The US House passed a continuing spending resolution through March 14, 2025 at 5:59PM yesterday, the US Senate passed it this morning at 12:23AM, averting a federal government shutdown

 

 The House roll call vote (366-34-1-29nv) is here. 34 Republicans voted Nay.

The Senate roll call vote (85-11-4nv) is here. 10 Republicans voted Nay, as did pinko commie Bernie Sanders.

The continuing spending resolution includes NO extension of the suspended debt ceiling time limit demanded by president-elect Trump, who now gets to waste his precious time trying to primary all 170 Republicans in 2026 who just voted for this

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL,

something he had threatened on Wednesday.

170 House GOP just told Donald J. Trump Nay Nay by voting Yea, proving once again that he is just a paper tiger.

Meanwhile the debt ceiling and the income tax remain chief among the failed gimmicks of the Progressive Era, dating to 1917 and 1913. The one hasn't stopped the debt from exploding to $36 trillion, and the other hasn't paid that bill. 

The continued existence of these gimmicks serves to remind us, but only periodically, of the lies we tell ourselves, which is why we have to keep them.

Billionaire Marc Andreessen loves him some plutocracy, which his beloved Thomas Jefferson would have taxed into oblivion

Trump's so-called party of populism has given us a cabinet teeming with billionaires.

Welcome to rule by the rich. We deserve them, good and hard.

Andreessen's hero, Thomas Jefferson, would have taxed them all into oblivion to keep their baneful influence from destroying republican government. Thomas Jefferson was an advocate of what we have known as steeply progressive taxation.

But billionaire Andreessen thinks you are too dumb even to know that.

Hell, he's probably too dumb to know that.

 

"Exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise."

Joe Biden more than once pledged not to pardon his son Hunter Biden, but today he did

 The period covered by the pardon goes all the way back to January 1, 2014 for any and all crimes Hunter may have committed, too. You know, like tax crimes. The statute of limitations for tax crimes is ten years.

This wasn't just about the gun crimes.

Meanwhile, 363 people were convicted of tax fraud in 2023, and 63% went to prison. 

It's great to be a Democrat.

 

Every single dollar spent by government is a dollar thrown into the fire, except for those handed directly to Elon Musk for every Tesla sold, so Trump adding a new Department of Government Efficiency is extremely amusing

Yeah, let's put the HOG feeding at the government trough and getting filthy stinking rich off electric car subsidies and tax credits, and government rocket contracts, in charge of government efficiency.

 

 

 Trump announces Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy to lead new ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ 

What a bunch of phony baloney plastic banana good time rock 'n rollas. 

"Government efficiency" is one of those oxymorons that is more equal than other oxymorons.

Donald Trump is already hard at work making long lists of all the things he's not going to accomplish as president, which he'll foolishly fritter away his time on

 Ten points about The Swamp.

Seven points about The War on the Drug Cartels.

Trump's saying all this stuff and we don't even know yet if Republicans will win the US House, where they have 214 seats as of right now and lead narrowly in 8 undecided races. If they win them all they'll have 222 seats, with 218 needed for the majority.

If not, well that'll be the end of all ambition, now won't it?

222 at best is a very narrow margin to accomplish anything anyway, a mere continuation of the status quo where Republicans in the House must tread lightly to keep the caucus unified with a very similarly sized narrow majority (220).

What kind of sweep was this? Once again the Trump movement . . . isn't.

It would be easy to call this stuff hubris from Trump. Let's just say he still hasn't learned anything about how to accomplish anything of relatively permanent value. He has NO priorities when everything is a priority. He is, once again, unserious.

The Senate will be in Republican hands, so we'll at least get more judicial appointments who might advance traditional American principles of law and order.

The scuttlebutt is that the first agenda item in Congress will be making Trump's expiring tax reform permanent.

I can imagine him having to waste the entire first year on this. He'd be better off quickly settling for its extension for another ten years under reconciliation rules, and then move along smartly to immigration and energy reforms before the midterms are upon us in 2026, after which he'll be the lamest of lame ducks.

If there's any hope of boosting GDP and improving everyone's pocketbook they've got to make energy reform the priority. And mere immigration enforcement solves an untold number of other problems which bedevil the country, like illegal drugs, crime, and social spending.

Spending bills will come as they will, and should simply aim to starve the federal government of money to shrink it, as could have been the case last time but nothing changed. The beast grows naturally because permanent spending programs are indexed to inflation. That isn't going to be stopped. Growing the economy to pay the bills is therefore job one.

I'm expecting very little positive from this lot, but I do hope J. D. Vance will emerge at the end of it to take us to a better future.

Democrats who say they fear Trump because he's an authoritarian are absolutely comic. Watch for rogue judges to hamstring him just like last time, and Trump will bluster and fume and things will simply muddle along.

But, of course, unforeseen events like wars have a way of intruding and making mooks of us all. Let's hope Trump can finally make a deal to end and prevent them.

