90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, December 5, 2021

IRS data proves Trump tax cuts benefited middle, working-class Americans most

Creepy Joe Biden and congressional Democrats’ Build Back Better (BBB) Act is now in the hands of the Senate. That legislative body’s 50-50 partisan split will undoubtedly make the bill’s passage difficult.

In order for BBB to become law, Democratic Senate leadership will need to convince moderates such as Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) that the legislation’s $2.4 trillion price tag can be offset by expanding the IRS and its enforcement efforts while imposing substantial tax reform measures.

Congressional Democrats have argued that one of the best ways to pay for the legislation is to raise taxes on wealthy households, which, according to many on the left, have benefited disproportionately and unfairly from the 2017 tax reform law passed by Republicans and signed by former President Trump. The latest data, however, proves that this claim is pure mythology.

Income data published by the IRS clearly show that on average all income brackets benefited substantially from the Republicans’ tax reform law, with the biggest beneficiaries being working and middle-income filers, not the top 1 percent, as so many Democrats have argued.

A careful analysis of the IRS tax data, one that includes the effects of tax credits and other reforms to the tax code, shows that filers with an adjusted gross income (AGI) of $15,000 to $50,000 enjoyed an average tax cut of 16 percent to 26 percent in 2018, the first year Republicans’ Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went into effect and the most recent year for which data is available.

Filers who earned $50,000 to $100,000 received a tax break of about 15 percent to 17 percent, and those earning $100,000 to $500,000 in adjusted gross income saw their personal income taxes cut by around 11 percent to 13 percent.

By comparison, no income group with an AGI of at least $500,000 received an average tax cut exceeding 9 percent, and the average tax cut for brackets starting at $1 million was less than 6 percent. (For more detailed data, see my table published here.)

That means most middle-income and working-class earners enjoyed a tax cut that was at least double the size of tax cuts received by households earning $1 million or more.

What’s more, IRS data shows earners in higher income brackets contributed a bigger slice of the total income tax revenue pie following the passage of the tax reform law than they had in the previous year.

In fact, every income bracket with filers earning $200,000 or more increased its tax burden in 2018 compared to 2017, and every income bracket with a top limit lower than $200,000 paid a smaller proportion of the total personal tax revenue collected.

That means that Republicans’ tax reform law resulted in the tax code becoming slightly more progressive — the exact opposite of what Democrats have claimed over the past four years.

The IRS data further shows that the tax reform law — which included a variety of business tax cuts, including a large reduction in...

You run, run, runaway

It's your heart that you betray

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I bet you're not so civilized

Shootin' at the walls of heartache

Bang, bang

I am the warrior

Well, I am the warrior

And heart to heart you'll win

If you survive

Marjorie Taylor Greene to Hold Press Conference on the Treatment of January 6 Protesters

On December 3, 2021, the office of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene released a media advisory announcing a press conference that will address the treatment of January 6th detainees at the DC Jail.

The press conference will take place on December 7, 2021 and will coincide with the release of “Unusually Cruel: An Eyewitness Report From The DC Jail.” Greene will be accompanied by Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, and Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar.

Greene has previously described the January 6 inmates as “political prisoners of war.”

Greene stressed that she did not support the storming of the Capitol, but she views the punishment meted out against the demonstrators as excessive: “No one has argued in defense of the Capitol riot, and I’ve always openly said I was very upset by it, but after seeing these men myself in the DC Jail, I can attest this abuse is true.”

So far, over 600 people have received charges for the January 6 protests.

In a piece published on November 4 at The Epoch Times, Congressman Louie Gohmert, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Congressman Matt Gaetz, and Virginia Congressman Bob Good described the treatment of January 6 protestors as “tyrannical” and an act of “apparent political revenge and retaliation.”

In the concluding remark of this piece, the congressmen warned that “If we as a country continue to allow this abuse of power to unfold and turn this nation into a banana republic, there is nowhere left in the world to take refuge for lovers of liberty and freedom.”

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #98

US Companies Are ‘Hostages’ to China

Foreign firms doing business in China should be aware of the costs of transacting with a totalitarian regime that controls everything in society and can easily bend any company to its will.

Heads of U.S. corporations don’t dare to criticize the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) even in private settings. They know Big Brother is always watching them.

JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon’s quick apology over a joke he made recently about the country’s communist regime provides a good example of how business leaders fear retribution from Beijing.

Clyde Prestowitz, author and strategist on Asia and globalization, explains the true cost of doing business in China in his latest book “The World Turned Upside Down: America, China, and the Struggle for Global Leadership.” He was a presidential advisor and a leader of the first American trade mission to China in 1982.

The U.S. companies that are highly coupled with China face all kinds of risks, from intellectual property theft to commercial cyber espionage. But the biggest, most fundamental risk is “the loss of free speech,” Prestowitz says in his book.

Dimon is not alone as there are many examples of free-world CEOs and presidents making apologies or backtracking when they anger the Chinese regime.

During Hong Kong protests in 2019, for example, Apple pulled from its app store a map application widely used by pro-democracy protestors that showed the location of police patrols and tear gas deployments, citing security reasons. The move was made after Chinese state media piled pressure calling for the app’s removal. Google also sparked controversy when it removed a Hong Kong protest role-playing game from its app store.

These are by no means the only apparently self-censorship incidents by U.S tech companies. Apple, for example, removed nearly 55,000 active apps from its app store in China since 2017, according to a New York Times report. They include apps made by minorities oppressed by the regime, including Uyghurs and Tibetans.

