taxation

Louisiana Senator Russell Long famously explained how most people feel about taxes: “Don’t tax you; don’t tax me; tax that fellow behind the tree.”

The Alabama legislature kicked off its new term with a special session to increase the gas tax, a result which seemed foreordained.  Nonetheless, the gas tax raises interesting economic and political considerations.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), announced by the House Ways and Means Committee on November 2nd, has generated a lot of commentary on both sides of the political divide.

On this I am totally with the Libertarians – taxation is theft. But I am a Realist. In the panoply of evils – taxation is a necessary one. It is absolutely not necessary in the omni-directional ways and at the confiscatory levels at which it currently exists.

It seems that when Chief Justice John Marshall was preparing the opinion for McCulloch v. Maryland he tapped into an eternal truth. “The power to tax is the power to destroy,” he wrote on behalf of a unanimous Supreme Court. Those words are no less true in 2014 than they were in 1819. Taxation appropriates money from one person or group of people in order to give it to others. There is no way to escape taxes. But there is a way to make taxes somewhat fairer. One way is to make taxes flatter and expand the tax base.

This morning the House Judiciary Committee will undertake the markup of the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act. The Act would protect consumers from the increased costs in accessing and using the Internet by permanently extending the moratorium on Internet access taxes, and would prevent multiple and discriminatory taxation of Internet sales.

The Barack Obama Administration is back at it — yet another big government power grab is in the works. The Administration’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) again resurrecting Network Neutrality — an all-encompassing Internet usurpation twice unanimously killed by court as an illegal overreach.

There were no net full time jobs created last month. The number of full time jobs actually declined by at least 162,000 on net last month.

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision holding the Obamacare individual mandate is constitutional was based on grounds not addressed by the parties to the suit. Thus debate was squelched on the…