Here we are in the thick of the election season and, as always happens during such times, we hear endless declarations from the candidates about the various problems that they will fix for us if we will only vote for them, and endless discussion from activists and advocates and self-declared victims and would-be policy-makers about […]
The only way rising property values lead to rising tax bills is if the government chooses to treat the tax rate as an inevitable force of nature rather than as the financial throttle which matches total valuation to total revenue; that is, if government chooses to use rising valuations as an excuse to collect and spend more than they could otherwise have done.
Jack Connors, Jr. argues (12 Jun) that the current revenue surplus in Massachusetts should be spent on increased Medicare reimbursements rather than being returned to the taxpayers from which it derived…using them to increase reimbursements for Medicare – or to fund benefit increases for any other entitlement program – is the worst possible use for the money.
My wife and I are worried about having enough money for a comfortable retirement. With the states of the economy and the world as they are we have been quite anxious. So I’ve come up with a plan:
I find this indifference to the very real cash-flow obligations with which we are saddling our children and grandchildren dismaying. I wrote this as yet another attempt to convince them – and their equally insouciant readers – to take those obligations seriously
The current debate over reform of the Social Security system has taken on all the qualities of an argument between 6-year-olds, reduced in essence to the intellectual content of the classic “Is not!”, “Is so!”.
There may be aspects of the new tax proposals that would shift tax burden from rich to poor, but the elimination of deductions for state and local taxes would not seem to be among them. Could it be that the primary outrage is not with the plan itself but with the fact that George Bush and the Republican Congress are the ones who get to propose it?
At some point in listening to the endless debates over how much the government should spend and how that spending should be allocated – in other words, in the debate over the fundamental operations of government – it occurred to me that one of the problems we have in discussing such things is that very few people actually know what we spend already. ‘Conservatives’ decry “welfare spending” and want to beef up defense; ‘liberals’ demand “butter before guns”, convinced that we spend only a pittance on social needs and a fortune on the military. But when I looked at the actual numbers (for FY2004 at the CBO web-site) I was somewhat surprised at how the money is actually allocated, and I would bet that most people share my ignorance. I would further bet that if you asked ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ to guess at the allocation of federal resources you would get vastly different estimates, with ‘conservatives’ grossly over-estimating and ‘liberals’ grossly under-estimating the relative weight assigned to “social programs” (and with them reversed on “defense”).
During the last presidential campaign John Kerry scored populist points castigating “greedy corporations” who avoided paying their “fare share” of taxes by “sheltering” their profits in foreign countries. In an era of corporate downsizing and record budget deficits that topic resonated with many people, and the charges were repeated widely before disappearing under the weight of other criticism more easily tied directly to George Bush. But before they disappeared The Boston Globe ran a piece by Stephen Glain on the topic in their business section. I sincerely believe there is a lot of questionable – or downright dishonest – stuff going on behind the corporate veil in support of avoiding taxes. But I also believe that a business reporter should consider the possibility that some practices characterized by populist politicians as malfeasance may actually have a rational and legitimate basis in business principles – and that a reporter writing a story on the topic should at least talk to some people in business who are using those practices before writing the story about them.
That kind of thinking, moreover, frames the debate on everything else. During the last presidential election, when it appeared we might actually have some temporary budget surplus lying around, we heard hundreds of proposals for how to spend the money – almost all of them by making permanent commitments to entitlement programs rather than one-time commitments to capital improvements. To someone who has to manage cash flow and capital needs for either a family or a business using a finite reserve fund as a down-payment on permanent spending commitments seems ludicrous; in an environment where there is no distinction between operations and infrastructure it seems routine.