Quotulatiousness

June 17, 2024

Inside the deputy PM’s thoughts

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper imagines what Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland might be thinking as she pushes her capital gains tax increase:


Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking in October, 2022.

On Monday, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland defended her government’s raising of the capital gains tax by delivering a weirdly catastrophic lecture speaking of a Canada beset by poverty, division and angry mobs.

“Do you want to be in a country where those at the very top live lives of luxury but must do so in gated communities behind ever higher fences using private health care and airplanes because the public sphere is so degraded and the wrath of the vast majority of their less privileged compatriots burns so hot?” she said.

[…]

Monday
Rivers of blood. Mothers consuming their offspring. Houses of worship employed only as makeshift storehouses for the dead.

Abundance will cease. Colour will vanish. The people you now know as loved ones will first become strangers, and then they will become enemies.

These are but some of the fates that realistically lie in store for a Canada that refuses to raise its capital tax inclusion rate from 50 per cent to 67 per cent on gains realized after June 25, 2024. While I am sympathetic to those who have worked hard and wish to retain what they have earned, I would urge them to consider the value of money in a Canada where the only remaining currency is one’s readiness to kill.

Tuesday
As deputy prime minister of Canada, I am fully aware that carbon taxes are an electoral liability for this government. But this is a problem not of policy, but of messaging.

If we’re not able to tax carbon-emitting fuels to a rate of $170 per tonne by 2030, the most optimistic scenario I can offer is the complete breakdown of the natural world as we know it.

Agriculture will become a memory. Cities will become unapproachable due to the overwhelming smell of decay. Language will devolve and then disappear. Any surviving art or culture will only inspire fear, because people will not know what it is.

The air may be breathable, but we will wish it was not.

June 8, 2024

Eco-terrorism – it’s all over Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Elizabeth Nickson on the strong likelihood of any given wildfire in Canada being not just man-made but deliberately set for political reasons:

“Forest fire” by Ervins Strauhmanis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

A Google Earth satellite video is making the rounds on twitter. it shows the moment an arc of fires began in northern Quebec, the smoke rising. It looks like people calculated the prevailing winds so that the smoke would blow south. Then connected via sat phone, they lit them. It’s another psy-op from our gracious overlords. We aren’t afraid enough, despite every nasty limiting idiotic play they have visited upon us in the last four years. Monkey Pox failed, more plague warnings were greeted by a shrug. But this one, the world bursting into flame? Be very very afraid.

Justin Trudeau lost no time in announcing that the fires were from “climate change” and the carbon tax, which is impoverishing everyone not in government or on lush pensions, is just the beginning of the restrictions he must institute or we are all gonna die.

The stupidity and cruelty of this is almost unimaginable. But fires have worked over and over again to terrify people into quiescence. The rumours that they were deliberate were the stuff of fantasy until people started getting arrested. Alberta shows that almost 60 percent of fires in that province are human caused. And in Canada, as of today, we have arrested dozens. They will be released, their bails paid by a high-priced lawyer because most of them act as agents of the hyper-rich, paid through a cascade of environmental NGOs. The richest people among us are burning the forests in order to force compliance.

When I moved back to the country 20 years ago, the movement adopted me because I was writing for the Globe and Mail and Harper’s Magazine. I interviewed hundreds of local activists, the ones who, with the inspiration of RFK, Jr. had shut down the biggest industrial forest in the world in an action called “The War of the Woods“. They were mostly ordinary people, socialists and scientists of one stripe or another and deeply profoundly committed to saving the earth. The fact that they had eliminated the principal source of funding for health care and education — forestry — their own in fact, went right over their heads. It didn’t matter. “Climate Change” was an existential threat and those trees must stand to suck up “carbon”, or CO2, as it used to be known.

I met Denis Hayes too, the founder of Earth Day, head of the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle, founded by the heiresses to Weyerhaeuser. He excitedly told me how he created the storm of protest that led to Bill Clinton shutting down the western forests of the U.S., during the same period that Clinton was giving away American manufacturing to China. The result was devastation in forested communities from northern California to the Canadian border. Hayes, a tall, attractive Ivy Leaguer married to a woman whose father won a Nobel in chemistry, slithers through every institution. When I hung out with him, his target was Bill Gates’ climate initiatives and clearly, he has succeeded.

