Tax

Over the last month, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has proposed roughly $4 trillion in new tax hikes. That is meant to the cover, at least partially, the $7 trillion in spending increases he’ll impose if he wins the White House. As part of his tax hike plan, Biden promises his tax increases won’t hit any American who earns under $400,000. But they will. Even the Washington Post analysis of Biden’s tax plan concedes that his tax plan will impact 82 percent of American earners if enacted as proposed.The reason it will hit so many Americans is because of the change he proposes to corporate taxes. There is broad consensus among tax experts that such an increase will lead to corporations ‘reducing investment returns and cutting working wages’.

How would an independent Scotland have fared during the pandemic? We found out this week on the annual release of Gers, which adds up all Scottish spending and taxes and states the size of the gap. This year it's estimated at about 27 per cent of GDP, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which would make it the worst-hit country in the developed world. It's unlikely that a small country could sustain a deficit of this size even in a pandemic: the UK has been hit bad, but we have the pound and the Bank of England's QE to lower the cost of issuing debt. For a country of five million to run a deficit of 27pc would be far, far harder.

There’s talk of reparations in the air. Lobbyists from around the world are demanding sin-payments from former colonial powers. Let me add my voice to the clamour on behalf of this island’s indigenous Celtic people. My family are from Llanelli in Carmarthenshire and I believe that my compatriots have an excellent case to make against the Roman empire. This is not an extinct claim – the money is still in play. Britain was invaded by Julius Caesar in 55 BC and his visit was followed up a century later by the Emperor Claudius and his mob. The Roman occupation, which involved the military subjection of the Celtic peoples, lasted for about four centuries.

Will Labour ever stop pushing for punitive taxation? Not content with gifting the Conservatives an 80 seat majority in December, the supposedly more moderate Labour party under Keir Starmer is already dreaming up ways it can extract large sums from our pockets. Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds floated a ‘wealth tax’ at the weekend, so that the burden of paying for the Covid 19 crisis might fall upon the ‘very best off people’. Except it won’t be the very best-off people who get whacked by a wealth tax, as she should surely know. The highly mobile global super rich wouldn’t hang around for five minutes after a Labour government announced a wealth tax – any more than they did in France when Francoise Hollande introduced the same thing.

Could motorists be hit with the first fuel duty rise in ten years in this month’s Budget? According to the Sun, the PM’s chief advisor Dominic Cummings wants to use petrol and diesel as a revenue-raiser to fund big infrastructure projects outside the capital. But ending the fuel duty freeze after a decade might not be a good idea, particularly when many new Tory voters in the North are likely to be the worst affected. Fuel duty is an easy way to raise revenue in theory, as the demand for fuel is always high. It is also a tax that is difficult for motorists to avoid (though this doesn’t stop some from trying).

Donald Trump just got another spot of good news. The Supreme Court has cut him a break by taking up three cases directly relating to his financial records and will not resolve them until June 2020. So much for the prospect of his congressional invigilators quickly obtaining his records and embarrassing Trump or worse over his past financial transactions, including with Russia.The Court’s decision offers a reminder that Trump, for all his shenanigans, has a well-oiled machine behind him that is determined, in one way or another, to ensure that he ends his term as he began it — unchallenged, unmolested and unbowed. In two weeks, when he kicks up his heels at Mar-a-Lago, his Southern White House, he should be able to golf and chill to his heart’s content.

As Congressional Democrats become increasingly strident in their demands for Donald Trump’s tax returns, at least one prominent Democratic presidential candidate has yet to release his: former VP Joe Biden, or self-styled ‘Middle Class Joe.’ Since he left office, Biden has become a millionaire and bestselling author. He inked an $8 million book deal with Flatiron Books. He commands $100,000 in speaking fees per event. He owns multiple million-dollar homes. Yet Biden still refers to himself as ‘Middle Class Joe,’ a moniker that was always questionable at best. As vice president, Biden earned $230,000 a year, and his federal pension may be worth as much as $248,000 annually.

Give Donald Trump credit for being sporting about the fresh revelation in the New York Times that he racked up a cool $1 billion in losses during the 1990s, a sum that earned him the distinction of being the number one financial loser in America. ‘It was sport,’ he announced on Twitter. Indeed it was. Not everyone gets to play with the sums of money that Trump has splashed about in for decades. Unlike Scrooge McDuck, however, who wallowed in his swimming pool, Trump has followed a rather different ethos. He’s spent his way into bankruptcy repeatedly, only to be bailed out of his predicament by...who?

My libertarian friends object to some of my recent writings — in particular, an essay for First Things proposing a moderate economic nationalism as ‘A New Conservative Agenda.’ The various intellectual factions on the American right are all susceptible to utopianism and dangerously wishful thinking when they dwell too much in their own minds: they all need the benefit of a look through someone else’s eyes once in a while, even to see their own concerns more clearly. In the letter below, I respond to some friends’ objections and summarize — tidily, I hope — a few vital questions to which libertarians offer inadequate answers.