Vaunce News

🔒
❌ About FreshRSS
There are new available articles, click to refresh the page.
Yesterday — March 28th 2024Your RSS feeds

Start Walking: Democrat-run NYC Approves $15 Toll on Cars Entering Manhattan

Democrat-run New York is poised to become the first U.S. city to hit drivers with punitive tolls after transit officials on Wednesday approved a $15 fee for most motorists headed to the busiest part of Manhattan.

The post Start Walking: Democrat-run NYC Approves $15 Toll on Cars Entering Manhattan appeared first on Breitbart.

Before yesterdayYour RSS feeds

Youngkin Stands Firm as Virginia Democrats Prefer to Give Millions to Pot Instead of Opportunity

Democrats in the Virginia General Assembly insist that Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, illegally appointed the director of the state’s renamed Office of Diversity, Opportunity, and Inclusion.  And they say they’re willing to give over $2 million more to commercial marijuana sellers to dramatize that point.

Created in 2020 under Youngkin’s predecessor, Democrat Ralph Northam, the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion sprang from a concept popularized by the Left and commonly known as DEI.

However, in his second week as governor, Youngkin signed an executive order Jan. 19, 2022, removing the term “equity” from the office’s name and replacing it with “opportunity.“ 

In November 2022, the Republican governor appointed Martin Brown, who is black, as Virginia’s chief diversity, opportunity, and inclusion officer—as well as director of the renamed Office of Diversity, Opportunity, and Inclusion.

In response to Youngkin’s name change for the diversity office, Virginia Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, successfully offered an amendment to the state’s budget bill requiring that the office revert to its original name. 

Youngkin has criticized the budget passed March 9 by the Virginia General Assembly, and the spending plan awaits the Republican governor’s signature. Democrats hold a 21-19 majority in the state Senate and a 51-49 majority in the House of Delegates.

In a statement emailed Monday to The Daily Signal, Surovell said he “introduced the amendment because the governor has refused to hire a chief DEI officer which is a position created and titled in state law.”  

“If the governor is going to violate state law, the money needs to be directed,” the Senate majority leader added, apparently meaning “redirected.” 

Surovell’s budget amendment requires Youngkin to change “Diversity, Opportunity, and Inclusion” back to “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” by June 1, or the diversity office’s $2.3 million funding would go to the Virginia Cannabis Equity Business Loan Fund, a program to help licensed marijuana sellers. 

“Governor Youngkin has been clear that he doesn’t have any interest in a retail market for marijuana; instead, we should be working to fix a backward budget written by Democrats that has $2.6 billion in new taxes on Virginia families,” Youngkin press secretary Christian Martinez said Monday in a written statement to The Daily Signal.  

“Since the beginning of the administration, the governor has challenged the groupthink of the progressive Democrats’ pursuit of equity at any cost, instead focusing on advancing equal opportunities, not equal outcomes for all.”  

Surovell didn’t respond before publication to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on why his amendment tied the sale of marijuana to the diversity office’s name change. 

Last year, Surovell and Virginia House Speaker Don Scott, D-Portsmouth, wrote to Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican, inquiring whether Youngkin’s name change for the office violated state law. 

In the letter, the two Democrats argued that Youngkin illegally renamed the office, saying the action violated the 2020 law that established the office in the executive branch with a director of diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

Here is the letter that @DonScott757 and I sent to @JasonMiyaresVA seeking an opinion regarding the Governor DEI actions – our first question is whether the Governor is bound by Virginia Law because apparently he doesn't think he is@FairfaxNAACP @charlottewords @LVozzella pic.twitter.com/E2PzbTvGL6

— Senator Scott Surovell (@ssurovell) May 2, 2023

The Senate and House leaders argued in their letter to the attorney general that Youngkin illegally named Brown as director since the governor didn’t appoint him to the office named in state law.  

In his written statement to The Daily Signal, Surovell said Youngkin had “hired someone for that office [and] renamed the person a diversity, opportunity, and inclusion officer who then made offensive comments regarding equity.”  

DEI is dead,” Brown said last April in a speech at Virginia Military Institute referencing the office’s name change. 

“We’re not going to bring that cow up anymore. It’s dead,” Brown said. “It was mandated by the General Assembly, but this governor has a different philosophy of civil discourse.”

