The Environmental Protection Agency announced Monday that all new cars that aren’t electric must average 55 miles per gallon by 2026.
This amounts to a Great Leap Forward of almost 20 miles per gallon from the currently ordered 36 miles per gallon that all new cars must achieve, else their manufacturers be punished for making them via “gas guzzler” fines applied to them.
Which are then passed on to the people who buy them. Which makes it progressively more difficult to afford them.
That being the point of the fines, you understand.
The Biden administration considers it their right and duty to punish you for buying the car you want if it doesn’t do what they like.
The free market being an intolerable affront to them. Can’t have supply and demand determined by … supply and demand. That would be even worse a thing than free association.
The administration will say they are “saving you money on gas” via their “rules.” Which is true in the same way that “ruling” you must live in a small apartment in the city “saves” you the bother of having to cut a lawn. They do not say anything about the cost of the apartment — including the diminishment of your personal space — and your control over it.
Nor, of course, do they say anything about using “rules” to make you pay more for what you don’t want. An affront which brings us to the following fact:
Right now, only two new (2022 model year) cars meet the new “rule” — just barely. They are the Toyota Prius and the Hyundai Ioniq.
Both are partially electric cars (i.e., hybrids) and also small cars designed to be primarily economical cars. They are not bad cars. Indeed, they have their merits — chief among them their ability to average about 55 miles per gallon. But they are not cars most people want — or else you’d already see most people driving them.
The Biden administration is mulling a plan to offer immigrant families separated during the Trump administration $450,000per person in compensation, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter.The payments – part of an inter-agency solution to several lawsuits filed on behalf of separated parents and children claiming lasting psychological trauma could amount to nearly $1 million per family, though ‘the final numbers could shift,’ according to the report.
According to sources, most of the families crossing into the US from Mexico included one parent and one child. Depending on circumstances, many families could get smaller payouts.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents families in one of the lawsuits, has identified about 5,500 children separated at the border over the course of the Trump administration, citing figures provided to it by the government. The number of families eligible under the potential settlement is expected to be smaller, the people said, as government officials aren’t sure how many will come forward. Around 940 claims have so far been filed by the families, the people said. -WSJ
In total, the potential payout could reach $1 billion or more.Throughout the Trump administration, thousands of children were separated from their parents (and coyotes paid to bring them into the country) after they had crossed illegally into the country from Mexico. The lawsuits allege some of the children suffered various ailments – including malnutrition, heat exhaustion, and were kept in freezing cold rooms with little medical attention. Some claim lasting mental health problems due to the trauma of being without their parents for several months.The average amount sought through the courts is roughly $3.4 million per family, according to the report.”President Biden has agreed that the family separation policy is a historic moral stain on our nation that must be fully remedied,” said ACLU deputy director, Lee Gelernt. “That remedy must include not only meaningful monetary compensation, but a pathway to remain in the country.”Senate Republicans slammed the plan on Thursday afternoon following the WSJ‘s report.”The Biden administration’s promises of citizenship and entitlement programs have already caused the worst border crisis in history—a huge cash reward will make it even worse,” said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR).
The discussions about the payouts have taken place over the past few months among a group of dozens of private lawyers representing the families and government lawyers. Some government lawyers have viewed the payouts as excessive for people who had violated the law by crossing the border, the people said. One government lawyer threatened to remove his name from the case out of disagreement with the potential settlement offer, the people said. -WSJ
“It is a complicated, complex piece of litigation” – trying to resolve hundreds of separate lawsuits at the same time, and “sometimes even more complex to try the cases” said Margo Schlanger, who ran the civil-rights office during the Obama administration at the Department of Homeland Security and now teaches at the University of Michigan law school.What will the reparations crowd think of this?
For Americans watching the shocking re-Nazification of Germany – where once again the ability to even buy food depends on a person’s physiological/medical status – it may be tempting to downplay the re-emergence of a nasty German political virus and scoff that, “it can’t happen here!” But it is happening here.
The Biden Administration is sinking under the weight of its feeble figurehead, who is clearly living in a world of his own creation rather than living on planet reality. As Biden’s approval ratings plummet to near-historic depths, the people who run his administration – some say it’s really led by demon Susan Rice – are not backing off their hyper-authoritarian approach to…well, everything.
