The Cruelest Tax
It’s Paid For. It doesn’t Cost Anything. It Won’t Add to the Deficit.
We are told that no one making under $400,000 per year will pay one penny in extra taxes. That is an enormous lie. While it is true that no one making less than that amount will pay additional money in anything called “taxes,” people will still pay additional money in things called “costs created by government.”
We have no supply chain problem. We have a labor problem, created by the Biden Administration. In the absence of a monopoly, supply chains are self-organizing. I’m good at fishing, not good at much else. My wife’s cousin is good at selling, so we agree that I will fish and he will sell them. I can catch many more fish than he can sell, so he takes a few as far away as he can to see if there are others interested in buying them. There are, but the fish only last a short time. His husband is an expert in preserving fish, and now we have a supply chain. In a couple of generations, it can stretch across a continent. With an internet built on the basis of effectiveness and efficiency, it can stretch across a continent in minutes. The internet was not built by government, but by private corporations incentivized to increase profits.
So, why isn’t the supply chain working? Because we do have a monopoly in the Federal Government. Statists believe that the self-proclaimed elite have a duty to control and direct the activities of their inferiors. The urge to regulate is difficult to resist. When there is a single group in charge of the legislative and executive departments, the group seeks to extend its influence and the force of its mandate. The judiciary can serve as a check on absolute power, but it is slow and deliberate, and has no enforcement capability.
Everything must be Regulated. Everything.
The regulatory zeal of the current administration is palpable. And its preferred enforcement mechanism is to deny critics employment. Concurrently, it repeatedly offers more services to those who do not want to work, and the Federal Reserve electronically prints more than $120 billion per month to purchase government bonds. Thus, the supply of money to purchase goods increases as the availability of the goods decreases. This is the definition of inflation.
How does the labor shortage affect the supply chain? Independent truckers, which is the vast majority, refuse to enter California, whose regulatory scheme punishes truckers severely. Both Washington and Oregon are hostile to businesses, and truckers don’t need that business to stay busy. In California, goods on ships cannot be unloaded because there is no room for them. At major East Coast ports there are Federal regulations that mandate use of multiple modes of transportation to move goods from ports to markets. Truck drivers cannot afford to serve either West Coast ports nor most East Coast Ports, where Longshoremen’s Unions have tied up ships, trucks and rail in a knot. Even were things not in a knot, truck drivers don’t need the aggravation.
That causes inflation, which in the short term affects the poor differently from the rich. The wealthy are unlikely to purchase a used car, but the poor cannot afford anything else. Thus far in 2021, used car prices are up between 38% and 46%. Gasoline prices are up 52%; the poor pay a larger portion of their income on fuel than the wealthy. The cost of coal and heating oil will surge this winter. Less than a year ago we were energy independent; today, we have barred ourselves from fracking, from building new pipelines or using existing ones. Secretary of Energy Granholm laughed when asked if it is possible to increase production in the U.S. We shot ourselves in the foot over energy production, then blamed OPEC for not increasing production. We dropped opposition to Russia’s Nordstream Pipeline bringing fossil fuels to Western Europe, and both China and India have announced plans for nationwide coal-fired plants to generate new. electricity. It seems there is more than one global environment. Where is Greta Thunberg when you need her?
Apartment rent prices are up nearly twenty percent nationwide. A moratorium on rent increases saved no money; landlords, half of which in multi-family housing are Mom-and-Pop operations, still had to pay for utilities, repairs and mortgages, while renters lived for free. Those who fail to see that cost transfer and cost saving are entirely different have an interesting (and ill-informed) world view.
The Cruelest Tax
I love the concept of "costs created by government" vs a tax hike. So much of what I am reading now has highlighted the ineptitude and disinterest in rooting out how organized crime filters tax dollars at taxpayers expense. Rampant abuse of covid 19 funding applications that is just bothersome to root out. There are lots of ways of taxing the lower incomes and your article helped me better understand how it is delicately woven. Thank you for sharing.
I enjoyed this, thank you.