Taxation

“Tax Expenditures” Is a Misnomer

by Laurence M. Vance August 25, 2023

The April 18 deadline for Americans to file their 2022 income tax returns had hardly passed before House Republicans began to talk about reviving three tax breaks for businesses that had lapsed or begun to phrase out under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) that the Republican-controlled Congress passed, and President Trump signed into law, in 2017. The TCJA The ...

How Not to Abolish the Income Tax

by Laurence M. Vance June 28, 2023

Throughout this country’s history, Americans have always paid taxes of various kinds. But no matter what kind, all taxation is theft. Everyone but a criminal obtains his income voluntarily. He either sells some good or service or he receives some kind of  stipend or gift But as explained by the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard (1926–1995): Only the State ...

Libertarian Plan to Simplify Taxpaying Misses the Mark

by Laurence M. Vance May 15, 2023

Another April 15 has come and gone. The inaugural and dreaded Tax Day initially fell on March 1, 1914. There was no withholding tax, so the full amount of federal taxes owed by individuals was payable on Tax Day. In 1919, the date was moved to March 15, and in 1955, the date was moved again to April 15. This year, ...

No One Should Have His Tax Returns Released

by Laurence M. Vance January 9, 2023

House Democrats finally obtained former president Donald Trump’s tax returns and promptly released them to the public. No one should have his tax returns released: not presidents, not politicians, not celebrities, not sports figures, not cab drivers. Released was nearly 6,000 pages of six years of individual and business income tax returns for the years 2015 through 2020. The

Biden’s Bloated IRS Will Skewer Taxpayers

by James Bovard December 1, 2022

The Internal Revenue Service is perhaps the ultimate sacred cow in Washington. It is the “goose that lays the golden eggs” for the city’s power and prestige, delivering trillions of dollars to politicians to work miracles (or at least get reelected). When criticism erupted over the 87,000 new revenooers to be hired thanks to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, Washington’s ...

Is Elon Musk Paying His Fair Share?

by Laurence M. Vance February 1, 2022

According to Forbes magazine, “The number of billionaires on Forbes’ 35th annual list of the world’s wealthiest exploded to an unprecedented 2,755—660 more than a year ago. Of those, a record-high 493 were new to the list—roughly one every 17 hours, including 210 from China and Hong Kong. Another 250 who’d fallen off in the past ...

Is There a VAT in Our Future?

by Laurence M. Vance August 1, 2021

President Joe Biden’s American Families Plan is expensive, really expensive. According to a White House “Fact Sheet,” this $1.8 trillion plan to “grow the middle class, expand the benefits of economic growth to all Americans, and leave the United States more competitive” includes “an additional four years of free, public education for our nation’s children” in the form of “free ...

The UBI, CTC, EITC, and the GOP

by Laurence M. Vance April 5, 2021

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Robert Doar and Matt Weidinger, two scholars at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank, are lamenting the passage of the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. They see it as the “Democrats’ stealth plan to enact universal basic income” because the “Covid stimulus would give checks ...

Millionaires for Insanity

by Michael Tennant August 17, 2020

A coterie of guilt-ridden rich folks calling themselves Millionaires for Humanity has signed an open letter begging the governments of the world to raise their taxes in order to undo the devastation wreaked by COVID-19. “As Covid-19 strikes the world, millionaires like us have a critical role to play in healing our world,” they write. That role, it seems, ...

Right Policy, Wrong Reason

by Laurence M. Vance April 6, 2020

Before Donald Trump indicated his support for the current coronavirus-relief program, he broached the idea of a payroll-tax cut. In addition to the money withheld from paychecks for income tax, there are, thanks to the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA), two payroll taxes: Social Security and Medicare. The Social Security tax rate is 12.4 percent (split equally between employer and employee) ...

What All the Democratic Presidential Candidates Have in Common

by Laurence M. Vance March 6, 2020

And then there were three. The Democratic National Convention will be held July 13-16 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A record twenty-nine Democrats formally announced that they were seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Fourteen of them withdrew in 2019. Four of them withdrew in 2020 before the Iowa Democratic caucuses on February 3 (Cory Booker, Julian Castro, John Delaney, Marianne Williamson). Three ...

So Much for Living the American Dream

by John W. Whitehead March 3, 2020

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” ― Frédéric Bastiat, French economist Let’s talk numbers, shall we? The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed ...