Told ya: Trump to raise lowest tax bracket from 10% to 12%

Story here:

Top White House and GOP leaders have agreed to raise the lowest individual tax rate from 10 to 12 percent, paired with doubling the standard deduction, 5 senior Republicans tell us.

The standard deduction becomes the football in this scheme. If the doubling survives intact, which is hardly certain, down the line someone can say it must be reduced, without advocating a change in the bracket percentage and voila, you've got a nice little tax increase on the poorest members of society without directly raising taxes.

This ridiculous tinkering with rates and deductions just continues ad infinitum since 1913.

As with the Obamacare repeal efforts, there are no guiding principles informing the tax reform debate.

Mandating health coverage at the federal level is tyrannical, and so is the income tax, quite apart from its deliberate inequalities.

Trump kept insisting on a replacement for Obamacare as well as a system of progressive taxation during his speechifying.

There's no there there. 

It's time to treat the rich like equals: Dean Kalahar speaks up for proportional taxation

Here, although the ahistorical reading of Scripture by liberals on behalf of progressive taxation is hardly new:

Proportional taxes actually meet the equity and ability to pay principles of effective, efficient, and "fair" taxes. With a proportional tax everyone pays the same percentage but those who earn or spend more pay more. For example: if you buy a $50,000 car and the Fair/proportional tax is 10%, then you pay $5,000 in tax. If, on the other hand, you buy a $5,000 car, your tax is $500. By paying the same percentage, everyone is offered the dignity of being treated equally, and those who afford more pay more. Isn't that what liberals are always demanding?

"We have to raise the progressive tax rate so the "rich" pay their "fair share."

In reality, progressive tax rates, like the federal income tax, might meet the ability to pay principle but not the equity principle. Progressive taxes have varied tax rate percentages depending on income so taxpayers are not treated equally. Currently the top 20% of income earners pay more than 90% of the income taxes, while the bottom 50% pays less than 3% of the income taxes. Who's actually "paying their fair share?"

Rush Limbaugh Adopts The Class Warfare Of Obama/The Wall Street Journal

Today, here:

The middle class still is, in an aggregate sense, where all the money in the country is. That's where all the money is in the economy. The rich do not hold all the money.

This is the voice of a very rich man who is under attack by a leftist president and a leftist consensus which says that the rich do not pay their fair share, the voice of a man who is not reasoning as a conservative but emoting as a rich man. If he reasoned as a conservative, if The Wall Street Journal reasoned as conservatives, we would be seeing something other than the suggestion that the leftists go victimize the middle class. Like the bank robber, this thinking, if it can be called thinking at all, maintains that you should tax the middle class because that's where the money is.

As such what Rush says is not conservative, but purely reactionary in the worst sense of the term: it responds to an historical development in which it finds itself the victim and seeks escape instead of statesmanship. This is what you get from a Rush Limbaugh, who abhors learning. You wouldn't get that from a William F. Buckley, Jr.

It goes without saying that it is absurd to suggest that all the money is in the middle, but apparently we must insist that it is not so.

The middle quintile of households made a median income of almost $50,000 in 2011. Generously speaking, this approximates to every single income in the country in 2011 making between $35,000 and $65,000 annually, 35 million workers, accounting for $1.7 trillion out of $6.2 trillion in net compensation, just 27% of the total pie. The bottom end of the richest quintile, on the other hand, begins somewhere just north of $100,000 annually, 10 million workers, accounting for $2.1 trillion out of $6.2 trillion in net compensation in 2011, significantly more at almost 34% of the total pie.

But this is no way for a conservative to look at it.

The founders of the country envisioned equality of contribution from taxation, which the original constitution required to be direct, apportioned according to population. This is why taxation was always very low, because the poor could not afford it. This is also why we have a census in the constitution, not so that we may learn how many Americans are of Italian descent, but simply how many there are, for tax purposes. If it is pleaded that the constitution has been changed to permit indirect taxation, it is still more originally American to insist on equality of treatment under the tax code. The real problem with America is that originalist principles were thrown under the bus in the early 20th century by progressives like Teddy Roosevelt, and enshrined in constitutional amendments under people like Woodrow Wilson.

Equality of treatment under the law is the principle conservatives should be trumpeting. But you will listen for that in vain from Rush Limbaugh.

The progressives like Wilson, a Presbyterian whose grandiose ideas bordered on the fanatical and are reminiscent of no one so much as George W. Bush, misused Christianity by insisting that "to whom much is given, much is required" in arguing for progressive taxation, and forgot that "no one can be my disciple who does not say goodbye to everything that he has". The actual price of Christian discipleship was everything you had, whether you were rich or poor. But in the secularized, immanentized bastard version of this under progressivism, the price became distorted so that the richer you were the more you owed, the poorer the less. It is little wonder that for that the rich demanded more, and eventually got it, in special rules in the tax code designed especially for them, which since that time have evolved into the elaborate distortions and complexities of the tax code we face with trepidation and consternation today.

In a very real sense when it comes to the tax code, The American Century has been the most un-American one of all, and the crying need of the time is to reverse it and refound the country anew on the original American principle of equality of treatment.

Senate Cliff Deal Settles For TEN TIMES LESS Revenue Than Cliff-Diving

As reported here:

"Before [Obama] spoke, details of the emerging deal emerged. It would raise $600 billion in revenue over the next 10 years [emphasis added] by increasing tax rates for individuals making more than $400,000 and households making above $450,000 annually, officials familiar with the talks said.  ... The Biden-McConnell negotiations appeared to offer the last hope for avoiding the fiscal cliff of $600 billion in tax increases and spending cuts that economists fear could throw the country back into recession."

$600 billion over ten years?

Notice how CNBC leaves out "per year" after "$600 billion" in that second part of the snip after the elipsis. A $600 billion annual hit to the economy would be bad indeed, but only because it would post as a bookkeeping negative. Government spending counts as GDP, and removing $600 billion annually from the pool of funds normally tallied under GDP would "book" a recession before we even got there.

Look, by letting the Bush tax rates expire we were supposed to face a tax increase generating revenues of $500 billion PER YEAR or so, plus $100 billion per year from separately agreed to sequestration cuts to defense and social spending from August 2011's debt-ceiling imbroglio. That's why this fiscal cliff was such a big deal. We were talking $600 billion per year in the case of the Bush tax cuts expiring, not $60 billion per year as the Senate has now agreed. Tax increases on the first $9,000 of income ALONE would have generated $65 billion per year by letting the Bush tax cuts expire on the lowest wage earners for the simple reason that that tax increase affects EVERYONE'S first $9,000 of income. That's how progressive taxation works. Keep going on up the income ladder with all those expiring Bush tax rates reverting to the higher Clinton rates and soon you are talking about $500-$600 billion PER YEAR in revenues. What do you think Obama and Dirty Harry Reid have been greedily eyeing after all? That they are caving to this "deal" just shows how really weak is their position, and how much power the House has in fact, if only they understood it.

Unless of course it is all an elaborate ruse, a trap for the House, which just might be conservative enough to reject the deal for its surrealism at a time when the political consensus in favor of "balance" is rearing its ugly head. In which case the political position of the conservative House will be marginalized more or less indefinitely, and the political power of the Senate enhanced.

The US Senate is clearly the most despicable institution in the federal system, if that were possible, for obscuring all this from the American people, for the way bipartisanship means liberals get to remain liberal while Republicans have to check their conservatism with the coat girl, for continuing to spend through borrowing, and especially for acting as a Super House in doing all this, trying to shove this crap down our throats just as it has already shoved the ObamaCare crap down our throats. Bills are supposed to originate in the House after all, but those which do are routinely ignored by the Senate, which thinks itself superior and possessed of a priority it does not have.

The problem clearly is the US Senate and the way it is elected, how long it serves, and the way it acts. If ever it were time to repeal the 17th Amendment, this is it.

Republicans Attacked ObamaCare. Hispanics Overwhelmingly Supported It. Any Questions?

The idea that Republicans alienate (can I say that?) Hispanics because Republicans are against amnesty for illegal immigrants is ludicrous. Hispanics love the welfare state and the party which stands for it, especially its newest iteration in ObamaCare:

The poll, which surveyed 887 likely Latino voters, shows that 62 percent of respondents approve of the overall job Obama has done with health care while in office, including his creation of the controversial plan for comprehensive health care reform. The poll was conducted the Sept. 11-13 and the margin of sampling error is +/- three percentage points.

More here.

Heather Mac Donald gets it right, for National Review, here:

"It is not immigration policy that creates the strong bond between Hispanics and the Democratic party, but the core Democratic principles of a more generous safety net, strong government intervention in the economy, and progressive taxation."

Romney Is Half Right: One Tax Proposal Is New, And Alarming

And it is amazing no one has taken this seriously:

"My plan is not like anything that's been tried before. My plan is to bring down rates, but also bring down deductions and exemptions and credits at the same time so the revenue stays in, but that we bring down rates to get more people working."

Romney is threatening to reduce the value of exemptions and credits which exist under the existing tax code.

This amounts to major fiddling which the preoccupation with "deductions" obscures.

Deductions we have lost before, as in the 1986 tax reform. That he wants to reduce the value of more deductions is bad enough. But the truly alarming thing is the proposal to do the same to exemptions, and to a lesser extent to credits. That is new, and alarming.

That can only mean the whole set of assumptions involving the system of personal exemptions, and perhaps also the time-honored "married filing jointly" status itself, and credits such as the Earned Income Credit and the Child Tax Credit and the like. I can well imagine a President Mitt Romney eliminating the favoritism of the tax code toward married people, and toward their housing and their children, to make gay and unmarried people equal to them in the tax code. Remember, in Massachusetts Gov. Romney had a reputation, deserved, for being a tax equalizer.

I also expect he will propose capping the value of deductions and credits by using something like Martin Feldstein's plan, in order to preserve the deductions and credits for lower income individuals but phasing them out as one climbs the income ladder. In other words, the progressive tax code stays, but progressivity of tax deductibility goes out the window. That may be fair to a liberal like Romney, but it isn't maintaining progressivity, it is steepening it.

Mitt Romney is not a social conservative. And if he gets his way with the tax code, I suspect he's going to prove it, unless conservatives in the US House stop him.

Good luck, America. You're going to need it.

Dem. Sen. Patty Murray Is Willing To Throw Middle Class Under The Bus

Unless Sen. Murray and the Democrats get what they want, the middle class is indeed expendable.

All taxpayers would be punished by Democrats' unwillingness to compromise with Republicans, who were elected to get spending under control, but no one more so than those Americans who file at the bottom of the income ladder in the 10 percent bracket, if current tax rates are allowed to expire as the Democrats threaten. Those hapless souls at the bottom will have to pay in the 15 percent bracket in that event, a tax rate increase of 50 percent.

It is remarkable that Democrats are willing to punish the poor in this way if they can't punish the rich in theirs.

Republicans want current progressive tax rates for all taxpayers made permanent, but Democrats do not. In Democrats' opinion, the rich don't deserve to pay their currently much higher rates, but need to pay even higher ones to meet a definition of fair Democrats demand to write by themselves. Nevermind a tax increase of any kind anywhere in this economy will be negative for growth. As for the spending cuts, Democrats agreed to those in the face of a downgrade to America's bond rating, but they weren't enough, and the AAA rating went into the ashbin of history. If those cuts were going to be inadequate, why did Democrats vote for them, and why aren't they calling for steeper ones now in order to restore the country to AAA?

In France, new socialist government tax increases on the rich are driving the wealthy out of the country, taking their money with them to friendlier, lower-tax-rate neighbors, which will deprive France not only of the tax revenue, but of the investment capital.

Expect the same here if the Democrats get their way.

Here is Sen. Murray, quoted in The Christian Science Monitor:

With the US economy speeding toward a year-end fiscal cliff of some $560 billion in higher taxes and draconian spending cuts, Sen. Patty Murray (D) of Washington bluntly laid out her party’s position on how Congress should handle the nation’s coming fiscal travails: Go big or go over the ledge.