His “work” turned the forests into a tinderbox. Today, the 9th of June, 2023, a full thirty years too late, the Wall Street Journal editorial board finally acknowledges that sustainable forestry management may be the principal cause of the forests burning down. Holly Fretwell, a fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, and professor at Montana State, gives, in this book, a thoroughgoing analysis of how wrong-headed and destructive “green” has been in the forests. Also this book by me, and a follow-up policy paper, also by me. These were not popular opinions, but they were, in fact, right. It is not “climate change” burning down the forests, it is government in the hands of brutal greens, in pursuit of an impossible goal.

May 25, 2024

Justin Trudeau – “a large percentage of small businesses are actually just ways for wealthier Canadians to save on their taxes”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Even before he became Prime Minister, the signs were there that Justin Trudeau was instinctively anti-small-business and that this would inform his approach to taxation and regulation of the private sector:

Changes to capital gains tax in this year’s budget were aimed at the wealthy, said the Trudeau Liberals, but the move has angered small businesses owners who have been snared by the increase.

Maybe that was part of the plan, since Justin Trudeau appears to view small business owners as rich Canadians trying to dodge taxes.

In an illuminating interview with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge in 2015, Trudeau didn’t directly answer a question about whether he would lower taxes for small businesses.

But he did say, “We have to know that a large percentage of small businesses are actually just ways for wealthier Canadians to save on their taxes and we want to reward the people that are actually creating jobs and contributing in concrete ways.”

It was a remarkable denigration of small business owners and may have passed unnoticed because Trudeau was still a month away from becoming prime minister.

For the record, businesses with fewer than 100 people employ almost 12 million private workers in this country.

And the government’s own statistics state that in the 20 years up to 2020, the number of small businesses increased every year except for three — 2013, 2016 and 2020 — so a decrease in two of the Trudeau years.

Meanwhile, Trudeau’s apparently tax-dodging wealthy small businesses seem to be having a hard time of it. Businesses that began with four or less employees were only 62 per cent likely to still be operating five years later.

Earlier this year, Reuters news agency warned that a 38 per cent spike in bankruptcies of small businesses in the first 11 months of 2023 could rise even further.

Small businesses are “an integral engine of Canada’s economy,” said the budget, but 72 per cent of the owners fear that the new changes to capital gains tax will harm the climate for investment and growth.

Interestingly, when Trudeau was asked in that 2015 interview how he planned to balance the budget by 2019, because that was what he promised, it was investment and growth that was the answer.

Then prime minister Stephen Harper had tried to cut his way out of the deficit, said Trudeau. “That doesn’t work.”

“He has been unable to create growth. He has the worst record on growth of any prime minister in 80 years.”

But as the Fraser Institute has pointed out, in the last nine years under Trudeau, Canadian living standards have declined.

May 19, 2024

QotD: Taxation and theft

Filed under: Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

High-income earners pay a higher rate of tax than people on low incomes. So why is it unfair, as Kim Beazley argues, that high-income earners receive a larger tax cut?

An analogy: your house and your neighbour’s house are both burgled. You lose a television. He loses a DVD player, microwave, his collection of Chomsky memorabilia (it’s an inner-city house), and a unique framed Leunig depicting Mr Curly’s pedophilia arrest. Would it be unfair if police were to return all of this fellow’s belongings, and you were only to get back your 24-inch Sony?

Tim Blair, “Simplistic right-wing greed justification attempted”, Road to Surfdom, 2005-05-12.

[H/T to Samizdata, both for the link and for their title on the post, which I’ve purloined.]

May 8, 2024

QotD: Imperial Spain’s “House of Trade”

Filed under: Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Since 1503, the Spanish port of Seville had been home to the Casa de Contratación, or House of Trade. In one sense, the Casa was an administrative centre. It was where all taxes and duties on trade with the New World were collected. In another sense, however, it was the sixteenth century’s most important research and development hub. It was where the maps were made. Anyone who crossed the Atlantic was to check in with the Casa and share their information. There, the expert pilots, astronomers, mathematicians, and cartographers, were to sort out the sailors’ tall tales from the careful observations of coastlines. The Casa institutionalised the practice of gathering information – everything from the locations of safe havens or treacherous rocks, to the willingness of local populations to talk to strangers, to the raw materials glimpsed in newfound lands – all to be collated, evaluated, and then re-disseminated into manuals, lectures, and maps. It was where new pilots were instructed, and where navigational instruments were constructed and regulated. The Casa was a living encyclopaedia of navigation, for every would-be Spanish merchant, coloniser, or explorer to consult.

