Conservative heroine Phyllis Schlafly opposed the territorial tax system the Republicans are about to shove down our throats

Here in November 2011:

Although the Perry plan's most striking feature is its anti-marriage bias, his proposal for corporate income is equally pernicious. Perry would shift businesses to a "territorial" tax system, which means that corporations would be taxed only on the profits they earn inside the United States.

We should do exactly the opposite. We should reduce or eliminate taxes on businesses that employ Americans producing goods and services inside our own country, while increasing taxes on the profits that corporations earn by outsourcing or manufacturing overseas.

Above all, we should eliminate the foreign tax credit, a self-destructive provision that allows corporations to pay China, Venezuela or Saudi Arabia the money they would otherwise owe the U.S. government. Let's also cut out the deductions that U.S. corporations take for hiring foreigners to do work that Americans can do.

Those who support a territorial business tax argue that it will encourage multinational corporations to bring home the profits they earn overseas, but that's unlikely so long as it remains more profitable for them to invest in cheap-labor countries. Of Republican presidential candidates, only Herman Cain and Rick Santorum understand that what corporations need is lower taxes on their operations inside the United States rather than on the profits they earn in other countries.

State capitalist cronyism in Wisconsin smells to high heaven: The state will pay $3 billion for Foxconn jobs

The cost of reelection for Scott Walker, Paul Ryan and Donald Trump.

From the story here:

What will the State of Wisconsin be paying to lure Foxconn? A steep price. It adds up to $3 billion, including tax credits, training grants and infrastructure improvements. That comes to almost a quarter-million per job, which will pay an average of $54,000 per year. In other words, the people of Wisconsin will in effect be paying the plant’s entire workforce for about five years. And the construction jobs – which make up more than three-quarters of the total – will only last about four. ...

No one knows how long the Foxconn jobs in Kenosha will last. But we do know the company has publicly committed to automating away the vast majority of its current 1.2 million jobs, most of which are located in Asia. At one plant alone in China’s Guangdong province they have eliminated about 60,000 jobs. And they certainly aren’t stopping there. They have targeted to reach 30 percent automation by 2020, and their stated goal is to eliminate almost their entire human workforce, retaining only a minimal number of workers in production, logistics, and inspection.

Trump's territorial tax plan gives no incentive for business and manufacturing to relocate to the US

What's up with that, huh? Maybe he's not really serious about bringing the jobs back here after all.

From Phyliss Schlafly here in 2011:

Although the Perry plan's most striking feature is its anti-marriage bias, his proposal for corporate income is equally pernicious. Perry would shift businesses to a "territorial" tax system, which means that corporations would be taxed only on the profits they earn inside the United States. 

We should do exactly the opposite. We should reduce or eliminate taxes on businesses that employ Americans producing goods and services inside our own country, while increasing taxes on the profits that corporations earn by outsourcing or manufacturing overseas. 

Above all, we should eliminate the foreign tax credit, a self-destructive provision that allows corporations to pay China or Venezuela or Saudi Arabia the money they would otherwise owe the U.S. government. Let's also cut out the deductions that U.S. corporations take for hiring foreigners to do work that Americans can do. 

Those who support a territorial business tax argue that it will encourage multinational corporations to bring home the profits they earn overseas, but that's unlikely so long as it remains more profitable for them to invest in cheap-labor countries. Of Republican presidential candidates, only Herman Cain and Rick Santorum understand that what corporations need is lower taxes on their operations inside the United States rather than on the profits they earn in other countries. 

Illegal alien workers in US get $4.2 billion in tax credits: Times five years is plenty to pay for The Wall

From the story here:

[A] July 2011 report by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration ... said individuals who are not authorized to work in the U.S. have been paid $4.2 billion in refundable tax credits.

There's lots to like in Trump's speech, but . . .

We can't afford $1 trillion in infrastructure spending and it won't accomplish what people say it will. We are $34 TRILLION behind in spending of all kinds, but that's obviously out of the question. Debt service payments at rock bottom interest rates already exceed 10% of the $4 trillion budget. This is the price we are paying now . . . FOR PREVIOUS "PROSPERITY", which was only borrowed.

Paid family leave, a new entitlement, will cost government and employers a fortune, subduing hiring.

Adding refundable tax credits for health insurance premiums paid by taxpayers to a tax system which already includes the Earned Income Tax Credit is a back door introduction of another new entitlement. It could end up costing the country tens of billions in lost tax revenue each year.

These proposals could be political feints on which he will ultimately never deliver, simple red meat for moderates and liberals thrown out there to garner bipartisan support for his overall program.

Only time will tell.  

How Obamacare hides federal spending

Seen here:

Obamacare's direct subsidies to insurers are falsely labeled as "tax credits," hiding some $104 billion in federal spending in the process.

Mark Levin won't tell you Ronald Reagan expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit in the 1986 tax reform

Hey Mark, does that make Reagan someone who "sold out his principles" for liberalism?

Well does it?

Drive-by-media keep accusing Trump of flipping on tax increases, but Grover Norquist is having none of it

Reported here:

Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, who has backed Donald Trump's promised across-the-board tax cut, endorsed the plan Monday even though Trump now says some of the wealthiest Americans will be paying a bit more.

"Some people who organize their lives around tax credits and tax deductions might see some increase," Norquist told CNBC's "Squawk Box" a day after the presumptive GOP presidential nominee doubled-down on comments he made on CNBC last week. ... "Because Trump takes the top personal rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent and the corporate rate from 35 percent to 15 percent, there is no way anyone would see an actual tax increase," Norquist said in a statement emailed to CNBC after the interview. "Trump's tax cut would be a tax cut for every American," he added. 

CBS News claims Trump keeps the EITC

Here.

For the current 5-year period 2012-2016 the Joint Committee on Taxation has previously estimated the annual cost of the Earned Income Tax Credit to be about $64 billion.

That's actually less costly than the food stamp program was in 2014: $74.2 billion.

Keeping the EITC means keeping what amounts to a welfare program, but one which rewards only those who work. The transfer payments to such individuals basically rebate the Social Security taxes they pay even though they generally make too little to pay much in the way of federal income taxes, if they pay any at all.

Trump's claim that his plan will be revenue neutral is already taking incoming because of things like this.

Of course we don't know what spending Trump plans to cut. He might go really big and call for shuttering some cabinet level departments entirely. The Department of Education, for example, costs $77.4 billion.

Libertarianism in Michigan now means smokers and drinkers pay 111% more in taxes than businesses

A fine how-do-you-do from the ménage à trois between Republican libertarianism, Democrat liberalism and the dry Dutch.

The Detroit News reports here:

Revenue from so-called sin taxes on tobacco, beer, wine and liquor totaled $290.5 million in the 2014 fiscal year, more than twice the $137.6 million net income taxes paid by Michigan businesses after receiving $768.8 million in refunds from tax credits, a Detroit News analysis of tax data shows.

Since Gov. Rick Snyder and lawmakers delivered sweeping tax relief for businesses in 2011, net business income taxes dropped 90 percent, depleting the state's main operating fund of $1.33 billion, according to state revenue data.

The percentage of general fund revenue from business income taxes also has plunged as tax credit payouts to companies have soared. Tax data show business income tax receipts declined from 21 percent of the general fund revenue a decade ago to about 2 percent last year. ... Last year, the balance of business income taxes as a share of general revenue began to turn when companies holding tax credits triggered a surge in refunds, from $75.8 million in 2013 to $723.3 million in 2014. The Democratic administration of former Gov. Jennifer Granholm was responsible for most of the state's surge in handing out tax credits to businesses.

ObamaCare's unequal treatment of Americans under the tax law illustrated

Some people who didn't deserve a tax credit are going to get to keep it anyway because of the government's own incompetence administering the credits. I'm sure this makes people who didn't get a credit feel all warm and fuzzy about ObamaCare.

Seen here:

"The White House has said the error could result in some people receiving a tax credit meant to subsidize health insurance coverage by mistake. 

"On Friday, it said people who received the tax credit and had already filed their taxes based on the incorrect forms would not have to refile and could keep the extra tax credit."

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So too bad for you if you haven't already filed your taxes. The corrected form is in the mail and you are obligated to incorporate it in your return.

Obama's $500 tax relief is so George W. Bush 2.0

Obama is to announce tonight not even inflation-adjusted George W. Bush-type tax relief to middle class families, as reported here, but just another gimmick:

"Among the highlights of President Obama’s State of the Union address plans to pull the American family out of economic plight is a $500 tax credit for two-earner families."

George W. Bush bookended his administration with similar gimmicks.

OK, the first one wasn't exactly a gimmick. The first was part of the then-temporary tax reduction passed by the Congress. You know the one. The check in the mail was a result of the implementation of the tax rate schedule which existed for the rest of Bush's presidency but was set to expire by the time of Obama. Obama finally agreed to make that schedule permanent, something George W. Bush wasn't able to make happen but Speaker John Boehner was. (Why is that? And how come no one except maybe two people on the planet recognize and applaud that? I am one of them. A Forbes columnist, Ralph Benko, is the other. But I digress.)

Flashback to the San Francisco Chronicle in June 2001, here, just six months after Bush assumed office after the narrowest presidential election victory in living memory:

Bush signed the $1.35 trillion tax cut -- which includes soon-to-be-mailed rebate checks of up to $600 -- amid the kind of presidential pomp he usually disdains: a formal ceremony in the East Room, with a Marine band playing "Hail to the Chief." ... In Congress yesterday, a few Republicans talked about making the current bill permanent. One of its odd features is that it expires on Dec. 31, 2010, a sunset provision put in because of congressional rules governing spending more than a decade into the future.

Bush's second and real gimmick came at the end of his presidency in 2008, just before all hell broke loose in the economy with massive bank failures, massive bankruptcies, massive foreclosures, massive job losses, and massive stock market declines. It was a minor echo of Herbert Hoover trying to stop the Great Depression, double, triple, and quadruple-downed on by his successor FDR but to no avail.

Market Watch had the story here in February 2008, detailing the very liberal character of the Republican stimulus plan, which at the time met with no criticism from candidate Obama (why? because it was Obama's brand of liberalism also):

President Bush signed a $168 billion economic stimulus package on Wednesday that will extend rebates to U.S. taxpayers, give tax breaks to businesses and make more-expensive mortgages available through the government and government-sponsored mortgage-finance companies. ... Bush said the U.S. economy has clearly slowed but that the package is "a booster shot for our economy." Approved by lawmakers last week, the package provides a tax rebate of up to $1,200 per working couple, plus $300 per child. ... Taxpayers will not have to apply for the rebate; it would come automatically based on their 2007 tax return. ... Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama wove the stimulus package into a speech in Janesville, Wisc., on Wednesday, touting a plan he offered a few weeks ago. He proposed sending each working family a $500 tax cut and each senior a $250 supplement to their Social Security check. "Neither George Bush nor Hillary Clinton had that kind of immediate, broad-based relief in their original stimulus proposals, but I'm glad that the stimulus package that was recently passed by Congress does," Obama said.

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These crumbs from the Master's table aren't going to help Americans do anything except survive as dependents, maybe for a week. What Americans need is jobs, decent jobs, and the decent wages which go with them, and liberals know nothing about how to provide them with those.

Crazy WaPo article portrays middle class as complete creature of government spending

Here, focusing on the anecdotal history of the middle class in Downey, California, where the removal of spending on the space program has hit particularly hard.

Just the sort of deliberate Keynesian propaganda you would expect from The Washington Post, where you will also find narry a word mentioned about how America's turnabout to free-trade fanaticism during the 1960s started the wholesale export abroad of good-paying middle class jobs, the dearth of which now is our present predicament.

The sickness of Republicanism in the present liberal era has been how ready it has been to participate in profiting from the export of these jobs, and by masking how the middle class was being gutted by providing transfer payments to them, for example, in the form of tax credits.

If there's every been a time for a middle class rebellion in America, this is it. Unfortunately, so many of the middle class are now in the lower class that, if a revolt comes, it will be studiously lied about by the profiteering elites of both parties as a dangerous, left-wing proletarian revolution.

There is a way to take the country back which is not violent, however, but it requires Americans to demand the representation which they do not enjoy. It requires a transformation of their vision in conformity with a constitution which never imagined there was anything sacrosanct about the number "435". 

NY Times laments "tax uncertainty" over breaks which expired almost a year ago

As seen at Amazon

This is like lamenting that the Bush tax cuts became permanent two years ago. The only uncertainty is for liberals who still hope to repeal them. When pigs fly.

Here:

"Absent congressional action, a host of business and personal tax breaks expires on Jan. 1. ...

"Negotiators have all but given up culling the government’s growing list of temporary tax measures, making some permanent and jettisoning the most egregious tax giveaways. Instead, the House will vote Wednesday on a measure to restore almost all the tax breaks that expired last year for one year retroactively. That would allow taxpayers to claim them on their 2014 tax returns while forcing Congress to grapple with the issue again early next year."

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Ahem. There's nothing temporary about a tax break which was allowed to expire many months ago. If you've been counting on getting any expired tax break back, you deserve to be disappointed. If Congress decides to reinstate any of them before the end of the year, you've received a gift.

And while we're at it, the New York Times isn't very helpful about telling you what expired. Here's a list:

Health Coverage Tax Credit

Deduction for Charitable Donations from IRAs

Educator Expense Deduction

Nonbusiness Energy Property Credit

Tuition and Fees Deduction.

But the real whopper of this story is that we're supposed to believe that

"Uncertainty alone raised corporate bond prices, lowered growth by 0.3 percentage points a year and raised unemployment last year by 0.6 percentage points."

Investors in popular corporate bond index funds know the first statement completely misrepresents history. Net asset values of intermediates and shorts fell dramatically in the summer of 2013 after Ben Bernanke's ill-timed remarks. That prices have recovered since then masks the fact that prices today are still almost 3% lower for intermediates than they were when the Bush tax cuts became permanent at the beginning of 2013, and a half percent lower for shorts.

As for lowering growth, how anyone is supposed to believe that is beyond me. Government revenues have SOARED to record heights in fiscal 2013 as a result of permanency in the tax code, allowing a positive contribution to GDP from government consumption expenditures for the first time in four years. The 3Q2014 contribution was 0.76, most of that military spending on the war against ISIS, and the 2014 average to date is 0.31. The average contribution from government spending for 2011, 2012 and 2013? -0.45, a subtraction from growth.

Meanwhile unemployment has been falling, mostly as a result of not counting over 6 million unemployed Americans who have given up on finding a job. Adding them back in would take unemployment up from 5.8% to 9.6%, and the New York Times thinks it can detect a 0.6 point contribution from "uncertainty". We should be so lucky.

Libertarians At Forbes Completely Misrepresent The Mortgage Interest Deduction

Here:

The mortgage interest deduction (MID) is the largest personal tax deduction on the books and is widely considered one of the most sacrosanct tax benefits in the country because it is seen as making homeownership more affordable for middle-class Americans. Our new Reason Foundation research suggests, though, that the average benefits from the MID are not enough to be the difference between renting and home owning for a household.

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If there's a sacrosanct tax benefit in this country, which by the way benefits mostly upper income people who also pay most of the taxes, it's reduced rates of taxation on dividends and long term capital gains, which the Joint Committee on Taxation says costs the federal government $596 billion in lost revenue between 2012 and 2016. The mortgage interest deduction, by contrast, will cost the feds $364 billion. Leave it to Forbes not to mention that.

The mortgage interest deduction may or may not be "the largest personal" deduction, but in the big picture of revenue forfeited by the feds due to tax preferences, which is categorized as "tax loss expenditure", the mortgage interest deduction represents just 6.9% of the revenue lost out of the largest 21 line items in the JCT's report representing $5.25 trillion in tax loss expenditures for the period mentioned (here).

Preferential treatment of income from stocks isn't the biggest preference either (11.4%), but it is much bigger than the preference given to mortgage interest. But businesses do get the biggest preference. When employers provide healthcare contributions, health insurance and long term care insurance, they get to deduct all of that. Cost to the feds? A whopping $706.6 billion (13.5%). And that figure will only grow under ObamaCare.

And how about retirement plan contributions? Cost of excluding both defined benefit and defined contribution plans comes to $505.3 billion over the period (9.6%).

Compared to these, the mortgage interest deduction comes in a distant fourth (in fifth is the earned income tax credit at $319.7 billion).

The much-maligned charitable deduction, meanwhile, which was the original basis for the standard deduction in the tax code, at $172.4 billion represents just 3.3% of the lost $5.25 trillion in revenue from 2012 to 2016. It comes in fourteenth.

There's lots of things wrong with the world, but changing the home mortgage interest deduction isn't going to fix them. For libertarians to focus on it as they do should tell you there's more going on here than meets the eye: an ideological bias against home ownership because it limits "freedom". Millions beg to differ.

Largest Sums Of Federal Revenue Forfeited Because Of The Tax Code, Joint Committee On Taxation, 2012-2016

$706.6 billion: exclusion of employer contributions for healthcare, health insurance premiums and long term care insurance premiums.

$596.0 billion: reduced rates of taxation on dividends and long term capital gains.

$505.3 billion: net exclusion of pension contributions and earnings to defined benefit/contribution plans.

$364.0 billion: mortgage interest deduction.

$319.7 billion: earned income tax credit.

$305.0 billion: exclusion of Medicare Parts A&B benefits.

$289.4 billion: credit for children under 17.

$259.2 billion: deduction of nonbusiness state and local government income taxes, sales taxes and personal property taxes.

$239.7 billion: deferral of active income of controlled foreign corporations.

$236.1 billion: exclusion of capital gains at death.

$184.3 billion: subsidies for participation in healthcare exchanges.

$182.8 billion: exclusion of interest on public purpose state and local government bonds.

$175.8 billion: exclusion of benefits provided under cafeteria plans.

$172.4 billion: deduction for charitable contributions.

$172.1 billion: exclusion of untaxed Social Security and railroad retirement benefits.

$153.8 billion: exclusion of investment income on life insurance and annuity contracts.

$143.0 billion: property tax deduction.

$124.1 billion: exclusion of capital gains on the sale of a home.

$119.1 billion: credits for tuition for post-secondary education.

ObamaCare Will Force Millions More Into Medicaid, And DENY Them The Right To Buy Private Insurance

It will deny them because ObamaCare-compliant plans will simply be too expensive for them to afford, and those will be the only ones available. 

John Goodman tried to warn us over two years ago, here:

"While defenders of the new law have chattered endlessly about people who are uninsured because of pre-existing conditions (turns out there are only 12,500 of them) almost no one seems to have noticed that 16 million people are not only going to be forced into Medicaid, they are effectively going to be denied the right to buy any private insurance — whether or not they have a pre-existing condition."

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But today it is coming true.

For example, in one county in Michigan an older, married, full-time worker with one child still in the home must make at least $19,530/year to get a tax credit to make the bargain basement Bronze plan monthly health insurance "affordable" for his family, but go below that threshold and he loses the subsidy entirely and ends up in Medicaid whether he likes it or not. That means he must make almost $9.39/hour, almost $2/hour above the Michigan minimum wage of $7.40/hour, or he's out of luck.

A single parent in the same situation must make no less than $15,510 to stay out of Medicaid and get the subsidy.

There were almost 61 million Americans making less than $20,000/year in 2011, and nearly 50 million making less than $15,000, meaning many of them will be forced into Medicaid under ObamaCare if they are not among the 70.4 million already in Medicaid in 2011, already 46.5% of all wage earners in the country that year.

Two kinds of insurance, ObamaCare and its crappier forerunner Medicaid, and one unhappy nation.

Inequality! Obama Delays ObamaCare Penalties For Big Business, But Not For You.

Time reports here:

The delay deprives the federal government of a year of penalties that would have been paid by companies that do not meet the law’s requirements, with as yet unknown budgetary effects. Republicans had warned of a downturn in hiring as a result of the mandate.

The so-called individual mandate is unaffected by the rule change. That provision requires the vast majority of Americans to purchase insurance or pay a penalty, with tax credits provided to those who can’t afford coverage.

Democrat Senate Wants Your Taxes To Go Up, Won't Vote On Obama's Plan

Story and video here, quoting Mitch McConnell on what the Senate refused to vote on:

"[W]e didn’t just put together a bill that included [Obama's] $2 trillion tax increase – we also added the almost $400 billion in new tax stimulus measures he wanted as well. This bill contained a continuation of the payroll tax holiday, a 10 percent credit for new wages that will go to businesses big and small, and it included a fix to one of the many flawed provisions of Obamacare – an expansion of a tax credit for businesses that no one uses. This proposal reflected exactly what was in the President’s budget and his various submissions to Congress."

Both Political Parties Are Greedy Liberals Eyeing Your Tax Credits And Tax Deductions

The partisan and liberal New York Times must think we can't read out here in fly-over country. "Tax reform" is now code for "tax increase".

The drumbeat to raise your taxes continues, here, an "absolute necessity":

Both parties agree on the absolute necessity of reforming the addled, inefficient American tax code. That means eliminating much of the underbrush of credits, loopholes and expenditures and then reducing marginal tax rates. Of course, the devil is in the details. Just about every tax expenditure has a powerful interest group behind it. That is part of the reason why neither party has gotten specific about what they would put on the chopping block, and both anticipate a drawn-out fight during the tax reform process.

Marginal tax rates are much easier to raise and frequently are raised, which is why the credits and deductions have to go: as long as the deductions and credits remain they suppress revenues when taxes are inevitably raised after a "reform". That's exactly what happened in 1993 after the broadly lower rates achieved in the 1986 tax reform were swept away by Bill Clinton. The deductions sacrificed in 1986 never returned.

Liberals in both parties intend to do this to the American people again.

There's nothing wrong with the current code that spending cuts couldn't fix: especially on defense and social welfare which both have dramatically increased under Bush and Obama.