The move caused an uproar in the General Assembly as many Democrats, joined by the Virginia chapter of the NAACP, demanded Brown’s resignation. 

The governor’s office defended Brown at the time, saying that Youngkin would “continue to advance equal opportunities—not equal outcomes—for all Virginians.”  

“This is too important of an issue to succumb to those seeking to cancel Chief Brown for challenging the groupthink of the progressive Left’s pursuit of equity at any cost,” the statement said. 

Ken McIntyre contributed to this report, which was modified with additional details within 24 hours of publication.

The post Youngkin Stands Firm as Virginia Democrats Prefer to Give Millions to Pot Instead of Opportunity appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Socialist Policies: Steps Toward a System That Has Always Failed

Red Guards Cell, Austin, Texas. By Reddebrek, CC BY 3.0

A country’s slide into socialism/communism begins with socialist policies. And every one of these has been proposed in the United States: like an exorbitant minimum wage which is exorbitant and not tied to performance or return on labor, a universal basic income, charging for electricity usage based on income rather than quantity of electricity used, issuing carbon usage credits, allowing the state, not the consumer, to decide how much is enough, imposing a billionaire tax, taxing wealth transfers and inheritance to prevent parents from helping their children, and taxing unrealized capital gains to discourage saving and investing.

Beyond the purely economic, policies that mandate demographic quotas for promotions, hiring, firing, or school acceptance are examples of social engineering that removes the “profit motive,” the reward for hard work, disincentivizing hard work, and resulting in the promotion of those who cannot meet the quality standards.

Washington State has proposed eliminating the bar exam in order to increase diversity among lawyers. Oregon high school students will no longer need to be able to read, write, or do math in order to graduate, for the same reason.

United Airlines announced that it would prioritize diversity in its selection of trainee pilots. And in order to ensure that the younger generation understands only the state agenda, homeschooling will be banned.

Socialism/Communism has never worked, but somehow, people keep voting for it and believing that this time will be different. The truth is that it has caused tens of millions to starve to death while robbing hundreds of millions of their innovation, creativity, and motivation.

The entire society, working different jobs from research scientist to ticket puncher, for an equal number of turnip coupons, is so unnatural that it can only exist in a totalitarian system where people have no choice.

No capitalist nation ever forced people to earn a profit, but communist countries had to use their secret police and state surveillance to force people not to.

No one was ever shot trying to break into East Germany or swimming to Cuba.

Socialism cannot bring prosperity because it destroys the market functions of private property and eliminates the incentives for more productive people to work harder or more inventive people to innovate. Socialists are always worried about wealth inequality, and their solution always involves taking money from the harder-working, more efficient people and giving it to the less productive.

Socialists believe that if they were to forcibly redistribute the wealth, everyone would be better off. The first problem with this logic is that the people who have wealth now would be worse off if someone stole it.

The United States has the highest GDP per capita in the entire American continent, from Canada to Argentina, including the Caribbean. The US average income is about $76,000 per year.

In Haiti, it is $1,748. If the socialists had their way and redistributed the wealth evenly across the roughly 1 billion people in the Americas, the average would be $35,000 per year. So, US citizens would be giving up more than half their income but would still be working the same jobs, for the same number of hours.

If you received the same wage, no matter what, you would stop doing overtime, stop coming up with new ideas, and pretty much stop working at all. In the Soviet Union, there was a joke: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

Almost every communist country began by abolishing money and nationalizing production of everything, including food. Within a very short time, these countries faced famines.

With no profit incentive, there was no motivation for farmers to grow food. Additionally, with no money prices, there was no rational way to calculate the cost of planting versus the money earned from selling the produce or to calculate how many resources should be allocated to producing food versus producing some other product.

Nearly six million people in the USSR starved to death in the Soviet Famine (1931-1934). Roughly half of these were Ukrainians, living in the “breadbasket of Europe.”

During the Khmer Rouge period (1975-1979) in Cambodia, between one half and a third of the population died of starvation and overwork, although nearly 100% of the population was sent out to the fields to farm. Venezuelans are facing hunger, while Cubans are facing shortages of everything.

The winner of the socialist starvation death toll competition is Mao Zedong, whose Great Famine (1958-1962) killed 30 million Chinese.

