The Center for New Revenue

Without footnotes, and with added language:

Revolution was written in 1968 by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.  “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow” provides the meter for the last couplet in each stanza. The Beatles’ “Well, you know” lines are omitted.  Youtube.com lets people listen to the tune, as if that complied with copyright laws.

You say you want repatriation:
(That’s what you say)
A tax-free corp’rate holiday.
You talk about the job creation
(You talk a lot)
That you’ll produce once you can pay
Big dividends out of the cash that you’ve stashed offshore;
But that didn’t work when we tried in Two thousand four.
Why don’t you go and pay
That tax?
Continue reading “Repatriation to the Tune of Revolution, suitable for singing”

“Getting into the weeds” is a confusing metaphor.  I think of a search for something lost, like a golf ball.

But folks use the phrase to mean looking at details.  http://www.word-detective.com/2011/05/getting-into-the-weeds/.  If so, “getting into the capillaries” (an old metaphor used by tax policy folks thinking through details) would be clearer.  Weeds are all bad; capillaries require careful, detailed, individual attention.  Some capillaries are working well, some need fixing, and some are beyond fixing — like different parts of a statutory draft.  Maybe capillaries is too big a word these days.  See http://www.languagemonitor.com/about/news/obamas-acceptance-speech-at-9th-grade-level/

 

 

“Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that ‘if [Obamacare] had been seen as a tax, they wouldn’t have gotten ten votes, much less sixty. . . they either don’t know what they’re doing, or they lied to us. So this is a huge issue in the fall.’”  http://spectator.org/archives/2012/06/29/roberts-too-clever-by-half/print.  Senator Graham, himself deluded or gullible by his own admission, indicates that the American people don’t have the sense to look through labels to substance.  He’s probably right:  Look at the effort to relabel the estate tax the “Death Tax,” and to call a trillion-dollar retroactive territoriality scheme a “Holiday.”  https://newrevenue.org/2011/11/23/tax-repatriation-holiday-choosing-words-strategically-2/

The ruling party in Uruguay seems likely to act, according to press reports:  “If approved, Uruguay’s national government would be the first in the world to directly sell marijuana to its citizens. Some local governments do so[?].”  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/uruguay/9346047/Uruguay-government-announces-plan-to-sell-marijuana.html

A monopoly provides the advantage (over taxes) of instantaneous price adjustments that can accelerate the death of the black market.  I figured the first country to get into the business would be a tiny island country whose tax haven business the developed countries had shut down, but who knows?

I won’t identify these upstanding folks, who may not want to be associated with my unorthodox views, but we all worked on the Tax Reform Act of 1986 for the Joint Congressional Committee on Taxation.  This photo was taken in the Joint Committee office in January 2012.  I’m in the back row, in front of the window, with a barely visible tie.  I’m proud to be associated with everyone in the picture, and with more who missed it.

Our North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue, fighting a losing battle against video gambling operations, says  “We need to tax the heck out of them and regulate them, regulate them hard.”  Makes sense to me.   The same idea makes sense for marijuana, too, instead of continuing the 40-year war on it.  See “Laws To Tax Marijuana,” 59 State Tax Notes 251-280 (January 24, 2011), downloadable at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1741735.

Here’s more of the gambling story:

BY JANE STANCILL, http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/06/07/2120002/perdue-proposes-taxes-on-sweepstakes.html#storylink=cpy:

Continue reading “If you can’t beat ’em, “tax the heck out of them.””

I-502 Final Assumptions 2012 has some of the thinking behind the big number.  I can’t find that document elsewhere on the web.  The official estimate is Multiple Agency Fiscal Note Summary, Bill 502 XIL, Mar. 20, 2012, available athttp://www.thestranger.com/images/blogimages/2012/03/20/1332288897-partial_fiscal_note_-_032012.pdf.

Maybe Greece will scare us into fiscal sanity, but here is a possible sequence of events:

1. Fiscal imbalance
2. Lenders won’t lend OR Hyperinflation
3. Government can’t pay salaries and benefits OR Currency loses trust
4. Social unrest
5. Violence in the cities
6. Strong-arm rule

We can avoid that, but not without new taxes eventually.

Edward J. McCaffrey puts it this way:  Continue reading “Strong-arm Rule”

This is a sign of the times:

In recent months, Italy has experienced a level of economic turmoil that has unsettled people, with some linking the government’s austerity measures to a rash of suicides. There has also been a rise in violence against tax collection offices — mostly carried out by indebted and frustrated taxpayers — as well as against other institutions, like the military and the aerospace group Finmeccanica, which has been singled out by radical groups that pattern themselves after the domestic terrorists that kept Italy under siege in the 1970s and early 1980s.

If Europe descends into violence, maybe America will wake up in time and calculate the civilization is worth its price.

 

Professor John Blum presents a new framework for sin taxes, the restorative justice mode.  “Sin Tax, Forgiveness and Public Health Governance,” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2042647.  An individual who sins “must acknowledge the harmful consequences of the conduct.”  I appreciate the thought, but wonder how taxes could apply differently to individuals on the basis on their acknowledgments.  If he is suggesting that.

That’s a new perspective, individual-based, which makes three for me.  The other two are:

Substance-based:  As someone who supports sin taxes, I’m more simplistic.  I “admit that the goal of sin taxes is to grant permission to . . . citizens to engage in unhealthy conduct.”  The other choices are prohibition and legality without taxation, neither of which appeals to me.  I agree that governments are not so explicit.

Revenue-based:  There’s another angle, another choice question:  what does government choose to tax?   Continue reading “Sin, Forgiveness, and Taxes”

The “drown Uncle Sam in a bathtub” crowd likes to point to the point to the rate cuts enacted under the Democrats in the early sixties.  They brought the top marginal individual rate down to 77 percent.  http://ntu.org/tax-basics/history-of-federal-individual-1.html.  Down from 91 percent.

That 77 percent rate is still too high for me.  There is some scholarship about finding the revenue-maximizing point on the Laffer curve (my allies think maybe low sixties).  But this issue of the right top rate is like theology:  each of us is unlikely to make personal converts among those who disagree with us.

 

 

Sure, there were loopholes, but from 1950 through part of 1963 the top Federal income tax rate was at least 91 percent.  http://ntu.org/tax-basics/history-of-federal-individual-1.html

That was too high, but today’s rates are too low, I think.  That opinion and those opposing it are as subjective as theology.

Partial Fiscal Note – 032012-1

The high numbers show up about halfway down the .pdf file, in the section titled “I‐502 Fiscal Note Projections.”  Search for “Fiscal Note Projections” to get there.

I’m planning to look at the numbers in detail before long.

I saw a guy inhaling from an e-cigarette in a theater lobby the other night.  That seemed to be OK.  Now Lorillard is buying a company that makes them.  And there’s a loophole.  “Prices for e-cigarettes vary greatly but can cost half as much as traditional cigarettes, which are heavily taxed.”  “Got a Light—er Charger? Big Tobacco’s Latest Buzz,” Mike Esterl, WSJ, April 26, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304723304577365723851497152.html Continue reading “Beating the tobacco tax”

Taxation without Hesitation was the name of a softball team made up of IRS workers in DC in the late 20th century.  With our fiscal situation, I sometimes think that’s what America needs.  But the aim here is to think about taxes analytically.

“In reality tax is the only truly funny subject taught in law school. It is human greed four mornings each week.” The late Marty Ginsburg, http://taxprof.typepad.com/files/135tn0177.pdf.

“British Prime Minister David Cameron will propose . . . that British retailers charge a minimum of 40 pence (63 cents) per unit of alcohol. A unit is the equivalent of 10 milliliters of pure alcohol.”

American taxes on alcohol depend on the form it comes in:  alcohol in beer is taxed less than alcohol in liquor, with wine in between.  Cameron’s policy of treating all alcohol alike has a lot of theoretical appeal.  Why doesn’t he propose taxing it?  Do pro-business leanings explain his desire to see the money to people in the alcohol business?

Quote is from Paul Sonne and Jeanne Whalen, Cameron Wants Brits to Pay More for Alcohol in Bid to Curb Drinking, WSJ, March 23, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304724404577297814271968518.html?KEYWORDS=alcohol+unit