The quote “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society” (is attributed to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. As we enter the 2026 IRS filing season, you may be treated to the libertarian* propaganda that taxes are just government stealing. In a representative democracy such as ours, the majority has […]
Mistake in Administering Property Taxes Results in a 1200 Percent Increase? This reads like something in a tabloid. However, it is occurring in an Illinois county. Montgomery County Assessor Kendra Niehaus discovered the assessment was being calculated incorrectly. A tract of woodland should have a tax rate applied to 33.33% of its fair market value. […]
Since Trump and Republicans are interested in cutting spending. I was interested in seeing what Musk and his side kick Ramaswamy might be looking at to reduce. What you are looking at is a Pie Chart showing all items in the budget. The breakout of the Payroll Tax Chart from the Pie Chart (further down) […]
Here is the abstract of a new paper by Edward Wolff: The paper analyzes the fiscal effects of a Swiss-type tax on household wealth, with a $120,000 exemption and marginal tax rates running from 0.05 to 0.3 percent on $2,400,000 or more of wealth. It also considers a wealth tax proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren […]
Dead people aren’t allowed to drive. They aren’t allowed to vote. They aren’t allowed to testify in court, acquire weaponry, check out books from the library or acquire a pilot’s license. This makes sense. After all, dead people don’t have a functioning brain. As a result, we wouldn’t want them driving or voting or wandering […]
by Linda Beale Inequality: Obama’s Speech, Detroit’s Bankruptcy, Taxes Was Obama’s speech on inequality really what Michael Lind claims in “The Day the Right Lost the Economic Argument” Salon.com (July 25, 2013)? The right, both here and internationally, has been pushing for austerity for most while those at the top reap unparalleled rewards from upward-moving […]
by Linda Beale The importance of redistribution I have dedicated ataxingmatter to a concept I call “democratic egalitarianism”–the idea that individuals flourish best in a free society that allows them to choose democratically the rules that govern their lives, with the understanding that the institutions must be sustainable and must allow all individuals to flourish, […]
Here is an interesting way to deal numbers, with the complete post to be read from the link: Obama taxes us into recession (Mish’s musings) Withheld income and employment taxes have been running about 8.3% higher year over year, comparing the same 33 business days between Tuesday, January 8 and Monday, February 25.…Regardless, there is […]
Lifted from one of David Zetland’s Aguanomics musings on how our conversations mix things up: Gasoline taxes are often justified as the response to a “negative externality” of pollution from cars, but the money from those taxes rarely (never?) goes to people who suffer from pollution. So is it really a tax on an externality […]
Stolen from an e-mail from coberly and worth a comment or two I think: …”the free market” adjusts… freely… to taxes the way it adjusts to any other “scarcity.” but apparently economics has not discovered this fact.