Taxes

The Other Blue State

Featured image Everyone knows that people are abandoning blue states like California and New York and moving to red states like Florida and Texas. The same phenomenon is at work in smaller states–on a reduced scale, but the pattern is consistent. Take my home state, Minnesota. For the last seven years, my organization has been documenting the net outflow of residents, and especially taxpayers, from the state. This year, that net outmigration »

New Yorkers Flee For Greener Pastures

Featured image The fact that people are steadily moving away from blue states and into red states is well known. Still, I thought these figures from New York were shocking: A new city analysis shows that a huge chunk of high-income earners fled in 2020. … The study by the city’s Independent Budget Office shows a 10% plunge in taxpayers who made over $750,000, and 6% of those with incomes between $150,000 »

Margaret Thatcher 2.0?

Featured image British Prime Minister Liz Truss is going big. Her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, has unveiled an aggressive program of permanent tax cuts. The Wall Street Journal likes the plan: Mr. Kwarteng axed the 2.5-percentage-point increase in the payroll tax imposed by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and canceled a planned increase in the corporate income tax rate to 26% from 19%. … Kwarteng also surprised by eliminating the 45% tax rate »

Tax Rally Tomorrow!

Featured image If you live within driving distance of the Twin Cities, tomorrow is the day to descend on the state Capitol in St. Paul to demand that the legislature return Minnesota’s projected $9.3 billion surplus to the taxpayers, in the form of permanent tax cuts. The rally will start at 11 a.m.; because of the threat of thunderstorms, we will be inside, in the Capitol rotunda. I will emcee the event, »

Biden Will Still Respect You in the Morning

Featured image Everyone is familiar with the two great lies of modern times: the check is in the mail, and “Of course I’ll still respect you in the morning.” To which should be added a third: “wealth taxes” will only affect the very rich—the middle class has nothing to fear. When you hear Democrats say this, reach for your wallet. This needs to be kept in mind with thinking about President Biden’s »

Biden’s Dumbest Idea Yet?

Featured image I know, it’s a stiff competition. But the “billionaire tax” that is part of the Biden administration’s proposed budget is astonishingly dumb. This is how the Wall Street Journal describes it: Under the proposal, households worth more than $100 million that don’t pay at least 20% in tax on a combination of their standard reported income and their gains on unsold assets such as stocks would owe additional tax until »

Another Industry Destroyed by Taxes

Featured image How many industries have been damaged or destroyed by high taxes and excessive regulation? A lot. But I have mixed feelings about this one: California cannabis industry on brink as buyers return to dealers. The cannabis industry in California is on the brink of collapse because of high taxes and onerous regulations that have burdened legal operators and allowed illegal growers to flourish, campaigners have warned. *** About 75 per »

Elon Musk for the Win

Featured image So Elon Musk is Time‘s “Person of the Year.” I’ve actually been warming up to Musk for a long time now. If you take away the lavish subsidies he got for his cars, what would be your complaint with him? That electric cars won’t save the world? True, but slow down for a moment and note that unlike nearly everyone else in Silicon Valley, he’s actually trying to build a »

Tax Cuts For the Rich!

Featured image That is what the Democrats are pushing, and anyone who is surprised hasn’t been paying attention. Current polling shows that most people think Republicans, not Democrats, are the party of the working class, and they are right. Democrats represent, more than anyone else, wealthy urbanites in blue states who wrongly believe themselves to be “elite.” But these lefty urbanites have a serious problem: by virtue of living in blue states, »

In search of billionaires (like you)

Featured image Readers have undoubtedly heard something of the Biden administration/Treasury Department proposal to expand the scope of bank reporting requirements on customer accounts. The proposal has elicited reactions ranging from indignation to rebellion, but what is it exactly? The New York Times had a good story earlier this week, but the story is a little short on the substance of the proposal (“the administration wants banks to give the Internal Revenue »

Joe Biden, tax evader?

Featured image Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats are pushing for a $3.5 trillion bill to subsidize childcare, education, and health care. To pay for at least part of this, they want to curtail tax avoidance and raise taxes on the wealthy so that the rich pay their “fair share.” But is Biden paying his legally required share of taxes? According to the New York Post, a new report drafted by the »

Will Biden Prosecute This Leak?

Featured image One of the many things the Biden Administration wants to do is increase the enforcement budget of the IRS, so it can hound tens or hundreds of thousands more taxpayers every year in their rapacious desire to punish the prosperous. (Remember: According to the new liberal dogma of “Modern Monetary Theory,” we can borrow and spend all we want without consequence, so there is no reason to raise any tax »

Today in Punitive Liberalism

Featured image I’ll just let Barron’s magazine take up the story: Everything was going fine for the stock market on Thursday—and then an anonymously sourced report hit that detailed how President Joe Biden planned to raise taxes on the wealthy, causing the major indexes to sink into the red. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 321.41 points, or 0.9%, while the S&P 500 fell 0.9%, and the Nasdaq Composite declined 0.9%. The small-cap »

It’s Official: Dems Want Tax Cut for The Rich

Featured image If you need proof that Democrats are really on the side of the plutocracy, look no further than New York’s Democratic House members, who today wrote to Speaker Pelosi threatening to vote against any of (P)resident Biden’s tax increase proposals unless the bill includes full repeal of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction limitations that were part of Trump’s 2017 tax reform. The SALT limitation was the single most »

Biden’s farcical infrastructure bill

Featured image There is widespread support for using federal money to improve the nation’s infrastructure. Donald Trump favored doing so, but never put forth legislation. Now, Joe Biden has unveiled an infrastructure bill of sorts. Unfortunately, his proposal is so bad that even the Washington Post has noticed. The first problem with Biden’s bill is that it isn’t much about infrastructure. The Post reports: Many economic experts agree that significant investments in »

Small-Government Conservatism and the Golden Turkey

Featured image At the federal level, traditional small-government conservatism is on life support. Even before the “Biden administration’s” $1.9 trillion money-printing spree, the forces of limited government hadn’t been heard from in Washington for quite a while. Things are different at the state level, however. State governments can’t print borrow money from the Fed, and most have constitutional balanced budget requirements. So if you want to control state taxes, you also have »

When You’ve Lost Gene Simmons . . .

Featured image After a certain point it becomes wanton cruelty to keep dunking on California’s slow motion suicide, but some stories are too good to pass unremarked. Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that rocker Gene Simmons is KISS-ing California goodbye and moving to no-income tax Washington state, and in high KISS-my-ass style: [Simmons] is now putting the property, which they later redeveloped into a sprawling European-style mansion, on the market for $22 million. »