Showing posts with label tariffs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tariffs. Show all posts

Monday, March 20, 2017

Brian Domitrovic and Larry Kudlow aren't the first to tell you the income tax made big government possible

Their book, JFK and the Reagan Revolution, released in September 2016, makes the point well, as does this article in Forbes:

And sure enough, with the income tax presenting itself as patriotically taxing the rich—at times with utterly fictional 91 and 94% top rates, from the 1940s until the 1960s, as Larry Kudlow and I marvel at in our recent book, JFK and the Reagan Revolution—government was able to grow where government under the tariff could not. The income tax supervised the rise of the federal government to well over a fifth of national output—from 3% during the era of the tariff. ... The dishonesty at the heart of the income tax was the key that unlocked the financing of big government, by the little guy no less.

We've been making the same point, more or less, since at least 2011, and especially in March 2016 here:

[Mark Levin's] tariff rant this evening ignores that the America of his precious founders was a tariff regime until the dreaded income tax of 1913.

The America of the founders was also a limited government for that reason until that very day.

But open wide the avenue for revenue, and you open the maw of the Leviathan and crawl into it.

Thursday, May 12, 2016

Hey Mark Levin you big dope: Tariffs were the main source of all Federal revenue from 1790 to 1914

That's why the federal government stayed SMALL from 1790 to 1914.

IT'LL NEVER BE SMALL YOUR WAY (just a little smaller

STARVE THE BEAST! A spillover effect we can all appreciate.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Matt Cover thinks Donald Trump is talk radio's Frankenstein

Here, saying Trump is the by-product of an ignorant expectations farce deliberately played on the public by the scheming, self-serving jibber-jabberers Limbaugh, Hannity and Levin:

However, by organizing the GOP base around this fictional system of legislative combat, Movement leaders would lay the groundwork for the ignorant populism of Donald Trump.

Voters, having been told that Congress just lacked strong leaders willing to fight for principle, would flock to a figure who embodied exactly the kind of fiery machismo they had been told was needed.


That's almost amusing, but blindly discounts the "non-ideological" character of the Trump phenomenon's success with the illegal immigration and trade issues. These are conservative issues with a long and storied history but, unfortunately, are not granted legitimacy by today's current crop of so-called conservatives, for whom "principles" and ideology are paramount because they are at heart libertarians, not conservatives.

Trump's immigration and trade crusade may eventually come a cropper, but it won't be because he and the people don't believe in it. It'll be because it has no support from the establishment which runs a "system" organized around antithetical ideas, but also because it has no support from the "anti-establishment" either.

Represented by Limbaugh, Hannity and Levin on the radio, the preferred element of the contemporary demagogue, the anti-establishment has been just as much for open-borders and free-trade as the establishment has been. None of them can even imagine a limited, small American federal government starving from its very beginning on the measly tariffs, excises and land sales with which the founders stuck it. And none in the establishment even wants to.

Laura Ingraham has been waging the lonely battle against illegal immigration almost single-handedly for years on her little radio program in the mornings, with great success, while Michael Savage has had to beat the dead horse for almost twenty-five years as a misunderstood New York Jew.

But the cool thing about 2016 is that New York values are finally getting some respect in the rest of the country for a change, thanks to one Donald John Trump.

"Anti-establishment" talk radio has yet to catch up.

Monday, March 14, 2016

It's hard to overstate what an ignoramus is Mark Levin about tariffs and trade

Mark Levin is a lawyer, not an historian, and not an economist, and not much of a hail fellow well met, either. Always seeking approval at others' expense, he should rather seek to convince without spite than to confound without understanding.

His tariff rant this evening ignores that the America of his precious founders was a tariff regime until the dreaded income tax of 1913.

The America of the founders was also a limited government for that reason until that very day.

But open wide the avenue for revenue, and you open the maw of the Leviathan and crawl into it.

We haven't been the same since, slowly dissolving in its mandibular juices on our way to the shit pile of history.

If Mark Levin had any brains about the founding, he'd know this.