In fact they’re doubling down.
Nurse shortage? Tough – get your shot. Billions of containers waiting to be unloaded and trucked to fill empty shelves? Tough – get your shot. Murder alley Chicago facing 50 percent less cops because those who don’t want the vax are being fired? Tough – get your shot. No one to fly the plane? Tough – get your shot. No teachers? Tough – get your shot!
Into this explosion of malevolent incompetence staggers US Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Department Wally Adeyemo – second-highest ranker in the entire Department. The Nigerian-born Adeyemo, who previously served as director of African American outreach for the inspiring John Kerry 2004 presidential campaign and as a senior advisor to corrupt “woke” multi-gazillionaire Larry Fink, should be given credit for at least being honest about the intentions of his bosses in the Biden Administration.
Sometimes they tell the truth by accident.
Interviewed on ABC News on Thursday, Adeyemo was asked about the thousands of container ships anchored offshore in California and elsewhere as US store shelves begin to look like Bulgaria circa 1975 – and even Santa Claus is sweating “supply chain” strangulation as Christmas quickly approaches.
It’s not Biden’s vax mandate which has unleashed a massive outflux of workers from their jobs – quitting or fired – at a time of severe labor shortages. Nope.
The problem is you. You unwashed vermin who refuse to have a cocktail of experimental goop jabbed into your arm.
In the ABC interview Adeyemo admitted what we all know: inflation is beating the hell out of middle America (though Biden’s multi-millionaire chief-of-staff laughed it off as “high class problems“).
“We are seeing high prices for some of the things that people have to buy,” Adeyemo told ABC’s Stephanie Ramos. But it’s not the Administration’s fault. Shelves bare? Treasury’s Number Two tells America it’s all the fault of those who have not yet succumbed to his boss’s demand that you take the jab:
The reality is that the only way we’re going to get to a place where we work through this transition is if everyone in America and everyone around the world gets vaccinated.
There is a word for this and it’s not actually blackmail. It’s terrorism. Until that part of America which has to this point decided that it does not want to take an unproven medical treatment is browbeaten – or worse – into submission to Fauci’s needle, the rest of the country will continue to suffer through empty shelves and a crappy Christmas.
Too strong a word? Here’s how the dictionary defines terrorism:
Threat: You will eat nothing and you will be happy. Political objective: Get the shot!
It’s terrorism plain and simple and the Biden Administration’s “War on Us” is taking a dangerous turn. The millions who have taken the shot are being baited to attack those who have for whatever reason – including the medically sound acquisition of natural immunity through contracting and defeating the virus – declined to take the medical procedure. In reality both groups should unite against the past two Administrations which have lied and intimidated Americans over the virus from nearly day one. But that would threaten the elites, who rule by divide-and-conquer tactics.
It’s not hyperbole to – after having closely watched the dark cloud of propaganda-induced hysteria descend on what many of us retrospectively incorrectly believed was a more-or-less a freedom-loving American spirit – start worrying about them mobilizing the boxcars and heating up the ovens…
Florida has one of the worst outbreaks in the country mostly due to the fast-spreading and highly contagious delta variant. In the last week, Florida and Texas accounted for 40% of the country’s virus hospitalizations and Florida has hit new record highs for case totals, the White House and reports said.
The Biden administration this week offered federal financial support to Florida school districts defying Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ban on mask mandates as the coronavirus surges in the state, according to reports.
U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona wrote in a letter to DeSantis and state Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran on Friday that defiant districts that lose state funding would have federal funds available to them, according to Politico.
“Florida’s recent actions to block school districts from voluntarily adopting science-based strategies for preventing the spread of COVID-19 that are aligned with the guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) puts students and staff at risk,” Cardona wrote in the letter, adding he was “deeply concerned” by DeSantis’ July 30 anti-mask mandate executive order.
Cardona said the districts were in line with guidance from the CDC, which earlier this month recommended universal mask-wearing in K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status, to slow the spread of the delta variant.
