RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-unions-heavy-grifting/

Over the years, the unions, especially the public employee variety, have heaped abuses on just about all of us. But finally, there are the seeds of resistance.

Tax exempt status

For starters, as 501(c)(5)s, unions have a special tax-exempt status with the IRS that is accorded to “Labor, Agricultural, and Horticultural Organizations.” As Mike Antonucci reports, the National Education Association took in $375 million during the 2019-20 school year, all of it tax-free. Additionally, the NEA sold more than $209 million of its stocks and securities during the year, but the union is also excused from paying capital gains taxes.

Antonucci further explains that the NEA doesn’t operate entirely tax-free. It still must pay income tax on “unrelated business income.” For example, revenue from businesses placing ads in NEA publications, book sales, etc. All told, the union paid $7.2 million in direct taxes of all types on more than $603 million in gross revenue in 2019-20 – an effective tax rate of 1.2 percent.

The NEA also has no sense of hypocrisy. At the same time the union benefits from this egregious tax exemption, it came out with a “playbook” in 2020. In the “Tax Fairness” section of the manifesto, the union maintains that we need to repeal or amend tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, and replace them with a progressive tax system. The NEA also opposes “tax loopholes or giveaways that reduce revenues and shelter corporations and high-income individuals from paying taxes.”

Release time

Then we have the quaint notion of “release time” or, perhaps more accurately, “union time, taxpayer dime,” which is common at all levels of government. This swindle allows public employees to conduct union business during working hours, with the taxpayer footing the bill. These activities include negotiating contracts, lobbying, processing grievances, and attending union meetings and conferences.

A 2020 Goldwater Institute policy report detailed the pervasive nature of release time provisions in union contracts. This bit of thievery costs taxpayers millions of dollars annually and forces them to fund private union activities, which are very often political in nature and work against the interests of the taxpayers. Even more painful is the fact that many local governments don’t bother tracking release time, meaning this corrupt practice is often carried out in secret.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/28/bidenomics-recession-return-to-70s-style-stagflation-or-both/

Americans expecting a better economy to emerge three years after the COVID shutdowns will no doubt be disappointed by the first quarter’s GDP gain of just 1.1% with higher inflation. And it’s even worse than it looks.

Of course, President Joe Biden denied the worsening news, saying, “Today, we learned that the American economy remains strong, as it transitions to steady and stable growth.”

“Strong”? Really? No one believes that. As recently as late March, economists were looking for a first-quarter GDP growth number exceeding 3%. Instead, they got 1.1%, down from 2.6% in the fourth quarter and 3.2% in last year’s third quarter.

See the trend?

It’s no accident. The Fed, responding to 9%-plus inflation during the COVID “emergency,” has jacked up interest rates to 5% from near zero, and is expected to add another quarter point in early May during its meeting.

More ominously, a big part of the Q1 GDP slowdown came from businesses reducing their inventories and, for the fourth quarter in a row, their capital investments. Typically, businesses do that only when they expect really rough times ahead.

https://victorhanson.com/civilizational-killers-part-two-debt-and-inflation/

Debt and its twin inflation destroy civilizations. Ancient coins were sometimes called “redheads” as the raised impressed silhouettes of grandees stamped on “silver” coins were the first to have their silver veneers worn away revealing the “red” bronze beneath.

Our paper money is similarly becoming less and less valuable, the more we print of it. Currently, the U.S. owes 130 percent of its gross domestic product, in total about $33 trillion.

The staggering sum has not stopped annual federal borrowing, which may hit $2 trillion this year. The massive borrowing is unsustainable. Yet anyone who tries to cut the massive indebtedness will be smeared as cruel and insensitive.

America apparently shrugs that when the nation faces insolvency, we will deal with the catastrophe the way it is done in the Third World and in antiquity.

One, the state can always pay off its debts by printing endless money and inflating the economy. Germany did that by intent to pay off war reparations to the victorious allies by printing Reichsmarks to the point that they became utterly worthless.

https://victorhanson.com/civilizational-killers-part-one-perversion-of-the-law/

No civilization can continue if its bedrock values and institutions are eroding—especially if the effort to save them is considered worse than their destruction.

When we look to the civilizational decline of the Greek polis, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, or of Europe in the 1930s we learn that erosion is a result of internal choices, and usually a matter of failing to adhere to time-honored customs and traditions, while evolving to meet new threats.

In the case of the autonomous Greek polis, the culprit was the inability of some 1,500 city-states to create a workable federal system for the common defense of Hellas—when threatened by Philip and Alexander. The Roman Empire was not able to maintain a common culture among its 70 million varied residents, nor to increase productivity to pay for always greater entitlements, or to systematize imperial succession, or inculcate Romanity among an increasingly diverse population.

For the Byzantines, it is hard to criticize an empire that sustained 1,100 years of continuous civilization. But in the fifteenth century, it failed to evolve into a partnership with a dynamic Western Christendom, especially after the damage suffered during the Fourth Crusade, to create a common front against Ottoman Islamism. Nor was a shrinking Constantinople able to attract Europeans into the empire, much less to convert Anatolians into Orthodox Christians.