Thomas Sowell on tax and false promises:
A recent article in the New York Times says that raising the tax rate on the top one percent of income earners to 40 percent would generate “about $157 billion” a year in additional tax revenue for the government. This ignores mountains of evidence, going back for generations, showing that raising tax rates does not automatically mean raising tax revenues — and has often actually led to falling tax revenues. When the state of Maryland raised its tax rate on people with incomes of a million dollars a year or more, the number of such people living in Maryland fell from nearly 8,000 to fewer than 6,000. Although it had been projected that the tax revenue collected from such people in Maryland would rise by $106 million, instead these revenues fell by $257 million.
There was a similar reaction in Oregon and in Britain. Rich people do not simply stand still to be sheared like sheep. They can either send their money somewhere else or they can leave themselves. Currently, there are trillions of dollars of American money creating jobs overseas, in places where tax rates are lower. It is easy to transfer money electronically from country to country. But it is not nearly so easy for unemployed American workers to transfer themselves to where the jobs have been driven by high tax rates.
Walter E. Williams put out numbers about a year ago that showed that if you took everything from the wealthiest in America, it would run the government for about 147 days and then the next year there would be nothing left to take. I guess there are many in both Canada and the US who think that would be a good thing. Envy is a serious problem for human beings.
Yup. Ya build a better mouse trap, and the mice get smarter. Something our governments will never figure out. It’s called the law of diminishing returns.
Yup. Ya build a better mouse trap, and the mice get smarter. Something our governments will never figure out. It’s called the law of diminishing returns.
You got that right. But who said governments ever used common dogf@@k? Over 3/4’s of my bucks are off-shore, where Turdeau cannot steal them. Thanks to that, I actually get a tax refund every year. Get your money as far away from Soros, etc. as you can, and you’ll be OK.
“There is nothing more nervous than a million dollars – it moves very fast, and it doesn’t speak any language.” — Jean Chretien
Yes, I know. I figured this out myself a very, very long time ago. Long enough for a whole generation to be born, grow up and get jobs themselves. Lots of people know this. It doesn’t matter.
Canada just finished voting for more/better/higher taxes.
So Mr. Thomas Sowell is pretty much p1ssing into the wind at this point.
The article describes a very fast reaction. It’s easy, in New York City, to move to Connecticut or New Jersey. It isn’t so easy to avoid the federal government.
But the rich will rearrange their affairs to avoid taxes, and the effect will kick in down the road. And the thing is … once the rich take their money off-shore, it won’t come back to Canada! Not likely.
The ultra rich (ya know the ones who like to dictate public policy to the polis they have purchased) never see 1/50 of the taxation thy should se – they hav so many out of sight dodges for personal wealth – and unlike the industrious rich who may have tangible productivity assets (hard sided businesses and factories) open to taxation, the ultra rich have no tangible taxable assets within government sight – as they derive wealth from fixing markets and undermining national productivity with predatory investing/lending strategies.
These are the 1% of the 1%, they own 90% of global wealth, most of the monetary and financial systems and they are untouchable – at least by the governments they own.
So when you hear some politician pretending to be the people’s warrior against the super rich you are listening to either a mindless blowhard who does not know how the world works or you are looking at a fully owned asset of the 1%.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374531617?*Version*=1&*entries*=0
Oil companies have already made their intentions clear ahead of Tuesday’s budget in Alberta.
Tax them an extra 20% when the price of the commodity has shrunk 60%?
They’ll wait another five years before going ahead with their projects. Or about the same time the next election rolls around.
What a perfect time to hand the anchor to the NDP!
“Despite an old saying that taxes are the price we pay for civilisation, an absolute majority of the record-breaking tax money collected by the federal government today is simply transferred by politicians from people who are not likely to vote for them to people who are more likely to vote for them.”- Thomas Sowell
The theft of taxation must aim at the imaginary group that voters think will provide loot promised by their political pimps. As reality ensues, the taxes get shifted lower down the income stream until what was once considered “middle Class” is now “rich”. Once the point is reached where voters getting taxed exceeds voters getting loot a political reversal occurs for a while until the voters memories are once again lost and the cycle returns.
Thanks, Occam…I’m going to order two copies of that book (one for my son.)
I avoid the federal government by not working. Two years ago I closed my business and went into early retirement. I was sick of working 60plus hours a week to give 45% of my income to the government. I went from upper-middle class to lower middle class, but also went from stressed out to happy. As the Captain would say, I am enjoying the decline.
Taxation is a feature of the NWO, not a bug. Force capital to lower wealth areas of the world. Make everyone uniformly poor. It’s about power and control. People are easily controlled if they aren’t too wealthy.
Devaluation of the currency over the years has probably removed more wealth than taxation. Over just the last 40 years the currency has devalued more than 4/5ths. $20 in the early 70’s was like more than $100 now. In the early 70’s the price of a Big Mac meal was 65 cents. Now it’s more like $5. The actual value of the meal hasn’t changed, but the value of the currency sure has. Somebody tell me again what a good job the central banks are doing…and that wealth has gone somewhere, it didn’t just evaporate.
The bug in their plan is the tremendous natural wealth and ingenuity present in the US and Canada. Hence third world immigration to fix that bug. That won’t work for them either, but it will cause a lot of chaos.
The “appearance of piety” (smug superiority – we know what’s best for you.}
“Berlin (AFP) – Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday said the influx of asylum seekers into Germany was part of the fallout from globalisation, which, she noted, had served Germany well in terms of exports and jobs.
Addressing a congress of the giant IG Metall metalworkers’ union in Frankfurt, Merkel said: ‘Your experience of globalisation has, until now, basically been: our economy goes into other countries, builds factories, sells products and the results are positive for German employment and business.’
‘And now we’re witnessing an inverse movement: globalisation is coming to us,’ the chancellor, who has thrown Germany’s doors open to hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the war in Syria, said.”
I agree with Donald Trump; Merkel is insane.
Donald Trump probably shouldn’t talk too loud. He’s also a collectivist who tried to use eminent domain to take a woman’s property. As justification he still says the ‘greater good’ would have been served by the creation of 2500 jobs…
His ‘greater good’, anyway. He agrees 100% with the Kelo decision. Just compensation doesn’t enter into his equations. If he could have made millions, he should have offered millions. That’s usually how the worth of property is determined.
He’s a predator, but likely less beholding, at present, to bigger predators. That won’t last.