You can’t talk about healthcare in America without
talking about obesity. We are fat, and it’s not because of genetics or big bonedness. Our food
policy pushes us to cheap food and away from healthy food, and the best way to rectify the mispricing is to add a tax to unhealthy food that would raise roughly enough revenue to offset the costs of said food. Finally, there’s rigorous evidence,
from the University of Buffalo, that taxing unhealthy food does decrease the amount of bad food people consume. It turns out that people respond to incentives!
Posted in Tax News.
Tagged with Business, Conditions and Diseases, Food, food tax, Health, health care, Nutrition and Metabolism Disorders, obesity, Pigout, Pigouvian tax, United States, University of Buffalo.
I get that people are mad that the economy sucks and that
one manifestation of that is a weird movement of hardcore right-wing anti-establishmentarianism. I get that people have different political views and have the right to express those views. What I don’t get, however, is when people base their beliefs and actions on verifiable falsehoods.
Continued…
Posted in Politics and Taxes, Rhetoric and Ideology.
Tagged with CBS, Obama, stimulus bill, tax credit, taxes, Tea Partiers, Tea Party.
The bag tax is expanding! In my adopted home state, Representative Karen Clark has introduced a bill to
impose a 5 cent tax on paper and plastic bags. (A bag tax
exists in D.C. and
other parts of the world.) Retailers would keep one cent of the tax normally and two cents when customers return plastic bags for a five-cent credit. So it’s more like bottle taxes that a lot of states have than a flat tax like a sales tax.
Posted in Tax News.
Tagged with bag tax, Business, Flexible, Industrial Goods and Services, law, Minnesota, Packaging, Paper, Plastic bag, United States, Washington D.C..
Read this
short history and dissection of the federal budget from
fivethirtyeight.com. The big takeaway is that interest payments as a percent of GDP have held steady because
interest rates on debt have steadily declined for over two decades. We also consistently run manageable deficits and have had consistently moderate levels of taxation. A sane, completely obvious conclusion is that “
The argument that the US is taxed to death is wrong. On a percent of GDP basis the US is taxed at moderate rates.” Nate Silver is clearly a frog-loving Communist who doesn’t like the freedoms that are constantly being taken away.
Posted in Politics and Taxes.
Tagged with deficit, Economic, fivethirtyeight.com, Gross domestic product, Interest rate, Nate Silver, tax, United States federal budget.
It’s so disheartening (but morbidly fun) to watch Congress complain about how poorly government works since, um,
they are the government. Part of the Republican discourse on taxes is that not enough people pay taxes, a
point I agree with. The problem, however, is that the vast majority of people pay federal income tax, but they receive more from the government and so receive a net transfer of wealth from the government. (Caveat: everyone pays payroll taxes, so when pundits say that people pay no tax, they mean no federal income tax. This is a very narrow definition of tax.) In fact, around 75% of Americans pay federal income tax; more than a third of those paying an income tax, however, receive more from the government in terms of
mortgage deduction, child credits, charitable deductions, etc. than they paid.
Continued…
Posted in Tax News.
Tagged with Congress, GOP, government, Income, income tax, payroll tax, Republicans, tax, Tax deduction, Tax Vox, TaxVox, United States, United States Congress.
If your goal is to erase our nation’s budget deficit while maintaining and expanding the social safety net, it’s pretty well-accepted that
taxes will have to be raised on the middle class. The Obama administration also has a habit of talking a hard game but playing a soft one, e.g.
Guantanamo,
Wall Street, or
healthcare. One of Obama’s lines in the sand has been raising taxes on the middle class, a worthwhile campaign pledge but a pretty unworkable governing position. Obama is smart and his advisors are smart, so they clearly realize the huge limitation this puts on their agenda, and they know they need to rhetorically pave the way for that possibility. And in a recent interview from the Oval Office,
they may have just done that.
Continued…
Posted in Politics and Taxes, Rhetoric and Ideology.
