By Daniel Becker Randolph Duke: Money isn’t everything, Mortimer. Mortimer Duke: Oh, grow up. Randolph Duke: Mother always said you were greedy. Mortimer Duke: She meant it as a compliment. Trading Places 1983 A while ago (an understatement) I posted on the question of what is rich. The first dealt with what issues to consider […]
by divorced one like Bush As we are talking about taxes and health care this is The Real News Network article regarding raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for health care. (The Real News Network is a global online video news network that listens to and is dependent on its audience. No ads. No […]
by cactus Megan McArdle responds to a post I wrote: So Obama doesn’t count because he’s not really a Democrat. But Bill Clinton was. But Richard Nixon–the chap who implemented price controls and massively expanded Social Security and Medicare–was definitely a Republican. Jimmy Carter, who deregulated like mad: definitely a Democrat. What are these policies […]
My Loyal Reader notes that the economic survival of Zimbabwe’s current government is now largely dependent on sin taxes: As he presented his revised 2009 budget to parliament, Finance Minister Tendai Biti noted that “indirect taxes made up of customs and excise duty have contributed 88 percent of government revenue, which means that the government […]
In honor of Economy Day at the DNC, the Tax Foundation sent me an e-mail trying to convince me that the corporate income tax is terribly unfair to average Americans. The pitch is based on a tax incidence study that claims that in the lower quintile of cash incomes, personal income taxes averaged $171 in […]
EconomistMom recently defended, after a fashion, Alex Brill and Alan Viard’s notorious article claiming that the Obama tax plan would raise effective marginal tax rates on middle-class taxpayers. They’re making a mountain out of a molehill, she concludes, even incidentally distorting the Obama tax plans along the way, but to her knowledge (of the two […]
In this post, Bruno commented and posted this link to reference this statement: In 2005, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 39.4 percent of all federal individual income taxes and earned 21.2 percent of adjusted gross income, both of which are significantly higher than 2004 when the top 1 percent earned 19 percent […]
“Taxation is in fact the most difficult function of government – and that against which their citizens are most apt to be refractory” Thomas Jefferson First, I apologize for taking so long to get back to this. But….I needed to work on some leads/songs (it’s not really work), get a new singer up to speed […]
Update…. Sheesh. I wake up this morning and my first thought is… what the heck was I thinking last night? I have to put a bit more thought into these things that I write at the end of the day. We all make stupid mistakes and this qualifies as one of mine. I think its […]
A few commenters of my last post suggested that picking at the tax code can create big problems if you don’t know what you’re talking about. I agree. Why mess with what is working as evident in the data continuously collected and reported concerning the economy. But, in 1981 they did mess with it and […]