You Thought Tax Day Was Bad? Biden Has Worse in Store
You could say “Happy Passover,” you could say “Happy Easter,” but you couldn’t really say “Happy Tax Day.” Tax Day is already bad, and President Joe Biden wants to make it worse.
If you filed for a refund, you may be waiting a while: As of March, the IRS hadn’t processed more than 12 million returns. The latest appropriations bill gave the agency funding to hire 10,000 more people, but that won’t solve the problem.
Biden wanted to give it a further $80 billion and hire another 87,000 agents. We already see IRS people chase waitresses around the table to tax their tips, run up and down city streets to make sure there’s no Uber hanky-panky and in their spare time go after successful small-business and gig workers.
That’s not enough for the president. Biden wants to make America No. 1 . . . in taxes.
If he had his way, the United States would have the highest individual, corporate and capital-gains taxes of all the developed nations. We’d have tax rates even higher than China’s.
And don’t forget his proposed confiscatory wealth tax on unrealized capital gains, which would be unconstitutional and impossible to calculate, besides being stupid.
Of course, Biden never acknowledges that under his tenure, Americans are already paying record taxes.
Just last week, Treasury announced it collected a whopping $2.1 trillion in taxes the first half of the fiscal year. It was the first time in history that tax collections exceeded $2 trillion in a six-month period. More than $1.1 trillion of that came from individual income tax.
You’d think that with record revenues, Biden would return some money to the working folks who earned it. Not a chance.
He wants to use it to expand his big-government regulatory state and control all aspects of the economy.
Instead of rewarding success, Biden and the Democrats want to punish it. They have no interest in economic growth. For them, tax policy is strictly a matter of class warfare and redistributionism.
But by hiking taxes on successful businesses and entrepreneurs, they reduce profits, which in turn reduces middle-class and blue-collar wages, increases consumer prices and throttles investor returns.
The left is always trying to tax the rich without realizing that you can’t be in favor of employees if you’re opposed to employers and you can’t support a system of capitalism without capital.
OK, Democrats aren’t always wrong about tax policy. One understood it well 60 years ago: John F. Kennedy.
So “long as our national-security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits,” he told the Economics Club of New York in 1962. “In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low, and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.”
JFK had it exactly right. He was describing the Laffer curve before there was a Laffer curve.
And Kennedy was for growth, which should be the top goal of tax policy. He took the top rate from 91% to 70%.
Years later, former Democrat Ronald Reagan took the top rate from 70% to 28%. In fact, when Reagan left Washington, we had a two-bracket income tax: 28% and 15%. His reforms ripped 10,000 pages of tax regulations out of the Federal Register.
As tax rates were lowered, the tax base was broadened, and taxes were simplified. The JFK tax cuts launched a decade of tremendous prosperity. The Reagan tax cuts launched a two-decade prosperity cycle.
The Trump tax cuts are giving us what limited prosperity we have. Congress should make them permanent.
A pro-growth tax-cut plan that flattened rates, broadened the base and simplified the code could generate 3% to 4% economic growth. It’d be a crucial element in a balanced budget that also included a domestic discretionary-spending freeze and a rollback of all the nutty Biden regulations, especially on fossil fuels. That would be a growth budget.
Over the roughly 50 years between the end of World War II and 2000, the US economy grew at a 3.6% annual rate. In the new century, from 2000 to 2021, it’s grown by only half that: 1.8% annually.
Why? Too much spending, too much deficit finance, too much money printing, too much inflation, too many regulations, too much central planning, too much big-government socialism. And Biden wants to raise taxes so he can do more of the same.
It doesn’t have to be this way. America deserves better. America can do better—as it has proved in the past.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14144&omhide=true&trk=rm
**********************************************Olympic hero's defiant take on trans debate
Australia's most decorated Olympian of all time, swimming superstar Emma McKeon, has made it clear she's against transgender athletes competing in women's sport, declaring "it's just not fair".
The trans-in-sport debate raging in Australia is more intense than ever because of the federal election campaign by Liberal candidate Katherine Deves, who's copped backlash for comparing her activism for women's sport to protesting against the Holocaust.
McKeon weighed in on the debate at Griffith University's A Better Future for All seminar this week. "I personally wouldn't want to be racing against someone who is biologically a male, so that's a concern," McKeon said.
"It's not a new thing, but it's new in that sport, swimming, are going to have to deal with it."
New Zealand's Laurel Hubbard sparked debate when she competed in women's weightlifting at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.
More recently, Lia Thomas of the USA became the first known transgender athlete to win an NCAA swimming title when she took out the 500m freestyle.