And it was something that the English tried, for decades, to emulate. Before they embarked on their first explorations of the icy seas around Russia in the 1550s, they first poached the Casa‘s principal navigator, the Pilot Major, Sebastian Cabot. And later, during the few years that England and Spain were united in matrimony, under Mary I, one English navigator, Stephen Borough, had the chance to visit and glean some of its secrets. He was instrumental in having Spain’s key navigational manual translated in English, and he petitioned Elizabeth I to create an English version of the Casa. That dream never materialised, but the quest to emulate the Casa informed many of the smaller-scale projects — lectures, manuals, globes, and maps — which meant that the English did not sail completely into the unknown.

Anton Howes, “The House of Trade”, Age of Invention, 2019-11-13.

April 21, 2024

Publius Rutilius Rufus, an honest man in a dishonest era

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lawrence W. Reed discusses the life and career of Publius Rutilius Rufus, Roman consul and historian, who suffered the revenge of corrupt tax farmers (publicani) after attempting to protect taxpayers from extortion in the province of Asia:

In the last decades of the Roman Republic, as its liberties crumbled and the dictatorship of the subsequent Empire loomed, honesty decayed with each successive generation—an omen we should think long and hard about today. Among the lessons of the Roman experience is this: Liberty is ultimately incompatible with widespread indifference to truth. A society of liars succumbs to the tyrant who brings “order” to its chaos and corruption.

In a book I strongly recommend, The Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius, authors Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman tell us about a man named Publius Rutilius Rufus (158 B.C.-78 B.C.). They regard him as “the last honest man” of the dying Republic. Though that description surely contains ample hyperbole to emphasize a point, Rufus’s exceptional honesty was indeed notable in his day because it was no longer the rule in a decadent age. As Mark Twain would note many centuries later, “an honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere”.

Rufus, the great-uncle of Julius Caesar (his sister Rutilia was Caesar’s maternal grandmother), built an illustrious career in the Roman military. Those under his command were known as “the best trained, the most disciplined, and the bravest” of the legions. He garnered enormous respect because of his Stoic virtues — courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice. In 105 B.C., he served in the highest political post in the Republic, the consulship. He was incorruptible, which meant he was a target of those who weren’t.

It had become a common practice in the late Republic for the government to hire private contractors to collect taxes. These “publicani” often extorted more from their victims than the taxes required because that’s the way the contracts were written. The government didn’t care what the publicani kept for themselves if it got its expected revenues. When Rufus attempted to stop the injustices this arrangement created, the publicani and their allies in the Roman Senate fought back. They arranged a sham trial with a pre-ordained verdict and charged Rufus with the very thing of which they themselves were guilty: extortion and corruption.

Historian Tom Holland in Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic writes that Rufus’s conviction was “the most notorious scandal in Roman legal history” and “an object lesson in how dangerous it could be to uphold ancient values against the predatory greed of corrupt officials”. With utterly no evidence and all credible testimony to the contrary, the accusers claimed Rufus had extorted money from Smyrna in the Roman province of Asia (what is now western Turkey).

Another historian, Mike Duncan, notes, “The charges were ludicrous as Rutilius [Rufus] was a model of probity and would later be cited by Cicero as the perfect model of a Roman administrator”.

As punishment for his trumped-up offense, Rufus was sent into exile but in deference to his past service, the court gave him the option of choosing where that would be. He chose Smyrna, the place he was charged with victimizing. When he arrived there, he was celebrated as the man who had tried to end the very practices of which he was wrongly convicted. Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman describe what happened to Rufus as “a very old trick”:

    Accuse the honest man of precisely the opposite of what they’re doing, of the sin you yourself are doing. Use their reputation against them. Muddy the waters. Stain them with lies. Run them out of town by holding them to a standard that if equally applied would mean the corrupt but entrenched interests would never survive … Smyrna, grateful for the reforms and scrupulous honesty of the man who had once governed them, welcomed [Rufus] with open arms … Cicero would visit there in 78 B.C. and call him “a pattern of virtue, of old-time honor, and of wisdom”.

April 17, 2024

Pay no attention to what “tax me more” folks say – instead watch what they do

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

One way for an a wealthy person to get a lot of free media attention is to performatively declare that they should be paying more taxes. This ostentatious virtue-signalling is frequent enough that Tim Worstall has been writing the occasional article about it for quite some time:

For there is this:

    Public donations to pay off the national debt have hit their highest level in at least a decade amid growing concern about the UK’s soaring debt mountain.

    Members of the public handed almost £700,000 over to the Government through six individual bequests and donations last year, according to Debt Management Office (DMO) figures obtained via a Freedom of Information request.