Saturday, October 4, 2014

The New York Times speaks out against free-trade


Since the 1970s, economic orthodoxy has argued for low tariffs, free capital flows, elimination of industrial subsidies, deregulation of labor markets, balanced budgets and low inflation. This philosophy — later known as the Washington Consensus — was the basis of advice the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank gave to developing countries in return for financial help. The irony is that during the Industrial Revolution, today’s rich countries — Britain, France and the United States — pursued the very opposite policies: high tariffs, government investment in industry, financial regulations and fixed values for currencies. Trade expanded, and capital flowed anyway. ... Nations that have ignored the nostrums of the Washington Consensus — China, India and Brazil — have grown rapidly and raised their standards of living. Improvements in poverty and inequality occurred in Latin America only in the 2000s, after the I.M.F. and the World Bank reduced their grip on those nations.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Blame The Yankees For The Minimum Wage: A Northern Tariff On The South

Doin' right ain't got no end
Jay Cost for The Weekly Standard, here:

Obama’s [State of the Union] address inadvertently referenced the government’s proclivity to play favorites. The minimum wage is a hallowed talking point for wealthy liberals posing as hardscrabble populists, but in fact its original purpose was to serve as a sort of domestic tariff. By 1937 Northern industries had come to terms with organized labor, but the South still resisted. Fearing a flight of capital to Dixie, it was Northern businessmen who made the difference in pushing a minimum wage through Congress.

Liberal Democrats had outsized majorities during this period of the New Deal, but Southerners controlled key choke points within the legislature, notably the House Rules Committee. It was only a broad coalition that included liberals, organized labor, and, crucially, Northern industrialists that brought the Fair Labor Standards Act to a vote on the floor. Unsurprisingly, the wage floor was set so low that only the South was really affected. And even then, it only passed after it was loaded up with exemptions for all sorts of politically privileged groups.

This decidedly inegalitarian back story of the minimum wage has mostly been lost to history. One would be hardpressed to find a book about the New Deal in Barnes & Noble that discusses this at any length. This is not a coincidence; advocates of bold, activist government want to forget all the inequalities it creates. So it is with Obama. His signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is one of the most grossly unfair pieces of legislation to become law in modern times. Underwritten by a logroll among elite interests as varied as the drug manufacturers and the feminist left, it is an enormous redistribution of wealth from the young to the old, the healthy to the sick, without due regard to socioeconomic status.

Monday, June 3, 2013

Obama Is Eliminating The Middle Class, But Do You Know Why?

Based on how thorough-going are Obama's attacks on the middle class, I'd say it's all intentional, something the professor would not dare say if he wants to keep his career, so I'll say it for him since I don't have a career to save.

Summarized from an op-ed by Peter Morici, University of Maryland, here:

    His immigration policy swells the ranks of visa-holders in skill-short areas like engineering as well as the ranks of semi-skilled immigrant workers, frustrating the middle-class aspirations of the working poor born in this country.


    His massive expansion of student loans permits universities to jack up tuition . . . Students are graduating encumbered by massive debt and too few marketable skills. Broke and unemployed, they are not marrying and starting families—that shrinks the middle class. 

    Despite the availability of loans, skyrocketing tuition mandates ever greater family contributions to finance college. This puts higher education further out of reach for many working class families, and fewer low income children are pursuing post-secondary education than in the past—that shrinks the middle class too.

    The President has jacked up taxes on families earning more than $250,000. Unfortunately, most businesses in America are either proprietorships or pass through corporations that pay those higher individual, as opposed to corporate, tax rates, raising the cost of investing and expanding businesses—that spells fewer jobs for the middle class and those that aspire to its ranks.

    Unable to push through Congress limits on CO2 emissions, President Obama has used executive orders and the EPA to impose limits by fiat. Unfortunately, those raise manufacturing costs, China has no such limits, and all this encourages business to outsource in China—again fewer jobs for the middle class and aspiring middle class.