Kamala Harris, the candidate of confiscatory taxes, has the endorsement of the IRS union

 

So predictable: Democrats run on punishing the rich with new taxes to pay for more obscene spending, the rich run scared to transfer wealth under current rules to escape them

 

  Under current law, individuals can transfer up to $13.61 million (and couples can send up to $27.22 million) to family members or beneficiaries without owing estate or gift taxes.

The benefit is scheduled to expire at the end of 2025 along with the other individual provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. If it expires, the estate and gift tax exemption will fall by about half. Individuals will only be able to gift about $6 million to $7 million, and that rises to $12 million to $14 million for couples. Any assets transferred above those amounts will be subject to the 40% transfer tax. ...

With Harris and Trump essentially tied in the polls, the odds have increased that the estate tax benefits will expire — either through gridlock or tax hikes. ...

More than $84 trillion is expected to be transferred to younger generations in the coming decades, and the estate tax “cliff” is set to accelerate many of those gifts this year and next. ...

While giving the maximum of $27.22 million may make sense today from a tax perspective, it may not always make sense from a family perspective. ...

For families that plan to take advantage of the estate tax window, however, the time is now. It can take months to draft and file transfers. During a similar tax cliff in 2010, so many families rushed to process gifts and set up trusts that attorneys became overwhelmed and many clients were left stranded. Advisors say today’s gifters face the same risk if they wait until after the election.

More.

Did you notice how not one word was said in last night's Trump-Harris debate about Kamala Harris' price controls proposal to combat inflation?

ABC's debate moderators made sure NOT to go there, no sir. And they completely avoided making Harris defend her inflation record as Biden's VP and instead joined the attack on Trump, fact-checking him multiple times but not her. Trump had to debate three people.

It was a disgraceful spectacle which he should have known better than to join.

At least Trump called her a Marxist at one point, that was good.

Harris for her part continued to push for the gimmicks which WaPo previously called out: $25k down-payment assistance which will only increase housing prices by $25k; $50k tax credits for starting a business, which is notably a lot more than for the everyday folks Democrats say they care about most (how many of those will later declare bankruptcy and pocket the cash?); $6k child tax credit, an idea stolen from J. D. Vance and bid-up just like student-loan forgiveness in order to buy votes.

It's all just marginal stuff which treats the symptoms and not the causes.

She is not a serious candidate.

 

The personal exemption from the income tax should be $127,000 today

 The personal exemption in 1913 was $4,000 when the average Joe made about $800 a year.

Adjusted for inflation, that's $127,000 in July 2024.

No one paid any tax except rich people, and on up to $20,000 of income the rich paid 1% on the $16,000 difference in 1913.

Kamala Harris meanwhile wants to tax your ass into oblivion, so spare me the comparisons between her so-called budget proposals and Trump's.

Do you have gains only on paper in stocks?

She'll tax them.

That's what unrealized gains are. 

The argument that this will apply only to the rich is a joke.

The income tax was to apply only to the rich, too.

Now look where we are: Paying through the teeth and $35 trillion in debt.

And she wants MORE.

 

 

Can you spot the year when your home became just another commodity?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxpayer_Relief_Act_of_1997

Another salvo at Kamala Harris: WaPo editorial board calls her anti-big business proposals populist gimmicks, says her first-time home buyer $25,000 down-payment plan will increase housing prices

 

 The whole thing makes sense, which is surprising coming as it does from The Washington Post, which ends this way:

 [Even] her [good] ideas would cost money, yet she insisted in her speech that she would hold to President Joe Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on any household earning $400,000 or less annually. That excludes 80 percent of taxable income, and does not take into account the recent surge in families earning over $400,000. The Harris campaign says it plans to raise revenue to cover these costs but did not provide specific offsets in its economic plan rollout. Without them, Ms. Harris’s full plan would add $1.7 trillion to federal deficits over a decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan budget watchdog.

To be sure, every campaign makes expensive promises that will never come to pass, especially with a divided Congress. Remember Mr. Biden’s pledge to make community college free? Even adjusted for the pandering standards of campaign economics, however, Ms. Harris’s speech Friday ranks as a disappointment.

Wow.

What's that old saying, When you're a liberal and you've lost The Washington Post, you've already lost?

Well ......................................................................................... is the Democrat Party still liberal though?

Kim Strassel: the GOP needs to be engaged in a whole-of-election message reminding Americans of the ugly Biden policies of past and present, and Kamala’s promise to carry them into the future

 The libertarian-inclined in the GOP want the message restricted more or less to the economy, inflation, immigration, and crime.

Biden: Forgotten But Not Gone

Kimberley Strassel, Wall Street Journal

 

Strassel points out Biden is continuing or proposing the following to help cement support for Harris on the left:

Student loan giveaways

Nationwide rent controls

A plea deal for the 9/11 terrorists

$2.2 billion for farmers, ranchers, and owners of forest land who experienced discrimination

Million$ in new grants for women's health, state climate programs, tribal fisheries, youth skills programs

Signage everywhere thanking Biden's infrastructure law for road improvements

New rules protecting workers from heat

New prevailing wage rules for clean energy workers

New chemical and air toxin crackdowns

New regulations for wildlife refuges

New regulations on offshore drilling

Higher efficiency standards for commercial equipment and residential boilers

A crackdown on so-called junk fees for extras like family-seating on flights.

