by | ARTICLES, BLOG, ECONOMY, GOVERNMENT
Phill Gramm and John Early do a nice job laying out the misnomer that income inequality is the problem. This concept of inequality really became a selling point during the Obama administration when the Democrats consistently implored that “millionaires and billionaires” should “pay their fair share.” But the simple fact remains that income inequality isn’t the actual problem with the economy. The problem lies in the fact that, due to the massive amount of government transfer payments, the bottom 60% of income earners have seen their income equalized to the point of nearly attaining the same amount of income of Americans who receive none. The result of this phenomenon is that the labor participation rate among the bottom quintile has fallen sharply to 36% (through 2017, the latest year for statistics), which is what is truly disastrous for the economy. (What’s more, this article doesn’t even begin to touch the ever-worsening labor participation/economic situation due to COVID policies and extra government transfers.) The article from the Wall Street Journal is reprinted below. It is a strong read about the concepts of income inequality and equality.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the most dramatic and consequential change in the distribution of income in America in the past half-century isn’t rising income inequality but the extraordinary growth in income equality among the bottom 60% of household earners.
Real government transfer payments to the bottom 20% of household earners surged by 269% between 1967 and 2017, while middle-income households saw their real earnings after taxes rise by only 154% during the same period. That has largely equalized the income of the bottom 60% of Americans. This government-created equality has caused the labor-force participation rate to collapse among working-age people in low-income households and unleashed a populist realignment that is unraveling the coalition that has dominated American politics since the 1930s.
On these pages, we have debunked the myth that income inequality is extreme and growing on a secular basis by showing that the Census Bureau measure of income fails to include two-thirds of all federal, state and local transfer payments as income to the recipients and fails to treat taxes paid as income lost to the taxpayer. The Census Bureau measure overstates current income inequality between the highest and lowest 20% of earners by more than 300% and claims that income inequality has risen by 21% since 1967, when in fact it has fallen by 3%.
Our most significant finding from correcting the census income calculations wasn’t the overstated inequality between top and bottom earners. It was the extraordinary equality of income among the bottom 60% of American households, regardless of employment status. In 2017, among working-age households, the bottom 20% earned only $6,941 on average, and only 36% were employed. But after transfer payments and taxes, those households had an average income of $48,806. The average working-age household in the second quintile earned $31,811 and 85% of them were employed. But after transfers and taxes, they had income of $50,492, a mere 3.5% more than the bottom quintile. The middle quintile earned $66,453 and 92% were employed. But after taxes and transfers, they kept only $61,350—just 26% more than the bottom quintile.
Even these figures don’t tell the whole story. In the bottom quintile, there are on average only 1.92 people living in a household. The second and middle quintiles have 2.41 and 2.62 people respectively. After adjusting income for the number of people living in the household, the bottom-quintile household received $33,653 per capita. The second and middle quintile households had on average $29,497 and $32,574 per capita, respectively. The blockbuster finding is that on a per capita basis the average bottom quintile household received 14% more income than the average second-quintile household and 3.3% more than the average middle-income household.
It should be noted that while per capita comparisons are widely used, they tend to overstate the effects of household size. Two people living together can achieve the same material well-being for less than they could living separately. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has developed a measure widely used internationally to adjust for household size, and the Census Bureau has a similar adjustment it uses in its supplemental poverty measure. Since the results produced by the OECD and the Census Bureau adjustments are so similar, we simply use the average of the two below.
The nearby chart compares the after-tax, after-transfer incomes of the bottom three quintiles of American households with no adjustment for household size, on a per capita basis, and using the average of the OECD and census adjustments for household size. We found that the average bottom-quintile household has $2,401 (or 6.6%) more income than the second quintile and only $3,306 (or 7.8%) less than the middle-income quintile.
The average second-quintile household earned almost five times as much as the average household in the bottom quintile, because it had 2.4 times as many working-age members working and on average each worker worked 80% more hours. The average middle-quintile household earned almost 10 times as much and had 2.6 times the percentage of its working-age people working, each working twice as many hours. Yet the bottom 60% of American households received essentially the same income after accounting for taxes, transfer payments and household size.
Given the surge in transfer payments since the war on poverty, it isn’t surprising that the percentage of working-age people in the bottom quintile who actually worked plummeted from 68% in 1967 to 36% in 2017. With transfer payments giving recipients about as much for not working as they could earn working, only a mandatory work requirement as a condition for receiving means-tested benefits will bring them back into the labor market. While official statistics don’t count two-thirds of those transfer payments and don’t show the income equality they produce, Americans who work hard to make ends meet are aware of it. Despite Democratic politicians’ efforts to provoke resentment against the rich, when was the last time you heard working people complain that some people in America are rich? The hostility of working people is increasingly focused on a system where those who don’t break a sweat are about as well off as they are.
This justifiable resentment is the economic source of today’s American populism. It is ravaging the increasingly unstable Democratic political alliance between welfare recipients and blue-collar workers. It was already building in the 1980s, with what were then called Reagan Democrats, and it was fully manifested in the Trump blue-collar political base. It is now driving political realignment among Hispanic voters, who are disproportionately middle-income earners.
By eroding self-reliance, worker pride and labor-force participation, government-generated income equality undermines the very foundations of American prosperity. A democratic society won’t knowingly tolerate it.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, COVID, ECONOMY
When the CDC admitted failure this week for its COVID response, one might have felt a bit vindicated regarding the lockdowns and disruptions — but only for a moment. Because it turns out that the CDC actually means is that they didn’t go far enough in their response measures and that next time it should be even more restrictive. This flies in the face of copious amounts of data that show the deleterious effects COVID response had on basically every facet of society — economic, mental, physical, educational, etc. John Tierney does a decent job taking to task this unreasonable CDC outlook. The WSJ article is printed in its entirety below.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention belatedly admitted failure this week. “For 75 years, CDC and public health have been preparing for Covid-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations,” Director Rochelle Walensky said. She vowed to establish an “action-oriented culture.”
Lockdowns and mask mandates were the most radical experiment in the history of public health, but Dr. Walensky isn’t alone in thinking they failed because they didn’t go far enough. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president, recently said there should have been “much, much more stringent restrictions” early in the pandemic. The World Health Organization is revising its official guidance to call for stricter lockdown measures in the next pandemic, and it is even seeking a new treaty that would compel nations to adopt them. The World Economic Forum hails the Covid lockdowns as the model for a “Great Reset” empowering technocrats to dictate policies world-wide.
Yet these oppressive measures were taken against the longstanding advice of public-health experts, who warned that they would lead to catastrophe and were proved right. For all the talk from officials like Dr. Fauci about following “the science,” these leaders ignored decades of research—as well as fresh data from the pandemic—when they set strict Covid regulations. The burden of proof was on them to justify their dangerous experiment, yet they failed to conduct rigorous analyses, preferring to tout badly flawed studies while refusing to confront obvious evidence of the policies’ failure.
U.S. states with more-restrictive policies fared no better, on average, than states with less-restrictive policies. There’s still no convincing evidence that masks provided any significant benefits. When case rates throughout the pandemic are plotted on a graph, the trajectory in states with mask mandates is virtually identical to the trajectory in states without mandates. (The states without mandates actually had slightly fewer Covid deaths per capita.) International comparisons yield similar results. A Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis of studies around the world concluded that lockdown and mask restrictions have had “little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.”
Florida and Sweden were accused of deadly folly for keeping schools and businesses open without masks, but their policies have been vindicated. In Florida the cumulative age-adjusted rate of Covid mortality is below the national average, and the rate of excess mortality is lower than in California, which endured one of the nation’s strictest lockdowns and worst spikes in unemployment. Sweden’s cumulative rate of excess mortality is one of the lowest in the world, and there’s one particularly dismal difference between it and the rest of Europe as well as America: the number of younger adults who died not from Covid but from the effects of lockdowns.
Even in 2020, Sweden’s worst year of the pandemic, the mortality rate remained normal among Swedes under 70. Meanwhile, the death rate surged among younger adults in the U.S., and a majority of them died from causes other than Covid. In Sweden, there have been no excess deaths from non-Covid causes during the pandemic, but in the U.S. there have been more than 170,000 of these excess deaths.
No one knows exactly how many of those deaths were caused by lockdowns, but the social disruptions, isolation, inactivity and economic havoc clearly exacted a toll. Medical treatments and screenings were delayed, and there were sharp increases in the rates of depression, anxiety, obesity, diabetes, fatal strokes and heart disease, and fatal abuse of alcohol and drugs.
These were the sorts of calamities foreseen long before 2020 by eminent epidemiologists such as Donald Henderson, who directed the successful international effort to eradicate smallpox. In 2006 he and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh considered an array of proposed measures to deal with a virus as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu.
Should schools be closed? Should everyone wear face masks in public places? Should those exposed to an infection be required to quarantine at home? Should public-health officials rely on computer models of viral spread to impose strict limitations on people’s movements? In each case, the answer was no, because there was no evidence these measures would make a significant difference.
“Experience has shown,” Henderson’s team concluded, “that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.” The researchers specifically advised leaders not to be guided by computer models, because no model could reliably predict the effects of the measures or take into account the “devastating” collateral damage. If leaders overreacted and panicked the public, “a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.”
This advice was subsequently heeded in the pre-Covid pandemic plans prepared by the CDC and other public-health agencies. The WHO’s review of the scientific literature concluded that there was “no evidence” that universal masking “is effective in reducing transmission.” The CDC’s pre-2020 planning scenarios didn’t recommend universal masking or extended school and business closures even during a pandemic as severe as the 1918 Spanish flu. Neither did the U.K.’s 2011 plan, which urged “those who are well to carry on with their normal daily lives” and flatly declared, “It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.”
But those plans were abruptly discarded in March 2020, when computer modelers in England announced that a lockdown like China’s was the only way to avert doomsday. As Henderson had warned, the computer model’s projections—such as 30 Covid patients for every available bed in intensive-care units—proved to be absurdly wrong. Just as the British planners had predicted, it was impossible to halt the virus. A few isolated places managed to keep out the virus with border closures and draconian lockdowns, but the virus spread quickly once they opened up. China’s hopeless fantasy of “Zero Covid” became a humanitarian nightmare.
It was bad enough that Dr. Fauci, the CDC and the WHO ignored the best scientific advice at the start of this pandemic. It’s sociopathic for them to promote a worse catastrophe for future outbreaks. If a drug company behaved this way, ignoring evidence while marketing an ineffective treatment with fatal side effects, its executives would be facing lawsuits, bankruptcy and probably criminal charges. Dr. Fauci and his fellow public officials can’t easily be sued, but they need to be put out of business long before the next pandemic.
Mr. Tierney is a contributing editor to City Journal and a co-author of “The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It.”
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, IRS
You have the Editorial Board at the WSJ taking the IRS to task. The following article outlines numerous problems listed in multiple agency audits, and yet Congress is still eager to give the IRS an extra $80 billion. I’ve reprinted it below.
The new Inflation Reduction Act has many damaging provisions, but for sheer government gall the $80 billion reward to the Internal Revenue Service stands out. The money will go to hire 87,000 new employees, doubling its current payroll. This is also doubling down on incompetence, as anyone can see in the official reports of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (Tigta).
We’ve read those reports for the last several years so you don’t have to, and the experience is a government version of finding yourself in a blighted neighborhood for the first time. You can’t believe it’s that bad. The trouble goes beyond the oft-cited failures like answering only 10% of taxpayer calls, or a backlog of 17 million unprocessed tax returns. The audits reveal an agency that can’t do its basic job well but will terrorize taxpayers whether deserving or not.
***
Consider the agency’s chronic mishandling of tax credits. By the IRS’s own admission, some $19 billion—or 28%—of earned-income tax credit payments in fiscal 2021 were “improper.” The amount hasn’t improved despite years of IRS promises to do better.
• A January Tigta audit found that an estimated 67,000 claims—totaling $15.6 billion—for the low-income housing tax credit from 2015 to 2019 “lacked or did not match supporting documentation due to potential reporting errors or noncompliance.”
• A May audit found that 26% ($1.9 billion) of its American opportunity tax credits for education expenses were improper in fiscal 2021, and 27% ($541 million) of its net premium tax credits (ObamaCare) were improper in fiscal 2019 (the most recent year it estimated). The same May audit said the IRS acknowledged that 13% ($5.2 billion) of its enhanced child tax credit payments were improper.
• How did it handle $1,200 stimulus checks, the sick and paid family leave credit, or the employee retention tax credit? Unknown, since the agency didn’t estimate failure rates—for which Tigta rapped its knuckles.
• A September 2021 audit found the IRS in 2020 issued 89,338 notices to taxpayers insisting that “balances were owed even though the taxes were not actually due.” Why? Because the feds had extended the filing deadline amid Covid but the IRS apparently didn’t notice.
• A February audit found the IRS department responsible for ensuring retirement-plan tax compliance suffered a 23% decline in the quality of its examinations from fiscal 2018 to fiscal 2020. In the past seven months, Tigta has issued searing reports on IRS mismanagement of everything from its partial-payment program for delinquent taxpayers, to its auditing of partnerships, to its struggle to handle internal employee misconduct.
• This ineptitude extends to programs Democrats insist will now raise revenue—those targeting higher earners. In 2010 Congress passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which was supposed to identify wealthy Americans using undisclosed foreign accounts. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation said this would raise some $9 billion in revenue by fiscal 2020. Yet an April Tigta audit noted that while the IRS has spent $574 million to implement the law, the agency has drummed up only $14 million in compliance revenue.
• A July 2021 audit related the failure of the IRS small-business/self-employed division’s strategy, which began in 2010 to examine more returns from “high-income individual taxpayers.” The IRS defines high earners as those with income greater than $200,000. Yet from fiscal 2015 to the end of fiscal 2017 (when the strategy was shut down), 73% of returns targeted by the strategy fell below $200,000.
Democrats say a turbocharged IRS won’t pursue taxpayers earning less than $400,000, but don’t believe it. Middle-income Americans are easier marks, as they are more likely to write a check than engage in years of costly litigation.
***
The Tigta site shows the IRS is good at one thing: punishing those who resist its demands. A March audit chastised the IRS for using lien foreclosure suits to confiscate “principal residences” from delinquent taxpayers, a process that does “not provide [taxpayers] the same legal protections as seizures.”
A March 2017 report related the agency’s crackdown on businesses flagged as potentially evading a law that requires financial institutions to report currency transactions exceeding $10,000. The IRS took to seizing property from its targets before even conducting interviews. Tigta reports that even when interviews were conducted, the IRS failed to advise the accused of their rights or the purpose of the interview, and failed to consider “realistic defenses or explanations.” Tigta found that “most” of those targeted (owners of gas stations, jewelry stores, scrap-metal dealers, restaurants) had not committed crimes, though many were never able to regain their property.
This is the IRS that Democrats are now arming with more money and manpower to unleash on Americans. The $80 billion is a demonstration of their priorities, and further proof of the rule that failure in government is invariably rewarded with a bigger budget.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, EDUCATION, FREEDOM, HYPOCRISY
The continued maltreatment of Amy Wax at UPenn is egregious and unacceptable. Ted Ruger, Dean of the UPenn Carey Law School, has consistently mismanaged the entire affair; his recent change in policy effectively abandoned his prior stance that upheld the right for faculty to express their views buckling under pressure from students who clearly do not understand the concept of freedom of expression. UPenn certainly doesn’t seem to be doing its job these days.
Wax’s “crime” of expressing unfavorable views to some on the topic of immigration — off-campus and unaffiliated with UPenn, by the way — has resulted in a barrage of unrelenting criticism among her colleagues; Ruger went so far as to issue an official statement distancing the law school from her and then penned an op-ed in an act of pure posturing while thinly conceding that free speech is still a thing.
Not so anymore. Ruger bowed to student demands that Wax be sanctioned and that tenure be reformed to “ensure that tenure be consistent with the principles of social equity.” Ruger has now announced that he will indeed take action against Amy Way, a tenured professor who may face termination. This change in policy undermines the right of faculty to speak freely and UPenn’s commitment to safeguard those rights. This chilling change will undoubtedly affect anyone who espouses an unpopular idea that might be found offensive at some point. One would think that UPenn faculty would be aghast at such a prospect — for they too could be next.
UPenn has proven to be rather un-collegial in this entire sordid affair which makes me recoil at the thought of supporting such an institution any longer. Clearly gone are the days by which the highest goals of a university are the pursuit of knowledge through the debate and discussion of ideas and the defense of the free expression of those ideas.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, ECONOMY, IRS, TAXES
Mike Hiltzik’ s article, “Proof the IRS targets the poor for tax audits while leaving millionaires alone” is either economically ignorant or intentionally misleading. He asserts that the IRS disproportionately audits lower income households for some biased reason, but that is simply not the case. Hiltzik takes his data from a non-profit called TRAC which reviews IRS reports that are generated as part of an ongoing FOIA request.
Hiltzik ignores the fact that the IRS audits taxpayers based upon sophisticated analyses that tell them where the taxpayer errors are. It is simply the case that low income taxpayers claiming the complex earned income and other credits have a huge error rate – leaving the IRS no alternative but to go after them. He even complains that 82% of those audited claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) – ignoring that error rates on these tax returns are around 50%, and improper refunds involving EITC claims is more than $17 billion each year. Hiltzik goes so far to state that “pursuing low-income taxpayers won’t do anything to close the tax gap,” nearly suggesting that low-income earners shouldn’t be audited at all – though anyone can see that the combination of erroneous credit claims, and the also quite common situation of people claiming low income because of work in the underground economy are significant contributors to the tax gap.
Even though higher-income tax returns would seem to have more money to go after, they are most often either 1) relatively straightforward, with full statutory tax rates being paid, or 2) complex requiring services of qualified tax professionals who are quite competent to see that the letter of the law is being followed. It’s egregious that Hiltzik claims, with no evidence whatsoever, “the rich keep more of the money they owe to the federal government.” He misconstrues this audit data as part of his screed against millionaires and billionaires by offering the tired old trope about them not paying their fair share; in reality, roughly 57% of U.S. households paid no federal income taxes for 2021. How is that actually fair?
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, ECONOMY, GOVERNMENT
Katherine Blunt’s WSJ article, “Why Your Electric Bill is Soaring — And Likely To Go Higher” absolutely ignores (or just possibly misses) that soaring gas prices are caused as much by Biden production restriction policies nationally. They are further exacerbated by policies like the New York State pipeline and fracking prohibitions just as much as they are by recent Ukraine issues. She should know that gas prices (unlike oil) are a local, not global market. Furthermore, most of New York increases are from a vast push into incredibly more expensive wind and solar mandates. Her own editorial board writes about this all the time, and she would do well to read it.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, EDUCATION, FED, GOVERNMENT
Recently, a young PhD student came to terms with the fact that academia was no longer based on merit. Rather, as a scientific researcher interested in procuring grant funding, he was dismayed to learn that certain terms such as “equity,” “diversity,” and “inclusion” were not only social goals, but now also scientific ones; in other words, they were increasingly being used in descriptions of actual scientific work.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awards millions in grants each year and the agency which renders their decision does so on two accounts: intellectual merit and broader impact. It is within the broader impact realm that the aforementioned social terms, among others, were being applied and interpreted. The appearance of particular terms related to identity politics in award abstracts, including “equity,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” “gender,” “marginalize,” “underrepresented,” and “disparity” increased substantially over the last thirty years.
In 1990, only 3 percent of award abstracts contained one of the terms, while in 2020, 30 percent of all award abstracts included at least one of those terms. Notably, the category which changed the most was Education and Human Resources, which went from 4% to 54% during that time span.
The problem with scientific research playing politics means that social causes as a scientific end are being elevated while intellectual merit and other similar criteria are being diminished.
This reminds me of the observation Rasmussen made, that “the more that scientific institutions are viewed as conduits for promulgating ideology, the less capable they will be of swaying public opinion on important issues.” Science and science funding should stick to being concerned with searching for truth among empirical evidence, not social activism.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, CONSTITUTION, ECONOMY, GOVERNMENT, TAXES
Capital gains are the profits realized from the sale of an asset and are included as part of taxable income. A handful of states have favorable rates toward capital gains (or don’t tax them at all because they do not have an income tax).
Other states tax capital gains as ordinary income. Among the most offensive states are NY, NJ, and CA. These states have concentrations of high income individuals and businesses who pay tax at high state tax rates. And they give no rate reduction for capital gains.Such tax policy discourages the sale of less productive assets and thereby reduces investment opportunities and economic growth.
Furthermore, taxes on capital gains (just like dividends) are subject to double taxation. This means every dollar of capital gains taxed to an individual has already been taxed at the entity level. No other major country double taxes this income. And for states to not even give a rate break for this double-taxed income is as mean-spirited as it is egregious.
High capital gains taxes are inequitable, destructive, and detrimental to the economy. They should be lower, not higher.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, GOVERNMENT, LAW, TAXES
A good tax system is built on four principles: simplicity, transparency, neutrality, and stability. Serious minded professionals and statesmen have known and pushed for these principles for generations. These principles should be the basis for tax policies created by lawmakers so that our tax system is organized and understandable.
The first principle is simplicity. By this concept, both taxpayers and the IRS deserve to have policies and a system that makes tax compliance and tax enforcement easy and understandable. No one should be obligated to wade through a system that doesn’t make obvious sense.
Next is transparency. A transparent system is one that clearly explains the tax in question, the steps needed to pay it, and the dates by which the tax is due. This should go without saying.
The third concept is neutrality. Neutrality means that no one industry is preferred over another nor any personal behavior given favor. Picking winners and losers in business or activities should not be the function of the tax system.
Finally, stability is key. Consistent tax laws without sunsets or changes from year to year provide predictability and help promote long term planning for taxpayers. If a tax system is fair and equitable, taxpayers should be able to count on it and plan for it into the future, without worrying that politicking and partisanship will create an unfair trap.
I had a recent conversation with Congresswoman Claudia Tenney (NY) on these concepts. At the end of our discussion she had a brilliant realization: that these four principles: simplicity, transparency, neutrality, and stability, not only make for a good tax system, but should be part of ANY legislation. Imagine Congress using these concepts to form the basis of all policies when considering the content of legislation?
by | ARTICLES, BIDEN, BLOG, ECONOMY, POTUS, TAXES
When Biden was a candidate, one of his proposals was to raise the capital gains tax (which also applies to dividends) to 39.6%. When I wrote about it at the time, it sounded completely outrageous that any serious candidate for President of the United States would willfully consider implementing such a devastating levy. We had already experienced the negative effects of Obama’s 23.8% tax on capital gains which contributed to the sluggish economic recovery during the Obama administration, and his Vice President now wanted to raise the capital gains rate even higher?
Unfortunately, Biden’s plan has been introduced and may be coming to fruition. This week he indeed announced a new 39.6% capital gains rate (43.4% including the Obamacare add-on), which nearly doubles the current effective rate of 20% (23.8% including the Obamacare add-on).
Yet that’s not the worst of it. Some states with a large concentration of wealthy people and high performing businesses, such as California and New York have recently raised taxes, so taxpayers in those localities will pay much more. The absolute worst area would be NYC; after factoring in local taxes as well as the recent state tax increase, high income earners would face a rate of 57%!
Remember, Economics 1a teaches that when you tax something you get less of it. Taxing investments this way guarantees that investment – economic growth and GDP – will decrease.
Furthermore, this increase is outrageous as a matter of equity and fairness. Taxation of dividends and capital gains is a second tax on the same income – having already been taxed at the corporate level. No other major country double taxes this income. That is the reason dividends and capital gains are taxed at a lower level now – and they should be reduced, not doubled.
Furthermore, raising taxes on capital gains does nothing to raise revenue. Because people have discretion as to whether or when to sell assets, higher capital gains rates invariably lead to lower tax collections! Furthermore, it discourages the sale of less productive assets thereby reducing investment opportunities and economic growth. Even President Obama acknowledged that higher capital gains taxes won’t raise revenue – he was forced to admit that his irrational, hypocritical and wrongheaded rationale was to promote “fairness”!
A massive capital gains tax such as the one proposed by Biden will be inequitable, destructive, and clearly detrimental to our economy and the very people Biden states he is intending to help.