    Free trade agreements that permit trading partners to undervalue their currencies, subsidize exports and artificially under price their products on U.S. store shelves, health care mandates that raise the price of insuring employees instead of controlling costs, unnecessarily cumbersome regulations to run factories, mindless limits on developing U.S. oil reserves, and exporting abundant natural gas to countries that shut out U.S. products with high tariffs all encourage outsourcing, not just in manufacturing but for many supporting services too—yet again, fewer jobs for middle class Americans.
    ----------------------------------------------------------------

    “The lower middle-class,” in Marx’s words, “has no special class interests. Its liberation does not entail a break with the system of private property. Being unfitted for an independent part in the class struggle, it considers every decisive class struggle a blow at the community. The conditions of his own personal freedom, which do not entail a departure from the system of private property, are, in the eyes of the member of the lower middle-class, those under which the whole of society can be saved.”

    And this is the very reason why the lower middle-class masses are the most dangerous enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They represent a very strong section of society. Their special interests are absolutely incompatible with the economic disturbances which are the inevitable accompaniment of transitional periods.

    The disturbance of credit cuts the ground from under their feet. They begin shouting for order, for the strengthening of credit, in such a way that every concession to them leads in effect to a complete restoration of the old order. ...

    [Marx] wished to separate the Labour movement from all lower middle class elements, because the lower middle class attitude — attachment to the idea of private property, more or less open striving to uphold credit, terror of every fundamental social disturbance — is in practice the greatest internal enemy of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution.

    -- Bela Kun, Pravda, May 4, 1918 (Marxists Internet Archive, here)





    Friday, May 24, 2013

    Rush Limbaugh Continues In Error: McCain Did NOT Get More Votes Than Romney

    Rush Limbaugh can be so wrong sometimes it's infuriating, and once he gets some misinformation into his head, it's almost impossible to get it out of there. He can complain about the low information voters all he wants, but it's the lazy misinformation he spews which we all need to worry about, as when Rush won't allow Donald Trump into the conservative movement because The Donald wants to raise tariffs to beat the hell out of China. That's not conservative, Rush says, nevermind a tariff regime funded this country clear through the War Between The States and many decades thereafter. The fact is that Rush Limbaugh's version of conservatism doesn't win because it can't imagine America before 1913, isn't intelligent and doesn't compel assent for that reason. America still has an institutional memory, and the people still can tell when someone makes sense and when they don't.

    Rush opened the second hour of the program today, here, claiming for the umpteenth time that Romney got fewer votes than McCain, which he didn't: "Obama got millions fewer votes in 2012 than he did in '08, but so did Romney get many million fewer votes than did McCain." This phone-it-in comment is in service of Rush's new vote suppression meme, i.e. Democrat suppression of Republicans, courtesy of the new IRS nonprofits targeting scandal. But the theory is completely unsupported by the facts of the last election. How different is this misinformation than the idea swallowed hook line and sinker by Republicans that they lost in 2012 because they lost the Hispanic vote? Maybe they lost the white vote. 

    Romney polled 60.93 million in 2012 and McCain 59.95 million in 2008, okay? And Romney lost the election by half as many votes in the swing states as McCain lost it by in those same states. Romney was a better candidate than McCain, but he was still a bad candidate.

    With what's happened with the IRS scandal I don't think Rush will ever be convinced he's wrong about the 2012 election numbers, even though he is.

    That would require some effort on his part, and as we all know, the older we get, the harder that gets.

    Thursday, March 14, 2013

    Rush Limbaugh, Shill For Florida Sugar?

    What a joke. Rush Limbaugh just accused the regime of trying to interfere in the "free market" in sugar, to drive up the price. Like we've got a free market now. Obama hates sugar like he hates oil and just wants to make it more expensive to use, you know, because liberals hate fat people, but the fact is sugar would be cheaper than it is today if Florida producers weren't protected with tariffs, quotas and price supports.

    Americans pay more for sugar already because it's NOT a free market.

    Rush once said Donald Trump wasn't a conservative because Trump advocates tariffs against the Chinese.

    Given the choice between Trump who's for tariffs and says so, and Limbaugh who's for them but says he isn't, the choice is clear.


