Category: Gummint

Many A True Word

Taxes and Theft

Last week I created this snarky meme after the Labour Party won the general election in Britishland:

And it was meant to be a bitter joke.  (The tarty redhead is Labour’s Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner).  So imagine my interest when this little snippet appeared in the news a few days later:

How to protect your money if Labour mounts an inheritance tax raid on pensions

Pensions, for example, have been a safe haven for those who want to pass on their wealth without the taxman taking a cut. And millions of people have ploughed money into their retirement savings with this in mind. But even this last bastion could now fall into the clutches of inheritance tax.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been urged by policy wonks to consider an inheritance tax raid on pension pots, amid rising pressure to meet public spending targets. Leading think tanks have told her the move could raise up to £2 billion a year in takings from grieving families.

So, as the title of this post suggests, sometimes the jest turns into reality.

Basically, the takeaway is this:  any chance the Communists can get to steal your money and / or property, they’ll grab it in their greedy little claws.

When The Hatred Surges

Gummint, Mocking Furriners, Watermelons

Not talking about our local Commies and their HitlerTrump bullshit here.  Nope, we have to go Over There to see a bunch of gummint types having their asses handed to them by the voters, for once.

The Labour government’s decision to scrap its blanket 20mph speed limits in Wales just a year after they were introduced has sparked hope for the rest of the UK. 

Wales’ Transport Secretary Ken Skates admitted the policy was so unpopular even his own family had signed the petition against it.

This despite all the assurances that a 20mph (!!!!) speed limit would do so much to combat Global Cooling Climate Warming Change©.  Of course it wouldn’t (and won’t), just as our own imposition of a 55mph highway speed limit did nothing of the sort either.

I suppose retraction is better than a public hanging, after all — although that may be a contentious issue all by itself, especially among Stout Bulldogs of my acquaintance Over There.  (The Englishman, for one, is especially fond of the “heads on pikes” approach to curbing government excess.)

Now we’ll see if the Welsh example spreads to other Brit municipalities of similar stupidity.  But I wouldn’t count on it.

Ahead Of The Game

Taxes and Theft

Yesterday I showed how wealthy people have been fleeing Illinois for greener pastures in Florida and such.

Now we have people in Britishland getting out even before the new Labour government is going to be swept to power with a massive majority (as seems likely).  And why would they do so, you ask?

The wealthy are already fleeing Britain over fears about Keir Starmer’s tax raids, it was claimed today.  It is the latest sign of anxiety about the prospect of a Labour government with potentially the largest majority in history.

 Sir Keir has insisted that apart from closing specific tax loopholes, nothing in his manifesto requires additional tax rises for ‘working people’.

But critics say his plans cannot be delivered without unleashing tax hikes yet to be declared to voters.

A Socialist lying about his goals?  Say it ain’t so.  Clearly, the people most likely to be affected by Labour’s rapaciousness aren’t being fooled.

I have three friends Over There who are actively making plans to leave, for good.  And no, they’re not especially wealthy ones, either — because as any fule kno, the only way to get serious tax receipts is to tax the middle class, and they are all in that category.  (The working classes don’t have money, and the wealthy can afford to shield theirs.)

One is even looking at moving to the U.S., but alas he wants to do it legally, which will take years.  (For reasons of honesty, he refuses to do the southern border swoop.)  He may go through Canada first, but we’ll have to see.

I know of another guy — not a personal friend — who’s just walking away from his house because he suspects that Labour is going to increase “stamp duty” on property transfers and sales, so when he did the arithmetic he found that it would be easier just to forget about it.  He’s just sold his company (a printing business), and from what I can gather, that moolah is already in an offshore tax haven.

Interesting times we live in, wot?

The REAL Big Loser?

Government Thugs, Legal Stuff

Last week the Supreme Court dealt what seems to be a massive blow to the bureaucracy of the modern Administrative State — wherein an agency can become a de facto mini-state by creating and interpreting its own regulations, and then enforcing them without much in the way of legal oversight and defense.

The beacon in this ruling is SEC v. Jarkesy, which noted “…the Securities Exchange Commission’s power to serve as enforcer, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner in administrative proceedings for violating the securities laws. The Court found that the defendants are entitled to a jury trial before an Article III judge.”

Needless to say, the gun guys — especially these folks, from whom I excerpted and modified the previous paragraph — who have long suffered such iniquity at the hands of the loathsome Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (ATF) agency, are all over this.

However, lost in all this excitement is the agency which I think has the most to lose from Jarkesy  (and the earlier Loper Bright v. Raimondo decision).

