Joel Mathis

The Weekly Standard seems genuinely mystified . Bringing U.S. corporate taxation in line with that of our global peers will spur the sort of broad-based growth that the Obama administration’s central planners could never achieve and that will benefit middle-income families quite as much as “the wealthy.”  Ahem . The first question was straightforward. Would they agree that if the US passed a tax bill “similar to those currently moving through the House and Senate,” GDP would be “substantially higher a decade from now”? Of the 42 economists polled, only one thought the Republican bill would boost the economy. The plurality said it wouldn’t, and the remainder were uncertain or didn’t answer. Back to the Standard: But the House bill, at least, contains some needed simplification: It cuts the number of brackets from seven to four, abolishes the estate tax, and gets rid of arbitrary breaks for such things as medical expenses, student-loan interest, and rehabilitating a historic

Today's New York Times : It is a maxim in Congress these days: If high-profile legislation affecting millions of Americans is about to expire, deal with it at the last possible second, preferably with rancor.  But a major exception is in the offing with the Bush-era tax cuts , which are set to lapse on Jan 1. Both parties in the House and the Senate are eager, perhaps even giddy, at the prospect of voting for their respective versions of an extension of the cuts this summer, well before the due date. Now, the piece goes on to say that the Democratic package would drop the cuts for high earners and keep them for the middle class. But with a divided Congress and this president in charge, does anybody expect the Democratic preference will become law? Anybody? (Crickets.) Right. We've already seen this movie before . So maybe it's time to end the debate, make the tax rates permanent rather than dickering with them every two years, and start planning for a budget withi

So says I in this week's Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk : The flat tax is Republican-led class warfare. It makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, for no better purpose than making the rich richer and the poor poorer. We have progressive taxation -- in which people with higher incomes pay a higher tax rate than those at the lower end of the scale -- for a reason: People on the low end are less able to pay. Flat taxes invert that logic, giving the rich a huge tax break and often burdening the poor. The Tax Policy Center says a low-income family making $31,000 a year would lose its $5,147 tax return under Perry's plan, for example. (Herman Cain's plan is worse. Nearly everybody making under $50,000 would see a huge tax increase.) Perry's plan was unveiled the same day as a new Congressional Budget Office report showing economic inequality is widening in this country. From 1979 to 2007, people in the richest 1 percent grew their after-tax income by 27

Stu Bykofsky, always the contrarian, uses his perch in the Philadelphia Daily News today to let the "Top 1 Percent" respond to the Occupy Wall Street protests. I found this excerpt to be particularly confounding: How do the members of the "1 percent" feel? I asked three - Renee Amoore, Tom Knox and George Bochetto - each a local, unapologetic, self-made millionaire. They believe they already pay their "fair share" in federal taxes. "I don't only pay the 35 percent," says Center City lawyer Bochetto, who was raised in an orphanage. "I also pay Social Security tax, state and city income tax, property tax. More than half of my income goes to the government. That's my fair share." Due respect to Bochetto and his rise to riches from the orphanage. Good for him! But does he really pay more than half his income to the government? If so, he needs to hire a new accountant—immediately. Why do I say that? Because the effective tax r

During my segment on the Morning in America show with Steve Hayward today, I tossed out the idea that—contrary to Laffer Curve expectations—the Bush tax cuts didn't actually increase revenue to government. That apparently resulted in some controversy after I left the air, with callers saying that I'm dead wrong on the topic. The easiest response here is to note that before the Bush tax cuts were enacted in 2001 and 2003, the federal government had a surplus of money to fund its operations and pay down the country's debt. After the tax cuts were enacted, we started borrowing money on a full-time basis. That's not proof on its own, of course, because we tacked on some new spending obligations during the Bush Era—most notably the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, increased national security spending aside from those wars, and the expansion of Medicare benefits to cover prescription drugs. So, hey, let's look at the revenues: Bruce Bartlett writes : "Accordi

