Why Not a Negative Income Tax? "What kind of program could help protect every citizen from destitution without granting excessive power to bureaucrats, creating disincentives to work, and clogging up the free-market economy, as the modern welfare state has done? [Nobel-prize winning economist Milton] Friedman’s answer was the negative income tax, or NIT."
posted by shivohum
on Mar 14, 2011 -
106 comments
The Romanian government has changed its labour laws, and in doing so has added a number of professions which weren't previously recognised but which are now subject to tax. Car valets, embalmers and driving instructors are unhappy to be added, but their protests aren't likely to be as scary as those of the...
witches.
[more inside]
posted by reynir
on Jan 9, 2011 -
18 comments
How do you tax religious communists engaged in capitalism through an exempt religious corporation? The Stahl Hutterian Brethren is a 65-member community of
Hutterites that runs a 30,000 acre farm in Washington. The community is incorporated as a religious corporation. Its members give all their "time, labor, services, earnings, and energies" to the community. They disavow individual property ownership, draw no salary, and do not contribute to or collect Social Security benefits. Instead, the community provides for its members' personal needs. And now it is the subject of the most fascinating 9th Circuit
tax case [PDF] you'll read this year!
But before you dig into the 9th Circuit opinion, here's a great
summary and commentary by law professor Shaun Martin. The case addresses the very tricky question of whether, as employees of a non-profit religious corporation, the community members should be allowed to deduct their living expenses, which are paid for by the corporation (they're communists, after all). Tricky additional fact: The 65-member community is all one big family.
posted by The World Famous
on Dec 13, 2010 -
36 comments
The Tax Gap - "
The Guardian will examine the extent of tax avoidance by big business, day-by-day over two weeks. We are naming more than 20 major British companies, and analysing their secretive tax strategies to ask: are they paying their fair share?".
posted by Gyan
on Feb 4, 2009 -
34 comments
Moreover, based on the empirical distribution of height and wages, the optimal height tax is substantial: a tall person earning $50,000 should pay about $4,500 more in
taxes (pdf) than a short person earning the same income. Draw what inferences
you will.
posted by Pants!
on Dec 15, 2007 -
41 comments
Many people want to legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana and other drugs, however, few know that many
U.S. states are content simply to tax. In fact,
even the federal government wants a share (middle of p. 89 of the PDF), and
used tax stamps in
early prohibition, but only the states have recently issued
issued cool
stamps (be sure to click "exhibit"). The point, of course, is not to actually tax the drugs, but to
penalize the drug dealers for tax evasion as well as drug sales.
They have brought in some money, though. A few interesting state government pages:
Conecticut,
Nebraska,
North Carolina and their
tax return form, and
Kansas.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim
on Jan 15, 2007 -
30 comments
Drowning the government in a bathtub -
"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Thus spoke Grover Norquist, of
Americans for Tax Reform.
"The lunatics are now in charge of the asylum", quipped the conservative UK
Financial Times. Hardly, says
Paul Krugman. The strategy?: "Instead of challenging popular liberal programs directly, the Republicans are creating fiscal conditions that make those programs unsustainable." [lead post, Am. Prospect]. In other words, the
400 billion dollar deficit, coupled with the Bush tax cuts, is designed to shift the obligations of the Fed
onto the States and, later, to cause a fiscal train wreck after Bush is out of office.
posted by troutfishing
on Jun 12, 2003 -
58 comments
The bait and switch. A last-minute revision by House and Senate leaders in the
tax bill that President Bush signed today will prevent millions of minimum-wage families from receiving the increased child credit that is in the measure.
posted by four panels
on May 29, 2003 -
21 comments
Millionaires' Havens, Heavens And Hell Holes: Ghastly, depressing
Monaco comes in for a deserved drubbing from Philip Delves Broughton in this week's
Spectator. The idea of billionaires surfing the Web looking for a hide-out makes me giggle and gag, but it appears poor people can play too. Have a look at (free!) e-zine
Escape From America; run your index finger down
a list of
tax havens and choose the
paradise place you'd scarper off to, if your money problems, whether from excess or lack of money, ever become too [
sorry...] taxing.
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Nov 29, 2002 -
9 comments
July 17th - The Day That Counts. These people have a plan to make their feelings known on the issue of public money being diverted to religious organizations. I had no idea that the atheists were so organized! Is this sort of thing a tremendous waste of time, or do you think it can, or will affect policy discussions?
posted by kristin
on Jul 13, 2001 -
11 comments
Proposed IRS rule could limit the freedom to link. The US Internal Revenue Service is proposing a rule that might make it inadvisable for not-for-profit organizations to provide links on their Web sites to
any political site. The IRS is proposing to interpret any link to a political site from the pages of a nonprofit as evidence that the nonprofit is "engaging in political activity" and thus in danger of losing its 503(c) status.
posted by lagado
on Feb 5, 2001 -
8 comments