“We are eager to partner with [the Florida Department of Education] on any efforts to further our shared goals of protecting the health and safety of students and educators,” he added. “If FLDOE does not wish to pursue such an approach, the Department will continue to work directly with the school districts and educators that serve Florida’s students.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis answers questions related to school openings and the wearing of masks in Surfside, Florida, Aug. 10, 2021. (Associated Press)
Christina Pushaw, a DeSantis spokeswoman, called out the Biden administration for giving more support to “superintendents and elected politicians, who don’t believe that parents have a right to choose what’s best for their children, than on Florida’s students, which is what these funds should be used for,” Politico reported.
Florida has one of the worst outbreaks in the country mostly due to the fast-spreading and highly contagious delta variant. In the last week, Florida and Texas accounted for 40% of the country’s virus hospitalizations and Florida has hit new record highs for case totals, the White House and reports said.
DeSantis has said parents should decide whether their children wear masks in school.
The letters mark the sharpest-yet pushback by the Biden administration to the state policies and come days after the president indicated he did not believe he had direct authority to overturn the governors’ actions.
Cardona sent a similar letter to Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas over his ban on mask mandates.
Also, just over a week ago President Biden told us that if we got the vaccine we would not get Covid. Then a few days later his own CDC released data from a Massachusetts study showing that 78 percent of the people who caught Covid were fully vaccinated. Is it any wonder Americans have lost all faith in “the science” as it pours forth from the politicized “scientists” in charge of US public health institutions?
Just this week, Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced that the US is increasing – not ending – its airstrikes on Afghanistan. The US would be pulling regular military troops out of the country (though likely keeping CIA, Special Forces, and mercenaries on the ground), but it would continue to bomb Afghanistan using “over the horizon” facilities from the Persian Gulf.
Aug 2 – For libertarians – and even many non-libertarians – it’s not shocking to discover that a US Administration lies and deceives the electorate. For government on all levels, lying to the American people is as American as apple pie. Sometimes the liars are held to account for their deception, but most often they are not.
Watching these early months of the Biden Administration it’s hard not to think that lying, deceiving, and manipulation is rising to a whole new level.
Take “ending the endless war” in Afghanistan. President Biden was cheered for achieving what even Donald Trump could not deliver: an end to the pointless 20 year – and several trillion dollar – war in Afghanistan. By the 20th anniversary of 9/11, we were told, the war would be over.
The only people furious about this decision were the bombmakers at Raytheon and the rest of the military-industrial complex and the laptop warriors in the Beltway think tanks. It turns out, they really didn’t need to worry.
The US is not finally leaving the Afghan people alone to run their country as they see fit. Just this week, Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced that the US is increasing – not ending – its airstrikes on Afghanistan. The US would be pulling regular military troops out of the country (though likely keeping CIA, Special Forces, and mercenaries on the ground), but it would continue to bomb Afghanistan using “over the horizon” facilities from the Persian Gulf.
I’m sure that makes Afghan victims of US bombs feel much better.
Then last week Biden announced an “end of the US combat mission” in Iraq by the end of the year. While we’ve heard that line before, still it seemed like good news. However, as usual, the devil was in the details. While the “mission” was over, the US troops would remain in-country in an “advisory role.” This is despite the fact that the Iraqi Parliament formally requested last year that US troops leave the country.
Biden has bombed anti-ISIS militias supported by the Iraqi government twice this year (so far).
The 900 US troops illegally occupying Syrian territory would also remain in-country, the Biden Administration announced last week.
Also, just over a week ago President Biden told us that if we got the vaccine we would not get Covid. Then a few days later his own CDC released data from a Massachusetts study showing that 78 percent of the people who caught Covid were fully vaccinated. Is it any wonder Americans have lost all faith in “the science” as it pours forth from the politicized “scientists” in charge of US public health institutions?
The US mainstream media has morphed into a de-facto arm of the Biden Administration, however, covering up for all of these lies and word-games and holding precisely no one in government accountable. So much for a free media acting as a check on government power.
In fact, any “enemy” country overseas with such a subservient press would be targeted for a State Department color revolution.
Governments lie. We understand that. It is the nature of politics and power. In the absence of independent institutions to hold government accountable, however, such lies become indistinguishable from facts, and soon “freedom” itself becomes slavery, as Orwell wrote. Let’s hope more of America wakes up soon.
The weirdest thing about the Biden administration tasking itself with the censorship of “disinformation” on social media is that the United States is the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is built upon a foundation of disinformation, maintained by disinformation, and facilitated by disinformation.
