MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘withholding tax’

Where Did My World Go? – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on May 28, 2020

When I was five years old I could walk safely one mile to school and
home by myself without my parents being arrested by Child Protective
Services for child neglect and endangerment.

In school we could draw pictures of fighter planes, warships, and
guns without being regarded as a danger to our classmates and sent for
psychiatric evaluation. Fights
were just a part of growing up. The police weren’t called, and we
weren’t handcuffed and carted off to jail. Today kids who play cops and
robbers or cowboys and Indians and point fingers at one another as
pretend guns end up in police custody. A fight means an assault charge
and possibly a felony record.

I received my new homeowners policy yesterday.  It arrived with 89 pages of warnings, definitions, and liability explanations.  One can’t really tell if one is insured or not. 

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/05/27/where-did-my-world-go/

Paul Craig Roberts

I remember when there was no tamper-proof and child-proof packaging.  That was before multiculturalism and Identity Politics when we could still trust one another and parents accepted responsibility for their children without fobbing it off on a company with a liability claim.

I remember also when there were no state income and sales taxes.  States were able to meet their responsibilities without them.

A postage stamp cost one cent. A middle class house was $11,000 and an upper middle class house went fot $20,000.  One million dollars was a large fortune. There were no billionaires.

The air museum on the naval base in Pensacola, Florida, has a street reconstructed from the 1940s. The restaurant’s memu offers a complete evening meal for 69 cents.

I was thinking about that as I reviewed a recent Publix supermarket bill:  a loaf of bread $3.89, a dozen organic eggs $4.95, a package of 6 hot dogs $5.49, 8 small tomatos $5.19, a package of baby spinach $4.19, a half gallon of milk $4.59, a package of two paper towel rolls $5.99.  When I was 5 or 6 years old, my mother would send me to the bakery with a dime for a loaf of bread or to the market with 11 cents for a quart of milk. The Saturday afternoon double-feature at the movie house was 10 cents.  A case of Coca-Colas (24 bottles) was one dollar. Ten cents would get you a Pepsi Cola and a Moon Pie, lunch for construction crews. Kids would look for discarded Pepsi Cola bottles on construction sites. In those days there was a two cent deposit on soft drink bottles. One bottle was worth 4 pieces of Double Bubble gum.  Five bottles paid for the Saturday double-feature.

Dimes, quarters, and half dollars were silver, and there were silver dollars. The nickle (five cent coin) was nickle, and the penny was copper. FDR took gold away in 1933. The silver coins disappeared in 1965.  Our last commodity money, the copper penny, met its demise in 1983.  Now they are talking about getting rid of the penny altogether.

Many of us grew up with paper routes for spending money.  Other than a paper route, my first employment was the high school summer when I worked the first shift in a cotton mill for $1 an hour.  And work it was.  After the withholding tax my takehome pay for the 40 hour week was $33.

When I was five years old I could walk safely one mile to school and home by myself without my parents being arrested by Child Protective Services for child neglect and endangerment.

In school we could draw pictures of fighter planes, warships, and guns without being regarded as a danger to our classmates and sent for psychiatric evaluation.  Fights were just a part of growing up. The police weren’t called, and we weren’t handcuffed and carted off to jail. Today kids who play cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians and point fingers at one another as pretend guns end up in police custody. A fight means an assault charge and possibly a felony record.

The kind of freedom I had as a child no longer exists except in remote rural areas. When I think about this I wonder if kids today even notice.  They live in the virtual world of the video screen and do not know the real world.  Catching crawfish in the creek while watching out for cottonmouth moccasins, playing capture the flag over acres of expanse without getting a bad case of poison ivy, organizing a neighbohood ball game, damning up a creek and making a swimming hole. Today these are unknown pleasures.

When it rained we read books. I remember reading Robert Heinlein’s Puppet Masters when I was 12 years old. Do 12 year olds read books today?  Can science fiction compete with video games?

I remember when a deal rested on a handshake.  Today lawyers tell me even contracts are unenforceable.

We were taught to behave properly so that “you can look yourself in the mirror.”  Today you can’t look yourself in the mirror unless you have upstaged or ripped off someone.  Character is a thing of the past, as are habits that are today regarded as inappropriate.  An older person hoping to get a point across to a younger one would put his or her hand on the younger person’s arm or thigh for attention purposes.  Do this today and you get a sexual charge. Both of my grandmothers would probably be locked up as sexual offenders.

Being a tattle-tale was an undesirable and discouraged trait. Today we are encouraged to be tattle-tales.  You will hear the encouragement several dozen times while awaiting your flight to be called.  Neighbors on quiet cul-de-sacs will call Child Protective Services to report one another’s unsupervised children at play.

I remember when black Americans said they just wanted to be treated like everyone else.  That was before racial set-asides in federal government contracts that only black-owned firms can bid on. Once you have special privileges, you don’t want to be like everyone else.  Blacks say being white is a privilege.  If so, it wasn’t enough privilege for Celeste Bennett’s firm Ultima.  Her white privilege and her gender privilege were trumped by black set-aside privilege.

If my parents and grandparents were to be resurrected, they would require a year’s training before it would be safe for them to go about with being arrested.  They would have to be educated out of their customary behavior patterns and taught the words and phrases that are today impermissable.  They would have trouble comprehending that there are no-go areas in cities.  Reading Diana Johnstone’s masterful book, Circle in the Darkness, I remembered the safety of my own youthful years as I read that as a 12 year old she could walk alone around the wharfs of southwest Washington, D.C., in the 1940s unmolested.

I received my new homeowners policy yesterday.  It arrived with 89 pages of warnings, definitions, and liability explanations.  One can’t really tell if one is insured or not.

