Sep 14

The U.S.–once a low-tax haven–now causes many to renounce U.S. citizenship over taxes

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CNBC reports on the relatively new phenomenon of tax exiles who flee America’s current high tax rates. The U.S. currently has the world’s highest corporate tax rates and substantially higher-than-average personal income taxes. See our earlier report here.

See the CNBC story here.

The urge to renounce U.S. citizenship is increasingly strong among high-earners who produce income overseas as well as domestically. In recent years, the U.S. government has been aggressively taxing Americans who hold money in foreign bank accounts.

“More Americans renounced their citizenship and terminated their long-term residency in the first three months of the year than ever before, courtesy of the crackdown in foreign tax rules.”

Sep 12

Initial research shows minimum wage increases in Seattle and San Francisco have cost thousands of jobs

suffering

Supporters of minimum wage laws are often hopelessly illiterate regarding basic laws of economics.

In recent election cycles, however, advocates of minimum-wage hikes have won some huge “victories” in such cities as Seattle and San Francisco. The Seattle City Council, for example, imposed a $15-per-hour minimum wage on all employers in the city last year.

Now there is sufficient data to show that these big hikes in the minimum wage have cost thousands of people their jobs. See here.

And it is a myth that minimum wage earners elsewhere in the United States are generally struggling to survive and need government to force their employers to provide a “living wage.”

· Only 11.3 percent of workers who earn the minimum wage live in households officially defined as poor.

· A whopping 63.2 percent of workers who earn the minimum wage are second or even third earners, living in households with incomes equal to twice the poverty line or more.

See here.

Sep 12

Ridesharing is safer than taking cabs

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For decades, the act of driving a cab has been preposterously overregulated. Government hacks in almost every jurisdiction have enacted stupid laws and policies requiring government licensing and approval of all cab companies. In many states, cab companies are ridiculously regulated as “public utilities” like water and electricity. Cab companies, in turn, have paid off politicians to keep these corrupt systems going and to keep out competition.

The ubiquity of handheld devices such as I-Phones, however, has spurred innovation. People seeking a ride can simply punch into an “app” and contact other people who happen to be driving a car in the same direction. It is known as “ridesharing.”

Now, after just a couple years of widescale ridesharing in some cities–and the rise of ridesharing companies such as Uber–we have enough data to compare such ridesharing operations with traditional government-licensed-and-approved cab companies. See here.

1) Uber is serving poor neighborhoods better than government-approved taxis, providing more rides than taxis to people from neighborhoods with lower-than-average-household-incomes.

2) It is safer for drivers to work for a ridesharing company compared to a taxi company. Taxi drivers carry cash and are attractive targets for robberies; Uber drivers are paid electronically through the “app,” and do not engage in cash transactions.

3) Uber and other ridesharing firms also cut down on drunk driving, and thus save lives. They provide additional options for people seeking rides after drinking at bars and restaurants. See this report.

Despite this growing data, government-licensed cab companies are presently lobbying heavily to get their uncle government to ban ridesharing.

Sep 09

Arctic Ice Has Increased by Hundreds of Miles in Past 3 Years

polar bear

Numerous manmade-global-warming alarmists predicted a decade ago that Arctic sea ice would disappear by 2015. Yet climatologist Steven Goddard says “The Arctic has gained hundreds of miles of ice over the past three years, much of which is thick, multi-year ice.” See here.

Goddard’s post also provides links to headlines and “news stories” in which prominent “experts” and “leaders” predicted Arctic ice would disappear during summer by 2015.

Sep 09

More Businesses are Dying than Starting in America

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According to Jim Clifton, chairman and CEO of Gallup, “for the first time in 35 years, American business deaths now outnumber business births.” See here.

Small business startups are being choked off by mountains of taxes and regulations. “Believe it or not, when measured in per-capita terms, socialist countries such as Denmark, Finland, New Zealand and Sweden now have more startups than [Americans] do,” according to Tom Purcell.
“So does Hungary, formerly part of the Soviet bloc, as well as Italy, which hasn’t had many successes in the economic prosperity column since before the Roman Empire collapsed.”

As recently as 2008, American business startups outpaced shuttered businesses by 100,000.

Sep 08

Wages have nothing to do with miserliness or generosity

john c. goodman

The brilliant economist John C. Goodman is out with another brilliant column. This one about the foolishness of minimum wage laws. See here. :

To summarize: a firm that pays workers more than they are worth cannot survive because it cannot match the prices and the rate of return to investors of its rivals. A firm that pays workers less than what they are worth, cannot survive because it will not be able to retain its employees. Competition in the marketplace tends to determine wages; there is a definite logic to what people are paid; and it has nothing to do with miserliness or generosity.

Sep 08

Obama Claimed CO2 is Melting Glacier that has Actually Been Melting Since 1815–Long Before Rising CO2 Levels

mhiker

Last week, U.S. President Barack Obama was on an Alaska propaganda trip, designed to promote government’s “climate-change” socialism agenda. Give government vastly greater power, says Obama (and hundreds of other U.S. government officials) or everyone is doomed.

