Tariffs have long been understood as a form of taxation -- indeed, the Trump administration brags about the revenue they are bringing in. But from whom? Not from China or Brazil -- in the first instance, from the importers, and then from whomever it is to whom the importers can raise prices. This is not a mystery. The founders/framers perfectly well understood that tariffs are taxes and they provided that Congress would have to enact just as it has to enact other revenue measures. It has the "power of the purse," while the executive has the power of the sword. Within Congress, it is important that the chamber closest to the popular will, the House of Representatives, is supposed to take the leading role. Article one, sect. 7 speaks broadly of 'bills for raising revenue" as Congress' prerogative. Article I, section 8 turns that broad phrase into a list specifically including "duties, imposts and excises" -- i.e. tariffs. The Trump administration seeks ...
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Proposition DD. Coloradans (who led the nation in the legalizing of recreational use of marijuana -- yeah, Rocky Mountaineers!) are now deciding whether to move in the direction of liberty on another important matter, one that could bring another major industry into the sunlight: sports betting. https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2019/09/26/colorado-sports-betting-water-plan/ In both cases, part of the sales pitch to get the public to legalize the industry involved is, "...and then the state can tax it, and do various good things with that money." I'm not enthusiastic about that part of the pitch but so long as the general direction is toward the liberty, the win will go to our best selves. ("That's a strange expression Bruce.") NOTE: The Proposition won, however narrowly.
A lot of hopes have been invested for decades now in the idea of a "Tobin tax." The idea, first formulated by Yale University economist James Tobin in 1972, is that a government can tax short-term, round trip transactions from one currency to another. That is, speculators might transfer their US dollars into UK pounds and, shortly thereafter, their pounds back into US dollars. That would be done, and is done, as a way of profiting off expected changes in the relative value of the currencies concerned: it is betting. Tobin's view was that such betting is destabilizing and it ought to be discouraged: thus the tax. Further, Tobin worked up this proposal soon after Nixon had destroyed the older Bretton Woods system. There was a great deal of concern over what would replace it, how the financial world was going to get along if every currency simply floats against any other, with no agreed up measuring/reference point. The idea seemed to die a quiet death. It was resur...
As noted yesterday, today we'll discuss Wisconsin Central v. US, the SAS Institute case, and Chavez-Meza v. US. These deal, respectively, with the definition of "compensation" for tax purposes, patent law administrative challenges, and the use of the sentencing guidelines. Coming off of the dispute we discussed yesterday, which placed employees and management in stark opposition, Wisconsin Central may seem refreshing and even wholesome: a private company and its employees working together to oppose a government encroachment on their dealings (successfully, it turns out.) Actually, various subsidiaries of the Canadian National Railway Company sued the United States for a $13 million tax refund. Their attorneys argued on the basis of the language in the Railroad Retirement Tax Act, which says that the compensation to be taxed includes "any form of money remuneration paid to an individual for services rendered as an employee." The US has been tax...
As I admitted two days ago, during my vacation I did some trawling in MEN'S JOURNAL for blog topics. This will be my second and last entry drawing upon that source. There's a fascinating though brief item about contemporary changes in van design. For purposes of historical perspective, the author [Jamie Lincoln Kitman, portrayed above] mentions an action of President Johnson in 1963. The new President, unhappy that France and Germany had imposed duties on US poultry exports, retaliated with a tariff of his own, one that amounted to a 25% increase in the price of imported vans. Kitman refers to this act of retaliation as the "chicken tax." What Kitman didn't say was whether this was something Johnson did by slipping a relevant amendment into some omnibus tax bill that then became law, or whether it was something accomplished by executive order (pursuant to some earlier mandate) or ... what. He writes as if Jonson unilaterally decreed the chicken tax, which l...