Over the years, the list of entities that have caved to Beijing’s censorship demands has grown long. The Gap, Disney, Delta Airlines, Medtronic, Marriott, the NBA, and many others have all bowed to the Chinese regime over issues ranging from Taiwan to Uyghurs to Hong Kong.

Such actions by U.S. firms, though, have drawn criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, who accuse companies of sacrificing American values for the allure of profits in the world’s second-largest economy.

For the CEO of Apple Tim Cook and other U.S. corporate executives navigating the Chinese market, they effectively become “hostages” to the whims of the Chinese regime.

“They may be perceived as the heads of American companies, but they fear Beijing far more than they fear Washington,” Prestowitz writes in his book.

Since there’s no rule of law in China, they become “captive,” he adds. In Washington, they have lawyers and lobbyists that give them the power to influence or sue the U.S. government. In Beijing, however, they can’t sue the Chinese regime because they know they would lose—the courts in China are controlled by the Communist Party—and would face retaliation from...

Joe Biden did his best at Friday morning's press conference to deflect attention from a surprisingly anemic jobs report.

It’s all in the spin — or “lies, damned lies, and statistics” if you will.

During President Joe Biden’s Friday morning press conference, he made three risible claims in quick succession — doing what he could to deflect attention from a surprisingly anemic jobs report: 210,000 jobs added, less than half of the 550,000 expected in November.

1. Oil Companies Are Creating High Prices For Consumers

First, he claimed credit for the drop in wholesale oil prices through his “largest ever” release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve while encouraging India, Japan, United Kingdom, and even China to do the same — though he admitted that China hadn’t done so yet. This, he, said, caused oil and gas prices to drop, saying, “Since the end of October, the average weekly price of gasoline on the wholesale market has fallen around 10 percent.”

Of course, no word from the president on his administration’s war on domestic oil and gas, including canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, ramping up regulatory uncertainty by proposing an economically devastating methane rule. At the same time, he’s encouraging Russia’s Putin to produce more energy and giving the green light to Western Europe’s growing dependency on Russian natural gas via dropping efforts to prevent the completion of Putin’s Nordstream II gas pipeline under the Baltic.

He also failed to mention that one big reason oil prices could be declining is that the economy is stalling due to global fear of renewed (but ineffective) government lockdown efforts designed to make it look as if they’re doing something about new COVID-19 variants delta and omicron.

Continuing his discussion about oil, Biden claimed that retail gasoline prices haven’t fallen as much as they should. Retail prices typically lag declines in wholesale prices, so, he said, “I’ve asked the Federal Trade Commissions to consider whether potentially illegal and anticompetitive behavior in the oil and gas industry is causing higher prices for consumers when they don’t need to be that high because the wholesale prices have come down so much. So, we can assure to the American people are paying a fair price for gas.”

This deflection is from a well-worn political playbook. When politicians, and the bureaucrats they empower, take measures that make energy more expensive through things such as requiring special gasoline formulations, discouraging the construction of additional refinery capacity, preventing new oil production, carbon taxes, etc., it results in higher energy costs. That’s the point. That was the goal all along.

But higher energy costs are unpopular with the public, so, they must invent a boogeyman to deflect public attention from their own guilt in causing the higher prices. They do this by claiming the companies have engaged in collusion. The modern oil and gasoline refining and distribution industry is highly competitive. As a result, these investigations amount to no more than theater. When she was California’s Attorney General in 2016, Vice President Kamala Harris launched an investigation claiming oil producer price collusion while that state’s Gov. Gavin Newsom did so again in 2019.

2. The Supply Chains Are ‘Sped-Up,’ Stores Are ‘Well-Stocked’

Biden’s next whopper happened a minute later as he was talking up his administration’s efforts to fix the supply chain. “The shelves of our stores are going to be well-stocked,” he said.

“We’ve sped up operations at our ports,” he said. “For example, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the two busiest ports in America, over the last month the number of containers left sitting on the docks for over eight days is down by 40 percent… What does that mean? It means that the product are no longer sitting on the docks, they’re getting off the docks into trains, into trucks, into vehicles to get them to the store shelves. This is an incredible success story.”

He then added, “We’re heading into holiday season in strong shape. We averted this potential crisis by figuring out what needed to be fixed and then we brought together the people that had the capacity to fix it, or at least alleviate it.”

So, let’s go back to the main claim bolstered by data, that shipping containers “sitting on the docks for over eight days is down by 40 percent.” The number of containers not moving out of the heavily unionized, regulated, and notoriously non-automated ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach could drop because more are moving out — or the number could drop for other reasons.

On Dec. 1, it was reported that vessel wait times in Southern California are averaging 26 to 30 days compared to Houston at two to six days. But the smoking gun comes from a shipping industry publication which reported on Nov. 30 that “The Port of Los Angeles is forecasting import volumes in the week of Nov. 21-27 to drop 41.1%.” Why? Because “U.S. import volumes were at least temporarily easing as most pre-holiday cargoes have shipped and many Chinese factories were operating at about 60-70% capacity due to power and labor shortages.”

So, the 40 percent drop in containers sitting around was predicted and was due, not to the herculean effort of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg but rather to a 41.1 percent drop in imports, caused, in part, to labor and energy shortages in China. Oops.

3. Build Back Better Will...