On Thursday, The U.S. Senate passed a bill that includes a provision that makes permanent what was a temporary moratorium on taxing internet access. The linked article says that “the White House has signaled that President Obama will sign it into law.”
According to the linked article, the moratorium was first enacted in 1998, then extended numerous times.
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I’m not sure how effectively it accomplishes the task, but a presentation by the Urban Institute and the Tax Policy Center looks like an attempt, at least, to measure the effect of sin taxes.
The post linked to above contains two graphics that are apparently part of the presentation. The first one, titled Taxing Content Is More Effective Than Taxing Volume or Sales Value, unfortunately doesn’t make any sense to me, which undermines the conclusion. From Coyote Blog, a map that Coyote says came from the House Committee on Natural Resources. The colored areas are land that is either owned by the Feds or has a federal designation that affects the use of the land.
I’m surprised to see that Arizona appears to have more land that isn’t owned by or under some designation from the Feds than the other western states. From Tucson New Now, a journalist’s first-hand account of finding drug cartel scouts camping on top of a mountain west of Casa Grande. Pretty frightening, if you ask me.
If you read the same sources I do, you’ll regularly see stories about civil asset forfeiture being used to deprive apparently completely innocent citizens of their money and property, without due process. Recently I saw a post about a particularly egregious-sounding case, that can be summarized like this: a police traffic stop results for one reason or another in a search of the car, the search turns up a large amount of cash, the police seize the cash, and the citizens have to prove that the cash isn’t somehow connected to illegal activity.
Actually, many of the cases I read about fit that pattern. The citizens victimized by these cases are, of course, at an extreme disadvantage in fighting the government to get their money or property back. Are there situations where the police seize money or property that really is the product of illegal activity? Of course there are. Does that justify the way these cases play out being so blatantly in violation of basic notions of due process? Not in my book. So I told you that you can go ahead and file your 1040 for 2016. Then this happens. So you can’t e-file at the moment.
If you are filing through another service, it just means that the service will hold your return until IRS fixes its outage. Doesn’t sound like that big of a problem, but…. I can’t believe it has been 1000 days since Lois Lerner, then the director of the IRS's Exempt Organizations Division, admitted that the IRS had been giving additional scrutiny to applications for tax-exempt status from groups with "Tea Party" or "patriot" in their title. That ignited what the TaxProf Blog quickly dubbed the “IRS Scandal.”
Nearly three years later, the situation is still unresolved. To its credit, TaxProf Blog has posted about it every day since the scandal broke. Stick with it, TaxProf Blog. According to these writers, the problem with the domestic airlines is lack of competition, which results from red tape and airport politics constraining the supply of airport gates.
I don’t know if they are right about the causes (and I’m not sure about blaming it on people on only one side of the political spectrum), and don’t care too much since I rarely travel by air, but I think it has been obvious for a long time that the airline industry has serious problems, and it certainly seems plausible that red tape and politics stand in the way of airport expansion. If you have read my Real Estate Law Update, you know I think that government meddling frequently distorts market forces in land use generally. Via Instapundit. “The fight against poverty will not be won until the inequality crisis is tackled.”
That sentence is from a “briefing paper” entitled “An Economy for the 1%: How Privilege and Power in the Economy Drive Extreme Inequality and How This Can be Stopped,” published recently by an organization called Oxfam. Later in the same paper, however, they say: “Oxfam is unequivocal in welcoming the fantastic progress that has helped to halve the number of people living below the extreme poverty line between 1990 and 2010.” I have never heard of Oxfam before. For all I know, they do good work. But aren’t those two sentences a bit inconsistent? If the “inequality crisis,” and therefore poverty, is worsening (the thesis of the paper), then how do they reconcile that with the fact that, as they say, the number of people living in extreme poverty has been cut in half? |
AuthorThe contents of this blog, this web site, and any writings by me that are linked here, are all my personal commentary. None of it is intended to be legal advice for your situation. Archives
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