 

Polling has shown inflation and illegal immigration have been the top issues, which of course doesn't mean other things can't be issues.

 

Strassel doesn't seem to get that the green energy war on fossils fuels is the top problem for the economy, driving up the cost of everything, while the massive illegal immigration feeds competition for the housing no one can afford anyway, not to mention crime up and wages down for the bottom half of the country. 

 

And of course, the Trump tax reform disappears if Harris is elected, among other horribles. 

Trump ups the ante with Democrats, proposes eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits paid by senior citizens, which about 40% of them now do, contrary to the original intention of the reforms in 1983

 

 About 40% of people who get Social Security must pay federal income taxes on their benefits.

More.

As originally intended in the 1983 reforms, taxes were designed to affect just 10% of recipients:

By the time the law was first amended in 1993, about 18% of Social Security beneficiaries had some tax liability (compared to about 10% when the law was originally enacted).

Kamala Harris wants to build the middle class by throwing $3,000 rent-subsidies at people instead of making this an economy which provides full-time jobs at potential

 Building the middle class may be a ‘defining goal’ under a Harris presidency — how that may shape a key tax credit

53% working full time today would mean 8 million more people working full time than do. 

Full time jobs are the indispensable key to homeownership.

 

53% worked full time in 2000

49% worked full time in 2024

Your reminder that Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi owns the two worst episodes of federal spending in excess of tax receipts in the history of the country

 Spending originates in the US House by law.

Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi owns the two worst episodes of federal spending in excess of tax receipts in the history of the country, by 310% in 2009 and by 309% in 2020, under Obama (Great Financial Crisis) and then under Trump (Pandemic).

 

Estimated-tax-penalties balloon by four times in 2023 due to higher interest rates and a greedy, lazy IRS which just got tens of billions in new funding from Joe Biden but can't get its software updated

 The average estimated-tax penalty in fiscal-year 2023 climbed to about $500 from about $150 in 2022, according to Internal Revenue Service data. Meanwhile the number of affected tax filers rose to 14 million from 12 million. Overall, the agency assessed $7 billion in estimated-tax penalties in 2023, nearly four times the $1.8 billion it assessed in 2022. ...

Filers who don’t pay in enough tax throughout the year owe a penalty in the form of an interest charge on their underpayment that’s set quarterly. In 2021, the year that prompted most of the 2022 assessments, the IRS’s rate on underpayments was a rock-bottom 3%. The penalty is based on the short-term Treasury rate plus three points, and it climbed to 6% as rates rose in 2022. That pushed up charges on underpayments assessed the next year.

In 2023 the rate rose to 8% for the fourth quarter. It’s still there–so underpayment penalties will continue to sting taxpayers who owe them. ...

The IRS’s computers can impose undeserved penalties on some estimated-tax filers, because they automatically treat income as though it’s earned equally throughout the year. So if a filer does a fourth-quarter Roth IRA conversion and pays tax on it at that time, the system will assume the income was earned all through the year but the tax was only paid in the fourth quarter.

More.

Trump has learned nothing, floats wacko bird pie-in-the-sky elimination of income tax

The federal government now needs about $6 trillion in revenue annually for the budget, social security, and medicare.

Imports of goods and services last year were valued at $3.83 trillion. You'd have to tariff all that at 160% or so to come up with $6 trillion. When pigs fly.

Trump promised big cuts to spending and to the size of the government workforce in 2016. Never happened.

This won't either.

 

Greek historian Victor Davis Hanson, born in 1953, flips his lid, laughably blames every single problem in America today on the Baby Boomers in a wildly insane rant, my favorite being . . .

 

 . . . the Baby Boomers destroyed the southern border . . ..

Here.

Immigration policy in the United States was forever radically altered in 1965, by no one born in the Baby Boom.

The average age of a US Representative in 1965 was 51.4, the Congress of which overwhelmingly passed the destructive reform 320-70, which ended the American commitment to social homogeneity prevailing from the 1920s.

This was an act of American hubris, born of victory in WWII. One would think Hanson would know about that.

Their average birth year puts them in 1914, children of the mentally-ill Progressive Era (1896–1917) which gave us the income tax (1909), popular election of senators (1913), prohibition of alcohol (1919), and women's suffrage (1920), all of which were sufferable as long as their was social stability. Well, except for the prohibition.

The biggest problem affecting Baby Boomers is a lazy attention to our own history, and perhaps self-hatred.

Tax Foundation tax calculator shows EVERYONE'S personal taxes going UP if Biden lets Trump tax cuts expire

 A married couple with 2 kids and a modest combined income of $85k would realize a $1,661 tax increase if the Trump tax cuts are allowed to expire under Joe Biden. 

The tax calculator is here.

If you LOVED Joe Biden's inflation, wait til you enjoy his tax increase!