I refer here to the still-more loathsome Internal Revenue Service (IRS), who have always been able to bludgeon taxpayers in this manner.  They have their own regulations, their own courts and, lest we forget, a veritable army of well-armed minions who are only too willing to enforce their agency’s regulatory diktat.  I remember seeing on TV an excellent summary of the power of the IRS when a judge said, “So basically, in order to win your case against this man, all the IRS has to do is prove that they followed their own internal procedures properly?”  to which the IRS lawyer said, “Yes, your Honor.”

Massive rafts of tax law have given birth to an entire world of tax lawyers and -accountants (both in private practice and in the IRS itself), which is in itself excessive and burdensome.  (I am reminded of the way colonial Hong Kong collected income tax:  once a year the taxpayer took to the tax office his employer’s statement of his gross salary paid, and he would write out a cheque for 5% of that total to the government.  That’s it.  Imagine the impact of that scenario in the United States today.)

Anyway, I’m not only not a lawyer, but I also don’t play one on TV and I sure as hell don’t play one on this blog.  But I am generally cognizant of the bigger picture, and I’m just wondering if the greatest losers of the Lopez Bright  and Jarkesy  decisions will not be the horrible SEC, EPA and ATF, but the fouler-still IRS.

I am sure that the Powdered Wigs among my Readership will be only too pleased to set me straight.

Too Polite By Half

Bureaucracy, Gummint, Legal Stuff, Politics, Resistance

Here’s a story which is quite heartening:

The people in question are with the American Accountability Foundation in Kentucky, and they are busily engaged in a project that I’ve been hoping to see all throughout the current presidential campaign. Tom Jones of the AAF received a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation to do some important research work. They are poring through the backgrounds of federal workers, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. They are checking public comments and social media posts, looking for swamp dwellers who may be opposed to the policies of Donald Trump should he return to office next year. They plan to publish a list of as many as 100 names later this summer, and those people may have to rethink their future career prospects if Trump returns to the White House.

There are, however, a couple of things which make me do a Lemon Face.  Firstly, while “accountability” is all well and good, what I’d really like to see is some kind of awful consequences for the disloyal (and perhaps criminal and treasonous both) government stooges, especially those who proudly proclaimed that they were doing their best to undermine the Republican administration.

I’ve always said that the State Department implements the foreign policy of the Democratic Party, regardless of which party is in power.  It’s a mordant comment, good for an amused smile, perhaps.

The time for that accommodation is over, or should be.

Just as Trump came to power in 2016 with a pre-vetted list of federal judges ready to be nominated and sworn in, I want him to arrive in the Oval Office in 2025 with a similar list of judges, to be sure — but with another list of Swamp apparatchiks who need, at best to lose their jobs, but preferably with some kind of legal censure — e.g. prosecution — and not just the prospect of losing their little place at the poxy government trough.

That little totalitarian cocksucker Anthony Fauci, for example, needs to spend his last years on earth in some dank federal prison for causing — and admitting he caused — untold harm to American society by his actions as a federal employee.  And he’s just the most egregious example.  There are a lot more than “100 names” who need to be kicked out of government and punished for their disgusting behavior.  Losing one’s job is a pointless “punishment” if all it means is a well-paid talking-head job on NBC or any of the other alphabet soup socialist-supporting media companies.  These bastards need to be punished.  At the very least, they should forfeit their government pensions:  they abused their positions, and don’t deserve to reap any benefits.

I know, I know:  this is not a good precedent to set because it will make people leery of working on government.  That, my friends, is a feature and not a bug.

What I’d like to see in Trump’s very first week as POTUS is a head-of-state summit with Argentina’s Javier Milei, both as an amicable confirmation of shared principle, and an exchange of ideas as to implementation of policy.

It appears that the Socialists — people like Kathy Griffin, Joy Behar and Rachel Maddow — are scurrying around like frightened mice at the prospect of Trump throwing people in jail when he comes to power.  I would advise Trump and his advisors to do precisely that;  just not to waste time with irrelevant nonentities like the above harpies, but to get serious with the actual bad agents like James Clapper, the entire upper management of the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and the authors of this document — for starters.  The State Department, EPA and so on can wait until Year Two of the 47th President’s term.

We don’t need an accounting;  we demand a reckoning.

Working Well, Then?

Anti-Gun Nannies, Crime, Gummint, Morons & Idiots

Here’s yet another abject failure of Nanny Government and gun control:

One gun is being seized in London every day as gangs fuel a ‘vicious cycle’ of drugs-related violence, a Met commander warned today – as footage emerged showing officers finding a loaded weapon in a child’s drawer. 

Cdr Paul Brogden said more than half of shootings in the capital are related to drugs gangs or organised crime, with firearms being used to take out rivals or threaten people who owe money.

This is clearly fake news, of course, as the BritGov banned private ownership of handguns many years ago;  so this is doubleplusunpossible.

But we all knew it was a waste of time — well, by “all” I mean sentient people (of any nation) whose collective head was not stuck up its ass.