RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/here-come-the-biden-taxes-11617231225?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

So much for the illusion of cost-free spending blowouts. The bill for President Biden’s agenda is coming due, starting with Wednesday’s proposal for the largest corporate tax increase in decades. Can we finally drop the pretense that any of this is moderate or unifying or bipartisan?

Mr. Biden’s corporate tax increase alone is more than $1.5 trillion over 10 years, with another $1.5 trillion coming soon on individual income and investment. That’s about $300 billion a year, or 1.36% of GDP each year, assuming U.S. GDP of $22 trillion. Dan Clifton of Strategas Research Partners compares that to Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase of 0.4% of GDP, making the Biden increase the largest since 1968.

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Mr. Biden’s corporate increase amounts to the restoration of the Obama-era corporate tax burden, only much more so. The GOP tax reform of 2017 was designed to fix a corporate tax system that was uncompetitive and convoluted. Companies paid taxes in countries where they earned the income, but then again if they returned the money to the U.S. Trillions of dollars piled up overseas. Remember the string of corporate “inversions” when CEOs moved their headquarters overseas?

Those inversions all but ended after 2017 as reform lowered the top corporate rate to 21% from 35% and moved the U.S. closer to a territorial tax system in which income is taxed where it is earned. Mr. Clifton calculates that companies repatriated $1.6 trillion from overseas to the U.S. from 2018-2020, which they deployed for a variety of useful economic purposes. The repatriation total three years before reform: only $495 billion.

https://asiatimes.com/2021/04/biden-2-3-tn-boondoggle-is-no-challenge-to-chin

Democrats would hike corporate taxes without restoring the R&D incentives that the Trump tax cut eliminated.

President Joe Biden’s proposed $2.3 trillion spending package unveiled March 31 should have come a day later, as an April Fool’s exercise.

Labeled an infrastructure package, it offers just $447 billion for transportation infrastructure over eight years. That’s less than a quarter of the most widely accepted estimates for the US infrastructure deficit.

On February 21, Biden told a group of US senators, “If we don’t get moving, [the Chinese] are going to eat our lunch. They’re investing billions of dollars dealing with a whole range of issues that relate to transportation, the environment and a whole range of other things. We just have to step up.”

Biden might as well instruct Secretary of State Blinken to ask the Chinese if they want fries with that.

Most of the $2.3 trillion will buy votes rather than infrastructure, including $400 billion for “elder and disability care,” $213 billion for “green and affordable homes,” $174 billion for electric vehicles, $137 billion for “school and childcare infrastructure,” $100 billion for “job training” and so forth.

https://lawliberty.org/the-real-threat-to-americas-constitutional-institutions/

Unpunished violence in the streets does real harm to the rule of law, and yet the media looks away.

EXCERPTS:

More recently, a thoroughly anti-constitutional precedent was set by then-minority leader Chuck Schumer only last March, when he led a posse of about 75 members up the steps of the Supreme Court to warn recently appointed justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh that they had “released the whirlwind,” would “pay a price,” and would “not know what hit” them if they voted the “wrong” way on an abortion case. (Schumer’s act won a rare rebuke from the normally reserved Chief Justice Roberts, who denounced Schumer’s comments as “inappropriate” and “dangerous,” stressing, that “all members of the court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.” In a proto-Trumpian response, Schumer spokesman Justin Goodman explained that his boss’s words didn’t mean what they sounded like, and denied that. Schumer was threatening or encouraging violence.)

A decade ago, an even more direct and threatening, though ultimately (mostly) nonviolent, challenge to constitutional government was offered by Wisconsin public employee unions who invaded that state’s Capitol to protest and attempt to block Governor Scott Walker’s program of reforming public-employee contracts so as to balance the state budget without raising taxes, and also liberate public school administrations from rigid tenure rules (closely paralleled in school districts throughout the country) that prevented them from hiring teachers based on merit and adjusting their pay based on performance. Walker’s reforms even went so far as to require public employees to contribute to their health-insurance and pension costs—while still paying less for those benefits than the average Wisconsin citizen. (See Walker’s retrospective view of the “Capitol Siege,” with over 100,000 occupying the building and its surrounding square). Although nobody died in the Wisconsin protests, several legislators, both Republicans and Democrats, reported receiving death threats at the time. And one woman who emailed death threats to Republican lawmakers also pleaded guilty to making a bomb threat. Yet it would be difficult to find criticism of either Schumer’s warnings or the Wisconsin unions’ attempt to intimidate their state’s public institutions in most of the “mainstream” media.