I have a 54-year old Jaguar that I have had for 47 years. The owner’s manual tells how to operate and repair the car. A friend showed me the owner’s manual on his 21-year old Porsche. It has more pages of warnings to protect the manufacturer from liability claims than the Jaguar manual has pages of instruction. Today any tool or gadget you buy has more pages of warnings than instruction.

My AARP Medicare supplement insurance policy arrived explaining my meager and expensive covering.  It came with a notice letting me know that language assistance services are available for the policy in Spanish, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Russian, Arabic, Haitian Creole, French, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Japanese,  Hmong, Llocano, Somali, Greek, Gujarati, and that there is no discrimination because of sex, age, race, color, disability or national origin. The notice provides access to a Civil Rights Coordinator in the event I feel discriminated against.  AARP even provides a number to call for help with filing a discrimination complaint.

I do feel discriminated against. But it is not a covered discrimination. I feel like my country has been stolen or that I have been kidnapped and placed in some foreign unknown place that I don’t recognize as home.

I feel the same when I get fundraising appeals from Georgia Tech and Oxford University. Georgia Tech was an all male school consisting primarily of in-state Georgia boys.  The Oxford colleges were segregated according to gender—male and female—and the vast majority of the members were British.  Today all the colleges except the women’s are gender integrated. White males seldom appear in the photos in the fundraising materials that arrive from Oxford and Georgia Tech.  I see lots of women and racial diversity and wonder what university it is.  An improvement or not, they are not the schools of which I have memories.  The schools I knew have simply been taken away.  Something else is there now.

Perhaps it has always been true, but today if you live very long you outlive your world. As your friends die off, no one remembers it correctly but you as you watch your world disappear in misrepresentations to serve present day agendas.

Be seeing you

 

 

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Let’s Not Waste a Crisis – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on May 13, 2020

Here’s a question for you. Which entities produce greater consumer
satisfaction: for-profit enterprises such as supermarkets, computer
makers and clothing stores, or nonprofit entities such as public
schools, post offices and motor vehicle departments? I’m guessing you’ll
answer the former. Their survival depends on pleasing ordinary people.
Public schools, post offices and motor vehicle departments’ survival are
not strictly tied to pleasing people but rather on politicians and the
ability of government to impose taxes.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/05/walter-e-williams/lets-not-waste-a-crisis/

By

Former Barack Obama adviser Rahm Emanuel, during a recent interview, reminded us of his 2008 financial crisis quotation, “Never allow a crisis to go to waste.” The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a wonderful opportunity for those of us who want greater control over our lives. Sadly, too many Americans have already taken the bait. We’ve allowed politicians and bureaucrats to dictate to us what’s an essential business and what isn’t, who has access to hospitals and who hasn’t, and a host of minor and major dictates.

Leftist politicians who want to get into our pocketbooks are beginning to argue that the COVID-19 pandemic is the best argument for a wealth tax. Let’s first define a wealth tax. A wealth tax is applicable to and levied on a variety of accumulated assets that include cash, money market funds, real property, trust funds, owner-occupied housing and other wealth accumulations. Assume a taxpayer earns $150,000 a year and falls in the 32% tax bracket. That individual’s income tax liability for the year will be 32% x $150,000 or $48,800. Say the taxpayer has a net worth of $500,000 consisting of a business or home and the government imposes a wealth tax of 32%, the person’s tax liability is $160,000.

The problem with most politicians is when they enact a law, they seldom ask, “Then what?” They assume a world of what economists call zero elasticity wherein people behave after a tax is imposed just as they behaved before the tax was imposed and the only difference is that more money comes into the government’s tax coffers. The long-term effect of a wealth tax is that people will try to avoid it by not accumulating as much wealth or concealing the wealth they accumulate.

A wealth tax has become increasingly attractive because it lends itself to demagoguery about the significant wealth disparity in the United States. The Federal Reserve reports that, in 2018, the wealthiest 10% of Americans owned 70% of the country’s wealth, and the richest 1% owned 32% of the wealth. That fact gave Democratic presidential contenders such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren incentives to propose a wealth tax as a part of their campaign rhetoric. Leftists lament that multibillionaires such as Charles Koch, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison and Sheldon Adelson have not made charitable efforts to address the coronavirus crisis.

My questions to these political leeches are: To whom does the billionaire’s wealth belong? And how did they accumulate such wealth?

Did they accumulate their great wealth by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man, as has been the case throughout most of human history? No, they accumulated great wealth by serving and pleasing their fellow man in the pursuit of profits. Unfortunately, demagoguery and lack of understanding has led to “profit” becoming a dirty word. Profit is a payment to entrepreneurs just as wages are payments to labor, interest to capital and rent to land. In order to earn profits in free markets, entrepreneurs must identify and satisfy human wants in a way that economizes on society’s scarce resources.

Here’s a question for you. Which entities produce greater consumer satisfaction: for-profit enterprises such as supermarkets, computer makers and clothing stores, or nonprofit entities such as public schools, post offices and motor vehicle departments? I’m guessing you’ll answer the former. Their survival depends on pleasing ordinary people. Public schools, post offices and motor vehicle departments’ survival are not strictly tied to pleasing people but rather on politicians and the ability of government to impose taxes.

Some advocates of wealth taxes and other forms of taxation might argue that they are temporary measures to get us over the COVID-19 crisis. Do not buy that argument. The great Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman once said, “Nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program.” The telephone tax was levied on wealthy Americans with telephones in 1898 to help fund the Spanish-American War. That tax was repealed over 100 years later in 2006. One of the objectives of the World War II withholding tax was to bring faster revenues to fight the war. The withholding of taxes is still with us blinding Americans on the taxes they pay. Let us not allow a crisis to bamboozle us again.

Be seeing you

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