India was resource-rich and had the largest workforce, but socialist policies led to India becoming synonymous with extreme poverty. The USSR was the most resource-rich country on the planet and had one of the largest workforces, but had an economy about 5% the size of the U.S. China similarly had a huge workforce, and it was not until 2007 that the average Chinese citizen was earning more than the average American was earning in the year 1900.

Vietnam also experienced a mini-famine caused by communism, but they quickly realized that by privatizing farming, they were able to increase rice production.

It was privatization that also ended the Chinese famine, and Deng Xiaoping allowing private sector entrepreneurs to earn profits that lifted 800 million Chinese out of poverty.

No former communist country has ever reverted to communism. And China and Vietnam, the world’s largest remaining communist countries, dramatically increased the welfare of their people by allowing market economics, profit, and private ownership.

But both China and Vietnam remain dramatically poorer than the US because of their refusal to completely let go of communism/socialism.

Given all the evidence against it, how can American socialists believe that this time will be different?

The post Socialist Policies: Steps Toward a System That Has Always Failed appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Red_Guards_Austin

Red Guards Cell, Austin, Texas. By Reddebrek, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104103414

Study: Netflix Pays Its Top Executives Nearly 3x More Than Its Federal Tax Bill

The left-wing streamer Netflix pays its executives more money than it pays in federal taxes, according to a new study of the country's most flagrant corporate "tax dodgers."

Biden Wrong on Corporate Profits and Taxes

 

By Pieter Brueghel the Younger – Artdaily.org, Public Domain/Wikicommons

No, Mr. Biden, it is not true that some big corporations earned $40 billion in profits and paid no taxes.

President Biden’s State of the Union Address was just riddled with economic misinformation and misunderstandings. After nearly four years of failing Bidenomics, the country only averted a recession because the administration changed the definition. As the deficit, debt, under-employment, and inflation rise, scrambling for cash, the president is looking to raise taxes on mean old corporations.

Increasing taxes on greedy corporations may sound like a good idea, but unless you are on welfare, self-employed, or work for the government, your salary comes from a greedy corporation. And the greedier that corporation is, the more money it makes, the more jobs it creates, and the more salaries it pays. Increasing taxes on corporations increases costs, decreases corporate expansion, and encourages reducing the number of personnel. It also drives up the cost of products, resulting in fewer jobs and higher prices.

During the State of the Union address, Biden repeated his favorite statistic: “In 2020, 55 of the biggest companies in America made $40 billion in profits and paid zero in federal income taxes.” And, of course, this is complete nonsense. Companies are taxed on profits. Usually, when socialists make these types of claims, they are referring to gross revenue. In this case, Biden is misquoting a study done by a left-leaning think tank, ITEP, which looked at “pretax profits,” a questionable term. What they were probably examining was pretax income, not profits.

Pre-tax income refers to the total revenue a company earns before accounting for taxes, while profits typically refer to the income remaining after deducting all expenses, including taxes. If the study was indeed looking at pre-tax income rather than profits, it’s possible that these companies reported substantial revenues but utilized various legal deductions, credits, and other tax strategies to reduce their taxable income, resulting in a lower effective tax rate or no federal income tax liability for that specific year.

The irony of the tax credits companies use to avoid paying taxes is that many of them come from liberal Democrat policies. Companies get tax breaks for green initiatives, meeting diversity goals, employing the disabled, Research and Development Tax Credit, Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC), Renewable Energy Tax Credits, Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit, New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC), Opportunity Zone Tax Incentives, Employee Retention Tax Credit, Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) Exclusion, Energy-Efficient Commercial Buildings Tax Deduction, and Health Coverage Tax Credits.

The White House complains about companies using their tax credits while simultaneously inventing new ones.

The average American is suffering under the weight of Bidenflation, coupled with a decline in full-time employment. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The number of people employed part-time for economic reasons, at 4.4 million, changed little in February. These individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were working part-time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs.”

Knowing he has to do something to help people’s checkbooks, Biden has decided to go after nuisance charges. In the State of the Union, Biden said, “I’m also getting rid of junk fees—those hidden fees added at the end of your bills without your knowledge. My administration just announced we’re cutting credit card late fees from $32 to just $8.” And while I hate junk fees as much as anyone else, they are there to keep the price down. Take the fees away, and prices will go up to match the current price plus fees.