    The amount for the 2023-24 financial year was the highest in at least a decade, with the biggest single payment to help pay off Britain’s £2.65 trillion debt pile coming from a £500,000 bequest, according to the DMO, which did not provide names of individual donors.

One way to think of this — an entirely correct way to think of it too — is that an entire 6 people last year thought that inheritance tax was too low. Which, out of the about 600k deaths (not looked it up but that’s right order of magnitude, it’s not 6 million and it’s not 60k) is not actually a lot. 0.001% in fact.

One of the grand insistences of economics is that watching what people do gives more information about their true beliefs than listening to what they say – revealed preferences, not expressed. So, by what people actually do we have 0.001% of the people leaving estates of any size whatever who think that the tax on estates is too small. This is not a large majority in favour of higher taxes upon estates being left.

But back to the far more important subject, me.

As far as the UK is concerned I did start this off. The reporting on how much people voluntarily leave to the government. Who pays extra that is – who makes a voluntary donation to government. Back in 2006 in fact, back in the depths of the Brown Terror:

    LAST YEAR there were five people in Britain who thought that their taxes were too low. No, this isn’t the number of people who have called for higher taxes. Rather, it is those who were so convinced of the righteousness of state spending that they voluntarily sent extra money to the Treasury.

The Americans have been doing this since 1843. It’s always been possible to pay extra to HM Treasury — Stanley Baldwin actually handed over one fifth of his estate while he was still alive. Admittedly, he was Financial Secretary to the Treasury at the time and was asking for donations to aid in paying down war debt but still, props for money where mouth is.

    Cheques, by the way, should be made out to “The Accountant, HM Treasury”, and sent to 1 Horse Guards Road, London SW1A 2HQ. A 2nd-class stamp is sufficient and you are encouraged to add a covering note so that your donation is spent in the way you like.

I wrote that piece for The Times simply because I thought it would be a cute thing to do — and I wanted the £200 that went with writing it. As ever with freelance journalism, my money is important.

I also know that that was the first piece that appeared in UK journalism on this point. For when I asked the Treasury they’d no idea at all how many had in fact paid extra. Took them months to find out too. The donations had happened before, but no one had been writing about it. At least, not since Baldwin’s generation.

His Majesty King Charles, in right of Canada, would also be happy to accept any unwanted sums of money above your mandatory tax rate here. Go wild, wealthy and patriotic Canadian multi-millionaires!

April 15, 2024

QotD: Cereal cultivation also helped grow the centralized state

Filed under: Food, Government, History, Middle East, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Sumer just before the dawn of civilization was in many ways an idyllic place. Forget your vision of stark Middle Eastern deserts; in the Paleolithic the area where the first cities would one day arise was a great swamp. Foragers roamed the landscape, eating everything from fishes to gazelles to shellfish to wild plants. There was more than enough for everyone; “as Jack Harlan famously showed, one could gather enough [wild] grain with a flint sickle in three weeks to feed a family for a year”. Foragers alternated short periods of frenetic activity (eg catching as many gazelles as possible during their weeklong migration through the area) with longer periods of rest and recreation.

Intensive cereal cultivation is miserable work requiring constant toil with little guarantee of a good harvest. Why would anyone leave this wilderness Eden for a 100% wheat diet?

Not because they were tired of wandering around; Scott presents evidence that permanent settlements began as early as 6000 BC, long before Uruk, the first true city-state, began in 3300. Sometimes these towns subsisted off of particularly rich local wildlife; other times they practiced some transitional form of agriculture, which also antedated states by millennia. Settled peoples would eat whatever plants they liked, then scatter the seeds in particularly promising-looking soil close to camp – reaping the benefits of agriculture without the back-breaking work.

And not because they needed to store food. Hunter-gatherers could store food just fine, from salting animal meat to burying fish and letting it ferment to just having grain in siloes like everyone else. There is ample archaeological evidence of all of these techniques. Also, when you are surrounded by so much bounty, storing things takes on secondary importance.

And not because the new lifestyle made this happy life even happier. While hunter-gatherers enjoyed a stable and varied diet, agriculturalists subsisted almost entirely on grain; their bones display signs of significant nutritional deficiency. While hunter-gatherers were well-fed, agriculturalists were famished; their skeletons were several inches shorter than contemporaneous foragers. While hunter-gatherers worked ten to twenty hour weeks, agriculturalists lived lives of backbreaking labor. While hunter-gatherers who survived childhood usually lived to old age, agriculturalists suffered from disease, warfare, and conscription into dangerous forced labor.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Against The Grain“, Slate Star Codex, 2019-10-15.

