Tax Day 2018 always brings out the cries of “Taxation is Theft!” from many, especially our friends in the libertarian contingent. But is it, and where are the lines between taxation is theft, taxation with representation, and oppressive forced funding of tyrannical government?
… and what do you get?
Not paying taxes for 18 years is not necessarily tax evasion
Why on Earth might someone actually support Donald Trump? Derek Stanley offers up his reasons.
It’s been well documented that Trump refuses to release his tax information in the run up to the election. But does it really matter?
In Which I Throw Water On Enthusiasm
Should Yale head for the Sunshine State?
I suspect that my off-off-year ballot is different from most of yours in more ways than one.
Last week at Politco’s State Solutions Conference, Republican Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam offered up an explanation for the GOP’s defeat at the ballot box this past November: poor messaging. According to Haslam, Republicans simply weren’t able to effectively communicate to voters that conservatives stood for lower taxes for everyone, especially for businesses that might look…
Note: This post is part of our League Symposium on Guns In America. You can read the introductory post for the Symposium here. To see a list of all posts in the Symposium so far, click here. While I usually post my Great Cases at my sub-blog (example) rather than here on the front page,…
This is not the most original post idea I’ve ever had, but this post by Matt Yglesias got me thinking, and I decided to just write it all down. The basic argument is about the US Postal Service. This comes up all the time, as they go more and more broke, and I actually used…
~by M.A. Conor P. Williams, in Conservatism Isn’t Radical—It’s “Modular”, argues that there is a certain amount of mental jiu-jitsu involved in shifting frameworks from argument to argument. An interesting test of this very case came up this morning with the local radio talk host bringing up the topic of the death penalty in conjunction with…
At Rortybomb (which has migrated to Next New Deal), Mike Konczal takes arguments against lower rates on student loans to task. My only question is this: Are taxes owed to the U.S. government a kind of debt?
Fellow Ordinaries Elias Isquith and Mike Dwyer have fired the opening shots in our discussion about the latest budget proposal from that fiscal firebrand from Janesville, Paul Ryan, and Tod Kelly (who has just been knocking them out of the park on these pages recently) has given a much-needed reminder to everyone that minding our manners…
~by Ryan B Every presidential campaign, there is inevitably a candidate or two (usually Republicans, although maybe Mike Gravel too) who advocate the Fair Tax. They would replace the income tax with a national retail sales tax of 30 percent. They call it 23 percent, but that relies on doing math in a way no…
Radley Balko wrote a post recently offering up some policy ideas basically geared toward getting as many peoples’ skin in the tax-and-spend game as possible. Other than payroll taxes, most people on the bottom of the income ladder don’t pay taxes, and so government is funded by fewer and fewer taxpayers. So here’s my idea:…
Here’s Kevin Drum: There are a few liberal pundits out there who believe that a cuts-only deal like this one isn’t all that bad. Jon Chait is one of the leading proponents of this theory, and it goes like this: Maybe an all-cuts deal is bad, but by leaving taxes off the table completely it…
Deficits don’t matter during a recession. We should be running deficits during a recession. We should be running deficits when there is little to no inflation. We should be running deficits when unemployment is at nearly 10%. We should be running deficits when consumer demand has dropped off a cliff. We should be running deficits…
Brad DeLong calls The Economist’s profile of Mitch Daniels, “A beat sweetener so sweet as to send us all into hyperglycemic collapse.” He continues: When Mitch Daniels was in a position of power and authority, responsible as Director of OMB for maintaining fiscal sanity, he simply did not do his job:Mitch Daniels Did Not Do…
From The Los Angeles Times: Maywood, a small working-class community south of downtown Los Angeles, plans to lay off all its employees, disband its Police Department and turn over its entire municipal operations to a neighbor — an action that appears to be without precedent among California cities. Several cities in the state have said…
There are many things wrong with what James is trying to say in this post. I will try to tackle a few of them. The meat of the post, which is also the part most riddled with odd suppositions and strangely drawn conclusions, is as follows: The tea partiers, in insisting that economic policy derives…
I’ve been out of pocket from the political realm for a week and a half, but President Obama’s claim that a health insurance mandate is not a tax strikes me as marginally good politics and absolutely terrible lawyering. I think Jason Kuznicki (also here) and by extension Will, are absolutely, 100% correct that an individual mandate…
In a rare moment of bipartisan convergence, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama continue to insist that forcing people to buy health insurance is not a tax. Unfortunately, they’re both wrong. Very wrong.
Riffing off my last post, I’d like to take on two thoughts. First, here’s Yglesias:
Matt Yglesias is in Denmark. I can sort of travel vicariously by blogging about Denmark as well, so here we go…. Not surprisingly, the Danes have very high taxes: The overwhelming fact about Danish public policy is that taxes in Denmark are really high. There’s a substantial VAT and also a substantial income tax. You…
Following up on this post from yesterday, on von’s post here, I provide (via Yglesias) yet another graph….
“Let’s put this simply. 80% of the budget falls into five categories: Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, Defense, Veteran’s Benefits, and Interest on the Debt. EIGHTY PERCENT. So if you don’t tell me what you’re going to be able to feasibly cut in those categories, you are not approaching the problem seriously. This is especially the case…
What can be said that hasn’t already about the Tea Party Phenomenon? Perhaps phenomon isn’t the right word. The Parties have been, it appears, co-opted (or hi-jacked) by the larger conservative movement; perhaps out-Foxed, or perhaps merely filling in for a large, hyper-politicized electorate bored now that the election is over. One wonders if Obama…
You seemed savvier at 12 than most adults.