Thirty years ago, you did not see a line item on your plane ticket receipt showing that you had paid for checked baggage. But you did pay for it. The cost was just built into your ticket. Then oil became prohibitively expensive, and the price of plane tickets went up. So, to bring the price down slightly, the airlines charged a lower price to people without baggage. Today, if you pay $50 for your bag, that is the price of moving one bag from point A to point B. And you only pay for it if you have a bag. But under the old system, because airlines knew some people had bags and some didn’t, every ticket included an average of, say, $30, which everyone paid. If the government tells the airlines they cannot charge you $50 for luggage, they will just add it back into the ticket price, and everyone will pay it, whether they have a bag or not.

Corporations are already facing higher costs than they did under Trump, owing to gasoline being 50% more expensive and interest rates being about five times higher. In many Democrat states and municipalities, companies are being forced to pay above-market rates for low-skilled and unskilled work. The minimum wage in some places is now between $15 and $20 per hour. Companies are also facing higher theft and rising insurance costs. And most haven’t recovered the money they lost during two years of Biden-induced lockdowns and supply chain disruptions.

Eliminating fees (how that would even be legal or how it would be enforced is a frightening prospect) and slapping higher taxes on top of four years of economic destruction is just going to make it even harder for companies that are not Amazon and Walmart to remain in business.

The post Biden Wrong on Corporate Profits and Taxes appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Pieter_Brueghel_the_Younger,_’Paying_the_Tax_(The_Tax_Collector)’_oil_on_panel,_1620-1640._USC_Fisher_Museum_of_Art

By Pieter Brueghel the Younger - Artdaily.org, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10787890

Biden’s Billionaire Tax and Other Economic Follies

President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol, Thursday, March 7, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

President Biden is very concerned about how to get more money from working Americans and redistribute it to non-working and non-taxpaying people, both foreign and domestic.

He does not seem concerned about reducing his spending, stopping the funding of illegal immigrants, giving away money to Ukraine, or getting people off of welfare. Instead, the fix he came up with in the State of the Union Address was a proposed 25% tax on America’s billionaire households.

The top income tax rate currently is 37%, assessed on income of $346,876 for a married couple filing separately. Therefore, high-income individuals are already paying more than 25%.

He also claimed that “under my plan, nobody earning less than $400,000 will pay an additional penny in federal taxes.” So, at a glance, it seemed like he would continue to tax people with less than $400,000 income at a 37% rate but would tax people earning more than $400,000 at a rate of 25%, which makes no sense.

When you look more closely at his wording, however, the rate is not based on income but on accumulated wealth, violating the definition of the term “income tax”.

The “tax the rich” mantra surfaces during every Democratic administration, generally more than once. And the justification is always that X percent of the wealthiest families only paid a low income tax rate of Y, “And that just ain’t right.”

According to a 2021 White House study, the top 400 richest families paid an average income tax rate of 8%. During the speech, Biden claimed that the average billionaire only paid 8.2% federal income tax, which is not consistent with the White House study, which only looked at the 400 richest families, not all billionaires.

The study was also horribly flawed, as it counted unrealized capital gains as income, which is not consistent with current tax law.

The IRS, which would presumably have better data on taxes, determined that the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average federal income tax rate of 26 percent.

But even if the White House had been correct that people with high wealth paid low income tax rates, there is no taxable connection between wealth and income.

Wealth is defined by the accumulation of assets, whereas you only pay income tax on income. So, unless we are going to become a communist country that forcibly seizes the assets of the rich and gives them to the poor, then we need to avoid joining Biden on this first step down the slippery slope to serfdom.

The White House study including unrealized capital gains in their income calculations was a subtle nudge to get the public to accept a new tax law.

In previous speeches, Biden proposed taxing unrealized capital gains. But under US law, you only pay tax on capital gains when you realize them. You do not pay tax on the appreciation of your home or your retirement account until you sell it.

Until then, it is just a paper gain and could as easily turn into a paper loss before the time comes to cash it in.

If unrealized capital gains were to be taxed, assets would have to be appraised each year, and a tax would be calculated based on appreciation.

If you did not have enough money to pay the tax, you would have to sell off assets until the tax was covered. To be fair, if Biden wants to tax you when your assets go up in value, will he also give you a tax credit when they go down?