If the propaganda engine of the US-centralized empire ceased actively deceiving the public about the world, it would collapse immediately. There would be mass unrest at home and abroad, status quo politics would be abandoned, alliances and coalitions would crumble, leaders official and unofficial would be ousted, and US unipolar hegemony would end.
The only thing keeping this from happening is the vast amounts of wealth and energy which are poured into continuously deceiving the people of America and its allies about what’s really going on in their nations and political systems, and in the world as a whole.
Getting people believing they live in separate, sovereign nations which function independently from one another, instead of member states within a single undeclared empire which moves as one unit on the international stage.
Getting people believing they control the fate of their nation via the democratic process, when in reality all large-scale politics are scripted puppet shows controlled by a plutocratic class who owns both the politicians and the media outlets which report on them.
Getting people believing they are part of a virtuous rules-based international order which opposes totalitarian regimes to spread freedom and democracy, instead of a tyrannical empire that works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates.
And above all, manufacturing the illusion that the oppressive, exploitative imperialist status quo is normal.
It’s not the big, famous lies like those which preceded the invasion of Iraq that make up the bulk of the adhesive holding the empire together, it’s the small, mundane lies we’re fed every single day by the plutocratic media. The ones which distort our worldview by half-truths, spins and omissions designed to normalize a status quo of murder, theft and ecocide.
This normalization happens in the way pundits and politicians treat any attempt to end wars or redress income inequality as freakish extremism and unrealistic fantasy, when in reality it’s the most sane and normal thing in the world and the only thing unrealistic about it is the fact that attempts to advance those agendas are always sabotaged by those same pundits and politicians.
The normalization also happens in the way endless wars, starvation deaths by US sanctions, the looming threat of total extinction via climate collapse or nuclear war, rapidly exacerbating income inequality and increasing tyranny at home and abroad are not treated as newsworthy stories, while celebrity gossip and partisan bickering between AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene makes headline news. Every day the news media fail to report on the greatest horrors that the empire has unleashed on our world while focusing on vapid trivialities, they help normalize the horrors.
If the mass media actually existed to share important information about the world, the US-backed genocide in Yemen would be front-page news every day instead of something which gets a marginal mention once every few weeks. Every day it isn’t, this outrageous abuse is normalized.
If the mass media actually existed to share important information about the world, the fact that Americans are getting poorer and poorer while billionaires multiply their wealth during the pandemic would be brought front and center to everyone’s attention. Every day it isn’t, this outrageous abuse is normalized.
If the mass media actually existed to share important information about the world, the fact that the US military just spent trillions of dollars on a decades-long occupation of Afghanistan that accomplished nothing besides making horrible people rich would have been a national scandal. Every day it isn’t, this outrageous abuse is normalized.
But the mass media do not exist to share important information about the world. They exist to share important disinformation about the world. If they did not do this, the same US empire which is decrying the spread of disinformation today would collapse into its own footprint.
The US empire is without exception the single most corrupt and destructive force on this planet, and it’s not even close. It is the very last institution on earth that should be in charge of deciding what online content is true and what is “disinformation”. Absolute dead last, without exaggeration.
Depraved institutions which lie constantly and have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century should not be the Ministry of Truth for the world’s online communication systems. This should be extremely obvious to everyone.
_______________________
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The prospect of the DNC and other government-affiliated groups having access to Americans’ private text messages represents a chilling surveillance dystopia.
Interfering with and trying to ‘fact check’ people’s personal conversations is also utterly demented.
Groups allied with the Biden administration are planning on working directly with cellphone network providers to ‘fact check’ private SMS messages if they contain “misinformation about vaccines.”
The revelation is made in a Politico article which explains how the White House is preparing to characterize “conservative opponents of its Covid-19 vaccine campaign as dangerous and extreme.”
The decision to ramp up the information war against vaccine skeptics was made after conservatives showed resistance to the Biden administration’s plan to go “door-to-door” to increase vaccination rates.
“Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages,” states the report.
“The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.”
JUST IN – Biden allied groups, including the DNC, plan to engage fact-checkers and work with SMS carriers to “dispel misinformation” about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages (Politico)
The prospect of the DNC and other government-affiliated groups having access to Americans’ private text messages represents a chilling surveillance dystopia.