April 8, 2024

“The carbon rebate seems to be one of those rare examples of people getting mad at receiving government money rather than being grateful”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson makes a strong argument that the vaunted (by Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party) carbon tax rebate is actually the big problem with the carbon tax, not the “Conservative misinformation” constantly being pointed at by the government’s paid accomplices in the mainstream media:

Is the purpose of the Liberals’ carbon tax to materially reduce carbon emissions — or is it a wealth redistribution program? I ask because every time the Liberals defend the carbon tax by resorting to the awesomeness of the rebate, what they cease to talk about is how effective it is at actually reducing carbon emissions.

Instead, we fall into an endless series of counterproductive debates about whether what individuals are getting from the rebate equals what they’re paying out in tax. And that debate is repeated every quarter, and each time the carbon tax rises. In other words, our entire political discourse about the tax is centred on wealth redistribution — not emissions.

That makes people suspicious of the government’s actual goals, and skeptical about its claims. This, again, is a problem of message dilution. If you cannot clearly express your intentions, then you’re not going to get political buy-in to your aims. This problem is particularly acute on a policy that is — by definition — demanding a sacrifice of cash and/or quality of life by Canadians. People can get on board with sacrifice, but only if it’s tied to a clear, obtainable, and material objective.

[…]

And here’s where we get into the real dark heart of the problem.

It’s the rebate itself.

I understand why the Canada Carbon Rebate happened. The government wanted to introduce a carbon tax without disproportionately penalizing the poor — the demographic least able to make the investments and lifestyle changes necessary to respond to the tax. But did that relief have to come in the form of a rebate?

Well, no.

There are lots of methods a government can use to ease poverty. But governments love themselves a rebate. Why? Because rebates are normalized vote buying. One that all political parties are guilty of using. The Liberals implemented the rebate thinking Canadians would hit their mailboxes every quarter, see a few hundred bucks, and get warm fuzzy feelings for Papa Trudeau and the natural governing party. “Government’s looking out for me!”

Getting government cheques is popular, and the Liberals were no doubt trying to replicate the appeal of the Canada Child Benefit.

But that didn’t happen here. The carbon rebate seems to be one of those rare examples of people getting mad at receiving government money rather than being grateful. Why?

Well, may I suggest that it’s because every time people open up those cheques, instead of processing the dopamine hit of “free” money, they’re instead reminded of how much they had to pay in to get it. They do the math in their head, think about their rising grocery bills and gas, and come away thinking “not worth it”. Every single quarter, millions of Canadian households are feeling as if they are paying dollars to get dimes — and it’s pissing them right off. Further, demanding they acknowledge they’re better off in the exchange is only adding salt to the wound. Throwing Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) reports at them doesn’t change their minds. It just pisses them off more.

To put it more pithily — a benefit is a gift. A rebate is a value proposition. And a hell of a lot of Canadians are looking at this rebate and determining that its value is wanting — all the more so as the goals of that purchase haven’t been clearly articulated.

April 5, 2024

Canada’s carbon tax – “… no emissions policy that doesn’t start with banning private jets can be called ‘fair’ with a straight face”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Clarke Ries points out the incredibly uncomfortable truth that no matter how the federal government tries to hide it, the carbon tax regime is going to be painful and the pain is going to be absorbed much more by the rural poor than anyone else:

Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020 (when he was Canadian Heritage Minister).
Screencapture from CPAC video.

Consumption taxes are a straightforwardly-effective policy tool. You simply increase the price of the resource you want to see used less and let people adapt to the simulated scarcity via ingenuity, frugality, lifestyle change, repricing their goods and services, etc. The government doesn’t dictate solutions, it lets people find their own. In the process, the consumption tax dispassionately reveals who’s making the most valuable use of that resource.

[…]

So the question remains, who uses a lot of carbon but doesn’t make a lot of money doing it? Who lives in drafty old single-family houses? Who uses archaic methods of keeping those houses warm, like furnaces that run on heating oil? Who has to drive halfway around the world to reach the nearest grocery store and halfway to the moon for the nearest medical clinic? Who’s making that drive in a battered old ride with terrible fuel economy?

The rural poor.

Not the farmers or the ranchers, who mostly make plenty of dough and often know their way around America’s higher-end resort towns, but the rural poor. The kind of people you disproportionately find in Newfoundland outports, eking out a tenuous living as they wait for the cod to return. You know, reliable Liberal voters.

