Category: Gummint

Revenue Streams

Taxes and Theft

As any fule kno, when a government is strapped for cash they will perforce come up with new ideas for “tax revenue streams” (a.k.a. “innovative methods to steal money from the public”).  Needless to say, they can’t just come out and say “we’re going to steal more of your money” because that might lead to public hangings…

…sorry, I went off to a warm and happy place there for a few moments.

Anyway, the theft has to be concealed beneath a maskirovka  of some sort, and the best one (apart from “national interest”) is “public health”, which shouldn’t fool anybody but it does, repeatedly and regrettably.

Examples of this abound, the latest being that of Head Thief, U.K. Division — sorry, I meant Chancellor of the Exchequer — Rachel Reeves, who wants to tax (wait for it) milkshakes.

The Chancellor has drawn up plans to impose a sugar tax on milk and yoghurt-based beverages for the first time, after concluding that they are damaging public health.

The levy will drive prices up by as much as 24p per litre, with officials expecting 93 percent of drinks on the market to be affected unless they change their recipes.

I think the British public should express their  rage  profound disappointment at this proposal by reverting to an age-old mechanism:

But they won’t, because as long as it’s for people’s health, you see, it’s acceptable.  (That sound you hear in the background is the bleating of sheep.)

Old Enough

Rights, The Gun Thing

As I wrote earlier:  if they’re old enough to have consensual sex, to vote, to be drafted, to sign binding contracts and all that goes with being legally adults, they should be old enough to own and carry guns, kinda like the Second Amendment provides*.

As Iowans have just passed into law, and every state should follow suit.

*Okay, I know that when the Constitution was written and ratified, the legal age of majority was 21 — at least when it came to voting and getting married without parental consent.  But seeing as at that time you could serve in the citizen militia at age 16, let’s not go down that rabbit-hole, shall we?

Today’s time is sufficient, and I’m fine with 18.

I keep thinking of the time when my kids were at college, had night classes and had to walk unarmed to their cars in badly-lit parking lots, forced to do so by stupid laws that forbade carrying guns on campus, and gun carry denied to them in toto  because of their age.

And they were the law-abiding ones;  their 50-something Dad was the lawbreaker, as he carried a gun onto campus every time he went there, despite the law.

I should point out that I also had a mental plan in the event of a campus shooter starting his bullshit if I were in a lecture or seminar:  tell everyone — lecturer included — to overturn their desks and take cover behind them, while staying out of my line of fire pointing at the classroom door.

I remember telling one of my erstwhile professors this some time after I graduated, and he thanked me.

Timely Law, Catchy Title

Government Thugs, Gummint, Taxes and Theft

From the U.S. Senate comes this little bit of commonsense:

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) on Monday introduced legislation that would sell off millions of dollars of the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) firearms to pay for the national debt.

As America approaches Tax Day on Tuesday, Ernst introduced the Why Does the IRS Needs Guns Act to reform how the agency handles firearms. The Iowa senator introduced the legislation after reports from Open the Books have suggested the IRS would one of the top 50 largest police departments based on its headcount and stockpiling of firearms and ammunition.

“Since 2006, the IRS spent $35.2 million on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment (CPI adjusted). The years 2020 and 2021 were peak years at the IRS for purchasing weaponry and gear. Just since the pandemic started, the IRS has purchased $10 million in weaponry and gear,” Open the Books wrote.

Since 2020, the IRS has spent at least $10 million on firearms and ammunition for its roughly 2,100 special agents.

Here’s Joni, outside D.C.:

And Rep. Barry Moore (R-AL) introduced the House companion legislation:

“Arming these agents does not make the American public safer. My legislation, the Why Does the IRS Need Guns Act, would disarm these agents, auction off their guns to Federal Firearms License Owners, and sell their ammunition to the public.”

Moore takes the cake with this exit quote:

“The only thing IRS agents should be armed with are calculators.”

As the old (and bitter) joke goes:

“Taxes are funds taken from citizens at gunpoint.”
“No, they aren’t!”
“Really?  Try refusing to pay them.”

Bastards.  Disarm them.  All of them.  Perhaps they’d be a lot less arrogant towards us if they were unarmed.

Nazzo Fast, Guido

Taxes and Theft

I’m truly enjoying the havoc and chaos that Musk and his DOGE squad are inflicting on the Gummint.