Interfering with and trying to ‘fact check’ people’s personal conversations is also utterly demented.
Recall that ‘fact-checkers’ infamously declared the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis to be a “debunked conspiracy theory” at the start of the pandemic, only to be forced into a humiliating reversal later on.
In doing so, they may have helped facilitate one of the biggest cover-ups in modern history, so what business such groups have in snooping on people’s private SMS messages is anyone’s guess.
This is a repeated refrain: the federal government will recruit “state, local, tribal, and territorial governments, as well as foreign allies and partners, civil society, the technology sector, academia, and more.”
This is because “the U.S. Government often is not best placed to identify or address issues that will first emerge at the local level.” They need “individuals, families, and local communities” to enlist in the war against Americans.
The Biden Administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism is, by its own admission, the first of its kind. The authors call it “America’s first government-wide national Strategy” to eradicate internal opponents of the regime—that is, not only to deter “violent extremism,” but even, in the words of Biden’s opening memo, “to root out the hatreds that can too often drive violence.”
This unprecedented state intervention into every level of American life is justified, the Administration claims, by the unrest that occurred at the Capitol on January 6. That event, while regrettable and ill-judged, has also been thoroughly mythologized into a veritable Reichstag Fire by Democrat politicians, Republican enablers, and a chorus of willing journalists.
A few buffoonish and overzealous protestors have been narrativized into a cabal of organized insurrectionists who brought us, in the words of Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to the brink of “a martial state.” One must admire the sinister rhetorical economy of a Party that can invent a threat of martial law while working steadily, and quite in the open, to impose it themselves.
At the heart of this assault on Americans by their government is a lie: the lie that Trump supporters killed Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick on January 6. As Northeastern Political Science Professor Max Abrahms notes in this feature, “Even after the official medical examiner concluded in April that Sicknick died from natural causes, President Biden, MSNBC, and CNN have continued to promote the politically self-serving fiction that he was killed in a terrorist attack.” Now, in the Administration’s new document, this invented murder is presented as the disastrous climax of an equally dishonest story about a supposed plague of right-wing terrorism in America.
“Domestic terrorism is not a new threat in the United States,” the Strategy explains. “It has, over centuries, taken many American lives and spilled much American blood—especially in communities deliberately and viciously targeted on the basis of hatred and bigotry.” What this means in practice is spelled out by a list of gunmen and bombers, all of them inheritors of a line tracing back to the Ku Klux Klan. There is Santino William Legan, who killed three shoppers in northern California, and Patrick Crusius, the suspect in the deadly El Paso shooting. There is Timothy McVeigh, an ex-Army man who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City. And there is a general reference to “violence and xenophobia directed against Asian Americans; the surge in anti–Semitism; and more.”
Nowhere in this sordid tale do we find mentioned the scores of youngmen, almost all of them Muslim, who were arrested throughout the 2010s under suspicion of collaborating with ISIS. There is not a word about the BLM- and Antifa-led guerilla campaigns that claimed the lives of police officers like David Dorn and ravaged the property of American workers—to the tune, as Pedro Gonzalez notes, of “$1 billion to $2 billion in paid insurance claims.”
The deduction was introduced to avoid federal encroachment on state and local tax prerogatives and, equally important, to avoid double taxation. The question that still needs to be answered is whether it is morally okay to tax income that isn’t really income at all, but funds that must be paid toward state and local taxes. Sure, progressives, socialists, and communists would like to take away as much money as possible from the rich, but it is problematic, to say the least, to tax income that is not even in the hand of a taxpayer anymore. That is, taxing funds already taken by state and local authorities is essentially taxing hypothetical income and earnings. This would be similar to taxing the paper value of an investment portfolio value instead of the realized gain from the sale of an investment.
When the Trump administration pushed capping the federal tax deduction for state and local taxes (SALT), the plan was billed as a way to punish Democrats in high-tax states. But the move also increased federal revenues by as much as $100 billion. Now the Biden administration is showing little enthusiasm for undoing Trump’s cap. The cap means more federal revenues to help pay for Biden’s infrastructure plan.