On Australian shores, the AFL hasn't allowed Hannah Mouncey to compete in the AFLW, resulting in the former Australian men's national handball player taking the AFL to court.
McKeon says she doesn't think she'll race against transgender athletes in her career but admitted it had become a major point of contention. "I don't think it's going to come to that point," McKeon said.
"But now that it's a growing thing, the sport has to think about how to handle it and how to deal with it, because you do want to be inclusive, but you don't want to have females racing against swimmers who are biologically male, because it's just not fair."
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Assault on free speech in Tennessee
America is in a free speech crisis. The mere mention of involvement in issue advocacy has resulted in personal and professional attacks by internet thugs determined to deny Americans, and indeed, Tennesseans the right to participate equally in the political process and petition our government.
In 2008, Brendan Eich, the inventor of Java Script and founder of Mozilla, legally contributed $1,000.00 to a California initiative campaign opposing gay marriage (which incidentally was supported by the electorate.) Eich was forced out of his position as the head of Mozilla due to threats by Internet social justice warriors making threats against his company. Eich shared his position with then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, so it could not have been more mainstream, yet he lost his company and livelihood.
Today, doxing of conservatives is viewed as sport by the current generation of internet warriors, and the impact is that many people will not donate to causes if they believe that their names will be made public.
I don’t have to provide a laundry list of examples, we both know this is true.
SB 1005-HB1201 would paint a target on the back of anyone who donated to a non-profit group which expressed a position on legislation pending in Nashville. While I can certainly understand and sympathize with the intent behind the legislation, the practical violence it does to the basic freedom to petition lawmakers in violation of the First Amendment overwhelmingly argues in favor of a veto.
In the 1950s, the state of Alabama passed legislation which required the NAACP to provide their membership lists to the state with the intent of discouraging participation. In 1958, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down this legislation. The practical effect of SB 1005- HB 1201 is the same, as participation in issue advocacy campaigns that happened to be adjacent to elections would be squelched.
For example, disclosure makes it foolhardy for someone with an interest in developing a green energy technology to publicly support a legislative effort to increase police funding. This simple act would put that donor at risk of losing funding from Wall Street’s Environmental, Social and Governance driven investment instruments due to Black Lives Matter’s word of disapproval.
We live in a world where people’s legitimately held, mainstream opinions are used to cancel their careers and livelihoods. SB 1005-HB 1201 enables that political persecution and no amount of legislative tinkering changes that fact.
For this and other reasons, Americans for Limited Government strongly urges Gov. Lee to veto this well-meaning, but ill-considered, dangerous and unconstitutional legislation.
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Australia: Protecting women not a priority for Leftists
Steggall is an "independent" Leftist.
It was a mistake for Zali Steggall to refer to the protection of women, girls, and children as a ‘dead cat strategy’.
In one breath, she dismissed the rights of women to make way for the desires of biological men. Steggall may as well have lashed the history of feminism to the stake. This is not progressive thought – it is a regression back to a Medieval era where women were forced to shut up and put up with the dominance of men.
‘We were basically told to, “suck it up”,’ said one of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas’ teammates. The woman, who was too frightened to be identified, said that they felt uncomfortable and upset being exposed to a naked man in their locker room.
The Member for Warringah uttered her ‘dead cat’ line during a recent interview with Laura Jayes on Sky News Australia. It was not a poorly worded error. When pushed on the subject, Steggall doubled-down, accusing parents that raised concerns about the safety of young girls competing against boys in contact sport of being ‘transphobic’.
Steggall’s callous attitude toward the genuine fears of women confirms speculation that when it comes to the Culture Wars, the Left are prepared to sacrifice women, their rights, and their safety in order to appease biological men. So-called ‘moderate’ Liberal MP and New South Wales Treasurer Matt Kean said that this wasn’t the 1950s – no. Quite right. In the 1950s no self-respecting man would take a medal from a woman and describe it as an ‘act of bravery’.
Matt Kean went on to immediately tweet that, ‘Gender balance on treasury boards will rise from an impressive 40 per cent to a balanced 50 per cent! Chris Minns attacked the policy this morning. He really does stand for nothing. He won’t stand for a fair go for women.’
Kean didn’t clarify if his 50 per cent female quota target was made up of women or men.
The message is not getting through to men in positions of power like Kean. Women do not want men in their bathrooms, change rooms, sports, or other female-specific spaces. Individual groups of women make exceptions on a case-by-case basis – such as a desperate dad taking his female toddler to a public women’s bathroom – but the idea of legal power being used by the State to force the issue is unacceptable.
