VAT, Bunnies, DC Mail 20110826

Mail 689 Friday, August 26, 2011

Value Added Tax

Dr. Pournelle:

As I understand it, the Value ADDED Tax is seen as a sales tax only by the end user.

All the rest of the way up the production, distribution, and sales chain, the value ADDED at each step must be computed. The businessman is supposed to get credit for his costs and pay tax only on his contribution to the value of the product. This sounds to me like a full employment program for tax accountants and government auditors.

It is probably a small matter in comparison with the easy-to-swallow-in-small doses shift of our money to government coffers that the VAT offers. But, like the Bunny Inspectors, these are people we should not have to pay.

I think Dr. Smith, E.E. Smith, that is, had something to say about low taxes due to restriction of the government to its proper sphere of authority. With the remark that if it were not for the space piracy problem it would be necessary to reduce taxes even further to keep too much money from accumulating in the accounts of the Galactic Patrol.

Jim Watson

If government gets more money it will simply spend it, and continue the 7% exponential rise in the size of government. Canada and some Latin American countries seem to be able to reduce their deficits without disaster. Why can’t America?

Food "insecurity"

"As many as 17 million children nationwide are struggling with what is known as food insecurity. To put it another way, one in four children in the country is living without consistent access to enough nutritious food to live a healthy life…"

What you have to do is look for the keywords in this statement. Such as "insecurity", and "nutritious", and "healthy".

What they’re saying here is not that people can’t get enough raw calories to stay alive. What they’re saying is that they can’t get the *right* *kind* of food, i.e. the food that the government thinks you ought to be eating instead of the food you actually prefer.

Or, in the case of most lower-income folks, the food that’s all you have *time* to eat. When you have twenty minutes to get from your first-shift job at the law office to your second-shift job at Safeway, you haven’t got time to prepare and cook a meal with plenty of vegetables and few starches or saturated fats. You’re going to buy something you can eat with one hand while you drive.

—

Mike T. Powers

When bunny inspectors just won’t do

I am so glad the feds are available to save us from ourselves.

http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/gibson_factory_raided_by_fbi.html

A.S. Clifton

Housing

Jerry,

You said,

"I do not know the origin of the right to have a house, nor of the obligation for someone else to pay for it."

The Realpolitik answer is Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, et al’s desire to buy votes with the public purse.

I have to agree that the Constitutional basis is murky…let me see:

It has nothing to do with laying taxes or providing for the common defense.

In the short term, it certainly is beneficial to the welfare of those of receive this largess, but is detrimental to the persons who have paid the bill (and in the long term, most of the ostensible beneficiaries have also suffered), so it is hard to argue that it has provided for the general welfare.

It has certainly benefited from the power to borrow money, but one should not borrow money just because one can.

Building materials are articles of commerce, but there is a large step from regulating commerce to stimulating or mandating it (as several Courts have pointed out in re: Obamacare).

A lot of the beneficiaries hare further benefited from lax enforcement of the laws of naturalization and laws of bankruptcy, but again it is hard to see how not enforcing the law is a power of Congress.

If the intent has been to inflate the value of the coin of the United States, then it’s been a winner.

For that matter, it has also empowered the Fed to counterfeit money (aka quantitative easing, whereby the counterfeit is given the same value — deflated — as the previous fiat money).

Given the number of homes in Hollywood which have been forced into foreclosure, I guess for a time it promoted the Useful Arts.

I will say the one can make no argument one way or the other about Piracies committed on the high seas. There are other, metaphorical Piracies which one might claim to have benefited, but again, I don’t think the purpose of the enumerated power was to help the pirates.

Again, I don’t see how the war powers are enforced by this.

And last, they might have done this for the District of Columbia, but not for the rest of the country.

Jim

As a general principle, let Washington demonstrate its superior abilities by demonstrating them in the District of Columbia, where the Congress has the power of dictatorship if it wants it; and certainly has the Constitutional right to spend money on things like education. When DC has the best schools in the country then we might well want to listen to the Department of Education on how to run the schools in the states. Last I heard, Congress isn’t doing any better job of educating its direct subjects in the District than any State is doing. Perhaps they just don’t know how?

Glen Reynolds today

http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=86

An excellent presentation on government intervention in the economy.

Phil

Glen is always worth paying attention to. I don’t as a rule watch many presentations, though. I’m a word man…

Free people are not equal, and equal people are not free

Jerry,

You comment that you could not find a source for this made me curious. This lead me to Lawrence Reed and the “Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy”

http://www.gppf.org/pub/seven_principles.htm

1) Free people are not equal, and equal people are not free.

2) What belongs to you, you tend to take care of; what belongs to no one or everyone tends to fall into disrepair.

3) Sound policy requires that we consider long-run effects and all people, not simply short-run effects and a few people.

4) If you encourage something, you get more of it; if you discourage something, you get less of it.

5) Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.

6) Government has nothing to give anybody except what it first takes from somebody, and a government that’s big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you’ve got.

7) Liberty makes all the difference in the world.

Mike Plaster

I have been saying that Free men are not equal and equal men are not free for long enough that I do not say “people”. The English language has always recognized that “men” and “mankind” includes both sexes, and I have known these principles from well before the fad of saying “his or her”, or Damon Knight’s made up pronoun yeye came into use. The general principles can be gathered from Aristotle and Cicero, but they are not in that succinct form. I learned that concise form a long time ago, probably in a political philosophy seminar.

The dose is the poison

Hello Jerry

I believe there is a saying that suggests it is not the substance itself that is poisonous but the amount. Feed a lab rat enough of any substance and cancer, liver/kidney failure, blindness, etc… will result.

Could it not be the same way with government borrow and spend? too much is a bad thing?

—

Numquam satis – slogan of the Obama administration

"Politicians are worse than thieves. At least when thieves take your money, they don’t expect you to thank them for it." Walter Williams

The dose makes the poison is an old maxim of pharmacy. I hadn’t thought of it as applying to government, but of course it does.