revenue

In this episode of the weekly Budget & Tax News podcast, managing editor and research fellow Jesse Hathaway is joined by U.S. Rep. Pete Roskam (R-IL), the sponsor of the Preventing IRS Abuse and Protecting Free Speech Act.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has often talked about his desire for the United States to emulate the socialist welfare states of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden by providing free college and health care and expanding Social Security. Sanders also wants to ban oil, natural gas, and coal production on lands owned by the federal government, and he has called for a ban on hydraulic fracturing, which has dramatically increased production of oil and natural gas in the United States.

In cities and states across the nation, lawmakers are using excise taxes on popular consumer products to raise funds to pay for their pet spending projects.

The world has changed. Although few yet understand it, the revolution in the production of oil and natural gas from shale has altered the course of global energy, affecting most of the world’s people. This is not a short-term event. Citizens, industries and nations will be impacted for decades to come.

Lawmakers in Congress introduced a plan to apply sales taxes to Internet purchases, hoping this time they’ve ironed out the problems that scuttled previous attempts. They haven’t, and this attempt at grabbing e-commerce tax revenue has the same flaws as previous attempts.

Chicago Ald. George Cardenas has proposed raising taxes on sugary drinks in an effort to correct the city’s budget woes. Last night, the effort appeared to fizzle, as community members and elected officials objected to the sin tax, noting that the tax would have little effect on both the budget and Chicago’s long-term health.

In response to significantly lower oil and natural gas prices, America’s energy sector is retrenching rapidly. The drilling rig count has dropped by more than 50 percent over the past year, while companies large and small have announced sizeable layoffs and cuts in their capital budgets for 2015 and 2016. Nonetheless, several states, including Pennsylvania and Ohio, are considering imposing or hiking production taxes—called severance taxes—on oil and gas operators. These increases will be in neither the public’s nor the industry’s best interests

At the end of January, the Obama administration announced the next step in a long process that could result in the exploration and ultimate extraction of oil-and-gas resources of the U.S. mid-Atlantic—something the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Governors Coalition supports. On March 30, the 60-day comment period ends. If everything goes well, we could see new American resources on the market in twenty years.

On January 16 The New York Times reported the lies NASA keeps telling about global warming with an article titled “2014 Breaks Heat Record, Challenging Global Warming Skeptics.” We have reached the point where neither a famed government agency nor a famed daily newspaper can be believed simply because both are lying to advance the greatest hoax of the modern era.

In 2011, numerous local-government special-interest groups and elected officials fought against Gov. John Kasich’s proposed reduction to the Local Government Fund, a pool of taxpayers’ money collected by the state government and redistributed to local governments’ general revenue funds.

Gov. Pat Quinn’s “millionaire tax” question, the most recent nonbinding vote added to the bloated November ballot, is not only a misguided effort to draw his base to the polls with blatant class warfare but incredibly poor public policy. Like all “soak the rich” tax schemes, the imposition of increased taxes on high-income earners will discourage new capital and entrepreneurs from entering the state.

Tuesday is April 15 – Tax Day. The official day that represents governments’ year-round, omni-directional shearing of We the People. Looking to get filing help from our federal fleecers is at best a crapshoot.

The environmental movement’s motivations are less about saving the planet and more about killing the global economy—while enriching themselves taxpayers’ expense.