At National Review today, Robert Verbruggen urges the federal government to save (admittedly minimal) money by tightening standards for the food stamp program. Spending on the program, he says, has quadrupled during the last 10 years and standards are too loose: This has created some truly ridiculous situations — such as the case of a Michigan man who won $2 million in the lottery, tied it up in investments, and received so little income from them that he was still eligible for food stamps. Until a recent policy change, food-stamp eligibility in the state was based solely on income, with no consideration of savings accounts, investments, or other assets. Though the policy was set at the state level, federal taxpayers picked up the tab. But how many millionaires are gaming the system to get food stamps? I'm guessing maybe ... this guy. Maybe there are a few others out there. But I'll pull a number out of my posterior and guess that 99.99 percent of all food stamp recipients ar

I noted recently that conservative hawk Max Boot was starting to sound like Paul Krugman.  Today, he again makes the economic case for leaving the military budget untouched: If the Pentagon is forced to slash a trillion dollars during the next decade—which would amount to an 18 percent reduction from the Obama budget projections released earlier this year—the Committee staff projects the total size of the Army and Marine Corps could fall from 771,400 personnel today to just 571,000, a 25 percent reduction that would make it impossible to respond to a range of different contingencies around the world . Some 200,000 soldiers and Marines who signed up to serve their country will be fired—and many of them will be hard put to find work at a time when the national unemployment rate is over 9 percent and the unemployment rate for young Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is believed to be over 20 percent. (For wounded veterans the rate is said to be over 40 percent.) We would not only be breaking

Nothing makes middle-class conservatives angrier than suggesting millionaires should be paying more in taxes . One admires such folks for sticking so rigorously to a principle that won't benefit them in the least, but still one wonders—why? Anyway, I've heard from you in blog comments and at Facebook. I also received a couple of letters on the topic overnight. The first, from John Senuta in Wickliffe, Ohio: Hey Joel here is another way to look at it .The poor that don't want to work and live off you they look at you as RICH and they want alot more of your money to spend.They want your TAX rate to go to 75% so they could live better,you can afford it RIGHT????  And by the way a portion of your phone bill pays for a cell phone for them to use FREE.Do you have a cell phone????How much are yoiu paying???Let dig a little deeper into your pocket and help them out.... There's a presumption here that "the poor" are a bunch of lazy panhandlers trying to get t

The farther I read into the Federalist Papers, the more I'm convinced the Tea Partiers only know about half their history. Back up: I didn't start reading the Federalists with the aim of debunking the Tea Partiers. But it's impossible to read historical documents about the nature of governance in America when there's a coalition of folks out there who so strongly identify with those historical personages . Their narrative, I believe, goes something like this: America was born, essentially, in a tax rebellion. And the Founding Fathers then created a limited government in order to avoid oppressing the people either with burdensome taxes or directly tyrannical rule. And maybe, just maybe, if the tax burden gets too large -- well, maybe, Americans have the right to resort to rebellion again . Like I said: I think that's only partly right. Because the Federalist Papers -- the documents we most use, aside from the Constitution itself, for insight into the Founders&#

Daniel Foster points to this Hill story , showing that Obama's health reform bill will actually sock the middle class with tax increases. The bolded parts are Foster's emphases: Taxpayers earning less than $200,000 a year will pay roughly $3.9 billion more in taxes — in 2019 alone — because of healthcare reform, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress' official scorekeeper for legislation. The new law raises $15.2 billion over 10 years by limiting the medical expense deduction, a provision widely used by taxpayers who either have a serious illness or are older. Taxpayers can currently deduct medical expenses in excess of 7.5 percent of their adjusted gross income. Starting in 2013, most taxpayers will only be allowed to deducted expenses greater than 10 percent of AGI. Older taxpayers are hit by this threshold increase in 2017. Once the law is fully implemented in 2019, the JCT estimates the deduction limitation will affect 14.8 million taxpayers — 14