Shove a woman in front of a camera on national TV surrounded by a thrall of press and she might begrudgingly go along with the ‘tolerance’ line, but that answer is usually coerced out of fear that she may lose her job if she does not comply with the activist line. Shame on society for threatening women into accepting an unsafe situation. The Left are keen to point out the existence of ‘toxic masculinity’, paint every young boy as a potential abuser, and talk at length about women as victims of male violence, but they outright refuse to accept that this biological imbalance remains regardless of modern ‘gender-fluid’ theory.
When a woman says that she feels unsafe with a naked man occupying a change room, is it the woman who is banned from the gym or told to stop complaining. When a woman says that it is unfair for a man to set unattainable records in competitive sport, they are told that sport is meant to be about ‘inclusion’, not winning. When a woman loses her career to man, she is forgotten and left to watch a man take her scholarship, money, and future.
This paradox of political correctness ensures that women who stand up and bravely demand equality are labelled as bigots.
Virtue signalling is a currency best measured in ‘clicks’ and Australia’s media core attack conservative women like seagulls on a chip. These are the sorts of journalists who like to remind us that Warringah is ‘an electorate that voted 70 per cent in favour of same-sex marriage’ as if there is a genuine comparison between two consenting adults entering a marriage and the side-lining of women or surgical mutilation of a child’s body. There is not.
When Deves said that the behaviour of militant activists reminded her of the Nazi regime’s habit of ruthlessly silencing those who opposed it, she was describing the intolerant, hate-fuelled landscape of social media that women are subjected to if they dare to defend their biological rights.
Besides, no one throws the ‘Nazi’ accusation around more liberally than the radical left, who use it as a daily slur against anyone and everyone who stands slightly to the right of Stalin. Trump is a Nazi. Scott Morrison is a Nazi. The Liberal Party are Nazis. Anti-vaxxers are Nazis. J.K. Rowling is a Nazi. Murdoch is a Nazi. Jewish people who support Israel are Nazis. Free speech supporters are Nazis. Anyone who has refused to actively ‘affirm’ the LGBTQ movement has been accused of being a Nazi by someone with pronouns in their bio. Last year in Melbourne, Union members were called Nazis by none other than ex-Labor Leader Bill Shorten. Everyone is a Nazi to the rabid mob.
What we are witnessing is an ideological movement that has become so corrupted by the cheap thrill of outrage that they cannot stand to look at themselves in a mirror. The level of festering violence sitting beneath anonymous social media accounts is astonishing and speaks to a deeper psychological problem rampant in the last few generations who manage their emotions by abusing strangers on the internet. Is social media desensitising people or are these kids being radicalised to hate by a State-sanctioned education program that demonises conservatives and traditional family values?
Matt Kean correctly stated that, ‘This is not an intolerant society.’ Unfortunately, Kean can’t tell the difference between tolerance and cheating, something he has experience with when it comes to women’s issues. No, he wasn’t cancelled. Male privilege, perhaps? Australia has a reputation for fairness, and that is what Katherine Deves campaigns on. The Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins stated that the ‘practical guidance [of the re-interpreted Sex Discrimination Act in 2013] on how sporting organisations, their staff, and volunteers can promote the inclusion of transgender and gender diverse people in line with human rights-based principles.’
And therein lies the problem. Sport is not about ‘inclusion’ and it is not a human right. Sport is a competition divided by gender to promote fairness where contestants are selected based upon merit. It is about finding the limits and peak performance of that gender. If, as of 2013, sport is about ‘inclusion’ then fine – let’s forget the whole gender division thing and throw everyone into the unisex category. We’ll see how long it takes for professional female athletes to tear apart the sporting world when they find themselves losing to teenage boys and excluded from multi-million dollar prizes.
Katherine Deves isn’t being set upon by activist wolves because she’s wrong. Deves is hounded by every able-bodied member of the left because she’s right. The majority of men and women know that there is a fundamental difference between the sexes that cannot be erased by wishful thinking and medical intervention. Deves stated reality and the electorate pulled toward her.
Steggall felt it. Albanese felt it. The activists draining millions out of the taxpayer purse felt it.
At some point, society has to sit down and choose.
Do we honour the biological rights and safety of women – or do we bow to the demands of Labor, the Greens, the ‘moderate’ Liberals, and the so-called Independents who want us to cast women back to the Dark Ages?
Choose.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/04/protecting-women-is-not-a-dead-cat-strategy/ ?
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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