    Sunday, February 3, 2013

    High Taxes On Imports A Chief Cause Of The Civil War

    So says Michael Sivy for Time, here:


    The income tax has always been hated – but so were the taxes it replaced. In Colonial America and the early U.S., taxes were typically on goods like sugar, tea, or whiskey (which triggered the Whiskey Rebellion in 1791). Other taxes were on land or were poll taxes (which was a flat amount per person and had nothing to do with voting). Later on, there were high custom duties on imports, which were one of the chief causes of the Civil War because they pushed up the prices of manufactured goods, helping the North but hurting the agrarian South. Real estate taxes were always extremely unpopular and still are.

    It wasn't until 1863 when The War of Northern Aggression was going badly for Lincoln that it became officially about slavery.

    Monday, January 7, 2013

    Rush Limbaugh: Turd In The Conservative Punchbowl

    On Rush Limbaugh's role in the decline of American conservatism, as recounted by Andrew Ferguson for The Weekly Standard, here:

    The idea that conservatives should have a special interest in high culture​—​the best that has been thought and said, sung and played, carved and drawn​—​has been selectively applied. In speeches and in the [Mars Hill Audio] Journal [Ken] Myers has often raised the question of why political conservatives, who defended the literary canon, the Great Books, with such energy in the eighties and nineties, went limp when it came to defending other traditional forms of cultural expression.


    A watershed may have been reached when Rush Limbaugh, who would replace William Buckley as conservatism’s chief publicist in the early ’90s, chose as his show’s theme music a Top 40 track by the Pretenders​—​a self-conscious contrast, Limbaugh has said, to the baroque trumpet concerto that opened Buckley’s TV show Firing Line. Buckley’s fanfare had signaled that he aspired to something lively but elevated, slightly at an angle to the surrounding popular culture. The Pretenders’ guitar riff was meant to signal that Limbaugh’s conservatism would have none of that stuffy stuff: He was fully at home with what had become of American culture and wasn’t terribly curious about what had come before.

    Which is why Rush Limbaugh isn't much interested, either, for example, in the original principle of direct taxation in the constitution. American history doesn't exist for Rush before 1913, which is why Donald Trump, who believes in tariffs on China, doesn't qualify as a conservative. Rush only learned the bad stuff from Buckley . . . like how to excommunicate people from the movement. "Stripped-down" isn't just for punkers.

    Wednesday, October 24, 2012

    Conservatives Have Become Wrong-Headed About Taxes

    Conservatives have become wrong-headed about the tax code.

    Steven Malanga provides an exasperating take on "tax reform", here, which was really a liberal Democrat conceit from the beginning but became a so-called conservative one under Ronald Reagan, who was, need we remind everyone, a "former" Democrat:


    Most conservatives (though certainly not most Republicans) have come to see the range of incentives and exemptions in the tax code as wrongheaded, including those for businesses which smack of little more than corporate cronyism. This is in sharp contrast to 1986, when many Republicans in Congress resisted reform until a popular GOP president came along willing to take on the business community.

    Sacre bleu. The liberal Democrats are nothing if they are not great simplifiers, and if conservatives join them in that enthusiasm, it doesn't mean they are right. Little ideologues all, regardless of party.

    Prior to the income tax, a president had to be a pretty smart cookie to figure out all the ins and outs of the tariff system if he wanted his federal government to have enough revenue to continue operations. By 1909, however, the whole country seemed to have wound down so far intellectually that it was just too tired to carry on any longer with that rigorous enterprise and bowed instead to the simplicity of an income tax. Tax reformers today, take note. It doesn't speak well of you that you admit the code is too much for you.

    Actually real conservatism opposed the income tax way back when not because it would grow too complex but because it was wrong. When amending the constitution is necessary in order to make something legal, conservatives' first instinct is always to question the advisability of the idea before they conclude there is a defect in the constitution requiring a remedy. The income tax was one such idea. It took four years to gain ratification in the states. As an invention of progressivism the income tax eventually worked a revolution in government by allowing government to grow to gargantuan size with a ready pool of available cash, stolen by force from the population's income. And it is no coincidence that the first major expenditure financed by the income tax was US entry into The Great War. Not long after which came The Great Depression. If progressive ideas were good ones, no one seems to have paid much heed to the early evidence to the contrary.

    Every effort by the people since the introduction of the income tax to obtain deductions, exemptions, credits and other incentives in the tax code should be understood by conservatives as wholesome reactionary, counter-revolutionary, rear-guard opposition to what the income tax represents, but today you can hardly find a conservative who will even entertain the idea of overthrowing the income tax, let alone any other of the so-called "achievements" of the progressive era. In fact, some so-called conservatives have become veritable cheerleaders for the income tax. Rush Limbaugh, for one, can't seem even to imagine an America without one for the first 137 years of its existence. An originalist in name only is he.

    The problem with so-called Reagan conservatism, then and now, is that it makes peace with the tax code, just as it does with the social welfare state, including Social Security and especially Medicare. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan actually campaign on just such a platform of preserving Medicare for future generations. As Reagan compromised in the direction of liberalism in the 1986 tax reform, so will they.

    These people wouldn't know conservatism if it ran up and bit them in the ass.

    Tax reform is a fool's errand. You can't "reform" something which is fundamentally wrong in the first place.

    Friday, August 31, 2012

    Nock's Critique Of The Tariff, 1927: A License To Rob The Domestic Consumer



    The great desideratum in a tariff, for instance, is its license to rob the domestic consumer of the difference between the price of an article in a competitive and a non-competitive market. Every manufacturer would like this privilege of robbery if he could get it, and he takes steps to get it if he can, thus illustrating the powerful instinctive tendency to climb out of the exploited class, which lives by the economic means (exploited, because the cost of this privilege must finally come out of production, there being nowhere else for it to come from), and into the class which lives, wholly or partially, by the political means.

    Tuesday, November 8, 2011

    Peter Morici Says Herman Cain's 999 Plan 'Makes Great Economic Sense'

    Here, but doesn't explain why in the same breath he criticizes Cain for being short on explanations (!):

    Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 tax proposal makes great economic sense but when pressed, he cannot explain why it does or how it would work. For example, when asked about how the nine percent sales tax would treat imports, he doesn’t know—this despite the fact that European countries have extensive experience with this issue, economist and lawyers have studied those issues ad nauseum, and the treaties the United States and EU have signed permit applying sales taxes to imports and refunding the same on exports to maintain neutrality in competition between foreign and domestic products.

    I think Herman is being coy about treatment of imports because he intends to apply tariffs wherever necessary to level the playing field to make American exports more competitive.

    Herman can't be entirely candid about that sort of thing at this stage because Republicans have been hooked on free trade since at least the 1960s. In the general campaign against Obama, however, Cain could conceivably make a bid for the Democrat union vote with such a tariff threat as part of an overall strategy to form a broader coalition not unlike Reagan put together in the 1980s.

    Sunday, November 6, 2011

    The Broadest Tax Base Which Can Possibly Be Imagined Implies a Tax Rate of 6.2%

    Herman Cain's 999 Plan is focusing attention on the perennially perplexing problem of taxation for the American electorate in 2012. His plan has brought questions about broadening the tax base for tax reform front and center, including: What tax base is large enough to generate adequate federal revenues? and: What rate of taxation is fair?

    Herman's big idea is to scrap the entire tax code and start over with three new bases taxed at the same low rate for a temporary period of time, eventually transitioning the country permanently to just one of these bases, taxed at a much higher single rate.

    His scheme is quite conventional in that it looks to the existing traditional bases of taxation with which we have been familiar for decades: corporations and individuals.

    What is new, however, is the national sales tax, the base for which was fairly sizable in 2008 at $10.1 trillion in personal consumption expenditures [PCE], and running at almost $10.8 trillion annualized through August 2011.

    Currently the overwhelming burden of taxation falls on the individual filer whose personal income is taxed in order to provide Social Insurance and Federal revenues, which in 2011 are currently running at an annualized rate of $2.3 trillion, as shown here by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Corporations, excises and tariffs provide puny sums by comparison: less than $500 billion in 2008.

    This means that in 2011, Herman Cain's ultimate idea of taxing consumption to replace current revenues of approximately $3 trillion would imply a national sales tax rate of 28 percent on $10.8 trillion in goods and services expenditures this year. That's a pretty hefty rate by comparison with present conditions.

    Currently the personal income base on which we exact that $2.3 trillion in Social Insurance and Federal taxes is just over $13 trillion. This implies an overall tax rate of 18 percent. If personal income in that aggregate amount had to do all the pulling to generate the full $3 trillion in revenues, personal income would have to be taxed at a rate of 23 percent to do the same thing as the consumption tax. Not as high, but still much higher than the 9 percent Herman Cain has called for currently, if only temporarily, in deference to the God of the Bible who asked for just 10 percent from his chosen people.

    By way of comparison, if there were some way to easily tax GDP, currently running at $15 trillion, the effective tax rate would have to be 20 percent.

    So is there a tax base which is broader still, from which we can derive the necessary sums and get that rate even lower?

    Given that people by definition receive income in consequence of the conduct of business of one kind or another (aside from gambling, prostitution and bank robbery), it seems reasonable to look at the size of the various tax bases available strictly from businesses, without whom none of the other tax bases would exist in the first place. If we really mean it when we say we want to tax income only once, we need to go to its source, and for nearly everyone in our society, that source is business.

    Corporations in 2008 had total receipts of $28.5 trillion, 2.8 times the size of Herman Cain's PCE tax base. It would have taken a gross receipts tax of merely 10.5 percent on this sum to have generated $3 trillion in tax revenue in tax year 2008, a year when revenues were actually lower at $2.5 trillion. That implies a gross receipts tax of only 8.8 percent on corporations in 2008.

    In such a world, there would be no more income taxes on individuals, no Social Security or Medicare taxes either, and no capital gains taxes nor taxes on investment income or savings of any kind, and government would not go wanting. Nor would business be constrained by other taxes and fees imposed on it if we were to throw out the current code and replace it with this simple levy.

    But the base could be made broader still in order to lower the effective rate even more.

    Add in partnerships, which had $5.9 trillion in total receipts in 2008. And S corporations, which had $6.1 trillion in total receipts in 2008. Both of these added to corporation total receipts yields a gargantuan tax base for 2008 of $40.5 trillion in gross receipts.

    All of that could have been taxed at a mere 6.2 percent to meet the federal revenue of $2.5 trillion collected in 2008.

    No more talk of a flat income tax, nor of a progressive income tax, nor of a consumption tax. No more compliance costs of $450 billion because of the current code. No more lost time equivalent to 3 million full time jobs.  Just one, low, simple, rate on business. That's it.

    In addition to God, John Tamny might go for it, too:

    "The answer as always is for the government to simply get out of the way. If it must tax corporations, its taxation should be blind in the way that justice is. A flat gross receipts tax would make all corporations equal before the IRS. That would ensure the most economic allocation of capital on the way to rational, market-driven growth."

    Saturday, October 29, 2011

    The Republican Establishment Has Taken the Tea Party to the Cleaners

    So said Lawrence Hunter, here, of the debt-ceiling fiasco:

    [T]he problem with the direction the country is headed is the Republican Establishment, which has made a long career out of snookering and hoodwinking conservatives into believing the Republican Party is the party of small government, low taxes, freedom and prosperity at home, and peace abroad.  Republicans are, in fact, the very opposite.  To paraphrase Pogo, “We Republicans have met the enemy and he is us.”

    Republicans are the stern, conservative side of the Janus Faced welfare state at home and empire abroad.  The GOP is Twiddle Dum to the Democratic Twiddle Dee.  And dear Tea Partiers, they just took you to the cleaners the same way they have been taking the American people to the cleaners since FDR rolled around the Oval Office. Welcome to the Nation’s Capital. ...

    Until the Republican Establishment is replaced to a man (there are no women) with serious people devoted to restoring America, rather than just getting themselves re-elected time and again, no progress will be made toward winning this epic struggle for freedom, peace and prosperity.


    Compare Rush Limbaugh here on October 13th, who keeps maintaining that the Tea Party must take over the Republican Party, but who on issues running the gamut from bank bailouts to taxes and tariffs to George W. Bush to spending to free trade adopts the alloyed rhetoric of the very establishment he decries:

    The Tea Party is under assault from the Democrats and the Republican elite, and now the battle has been brought full fore in the pages of the New York Times Magazine.

    There's some quotes from various people in this story.  Bill Kristol on the Tea Party:  "It's an infantile form of conservatism."  Scott Reed, veteran strategist and lobbyist:  "I think it's waning now," talking to the reporter of the story about the Tea Party's influence.  "Party leaders have managed to bleed some of the anti-establishment intensity out of the movement, Reed said, by slyly embracing Tea Party sympathizers in Congress, rather than treating them as 'those people.' Did he mean to say that the party was slowly co-opting the Tea Partiers? 'Trying to,' Reed said. 'And that’s the secret to politics: trying to control a segment of people without those people recognizing that you’re trying to control them.'"  This is a Republican consultant talking about how to neutralize the Tea Party.

    John Feehery, a lobbyist who was once a senior House aide I think to Denny Hastert, is also quoted.  "The thing I get a kick out of is these Tea Party people calling me a RINO. No, guys, I've been a Republican all along. You go off on your own little world and then come back and say it's your party. Well, this ain't your party."


    Rush should spend more time reading Forbes and less time The New York Times.

    Friday, October 28, 2011

    Federal Revenues Came From Tariffs and Land Sales in First Half of 1800s, From Tariffs and Excises in Second Half

    A largely forgotten fact when discussing the history and meaning of US tax policy.

    Gary M. Anderson and Dolores T. Martin examined the role of land sales in considerable detail in 1987 here.

    I provide a few excerpts:

    [F]rom 1800 until the beginning of the Civil War, proceeds from the sale of public lands constituted a major source of revenue for the federal government, accounting for 48 percent of net receipts in 1836. ...

    After 1820, receipts from land sales became a major component of federal revenues. During 1836, for example, receipts from land sales exceeded 48 percent of total federal revenues. From 1820 to 1860, receipts from land sales averaged 10.8 percent of total federal receipts per annum.

    From the program’s beginnings in 1796 until 1862, privatization of the public lands via sales to the private sector scored several major successes. By 1862, acreage equaling about 67 percent of the public domain in 1802 had been sold, and land sale receipts provided a significant, although fluctuating, fraction of total federal revenues. ...

    Before the Civil War, proceeds from land sales and tariff revenues were the two major components in federal receipts. The proceeds from these different sources were highly substitutable; one dollar of revenue from land sales could replace one dollar from a tariff and vice versa. There is strong evidence to suggest that this substitutability may have been a significant factor in the demise of the system of revenue-maximizing land sales.

    Of course the rise in reliance on excises from 1862 onwards could also explain why reliance on land sales declined to almost nothing by century's end, quite apart from the so-called rent-seeking aspects of tariff politics which the authors explore. But they seem not to notice the role of excises.

    Excises on alcohol and tobacco ramp up dramatically to $100 million to $150 million per year from 1862, from next to nothing beforehand, while tariffs move up and down around a trendline of $200 million in revenues per year starting also at the same time, having been in the $50 million and below range per year for most of the century prior to the War Between the States.

    The importance of alcohol, and tobacco, in the social and economic history of America should not be underestimated, as Daniel Okrent's important recent book on Prohibition has reminded us.

    Gotta go. Time to light up and have a drink!

    Wednesday, October 26, 2011

    Explaining Property Taxes Then and Now

    Critical listeners to recent remarks I made here on The Newsmaker Show with Kevin Doran will have wished that I had done a better job of explaining property taxes in the late 19th century and how their burden on property owners helped create the conditions which led to the tax reform which gave us the Income Tax in 1913.

    So do I. Regrettably one can't say everything one needs to when trying to explain something else, especially like Herman Cain's 999 Plan.

    If anyone gets the impression that I intended to say that the federal government routinely and directly taxed homeowners then, for example, in the same way homeowners are so taxed today on their property, that would be a mistake, but one which could easily be inferred. The federal government did do that sort of thing three times in the 19th century, but only for very brief periods and only to fund wars: in 1798, 1812 and 1861. Which is not to say there weren't other attempts, notable in the Pollock decision in 1895.

    To a considerable extent, however, I have found that the terms "property tax," "excise," "tariff," "ad valorem" and the like get used interchangeably, and confusingly, in discussions about taxes both then and now. We would be better served if we were all more precise in these matters, but even supposed experts talk about this period with such imprecision sometimes that it is difficult to know exactly what people really do mean.

    For example, "ad valorem" today gets used, as at usgovernmentrevenue.com, as a category under which to list excise taxes, tariffs, property taxes, etc., as opposed to income taxes, corporate taxes and social insurance taxes. In truth, however, its specific meaning has been more complicated than that.

    From that characterization would not know that tax historians often distinguish personal property taxes in the first half of the 19th century as "in rem" from real property taxes in the second half as "ad valorem."

    In the case of the former, as in 1798, slaves, for example, were taxed for war preparations with France as personal property. It didn't matter, however, how much one had invested to purchase the slave. Each one was simply taxed at 50 cents. Similarly a tax assessor would count the windows on your house, your horses, your cows, chickens etc. (unless you hid them well) and total them up by kind and assess the appropriate tax, which inhered in the thing, "in rem," not in the value, "ad valorem."

    The latter is how the federal government in the 19th century was able to get around the onerous requirements of apportioning direct taxation of property equally according to state population. Instead of the arduous task of trying to tax the whole general sum of an individual's wealth in every state on an equal basis, the value of beer, wine and liquor, for example, produced anywhere could thereby be taxed everywhere the same, proportionally according to its value. In this way there was no need to divide the necessary revenue to be raised according to the population of the individual state, since the basis was the same everywhere beer was sold.

    Such taxation is often called an excise, generally understood to fall on domestic produce. We still pay excises to this day, for example everytime we fill up the gas tank, 18 cents on the gallon to the feds. In truth excises are just a special kind of sales tax. A tariff is similar, but taxes foreign imports.

    When it comes to the problems of farmers in the late 19th century, who eventually made league with Prohibitionists to install the Income Tax in 1913, theirs was a two-fold problem. Not only did the cost of financing state government fall heavily on them because of property taxation in the state in which they lived, federal excises on their produce represented a double "property tax" whammy. Think tobacco excises.

    Viewed from this perspective, government at all levels, it seemed, got them coming and going.

    To his credit, Herman Cain is trying to imagine a world in which government gets it for a change, instead of the taxpayer. His way of trying to make that happen is to play human desire to consume off of human desire to avoid paying taxes, by making what we consume each and every day the scene of a skirmish in the battle for limited government, which cannot exist without self-restraint.


    Tuesday, October 25, 2011

    The 1913 Income Tax Enabled Stark Increases to Government Revenues to Pay for WWI














    Revenues went up by a factor of 6 in three short years, and dramatically reversed federal reliance on tariffs, excises and other taxes of one kind or another to finance the preponderance of government spending. Note the overnight reversal between 1917 and 1918 in the income tax share of the federal revenue. The analogy today would be like going from $3 trillion in revenues to $18 trillion.

    Excises on alcohol started disappearing in 1920 with enactment of Prohibition. Such taxes had routinely accounted for 20-40 percent of all federal revenues from the War Between The States until that time. Over the course of a decade from 1920 through 1932 alcohol excises dropped in the end by a factor of 10, but instantly surpassed their 1920 levels with Repeal in 1933, a year in which everyone desperately needed a drink.