“Millions of jobs could be lost through the automatic cuts, programs families depend on would be slashed irresponsibly across the board, and middle-class tax cuts would expire.  And once again, if Republicans won’t work with us on a balanced approach, we are not going to get a deal,” said Senator Murray,  the Senate’s No. 4 Democrat, in a speech at the Brookings Institution on Monday.

“[I]f we can’t get a good deal – a balanced deal that calls on the wealthy to pay their fair share – then I will absolutely continue this debate into 2013, rather than lock in a long-term deal this year that throws middle-class families under the bus,” she said.

Michael Barone Joins The Liberal Chorus Attacking Progressive Taxation

You heard me right, the liberal chorus attacking the progressive tax code, in this case the progressive tax code's deductibility provisions which are . . . well, progressive.

Barone and other liberal Republicans like Pat Toomey, Gang of Sixers and Gang of Twelvers do it on the grounds that the deductions for mortgage interest and state and local taxes help the $100K+ set more.

Nevermind "the rich" already pay the vast majority of the taxes. They want to make them pay even more because . . . well, they don't really need the money, and government does! And maybe liberals will like us more.

Talk about ceding the moral high ground to the left. Who would want to go to all the trouble of becoming rich just so that they can have the privilege of paying even more of the taxes?

Nevermind that the poor own one of the biggest "tax loss expenditures" in the form of transfer payments for the Earned Income Credit and the Child Tax Credit: $109 billion. Compare that to the mortgage interest deduction's tax loss cost to the Treasury : $88 billion.

Here is Barone:

[T]he big money you can get from eliminating tax preferences comes from three provisions that are widely popular.

The three are the charitable deduction, the home mortgage interest deduction, and the state and local tax deduction. ...


[T]he vast bulk of the "tax expenditures" -- the money the government doesn't receive because taxpayers deduct mortgage interest payments from total income -- goes to high earners . . ..


Well why shouldn't they under a progressive tax system? 


There's really no difference between Michael Barone and Republican advocates for "tax reform" and Democrats like Peter Orszag, for example, who makes an argument for similarly flattening deductibility for the rich by limiting their traditional deductions enjoyed by everyone across the income spectrum. What this amounts to is an admission that the progressive deductibility which we have now does NOT go hand in hand with the tax code's progressive taxation.

The current arrangement may not seem fair to flat taxers, but it is internally consistent. If you pay progressively more in taxes, your deductions should justly be progressively worth more to you. And so they are. If you pay progressively less in taxes, your deductions should justly be worth less to you, progressively. And so they are.

Proposals to limit deductions for one class of taxpayers amount to destroying the internal coherence of the progressive tax code itself. It is nothing less than an attack on the idea of progressivity and its fair unfairness, all in the name of extracting even more from the pockets of successful people.

Sheer nincompoopery. 

Progressive Taxation: What Would Jesus Take?

The short answer is: all of it.

The long answer is more complicated.

Rush Limbaugh was a little ticked off a while back because liberals were asserting that Jesus would raise taxes, especially on the rich, which is, of course, a complete caricature of Jesus' teaching. Jesus wouldn't just raise taxes. He'd have made them completely irrelevant. For everyone.

The fact of the matter is, Jesus advocated complete liquidation of one's assets as a condition of discipleship. And after one did so liquidate, one would have no job to tax, either, because one would have to leave one's job to follow him.

Read the famous story about the rich man in Mark 10, paralleled in Matthew 19 and Luke 18, whom Jesus instructed to "sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor." Liberals like to stop right there, with the obligations this story places on the rich.

Few like to reckon, neither liberals nor Christians it must be said, with Luke 14:33: "Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple."

Or with the calling of The Twelve Disciples, who left all and followed Jesus at his command, wandering around Galilee and Judea for something between one and three years until Jesus met his coup de grace, leaving their families unsupported for the time and becoming deadbeat dads in the process. A fine lot, they.

The truth is Jesus had only these 12 takers, and all of them proved to be something of a disappointment in the end, to say the least. Everyone else he called to discipleship found it a bit of a stretch, and followed at a distance, as it were, especially if a miracle feeding looked to be in the offing. The analogy would be to the Jewish proselytes to whom Paul preached his gospel, which they found rather more attractive than that whole circumcision thing required to become Jews.

