by | ARTICLES, CONSTITUTION, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, OBAMACARE, POLITICS, TAXES
Thanks to the folks over at CATO, we have a video of the current IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, speaking before the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee early this week. He was being questioned about taxes and Obamacare, and asked about subsidies being repaid.
Chairman Brady said, “The law in that case is that there is not a cap. Subsidies must be repaid. Will you be following the law in that recapture?”
Koskinen replied, “Yes, wherever we can, we follow the law.”
In other words, following the law is a “can”, not a “must”.
With regard to Koskinen’s remarks, Forbes had an interesting observation:
“Numerous Treasury and IRS staffers have told investigators from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that they knew back in 2011 that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act didn’t authorize them to issue health-insurance subsidies through Exchanges established by the federal government. But they did so anyway. (And now they’re in court.) The Wall Street Journal‘s Kim Strassel writes about it here.
Given that context, Koskinen’s remark seems like an admission that the IRS sees the law more as a set of guidelines”.
Indeed. I wonder if anyone was to get audited by the IRS, that they could use the phrase “Wherever we can, we follow the law” successfully in their defense.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, ECONOMY, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAXES
At least you can say Bernie Sanders is ideologically consistent. The self-proclaimed socialist unabashedly declared on Saturday that “we need a tax system which asks the billionaire class to pay its fair share of taxes and which reduces the obscene degree of wealth inequality in America.” It was particularly fitting that the speech was at an AFL-CIO convention.
Over on his Senate page, Sander’s posted his proposal — “a progressive estate tax on the wealthiest Americans”:
“For those who would pay more, the tax rate on estates valued from $3.5 million to $10 million would be 40 percent. There would be a 50 percent tax on estates worth $10 million to $50 million and a 55 percent levy on estates worth more than $50 million. A 10 percent surtax would be applied on estates worth more than $1 billion, a category that today includes fewer than 500 American families. The bill also would close estate tax loopholes that have allowed the wealthy to avoid an estimated $100 billion since 2000.
His rationale? Sanders said that this is “the fairest way to reduce wealth inequality, lower the $17 trillion national debt and pay for investments in infrastructure, education and other neglected national priorities.”
Notice he said fairest — not most efficacious — way to reduce wealth inequality. Because the actual amount raised on such a tax will be negligible for any real deficit reduction, hopefully such a foolish proposal will never be implemented.
Unfortunately, with any sort of supertax, the truest and most invisible effects will be felt in the economy. The confiscatory nature of a high estate tax is among the worst offenders. “The economic incidence of the death tax is far broader, because it causes many wealthy individuals to save less, choosing instead to retire early or, as Milton Friedman put it, “dissipate their wealth on high living.” This reduction in savings means a concomitant reduction in investment, lessening the flow of capital to businesses and organizations where countless ordinary Americans are employed.”
And yet, Sanders sees nothing “obscene” about the another kind of wealth inequality: the salary and benefits of Congress, which, at $286K, is about 95% greater than what average Americans earn. Or still yet, another kind of wealth inequality: the $17 trillion government debt and spending problem that he is purporting to fix by his punitive tax proposal.
by | ARTICLES, ELECTIONS, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAXES
The idea of “disparate impact” is a cancer that has taken root in the business world. If we do not focus on substantially curbing or ending it, it will continue to grow, extorting huge sums from innocent companies, creating an enormous economic burden on society, and allowing the tort bar to run amok.
There are many areas in business where charges of “discrimination”, often regarding race, could and are being made every day. Employment and mortgage origination are two of the most prevalent. The law requires – as it should -that for a company to be guilty of such discrimination, there must be an intent to discriminate.
But government agencies have found a way to overrule that requirement by developing the idea of “disparate impact”. Disparate impact is the concept which allows if a protected class of citizens has a statistically lesser representation with respect to a business (hiring, mortgages origination, etc) it may be implied that the business has intentionally discriminated — because there is an adverse impact as a result. This is clearly irrational, since there may be many economic, societal, and local reasons for the particular statistical representation. Unfortunately, disparate impact puts the burden to show lack of discrimination on the employer, meaning he is guilty until proven innocent. In fact, in order for an employer to defend himself against such a charge, he would have to show that the “offending rule or practice” was a “business necessity”.
Though I find this concept outrageous, the federal and state governments and their agencies seem to love it lately. I therefore believe that they should be equally adamant in applying the concept of disparate impact in the public sector.
The IRS scandal has shown the clear practice of targeting conservative groups applying for 501c4 status (despite the subsequent cover up). By applying disparate impact theory to this situation, the charge of intentional discrimination would most certainly apply because there is no “business necessity” in the policy the IRS employed.
The Obama administration, having complete control and responsibility for the Department of the Treasury and its Internal Revenue Service is therefore guilty of such intentional discrimination. In particular, President Obama’s specific response, that there has been no evidence that anyone directed anyone to intentionally target conservatives, does not insulate him from being actually guilty.
The current administration has been keen on applying disparate impact theory to a number of private companies, and appears intent on ramping up the practice. For example, Obama’s labor secretary pick, Thomas Perez, has been particularly lucrative in this regard. Last summer, National Review Online (NRO) covered some of Perez’s cases in recent years, noting that Perez “has applied that theory vigorously to force large settlements from financial companies even in cases where there was no evidence of actual racial discrimination”. In other words, employers can be sought after for violating the law whether or not they intended to do wrong.
The White House in general, and Perez in particular, like disparate impact theory because it, as NRO notes, it “sets a very low bar for proving discrimination. Under it, prosecutors need not prove intent, merely that minorities have suffered a disparate impact from some action”. And this is a person Obama added to his Presidential Cabinet.
If disparate impact can be applied to the private sector, it should also — in the spirit of fairness and equality, of course — be applied to the IRS. Particular groups were adversely singled out and subject to excessive, burdensome, and overreaching scrutiny; of this we are certain. The targeting of conservatives was a concerted effort to slow down or dissuade the creation of their tax-exempt groups. Even if we no longer have tangible evidence of a White House link because of lost, missing, or destroyed emails and Blackberrys, it doesn’t really matter anyway under disparate impact theory. Intent needs not to be proved in court; merely the act of discrimination is enough.
Based on the White House’s unmitigated belief of their ability to use disparate impact against companies for questionable practices, the rule should be applied to the IRS for its questionable practices as well. Since the IRS falls directly under the purview of the Executive Branch, why is the President of the United States therefore not directly responsible and culpable for the IRS abuse?
by | BLOG, ECONOMY, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAXES
In a moment of recent hand-wringing, the Fed examined the question of why inflation has stayed extremely low in the United States despite all the efforts of quantitative easing money pumping. Their answer: American consumers are mainly to blame.
Yes indeed. In a paper released this week by the St. Louis Federal Reserve, the Fed cites “low level of money movement in large part on consumers and their “willingness to hoard money.”. To be fair, the paper also criticized its own policies as well, suggesting that the has they have “reinforced the recession” with their “excessively low interest rate policy”.
However, “hoarding money” is seen as the main culprit and attributable to two factors:
A (gloomy) economy after the financial crisis.
The dramatic decrease in interest rates that has forced investors to readjust their portfolios toward liquid money and away from interest-bearing assets such as government bonds
The use of the word hoarding is key to understanding the contempt here. They didn’t say “willingness to save money”, they said “willingness to hoard money”. Saving would imply prudence while hoarding implies selfishness, carefully guarded. It’s like a petulant temper tantrum: why won’t you spend your money for the good of the economy?!
Equally stunning is the lack of discussion with regard to investors. They point out that investors aren’t investing in interest-bearing assets “such as government bonds” but completely omit the reality that investors aren’t investing in businesses either. This is a result of the anti-business climate which is displayed by the current administration.
People used to spend their money investing in or even starting small businesses. That was the backbone of America. It’s not so much anymore. This administration has been exceedingly heavy-handed in its efforts to demonize businesses, while promising that businesses will be highly taxed and regulated. Additionally there have been huge increases in both criminal rules and regulations about what businesses are allowed and not allowed to do, along with a litigation-friendly environment.
All anyone ever reads in the paper is that the government is spending their time and money going after businesses and penalizing them, so much that we are truly becoming dissuaded from going into business.
A few months ago, I wrote about the liberty of risk after the WSJ posted an article by Ben Casselman, who noted the very real decline of risk-taking in business ventures. It is this downward trend which is a major contributor to the fact that the recovery from the recent recession is so painfully slow and anemic. The people’s appetite for investing has been totally decimated by the war on businesses being waged.
And don’t forget, we apparently have lost our appetite for spending too, because we “hoard money” these days (whatever is leftover in a paycheck to actually be able to hoard, that is) in this “gloomy economy”.
by | ARTICLES, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, TAXES
Thomas Perez’s recent appearance on “On the Money”, proved his economic naivete once again. It begs the question as to how he can be the head of the Department of Labor?
When asked about inversions, he used an anecdote to set the tone of the discussion. It was about a Fortune 500 Exec who (anonymously) proclaimed “I’d rather be rich than right!” implying that a) these people were willing to do the “wrong thing” to make money and b) that inversions are wrong in general.
By implying inversions are wrong, Perez completely and conveniently ignores the fact that our tax laws currently make taxes lower when a foreign corporation owns a US business than when a US company owns that same business. How stupid is that! That not only provides incentive for US companies to do inversions, but it incentivizes US companies to sell out to foreign owners. Stated differently, it is more profitable for a foreign company to own a US company, than it is for a US entity to own that same company. The law then actively promotes the movement of multinational headquarters out of the US, taking untold numbers of jobs with them.
Only someone who is both economically ignorant and politically partisan could support this status quo, and Thomas Perez fits the bill. Perez as the head of the Department of Labor is in charge of improving the situation for workers – but by his actions, he makes it much worse. He should be making it a priority to advocate for change in our tax policy to make it more friendly for our companies in the United States, not for their foreign competitors.