To illustrate the government’s hysterical claims, Obama spoke at Alaska’s Exit Glacier, claiming the Glacier is melting rapidly due to manmade CO2 in the atmosphere. Tellingly, Obama claimed the melting of the Exit Glacier is “as good a signpost of Climate Change as anything.”

The problem is that the glacier has been receding since 1815, according to the National Park Service. See here.

And there are other Alaska glaciers that have been growing in recent years! The Hubbard Glacier, the largest calving glacier on the North American Continent (25 percent larger than Rhode Island), has been growing steadily. See here.

Sep 06

Government continues waging war on pain doctors and their patients

tyranny

For years, government drug investigators and prosecutors have sought to act as “supervising physicians” over the medical profession–indicting and imprisoning doctors (and often, their patients) whom the government deems to be dispensing or using too much pain medication.

Pain is a symptom, not an illness, and no two doctors or health experts agree on pain management styles or medication dosages. And the complexity of government regulations make the management of chronic pain very dangerous. In the words of the great Rodney Balko (see here):

As more doctors drop out or are forced out of pain treatment, pain patients grow more desperate. Doctors aren’t permitted to post-date painkiller prescriptions, and patients can’t get refills until their prescription runs out. So they may horde pills when they can, or seek out multiple doctors, often without telling one doctor that they’re seeing others.

In some cases, prosecutors imprison doctors who happen to have patients who are caught reselling pain meds. See the case of Virginia doctor William Hurwitz, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison after a judge falsely instructed jurors they could not consider whether Hurwitz acted in “good faith” when he prescribed large doses of medicine.

In one notorious Florida case, a paraplegic and multiple sclerosis patient named Richard Paey was sentenced to 25 years in prison for “drug distribution” (based solely on the quantity of pills in Paey’s possession, without any evidence that Paey ever “distributed” a single pill). As Balko writes,

Prosecutors claimed that no legitimate pain patient could possibly need the amount of medication Paey was taking. But once Paey was in prison, the state of Florida treated him with the same class of painkillers it put him in prison for possessing, and at the same or higher doses. “It became a comedy of bureaucracies,” Paey told me in a 2007 interview. “One agency prosecutes me for taking too much medication… Then I get to prison, and the doctors examine my records and my medical history, and they decide that as doctors, they have to give me this medication…

(When Paey told his story to the New York Times, he was moved to a higher-security prison, further away from his family, and was put into solitary confinement.)

Now we read that a Florence, Montana doctor has been criminally charged with 400 counts of illegal drug distribution for allegedly overprescribing pain medication to Montana patients. And another Montana doctor, Mark Ibsen, has opted to quit treating chronic pain patients altogether. See here.

Ibsen states that he live in constant fear of DEA investigation and criminal prosecution.

Sep 05

“Disability” Checks Now Sustain 11 Million Americans

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There are roughly 300 million Americans. Some 100 million of those are children or retirees. Of the remaining roughly-200 million eligible workers, MORE THAN 5 PERCENT claim to be “disabled” and unable to work. They generally draw monthly “disability” checks for life.

The “labor participation rate” is now near an historic low. See here.

The “disability” “program” is–like all similar programs worldwide–running short on cash. Today the program pays about $142 billion annually–many times the annual budgets of some ten states. See here.

Of course, many “disabled” people could work and work very productively. Numerous studies have documented that those who go on disability checks tend to report drastically lower-than-average lifetime earnings. Indeed, many become trapped in a vortex of poverty from which they can never escape.

Aug 29

Montana Political Candidate Faces Government Accusation of—Purchasing a Domain Name Without Notifying Government

Gianforte

There is a powerful movement among the ranks of government trusters to allow government vastly more power in the area of political regulation.

This movement sometimes calls itself a “campaign finance reform movement” and promotes its pro-government agenda by means of certain innocuous-sounding slogans. It posits that the influence of the private sector on politics must be curtailed or limited by government.

Every single claim made by these campaign-finance “reformers” is untrue. And the entirety of this “reform movement” threatens fundamental principles of First Amendment law.

Yesterday, August 28, 2015, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle (a Montana newspaper that has been feeding its readers a steady diet of deceptive “campaign-finance-reform” messaging) published a front-page (above-the-fold) feature story bearing the headline, “Political complaint filed against Gianforte.”

Here is the link to the BDC article.

Upon reading this, many people would be forgiven for supposing the Montana gubernatorial candidate was being investigated for bribery or other corruption.

But the guy is being investigated for–wait for it–purchasing a domain name and hiring a staffperson before notifying the government that he was going to run for governor. Apparently, the government wants to know EACH AND EVERY MOVE OR IDEA that a person makes or has that might lead to political campaigning.)

Campaign finance “reformers” would actually take American speech and press law back to the days when presses needed to be government-licensed. They seek to create a landscape in which EVERY STEP that a person makes toward criticizing the state must be state approved.

(Note: nothing in this discussion should suggest any support whatsoever for candidate Gianforte.)