Jesus' radicalism makes a certain kind of sense if the end of the world and The Final Judgment is just around the corner, which, of course, would make practical concerns beside the point. "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on." "Some of you standing here will not taste death before you see the kingdom of God come with power."

This is the sort of stuff from which progressive liberalism, inspired by 19th Century liberal Christianity, tried to salvage something, denuded as it was of its supernaturalism and its apocalypticism. Inappropriately inserting their interpretation of a timeless Christian religion into American life, the progressives advocated a moral sensibility based on an unhistorical reading of the history of the religion, pretending all the while that only fundamentalists sought to impose a theocracy on America. In view of the high rates of taxation they came to advocate starting from 1913 (see here), one would almost gladly settle for the fundamentalists' theocracy with its tithe. What rich man in America wouldn't kill for a 10 percent tax rate?

Progressive taxation is a Christian heresy, arbitrarily ratcheting up the cost of discipleship citizenship the richer one gets, but never quite taking all the money, and never really justifying the varying costs in any given year, nor from year to year. Why is the price of entry at a lower rate for a relatively poorer rich man than for a richer rich man? Oh, progressivism tries to pretty this up with sayings of Jesus such as "To whom much is given, much is required" and the like, but at the expense of the full record which shows that Jesus demanded the same from everyone: a complete turning of one's back on one's former existence, no matter how great or how small by human standards of measurement. The Christian conception for this turning was summarized in a single word: "repentance." By contrast the paying of taxes in America is merely with reluctance.

In addition to this heresy, progressivism offers a related one which asserts that a better, improved future is just around the corner for all, if only the rich pay their fair share. This promise of an immanentized eschaton is a bastardized version of Jesus' belief in the coming sudden end of the world and of the in-breaking of the kingdom of God. But the reality is, like the prediction of the end of the world before it, the progressives' expected bright future never arrives, no matter how much money they throw at it.

The message of Jesus was much more stern and demanding than you will find in any church in America, or in the tax-writing committees of the Democratic caucus for that matter. Jesus' message was both much more pessimistic and much more undemocratic than most Americans would care to hear, which is why you don't hear it. It assumes that though many may be called, few end up being chosen. "Narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it." (Note to Rev. Rob Bell).

To a significant degree, that pessimism about human nature naturally animated the American founding generation, which ever sought to restrain human evil by recourse to divided government and divided powers within it. They were as familiar with the weaknesses of human nature through their reading of ancient history, literature and philosophy as they were through their reading of the Gospels and St. Paul.

They knew better than most men before them or since that you can't make men good simply by passing laws.

Paul in particular had written that sin was not counted where there was no law, but that when the law came, sin revived, and he died. The analogy from the tax world is similar: If you want to witness tax evasion, multiply the taxes. So funding the new government was going to be at best a tricky business. Which is one reason I think the founders decided to export the sorry business of taxation the way they did, imposing tariffs on foreign trade to generate government revenues, instead of taxing the population directly. They knew it was better to raise the ire of the alien who could be kept at bay than the ire of the countryman who could not.

It's a lesson we need to relearn, and fast.  

Liberals Love Progressive Taxation. Progressive Tax Deductions? Not So Much.

Peter Orszag for Bloomberg here likes the idea of flat tax deductions for some reason, but not flat taxes.

Maybe it's because such equality in deductions would increase the taxes paid by the top 25 percent of taxpayers, who already contribute the vast majority of the government's revenue. Orszag sees no reason why a person in the top marginal tax bracket should have his taxes reduced at that marginal rate by a deduction for a 401K contribution, or a mortgage interest payment, or a donation to charity. He wants the deduction to be a flat deduction for everyone, regardless of income, which sounds to me like an admission that there's something actually immoral about progressivity in the tax code.

Sounds like progress to me, the logical implication of which is that the tax rate also should be one flat rate for all.

In the meantime it remains that "tax reform" is to "progressive" as "tax increase" is to "liberal." The name has been changed to disguise the guilty.