Nonetheless, Democrats in high-tax states like California, New Jersey, and New York are now threatening to hold up President Joe Biden’s plan in the hope of eliminating the cap on the SALT deduction. The SALT deduction divides the Democratic Party between socialist activists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who oppose the repealing of the SALT deduction as a “gift to billionaires,” and other representatives of New York and New Jersey, who want an elimination of the cap. However, in the debate on whether SALT is a tax break for the rich or a lifeline for middle-class families in high-tax states, most politicians forget that a tax takes away money from an individual regardless of income. The cap on the SALT deduction also essentially paves the way for the federal government to tax income twice.
The SALT tax deduction allows state and local taxes—like property taxes—to be deducted from federal taxes. State and local taxes and other taxes have been deductible since the inception of the federal income tax in 1913 to avoid federal encroachment on state tax prerogatives and to allow the federal government to tax income that has already been confiscated via taxation by more local levels of government. Changes in 1964, 1978, 1986, and 2004 have mostly taken away the ability to deduct certain state and local taxes, with the exception of the 2004 change, which reinstated the original ability to deduct sales taxes. However, the biggest change came in 2017, when the SALT deduction was capped at $10,000 under President Trump’s tax reform bill. However, that provision in the law is scheduled to expire after 2025.
Unfortunately, many conservatives argue in favor of the cap and claim that the SALT deduction benefits higher-tax states like New York, New Jersey, and California at the cost of those living in lower-tax states like Texas, New Hampshire, and South Dakota. The Tax Policy Center provides a good overview of who claims the SALT deduction and its effects. Similarly, the Tax Foundation provides an overview of benefactors of a SALT deduction and its consequences. Politicians use this discrepancy in impact to justify the elimination of the deduction on the grounds that it is an unfair subsidy to high-tax states.
However, most analysts seem to look at the consequences of the SALT deduction without looking at the reason for the SALT deduction: state and local taxes. Whatever one might think about the original federal income tax, at the least the original federal income tax statutes in 1913 answered two questions about the deductibility of state and local taxes quite clearly. The deduction was introduced to avoid federal encroachment on state and local tax prerogatives and, equally important, to avoid double taxation. The question that still needs to be answered is whether it is morally okay to tax income that isn’t really income at all, but funds that must be paid toward state and local taxes. Sure, progressives, socialists, and communists would like to take away as much money as possible from the rich, but it is problematic, to say the least, to tax income that is not even in the hand of a taxpayer anymore. That is, taxing funds already taken by state and local authorities is essentially taxing hypothetical income and earnings. This would be similar to taxing the paper value of an investment portfolio value instead of the realized gain from the sale of an investment.
The second argument for eliminating the cap on the SALT is that the cap grows the role of the federal government at the expense of more local levels of government. In other words, the SALT deduction lowers the amount of income to be taxed by the federal government, while imposing a limit on the SALT deduction is to increase federal revenue.
This is especially problematic, since federal taxes are already a major part of households’ overall tax burden. Moreover, federal taxation is less likely to go to services that taxpayers might actually use, such as highways. Federal spending mostly goes to welfare programs. Keeping the cap on the SALT deduction actually increases federal tax revenue and decreases decentralization. More importantly, any increase in federal taxes reduces the ability for taxpayers to “vote with their feet,” leaving high-tax states and localities for lower taxes in another state or locality. (See this article by Ryan McMaken.)
Some advocates for keeping the deduction cap—but who also claim to be for low taxation—argue that by exposing taxpayers in high-tax states to higher levels of taxation, taxpayers would finally come to their senses and revolt against state taxation. This is essentially a “do evil that good may come of it” argument. This is an odd position to take for anyone claiming to oppose government power and taxation.
The debate on the SALT deduction needs to be rephrased as a debate on the morality of taxing unrealized income. In addition, it is important to consider the repercussions of handing over more taxing authority to the federal government. While the uncapped SALT deduction reduced tax revenue by about $100 billion a year, President Biden has kept the limit on the SALT deduction because it will increase federal tax revenue to pay for his ambitious spending agenda. His keeping the SALT deduction exposes President Biden’s real agenda and ethics. President Biden does not care about the morality of taxing income twice, he likes the idea of more tax revenue at the cost of ethics and transferring more power and more money to the federal government. Author: