Populist taxes to match Trump's populist rhetoric

 The original personal exemption from the income tax was $3,000 in 1913. The equivalent of that in September 2025 is $97,440.

For married filing jointly the personal exemption was $4,000 in 1913. The equivalent of that in September 2025 is $129,920. 

This personal exemption, which Trump eliminated in 2018, should be reinstated, and indexed to inflation in this way from here on out, and this income should be entirely federal-tax-free, except of course for Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes, and state and local taxes.

About 83% of individual wage earners made $97k or less in 2023.

That's what actual populist taxation would look like.

Remember, the roughly top 20% would not pay taxes on their first $97k either, so they would be just like everybody else in respect of basic income. If they can't live on that, then neither can we.

Standard deductions and/or itemized deductions for the top 20% are for the debates over the rates they should pay progressively, and should be a moot point for the majority because the majority wouldn't be paying federal taxes anyway. 

Corporate income taxes and capital gains taxes muddy these waters, but those taxes were originally placed on Wall Street fat cats at a time when farmers all across this land faced punitive taxes on property which the Wall Streeters did not. Corporate income and capital gains taxes were meant to address that inequity.

The income tax was subsequently added, on the rich obviously, in part because those other taxes didn't really work to address the inequity. But now we have this Rube Goldberg machine of taxation which Trump has merely tweaked again but is not fundamentally reformed.

The fact is that today we still have horrible tax inequity where some income is more equal than others, with much lower tax rates on capital gains held more than one year.

This overwhelmingly benefits the top 20% by wealth, who own about 90% of the stock market's value*. The owners of this wealth routinely take their income from this source, not from W-2 income, but they are taxed at much lower long term capital gains tax rates of 0%, 15%, and 20%.

* the top 20% of households as measured by income own about 87% of directly-held equities

-- Michael Hiltzik, here 

Let's compare a person's taxes on next year's income of $97,000 under the Big Ugly Bill's ordinary income tax rates versus the capital gains tax rates.

Starting in 2026, a single filer will get a standard deduction of $16,100. If he makes $97,000 next year in ordinary income, his taxable income will be $80,900 and his federal income tax will be $12,510 ($5,800 plus 22% of the amount over $50,400). The effective tax rate is 12.89% on $97,000.

The same filer without W-2 income but with $97,000 of long term capital gains income instead comes out way ahead. His taxable income is the same because his standard deduction is the same: $80,900. However, on the first $49,450 of taxable income he pays 0% capital gains tax because he held it longer than one year. The remaining $31,450 is taxed at just 15%, which is $4,717.50. The effective tax rate is 4.86%, not 12.89%! That's 62% lower.

If we treated all income from every source the same way and taxed accordingly, the playing field would be more level.

If the people are taxed at ordinary income tax rates, arguably all entities should be. Corporations are people, they tell us, so there should be no story ever again about a profitable company escaping federal taxation in this country.

But Tesla and Meta, for example, paid no tax in 2023. About 25% of companies don't on average. 

As for individuals, the data about how many escape taxation is harder to come by, but an estimated 90,000 households making $200k or more in 2022 escaped taxation legally, and about 3,200 individuals making $1 million or more paid no federal tax.

There is nothing populist about a system which treats the income of rich people worthy of a privilege the income of the rest of us is not. 

LOL, Ben Stein, cheerleader for "corporations are people", has decided that America has only just now become a fascist state

Now, in the year 2021, the iron curtain has come down hard. With Big Internet Tech and the White House now admittedly colluding to identify and suppress dissidents, even completely nonviolent dissidents, we no longer have a Constitution.

There is just one big corporate–government–IngSoc superstate running everything. Goodbye, America. The GOP, with 50 senators, does nothing. The state legislatures, by far a majority GOP, and the spineless Supreme Court do nothing. And so goodbye to the greatest experiment in the history of the world.

More.

Gee, what's the problem, Ben?

“Liberals don’t understand that corporations are people,” columnist Ben Stein wrote back in 1974. “They are the people who work for the corporation, buy its products, and own its stock. There is no mechanical person who is benefited if corporations make a good profit. Real people benefit, just as real people lose when corporations lose money.” True enough. But it is also true that corporations have as much of a vested interest in the political system (if not more) . . ..

Here.

The corporation in America was the creation of the King of England. Virginia was but one example of thirteen. The damn things rebelled. Samuel Johnson tried to explain it to us, but it, shall we say, kinda went over our heads, and where it didn't was met with what they would come to call a generous demonstration of disapprobation.

And so, what goes around comes around. Or as Reverend Wright would put it, "America's chickens . . . have come home . . . to roost!"

Taxation No Tyranny

 

 

LOL, Mittens joins Republican squishes Bush 41, Gerald Ford and John McCain in receiving the JFK "Profile in Courage" award

Story.

Mitt Romney voted to impeach Trump.

Bush 41 raised taxes after promising not to ("Read my lips").

Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon.

John McCain sponsored campaign finance reform legislation in 2002, which was partially overturned in Citizens United in 2010.

Romney's award is for Trump's first impeachment, not the second, for which Romney also voted, but I guess the six Republicans who joined Romney the second time are just chopped liver. That took took no courage whatsoever, apparently.

Does Carson Holloway for The Federalist even live in America 2020, torn by $2 billion in damages from rioting and looting?

