Our family hasn’t yet received the political boondoggle that is the federal tax rebate enacted as part of an economic stimulus plan. But other folks have, and they’re telling the world how they spent the money.
Check the list at the new blog How I Spent My Stimulus. It’s full of ideas that range from responsible and political to entertaining and downright wacky.
Somehow I don’t think this dude’s wife will be impressed with the scary likeness of her now emblazoned forever on his arm. Then again, she married the guy, so she probably knew he was capable of pulling a bizarre stunt like that one day.
My Dad forwarded to me an e-mail that included this gem about all of the taxes conceived in the minds of politicians over the past century (the impact of several of them on just our family has been chronicled on this blog):
Accounts receivable tax
Building permit tax
CDL license tax
Cigarette tax
Corporate income tax
Dog license tax
Federal income tax
Federal unemployment tax
Fishing license tax
Food license tax
Fuel permit tax
Gasoline tax
Hunting license tax
Inheritance tax
Inventory tax
IRS interest charges (tax on top of tax)
IRS penalties (tax on top of tax)
Liquor tax
Luxury tax
Marriage license tax
Medicare tax
Property tax
Real-estate tax
Service charge taxes
Social Security tax
Road usage tax (truckers)
Sales taxes
Recreational vehicle tax
School tax
State income tax
State unemployment tax
Telephone taxes
– Federal excise
– Universal service fee
– Federal, state and local surcharges
– Minimum-usage surcharge
– Taxes on recurring and non-recurring phone charges
– State and local phone taxes
– Telephone-usage charge tax
Utility tax
Vehicle registration tax
Vehicle sales tax
Watercraft registration tax
Well permit tax
Workers compensation tax
The kicker to the e-mail: “Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago, and our nation was the most prosperous in the world. We had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and Mom stayed home to raise the kids. What happened? Can you spell ‘politicians?’”
Proposals to give Americans a break from gasoline taxes this summer — and perhaps to offset it with a “windfall profits tax” on oil companies — are being roundly criticized by economic experts and pundits across the country. Here’s a selection for your reading pleasure:
– Charlotte Observer: “This is flimflam work. The plan can only hope to provide small and limited relief. … This is still sleight-of-hand chicanery. Sen. Barack Obama … is right to oppose it. So should the rest of us. What’s needed is a president with a practical energy policy, not one who’s prone to pander.”
– The Chicago Tribune: “[A] three-month break is too brief to elicit much response from refiners. They would more likely pocket the difference, leaving motorists no better off.”
– Christian Science Monitor: “The tax break would add to the federal deficit. Gas-tax revenues normally go to the Highway Trust Fund, which is used to maintain and improve the highway and public transit systems.”
– Dallas Morning News: “The McCain-Clinton ‘gas-tax holiday’ would be celebrated most fervently in the corporate offices of oil companies and in Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and the other oil-producing nations. Your 18-cent ‘discount’? That would degrade and probably disappear faster than you could say ’supply and demand.’”
– Houston Chronicle: “What we have is a supply problem. It just seems strange to me that the people who scream the loudest about our dependence on foreign oil, Sen. Clinton and Speaker Pelosi among them, are the very ones who do everything they can to suppress production from domestic sources with repressive restrictions on offshore drilling and the building of new refineries.”
– The Mercury News: “For politicians to gain any real traction, they should bring something beyond a say-anything-for-a-vote pipe dream to the table. Be bold and call for a permanent end to the federal fuel tax.”
– Miami Herald: “The tax holiday — give-away, to call it by its real name — is a classic Washington palliative. It creates the illusion that the politicians are making the problem go away when, instead, they are actually making the problem worse. … [I]t does nothing to cure the underlying problem, which consists of an addiction to cheap gasoline coupled with wasteful habits like driving gas-guzzlers instead of gas-savers.”
– The Star Tribune in Minnesota: “The gas tax holiday is an empty political gesture that makes little sense. It wouldn’t put enough in consumers’ pockets to stimulate a sluggish economy. It wouldn’t solve the underlying problems that are sending gas prices soaring toward $4. And, by artificially stimulating demand, many energy experts believe it could send pump prices even higher when the gas tax kicks back in.”
– Tax Policy Blog: “ExxonMobil’s recent announcement of first quarter profits of $10.9 billion has prompted the predictable political demagoguery about “obscene” profits and the need for a new windfall profits tax. … If reporters were to dig just a bit deeper into the company’s earnings statement they would find that Exxon — like all the major domestic oil companies — directly pays or remits a staggering amount of taxes to governments both here and abroad.”
– The Wall Street Journal: “We tried this windfall profits scheme in 1980. It backfired. The Congressional Research Service found in a 1990 analysis that the tax reduced domestic oil production by 3 percent to 6 percent and increased oil imports from OPEC by 8 percent to 16 percent.”
President Bush and the Democratic Congress already have given Americans a tax rebate touted as an economic stimulant that isn’t likely to stimulate anything. Now politicians are tripping over themselves to offer more tax gimmicks as gasoline prices rise in this election year.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain was the first to propose a holiday from the federal gas tax (currently 18.4 cents a gallon) for the summer, and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has embraced a similar idea, with the twist of adding a “windfall profits tax” on oil companies to cover the lost revenue from the tax break. Barack Obama, Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination, has criticized those plans but countered with a call for a middle-class tax cut.
If only we voters could get a summer holiday from this kind of pandering!