Tagged with Business Week, BusinessWeek, Congress, debt commission, Guantanamo, healthcare, middle class tax, middle-class, Obama, Republicans, taxes, Wall Street, White House.
I have family there, so I can say this: South Carolina is an
absolutely crazy state. Exhibit Z: their Lieutenant Governor compared
people on welfare to stray animals, saying at a town hall meeting that, “You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.” He then went on to say that those receiving welfare should receive drug tests, with the goal of improving their overall behavior.
What does this exchange have to do with taxes? Well, if the principle is that people need to pass hurdles to receive help from the government, then, logically, homeowners must pass these same tests. The mortgage interest tax deduction is, after all, a huge subsidy to homeowners.
Continued…
Posted in Rhetoric and Ideology.
Tagged with Bauer, Mike Konczal, mortgage interest tax deduction, Republicans, Rortybomb, South Carolina, welfare.
The relationship between a trade deficit and budget deficit is
not 1:1 – in fact, it’s
generally unclear - but they are often symptoms of a larger problem. In America, the problem is now
largely about oil: over half of our trade deficit is because we
import so much petroleum. Here’s the chart from
Matt Yglesias:
Domestic energy production in all forms good
Continued…
Posted in Important Charts, Politics and Taxes, Rhetoric and Ideology.
Tagged with Business, Energy, Energy development, fiscal deficit, gas tax, Gasoline, Nuclear power, Petroleum, Senate, Sustainable energy, trade deficit, United States, Yglesias.
It’s obvious that that there is not one silver bullet that will reform our financial system to prevent a repeat of this crisis, but one common theme amongst several proposals is that we need to get away from being a debt-based society. Everyone has become way too inured to debt at every level: paying off a credit card over several months, paying only 3% down for a
FHA mortgage (personal leverage of 33:1!), running perpetual budget deficits, not saving enough of our paychecks, etc. Another manifestation of our debt-intoxication that needs to change is the
deduction of interest paid on corporate debt from corporate income tax.
This preferential treatment of debt over equity makes it more attractive for companies (and private equity firms) to take on debt instead of raising equity or using cash flow to fund corporate activities. It’s of course hugely profitable for bankers running these deals, PE people stripping assets from companies, or corporate chieftains enlarging their company. It’s not clear that it’s such useful treatment for anyone else.
Continued…
Posted in Important Charts, Rhetoric and Ideology.
Tagged with Congress, Congressional Budget Office, corporate debt, corporate debt interest, Corporation, Credit card, debt, deficit, income tax, interest tax deduction, Private equity, United States.
I’ve already made it pretty clear that I’m against the Vehicle Miles Traveled fee for
practical and philosophical reasons. Felix Salmon and Matt Yglesias agree with me.
- Matt Ylgesias calls support for the VMT tax “baffling.” “Raising a given quantity of funds through a new VMT rather than through higher gas taxes creates (a) more administrative headaches, (b) more civil liberties concerns, (c) fewer environmental benefits and in exchange you get nothing.”
- Felix Salmon is more technocratic in his opposition: a nationwide VMT is difficult to administer and the benefits do not merit the investment. “So although I’m a fan of a cap-and-trade system over a carbon tax, and although in theory a VMT tax is to the gas tax as cap and trade is to a carbon tax, I can’t get very excited about the idea of a nationwide VMT tax. The difficulty of implementing it is just too great, and the marginal upside is too small. Let’s start with a couple of cities, and work out from there. Starting nationwide is far too ambitious.”
Posted in Tax News.
Tagged with Felix Salmon, gas tax, Matt Yglesias, Vehicle Miles Traveled, VMT.
When you watch interviews with “normal” Americans who should support liberal policies on income tax but do not, the most common retort they give is that rich people spend money and this money makes jobs for normal people. This idea goes by the names “trickle down economics” and “hogwash.”
I wrote before about this canard of an idea, and it bears repeating: there is no evidence that our level of taxes, now or if they are raised, impede growth. In other words, Republicans’ argument against taxes is empirically wrong.
