space of a century metastasizing into a colossal monster—one that [...]
Healthcare ‘reform’ means never missing an opportunity to raise taxes
By Chuck Roger • December 22nd, 2009 12:19 am
Pay particular attention to the first tax increase on this list prepared by Americans for Tax Reform. Individual Mandate Tax(Page 324/Sec. 1501/$15 bil/Jan 2014): Starting in 2014, anyone not buying “qualifying” health insurance must pay an income surtax according to the higher of the following (page 71 of manager’s amendment updates Reid bill): Single [...]
Liberals would gladly kill prosperity to achieve ‘harmony’
By Chuck Roger • December 6th, 2009 2:44 am
More than 233 years ago, Adam Smith recognized that an investor “would be apt to abandon the country in which he was exposed to a vexatious inquisition, in order to be assessed to a burdensome tax, and would remove his stock to some other country where he could either carry on his business, or enjoy [...]