 From his essay here:

Tocqueville was certainly correct that the dire legacy of slavery would not be eliminated immediately upon its abolition. America’s path toward racial justice was long and difficult, continuing for many decades after the end of the Civil War. Nevertheless, over time the process turned out better than Tocqueville expected. The country was not engulfed in a race war, and whites and black Americans gradually learned to live with each other as fellow citizens.

If you subscribe to ideology qua ideology, you can pretend that what your lyin' eyes are trying to tell you isn't true. And Holloway explicitly embraces the ideological habit of mind which blinds him to our reality:

Moreover, the northern settlers — and particularly the Puritans of New England — came to America not only with the general habits of freedom characteristic of all the English but with a peculiarly intense inclination toward self-government. They came, Tocqueville says, driven by a “purely intellectual craving,” seeking the “triumph of an idea.”

Accordingly, he embraces a sharp, ideological distinction between North and South, which is nothing but a caricature, as if neither love of lucre nor racism existed in the North: 

Tocqueville clearly regards the original southern settlers as less moral and less enlightened than their northern counterparts. The northerners came to America primarily to found self-governing communities based upon their (lofty and demanding) religious vision of a righteous society. The original Virginians came primarily in the pursuit of gain.

You will hardly find in American "conservatism" anywhere any rumination on the founding of the colonies as corporations, entities which were explicitly formed for gain for and by the English Crown in cooperation with the Bank of England. That was the whole point of Samuel Johnson's "Taxation No Tyranny", which ridiculed Americans with "Why do we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negroes?", which is the main reason why no one reads it. The American colonists broke the business deal with the Crown, violating their contracts. We responded by gussying up our thefts with lofty bs about freedom and equality and rights. French loans, and the French navy, helped us get away with it.

Tocqueville's antipathy toward the South is an artifact of French affinity for the excesses of those Enlightenment ideas which enjoyed a higher traffic in the American North, but also of immemorial French hatred for England which enjoyed free trade with the American South. He is hardly the guide Holloway makes him out to be. 

If there is any commonality left with the French vein in 2020 America, we have seen it in our streets with the violence, destruction, and blood-letting too reminiscent of the excesses of the French Revolution. The difference is that French republicanism sought to literally behead aristocrats, whereas now the rage is explicitly racial, focused on whites.

We have not learned to live with each other as fellow citizens. Cancel culture is everywhere, a euphemism for murder. The triumph of the ideas of BLM will literally mean the death of whitey. 

Any conservatism which pretends otherwise isn't worthy of the name.

Trump's Chair of the Council Economic Advisors, Kevin Hassett, wants to DOUBLE the number of immigrants into the US

David Bossie: An ‘America First’ immigration policy looks like this [no, it doesn't, Mr. Citizens United]:

As President Trump’s Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors Kevin Hassett pointed out in a 2013 paper for the American Enterprise Institute, the United States could add half a percentage point to economic growth by doubling the number of immigrants it lets into the country, especially if they come on employer-sponsored visas. President Trump’s chief economist continues to make the case that "for a country that has long thought of itself as a nation of immigrants, the U.S. falls far behind almost all the other countries in the number of immigrants it admitted relative to its population size.”

"Corporations are people" is based on the 14th Amendment, except it wasn't

Adam Winkler of the UCLA School of Law for The Atlantic explains, here or here.

Are bankrupt people who commit crimes absolved of them because they were bankrupt?

Then why should GM get off for killing over 80 people?

If corporations are people who have free speech rights just like everyone else, they have personal liability when they break the law, bankrupt or not.

Poor people go to jail all the time, but rich, well-connected corporations do not. How convenient.

Corporations Have Been Considered Persons Since At Least 1775

And not only have corporations been considered persons since at least 1775, the original 13 American Colonies were considered corporations who like individuals subject to their king also owed everything to him.

To wit, one Samuel Johnson, harmless drudge, in "Taxation No Tyranny" (1775) here:

An English colony is a number of persons, to whom the king grants a charter, permitting them to settle in some distant country, and enabling them to constitute a corporation enjoying such powers as the charter grants, to be administered in such forms as the charter prescribes. As a corporation, they make laws for themselves; but as a corporation, subsisting by a grant from higher authority, to the control of that authority they continue subject. ...

To their charters the colonies owe, like other corporations, their political existence. The solemnities of legislation, the administration of justice, the security of property, are all bestowed upon them by the royal grant. Without their charter, there would be no power among them, by which any law could be made, or duties enjoined; any debt recovered, or criminal punished. ...

It is, say the American advocates, the natural distinction of a freeman, and the legal privilege of an Englishman, that he is able to call his possessions his own, that he can sit secure in the enjoyment of inheritance or acquisition, that his house is fortified by the law, and that nothing can be taken from him but by his own consent. This consent is given for every man by his representative in parliament. The Americans, unrepresented, cannot consent to English taxations, as a corporation, and they will not consent, as individuals. ...

A corporation is considered, in law, as an individual, and can no more extend its own immunities, than a man can, by his own choice, assume dignities or titles. ...

That corporations, constituted by favour, and existing by sufferance, should dare to prohibit commerce with their native country, and threaten individuals by infamy, and societies with, at least, suspension of amity, for daring to be more obedient to government than themselves, is a degree of insolence which not only deserves to be punished, but of which the punishment is loudly demanded by the order of life and the peace of nations.

So in one sense the American revolution was a throwing-off of the corporate yoke and the deliberate breaking of a business contract the terms and conditions of which had fallen into dispute, with the added overlay of political philosophy lately inclined to view monarchy as tyranny.

And we thought crony capitalism was a late invention of fascist Italy when America was actually born of it.