Put another way, a neutrally-applied carbon tax goes after Maritimers first and hardest — forcing them to close shop on their romantic traditional lifestyle and move into apartment blocks in the nearest city, where they’ll earn more for their labour and emit less carbon doing it.

[…]

Remember: for the carbon tax to do what it says on the tin, somebody has to lose. For the carbon tax to be anything other than a purposeless pain in the ass, somebody — a lot of somebodies, frankly, if the Liberals are serious about cutting carbon emissions to 40 per cent under 2005 levels — must be forced to make significant and unpleasant lifestyle changes.

So let’s assume the Parliamentary Budget Office is right, and that Atlantic Canadians are now, after a second round of special supplements and exemptions, definitely net beneficiaries of the carbon tax. All it’s bought the Liberals is a reprise of the same question: who’s for dinner?

Who’s going to trade in their beater for bus tickets? Who’s going to raise their kids in a condo tower instead of a single-family home? Who’s going to start taking their midwinter vacation in the province next door instead of Palm Springs or Costa Rica? Who’s going to shiver on a cold night instead of raising the thermostat?

Only the most diehard of optimists could believe that the roster of ritual sacrifices will substantially consist of financially-comfortable Canadians. The people who can afford to make investments that reduce their carbon emissions without materially sacrificing their lifestyles will do so. A handful will start biking to work during the summer. Others will install solar panels on top of their detached houses — which are mostly located in neighbourhoods where you’re not even allowed to build a condo tower — and that’s going to be that.

Beneath all the aspirational language, what an effective carbon tax actually does is throw the government into a cage match with Canada’s working class. The truth behind the Liberals’ woes on this file is that as long as they’re committed to the carbon tax as a tool for fighting climate change, their only real choice is which part of the working class they land on when they come off the top rope.

March 7, 2024

“The traditional answer to this is to leave those inheritees be and they’ll blow it all on hookers and coke soon enough”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall tackles the ongoing angst about “the wrong sort of people” getting their sweaty mitts on family inheritances and then backhands the ostentatiously super wealthy demanding to be taxed more heavily as “Full Of Shit. Obviously”.

This has to be one of the least sympathy inducing articles ever — rich kids worried about their inheritances. We’re about to have that grand generational shift apparently, trillions upon trillions are going to move from the people who made it to the Lucky Sperm Club.

Woes.

The traditional answer to this is to leave those inheritees be and they’ll blow it all on hookers and coke soon enough. The standard deviation of soon enough is pretty big — the folk tale is clogs to clogs in three generations but the Hervey’s managed to wait until the 7th Marquess for it all to get — quite literally in that case — blown. But, you know, it does eventually happen. There are no really old fortunes.

This isn’t, perhaps, enough for the hurry hurry of the modern world. Thus we get people like this:

    Tax, of course, could — should — play a huge part in all this. “Philanthropic donations are a drop in the ocean compared to what even quite minor tax increases on the richest in society would provide,” Lewis says. Patriotic Millionaires is calling for a hike in taxation for the super-rich — and its members aren’t limited to millennials. They include Guy Singh-Watson, founder of Riverford Organic Farmers; Graham Hobson, founder of Photobox; the Perry family, from the posh ready-meal business Cook; and Ian Gregg, whose father founded Greggs.

    “At the moment philanthropic donations amount to about £10 billion per year,” Lewis says. “A wealth tax of 1 to 2 per cent on assets over £10 million, which would affect only the wealthiest in the UK, would raise more than double that. Closing tax avoidance loopholes would raise much more than this.”

As I pointed out in the same newspaper, The Times, two decades back, this is purest bollocks. For it’s entirely easy to pay extra tax if that’s what you wish to do:

    Cheques, by the way, should be made out to “The Accountant, HM Treasury”, and sent to 1 Horse Guards Road, London SW1A 2HQ.

Job’s a good ‘un. Except, back then, near no one did. I managed to get the numbers out of The Treasury for the previous year — it took some months as they were amazed that anyone had even thought of checking this — and a whole 5 people had paid that extra tax. Four of whom were dead, leaving bequests. That is, the UK, that year, contained one whole person willing to pay higher tax than duly and justly levied upon them. Some flood of patriotic millionaires there was not.

Matters do not seem to have improved greatly:

    But something is not working. The accounts of the Debt Management Office for the year ended 31 March 2020 show that it received donations or bequests totalling just £48,957. While that’s a large percentage increase on the £11,069 received during the year ended 31 March 2019, by any standards these figures are tiny.

Not the sorts of amounts likely to make a great impact upon a lifetime’s supply of coke and hookers, is it?