I’m not so sure about this one, though:

Acting IRS Commissioner Melanie Krause felt slighted after Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem struck a deal for the tax agency to share data with DHS on illegal aliens. She decided to resign and take the government buyout that Trump offered.

Sources told the Washington Post that disagreements over the agency’s direction also factored into Krause’s decision to leave.

To be sure, I don’t give a rat’s ass about Krause — or pretty much any IRS apparatchik, fuck ’em all — but on reading further, her reason for quitting stuck with me:

Trump and Musk want to overturn the entire privacy regime that prevents the IRS from sharing data with other government agencies. They’re contemplating building a “cross-government data-sharing system,” reports the Post, “that would allow agencies to use personal tax information to hunt for fraud in social safety net programs.”

Nice goal, but I’m not so sure about that “cross-government data-sharing system” thing — most of all when it comes to tax-related data.

Remember the immortal words of John Cowperthwaite:  “If I let them compute those statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.”  And no “statistics” are more deadly in government hands than financial ones.

I’m against giving government personal data, even in that most innocuous of functions, the decennial census.  Financial data, that could be shared between government agencies (such as, for example, the FBI and ATF and not just Social Security)?

I don’t fucking think so.

The old joke was that the IRS didn’t care if you were a citizen or an illegal alien, as long as you paid taxes on your wages and earnings;  while the INS didn’t care if you paid your taxes or not, as long as you were a legal resident.  It was a joke back then, but it’s going to stop being a joke, in every way possible, if this “cross-government data-sharing system” becomes a reality.

And remember, while I may — may — trust that this Republican government is going to do The Right Thing with all this data that’s going to be shared (and that’s not a sure thing, by any means), I have no illusions about how this data is going to be used by any future government, no matter what its label may be.

It’s going to be used against us — you and me — for whatever purpose they may dream up.

The only way I might agree to this fuckery is if there’s an absolutely cast-iron guarantee that the IRS is going to disappear altogether in the (very) near future, to be replaced by a National Excise Office that would collect taxes exclusively from foreign governments (tariff fees) and merchants (end-user sales taxes) — i.e. when the godless 16th Amendment is nullified — and we all know that none of that is going to happen anytime soon.

I would stipulate that this sharing of tax data be limited strictly to root out corruption in the SocSec network — i.e. it’s a one-time, one-function application — but we all know that this stipulation would be ignored before the ink was dry on the paper, to await the arrival of a future government or government department which would use it as a tool to oppress and destroy our freedoms.

No, this data-sharing thing is a bridge too far, and I don’t care how badly it’s needed — Musk has yet to prove that to me or anyone else — or how much easier it would make DOGE’s job.

My personal data doesn’t exist in order to make anyone’s job easier or more convenient.  So leave it the fuck alone.

Great Idea, Never Happen

Advice, Economics, Taxes and Theft

Turning Britishland into Singapore?  It’s an intriguing concept, as explained here.  An excerpt:

There is nothing new in the comparison between modern Britain and circumstances in Singapore when it gained independence in 1965. Like the UK following the Brexit referendum, Singapore was involved in a rancorous divorce from a much larger geopolitical entity that left it facing an uncertain path. For one island’s withdrawal from the European Union in 2016, read another’s split from the Federation of Malaysia 55 years ago.
As many a minister has pointed out in recent years, Singapore went on to conjure an economic miracle. In the space of a generation, it has transformed itself from a country where the average citizen was two and a half times poorer than the average Briton, to a hotbed of soaring prosperity where total economic output is now 70 per cent higher than in the UK.

Here’s what the Brits would have to do, though:

In a country where the average monthly salary is about S$70,000 (£40,000), [Singapore] residents pay income tax of just 7 per cent – less than half of the 20 per cent charged in the UK – while a salary equivalent to £46,000 would attract 11.5 per cent tax.
The individual tax ceiling is 24 per cent, payable only by those earning more than 1 million Singapore dollars; the equivalent rate in the UK is 45 per cent, a bracket that comes into play for anyone with a salary of more than £125,140 (about 217,000 Singapore dollars).
The country’s more favorable tax regime extends to corporation tax, which stands at 17 per cent in Singapore compared with 25 per cent in the UK. There is no capital gains or inheritance tax.

Cut and eliminate taxes?  In Britain?

Hence the title of this post.