A few home-schooling friends of ours gathered this afternoon for a music recital by some of the young people. Kimberly stopped for a bucket of grease from Kentucky Fried Chicken to contribute to the potluck event — 16 pieces of chicken and $1.02 in taxes. What a country!
Journalists like me should never write blogs that require a good grasp of mathematical logic. When we do, we spend hours trying to compose entries that would take normal people minutes.
That’s my way of saying that some of the year-to-date numbers you’ll find on this blog are suspect. Specifically, the year-to-date numbers for entries that recap our weekly tax bite may be off.
It’s too complicated for me to try to explain why. Just trust me when I say that the most trustworthy year-to-date numbers are in the entries that calculate our monthly tax bite. No partial weeks are involved there, so I’m not as confused when I try to do the math.
I’ll keep tracking the year-to-date numbers in the weekly entries; you’ll just have to wait until the end of each month to see the more reliable numbers.
One other administrative note: I have revised the year-to-date numbers throughout this blog for two reasons: 1) I discovered some math mistakes and fixed them; and 2) I have dropped property taxes from the monthly calculations.
Our mortgage statements this year have yet to reflect any property taxes paid to the county government. I’m guessing that means our lender only pays the taxes quarterly. (See, you learn things when you blog about taxes.)
Rather than trying to estimate those taxes monthly as I had planned, I’m going to make note of them when they are paid. That will explain in part why a few of the monthly tax entries will be noticeably larger.
You can’t even get a drink these days without the government seeing it as another opportunity to collect taxes.
First, there is the news out of California about a Democratic assemblyman pushing a plan to tax beer at the rate of 1,500 percent. I’m a lifelong tee-totaller so this kind of tax wouldn’t affect me even if some looney lawmaker in my home state of Virginia made the idea his own, but 1,500 percent? That’s insane!
It also has college Republicans riled up in California. They confronted the lawmaker about his idea and posted video of the encounter on YouTube.
Across the country in Maine, there is a more outrageous plan to tax soda because it’s bad for you. Under a bill that the governor of the state just signed, two liters of carbonated consumption will cost Mainers an extra 22 cents.
As the Tax Foundation notes in its blog, this kind of tax is an outgrowth of the “sin tax” movement that began with the assault on tobacco — yet another reason to hate all sin taxes.
Until February, I had worked as the managing editor and then editor of National Journal’s Technology Daily for seven-plus years. One of our recurring areas of coverage was the never-ending push by politicians to find ways to tax the Internet.
As the Wall Street Journal shows in an editorial about New York’s latest attempt at an Internet tax grab, the Supreme Court has made such taxes all but impossible by holding, rightly, that Congress alone has authority over interstate commerce. One state can’t tax consumers in another state for purchases made online.
But that reality won’t keep the tax-and-spenders from trying:
New York Gov. David Paterson is not repeating the worst mistakes of his predecessor. That’s too high, or perhaps we should say too low, a bar. Still, the new governor has resurrected one of Eliot Spitzer’s least popular ideas, a tax on Internet sales that he hopes will raise more than $70 million a year. Despised by consumers and constitutional scholars alike, this new tax will hit e-shoppers within weeks.
By signing the state’s budget, Mr. Paterson is now attempting to do what Mr. Spitzer only threatened: force out-of-state retailers such as Amazon.com to collect New York’s sales taxes, which approach 9 percent, including local levies.
The bad news for New Yorkers, the Journal predicts, is that “some companies will feel pressure to pay instead of doing battle with a state government” until a court overturns this tax grab.
I made a trip to Atlanta last week for a work-related conference. It’s a 10-hour drive and I hate to fly, so I drove and was able to take Kimberly and the kids with me.
My company paid most of the tab, save for food and tourism for the family. I didn’t include the taxes my company paid in the weekly tax bite, but I wanted to make note of it in a separate entry just to give readers a sense of how much travel can add to the expenses their companies pay.
The tax tally for my Atlanta trip:
– Hotel (Courtyard Marriott in Buckhead): $76.50, for three lousy nights!
– Gas in South Carolina (35.2 cents a gallon): $9.60
– Gas in Virginia (38 cents a gallon): $5.35
– Food: $2.39
Most of my food was covered as part of the Heritage Resource Bank I attended. Taxes most certainly were paid on those meals as well, but I have no way of calculating them.
In any case, the Media Research Center is out somewhere around an extra $100 just because of the taxes accrued on one work-related trip. Imagine the tax bite taken out of companies across America every year because of travel. The number has to be astounding.
Our family is Atlanta the rest of this week. I’m here for week, and my wife and kids tagged along. They toured the Coca-Cola factory today and bought some goodies.
The sales taxes, at the exorbitant rate of 8 percent, totaled $4.78.
I love the South, and I discovered another reason to love it today.
While on a road trip for a work-related conference in Atlanta, our family bought some bottled water at a Flying J in South Carolina. The state didn’t tax us one red cent for the right to satisfy our thirst. I couldn’t believe it!
Tomorrow is Tax Freedom Day. Theoretically speaking, every penny you have earned since Jan. 1 this year has gone to the government in the form of one tax or another. But tomorrow you can celebrate your freedom from the taxers and spenders!
“I work almost four months a year until I’m finally free. Every penny that I earn they keep ’til April 23.”
How much do you really pay in taxes? If you knew, you might get angry. You should -- and I hope this blog will get you riled. For the next year, I'll be blogging about the taxes our family pays so you can appreciate how much you pay. Get the details at "The War On Taxes."