One correct answer to these claims by the Patriotic Millionaires is therefore that they’re full of shit. In slightly more technical language they’re doing ethical performativity. There’s always a difference between expressed preferences — what people say — and revealed preferences, what people do. What people really believe is in what they do — but it’s entirely possible that saying the right things, even if not doing them, will get you invited to the right sorts of parties. You know, the ones where someone else pays for the hookers and coke. So, people say things they don’t do for reasons of societal enrapture. Hardly an uncommon human activity, that.

I seem to remember linking to an article of Tim’s on the old blog, but that’s long been offline. More recently, we’ve seen this exact scenario play out in Norway, the UK, the United States, and the City of Toronto.

His Majesty King Charles, in right of Canada, would also be happy to accept any unwanted sums of money above your mandatory tax rate here. Go wild, wealthy and patriotic Canadian multi-millionaires!

February 24, 2024

Never mind the unfunded liability … money printer go brrrr!

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kulak at Anarchonomicon points out that the US government’s debt situation — which was alarming 20 years ago — has continued to get worse every year:

Libertarian Economists have been predicting this collapse of the federal system would happen “By About 2030” since before 2008. I remember in high school in the early 2010s listening to Ron Paul lectures and visiting USDebtClock.com, this was a hot button issue after 2008 … (then of course there was no political will to do anything and everyone just stopped talking about it)

I honestly forget that everyone around me doesn’t already know this, this is so common and accepted in libertarian and economic circles, and everyone who knows it got bored of eyes glossing over when they tried to explain it (in an autistic panic) decades ago.

US Unfunded liabilities:

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, US Debt, and Federal employee benefits and pensions, are all basically intergenerational ponzi schemes that require constant 1950s level population growth amongst the productive tax paying middle-class to maintain. By 2000 it was obvious this population growth was not happening, that population was beginning to age and collapse, and NO, the illegals at the border weren’t adequate replacements … (they weren’t adequate to prop up federal expenses in 2000 when they were still Mexican, now that they’re Guatemalan, Haitian, and Senegalese they’re almost certainly a net drain).

The Specter of Mass Boomer retirements with few to no children and grandchildren to replace them and pay for all the costs of their retirements and healthcare was maybe the slowest but most assured crisis ever to be seen in human history … Demographics is destiny.

This was a foreseen problem in 2000 when US Debt to GDP (just the portion that’s already been spent and interest has to be paid on) was 59% of GDP. Today the US Debt to GDP ratio is 122% of GDP whilst just in the past 24 years. Absolute US Federal Debt (not including state or local) has grown from 5.6 trillion dollars to 34 trillion dollars (102k per citizen: man, woman, and child). just the interest that has to be paid out of your tax dollars on that debt is set to eclipse ALL US Military spending sometime this year … And by 2028 Debt to GDP will be 150% (46.4 Trillion, 132k per citizen, 12 trillion more in 4 years, with no additional spending bills) and the Interest (at current estimates) will be over 2.5 trillion dollars, over a third of all Tax Dollars brought in will be spent on just interest, because dollar confidence has collapsed and the only way to keep inflation from destroying the dollar has been to radically raise the interest rates the Federal Reserve offers.

Now all that, That catastrophic state of things, is just the debt, the money that’s been spent … The real crisis is the Unfunded liabilities, all the promises the US has made to Boomers (who dominate the vote) and others about money they’re GOING to spend.

As of now total Unfunded liabilities stand at 213 trillion dollars, $633,000 per US Citizen (Man woman, and newborn babe)… These are all dollars the US has promised to pay to someone somewhere at some point: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Federal pensions, VA Benefits, etc. And cannot in any politically feasible way restructure or get out of.

If no one ever contributed another dime to social security, and in so doing was promised in turn significantly more than that dime (it’s a Ponzi scheme, it loses money in proportion to and at a greater rate than the money being contributed to it (every dollar you contribute you’re promised multiple dollars in return, and your dollar is not invested, it just pays off previous contributors)) … If everything froze and every young person was locked out of ever receiving Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, the Unfunded Liability would be $633k per every man, woman, and child … that’d be the debt a newborn American would be born with.

However because it is NOT frozen and it will not be, by 2028 that number will Rise to $837k and an ordinary household of 4 will have seen their, politically unavoidable, family obligation in future tax payments to the federal government increase by $804,000 in just 4 years.

If your response is that your family doesn’t even make 804k in 4 years and there’s no way you could ever pay that much in 4 years given its just going to increase at a faster rate the next 4 years … CONGRATULATIONS! 90% of families don’t make that much, and less than 1% of families could ever afford to pay that much in taxes in a 4 year time.