James Kwak at Baseline Scenario carries much more weight than me, and he also made this point recently. The whole post is worth a read, and I’ve posted the very important images below the fold.
Continued…
Posted in Politics and Taxes, Rhetoric and Ideology.
Tagged with Baseline Scenario, income tax, James Kwak, Ronald Reagan, Simon Johnson, supply side economics, trickle down economics.
For people serious about the deficit, it’s well-recognized that Ronald Reagan wasn’t the tax-cutting behemoth that conservatives love. Yes, he cut taxes a lot, but he also
raised them quite frequently during his presidency. Though he did set us on an unsustainable path of structural deficits, he at least was not
dogmatic about tax cuts.
This point is well-established, but the only way to convince non-ideologues but people who nonetheless support tax cuts is to hit them on the head with the point over and over until it begins to sink in. In that vein, here is Peter Beinart’s recent article at The Daily Beast, “The Republicans’ Reagan Amnesia.”
Continued…
Posted in Politics and Taxes, Rhetoric and Ideology.
Tagged with Beinart, Daily Beast, GOP, increase taxes, Medicare, Peter Beinart, Republicans, Ronald Reagan, starve the beast, taxes.
Not too surprisingly, people aren’t well-informed about the gas tax. Americans of different income and political affiliation believe the gas tax is raised annually or at least every few years, but it actually was last raised in 1993.
Here’s the Infrastructurist blog explaining the results of a recent poll from Building America’s Future:
The survey was done from June 30 through July 2, 2009, and involved 800 adults, with a +3.46% margin of error. And a whopping 60% of the respondents — Republican and Democrat alike — believe the federal gas tax is raised annually. Geographic location didn’t make much of a difference — 61% believed this incorrect statement in the Northeast, 58% in the South, 54% in the Midwest, and 67% in the West.
The truth, of course, is that the federal gas tax has been unchanged at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993. And, in a colossal error of judgment, the government neglected to index it for inflation. So it’s worth even less now than it was then.
Continued…
Posted in Important Charts.
Tagged with fuel tax, government, Infrastructurist, Margin of error, Politics, Republican, tax, Texas Transportation Institute, United States, vehicles mile traveled, VMT.
It’s a point most people (
myself included) have been making lately, but Republicans’ votes pretty much say they don’t care about balancing the budget. Here’s Matt Yglesias also
making this point:
I’ve been trying to make this point for a while, but the main impediment to forming a consensus on a plan to reduce the deficit is that most conservatives don’t actually want to reduce the deficit. What they want is lower taxes. That’s why Ronald Reagan and George W Bush both increased the deficit and it’s why conservatives tell pollsters they don’t care about the deficit: “Fifty percent (50%) of conservatives are comfortable with a budget deficit if taxes are cut versus 63% of liberals who favor a balanced budget with higher taxes.”
Posted in Politics and Taxes.
Tagged with Balanced budget, Barack Obama, deficit, George W Bush, History, Presidents, Ronald Reagan, United States.
Three days ago, I talked about how responsive consumers are to a slight change in incentives, in this case a
5 cent tax on plastic bags in Washington D.C. My friend Alan Perlman, who runs
the9to5alternative.com and travels a lot, pointed out that some other countries are way ahead of Washington D.C..
In 2002, Ireland imposed a 15 cent tax per plastic bag and saw similar positive results. Bag consumption plunged 90%, from an annual 1.2 billion bag to less than 100 million in the initial year. Going one step further, China, in 2008, banned thin plastic bags and taxed heavier ones. The ban prevents the production of 40 billion plastic bags, equivalent to 37 million barrels of oil, annually and has decreased other plastic bag use by 66%.
Rwanda, Eritrea, Hong Kong, and South Africa have either banned or taxed plastic bags. Anyone have information on other countries, states, or cities?
Posted in Taxes in Other Places.
Tagged with bag fee, bag tax, Barrel, Business, China, Ireland, Plastic bag, plastic bag tax, plastic bags, Plastic shopping bag, tax, Washington D.C..
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