This has been slowly growing for decades, and in the late 2000s and 2010s Ron Paul types were screaming that those Benefits needed to be reformed NOW (in 2008) or they’d drown America. But of course, cutting benefits is political Anathema to boomers, so nothing was done …

The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

Times might be tough right now, America, but at least you’re not Canada

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

You may be feeling the pinch from Bidenflation, election year stresses, and political lawfare, but at least you’re not up in America’s hat:

It’s late February, a time of year when many Americans contemplate stacks of documents and receipts, dreading the moment when they’ll have to square accounts with government extortionists. That this comes as the state grows increasingly intrusive and coercive adds insult to injury, since we pay the bill for this mistreatment. But it could be worse; we could be Canadian!

Same Inquisition, Different Dollar

“As tax season ramps into high gear in Canada, the average citizen is facing an unholy ream of paperwork so daunting that even the Canada Revenue Agency isn’t entirely sure how it all works,” Tristin Hopper wrote this week for the National Post. “An infamous 2017 Auditor General report found that CRA call centres ‘gave wrong information to callers almost 30 per cent of the time’.”

Oh, OK. That doesn’t sound much different from the experience here in the U.S., where the IRS hands out the wrong information maybe a quarter of the time. (Or more. Who knows?) But Canadians pay a high price tag for the privilege of spelling “call centre” with the “r” in front of the “e”.

But a Higher Tax Bill North of the Border

“In December 2015, Canada’s new Liberal government introduced changes to Canada’s personal income tax system,” Canada’s Fraser Institute, a free-market think tank, noted in 2020. “Even before the changes, the country’s combined federal and provincial top marginal tax rates compared unfavourably to those in the United States and other industrialized countries. … Nine Canadian provinces occupy the list of 10 jurisdictions with the highest top combined marginal income tax rates and all provinces are in the top 13 [across the U.S. and Canada].”

Umm. Ouch.

In truth, comparing tax burdens requires a deep dive because of differences in how taxes are applied, income brackets, deductions, and the like. Fans of big government always want to balance costs against “benefits” of government services, as if being mugged to support a state monopoly should be welcomed by those who’d rather shop among competitors or entirely forgo some services. Suffice it to say that comparisons of provincial and state tax burdens generally reveal a lighter touch south of the border.

Worse, though, the think tank finds overall economic freedom slipping across Canada.

Higher Taxes Reflect Less Freedom

“For the first time, every Canadian province ranks in the bottom half of jurisdictions in our annual rankings of economic freedom in North America,” Fraser announced of its Economic Freedom of North America 2023 report. “Alberta in the all-government index is once again the highest-ranking Canadian province but it has declined substantially. In the all-government index, Alberta is now tied for 31st place out of 50 U.S. states, 32 Mexican states, 10 Canadian provinces, and the US territory of Puerto Rico.”

Economic freedom is defined as you’d expect, with economic activity involving “minimal government interference”. As the report adds, “an index of economic freedom should measure the extent to which rightly acquired property is protected and individuals are engaged in voluntary transactions”.

Fraser compares the states and provinces to each other within their countries, and also across Canada, Mexico, and the United States. For the purpose of comparing jurisdictions across three nations, the report looks at six areas of economic activity: government spending; taxes; labor market freedom; legal systems and property rights; sound money; and freedom to trade internationally.

The highest ranked jurisdiction is New Hampshire, followed in the first quartile by Florida and 20 other U.S. states. Alberta ranks at 31, between Missouri and Connecticut. British Columbia comes in at 45, with Ontario at 50 and Manitoba at 54. The last-ranked U.S. state is Delaware, at 53, though the territory of Puerto Rico ranks at 61. Quebec brings up the rear for Canada, at 56.

February 12, 2024

QotD: The Golden Rule of Canadian Politics

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

But we forgot the golden rule of all Canadian politics: The voter will demand all manner of lofty principles from his government, provided he never has to sacrifice or pay for it in any noticeable way whatsoever. Name any popular high-minded pursuit of government — from stream rehabilitation to famine relief — and it all comes crashing down tomorrow if you start making it an itemized charge on everyone’s utility bill.

Tristin Hopper, “‘Stick a fork in me; I’m done’: Inside the thoughts of the carbon tax”, National Post, 2023-11-11.

February 9, 2024

His Year: Julius Caesar (59 BC)

Filed under: Europe, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Historia Civilis
Published Jul 5, 2016
(more…)

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