If the stock market has a bad year, should the government send you a check? Imagine someone saying, “Man, I wish I had picked some bad stocks because I could really use some cash right now.”

While we are on the subject of home values, Biden wants to help Americans buy a home and ostensibly tax them on the appreciation. Consequently, he wants to provide a $400 monthly tax credit for first-time homebuyers.

The issue is that this will increase demand for homes, which will drive up prices. The price will increase by the amount people can afford to pay, which is $400 a month.

He also wants to crack down “on big landlords who break antitrust laws by price-fixing and driving up rents.” Government legislation that reduces rents removes the incentive to build new rental units, which decreases the supply and drives up the price, hurting renters.

If the government implements a rent cap, then the result will be a shortage. Either way, renters will suffer.

Working Americans would have to cover the $400 tax credit given to homebuyers. So, the takeaways from the State of the Union address are that the president hates rich people, working people, homeowners, and renters.

The post Biden’s Billionaire Tax and Other Economic Follies appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Biden_SOTU_2024_01

President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol, Thursday, March 7, 2024, in Washington, D.C.  (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

White House on Biden Budget Boosting Spending: We Pay for It, Congress Should Ask for Higher Taxes

On Monday’s broadcast of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” White House Office of Management and Budget Shalanda Young responded to a question on if President Joe Biden’s budget will require more government spending by stating that “this President, unlike many who talk about fiscal

Biden’s DOA Budget

(John Hinderaker)

Joe Biden unveiled his 2025 budget proposal earlier today. In general, presidents’ budgets are hardly worth discussing. They project revenue and spending over the next ten years, and if you go back and look at them a few years later, they usually bear no relation to reality. And, in this instance, there is zero chance that Congress will pass anything resembling Biden’s budget, which can best be seen as a campaign document.

But, for what it is worth, this is what the Wall Street Journal had to say about it:

President Biden proposed Monday a $7.3 trillion budget for the next fiscal year that would raise taxes on wealthy people and large corporations, trim the deficit and lower the costs of prescription drugs, child care and housing.

Other than spending $7.3 trillion and raising taxes, it wouldn’t do any of those things. For purposes of comparison, federal spending in 2000, the last year of the Clinton administration, was $1.79 trillion. So Biden wants to spend almost exactly four times that much.

The fiscal 2025 budget would cut the deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade, and it would raise taxes by a net total of $4.9 trillion, or more than 7% above what the U.S. would collect without any policy changes.

Those hypothetical deficit cuts depend on economic forecasts in the out-years that won’t come true. The only meaningful fact is that Biden wants to raise taxes by nearly $5 trillion.

Biden’s purported budget is largely an exercise in fantasy:

The budget leaves some blank spaces. It lists principles for shoring up Social Security, without specifying a plan. It calls for paying for extensions of tax cuts for most households after 2025 but doesn’t detail how that would be paid for. And it calls for restoring the expanded child tax credit, but only temporarily, lumping that into the broader 2025 tax debate.

Biden’s budget proposes absurd taxes on corporations and “the rich”:

The budget repeats many past Biden tax-increase proposals, including higher tax rates on corporations and high-income individuals along with minimum taxes on the wealthiest Americans’ unrealized capital gains.

Which is insane. If the government taxes unrealized gains on unsold securities when the market goes up, will it write checks to investors when the market is down? Logically, it would have to, but of course that is not part of Biden’s proposal.

Biden rolled out several new tax increases last week, such as raising his new corporate alternative-minimum-tax rate to 21% from 15% and denying deductions when corporations pay any workers, not just top executives, more than $1 million.

The net effect of Biden’s proposals would be to give the United States one of the heaviest tax burdens in our history, equaled only once since World War II.

Is that because people are dying to give the federal government more money to waste? No, it is because many people are too naive to understand that, as has been said a million times, corporations don’t pay taxes, they collect them. Those taxes are actually paid mostly by customers (i.e., all of us) and secondarily by employees (i.e., most of us). But Biden’s budget is not about economics or, for that matter, mathematics, as the numbers will never add up. Rather, it is about politics:

Biden’s advisers are betting that a focus on lowering costs for families will help push the president to re-election.

Needless to say, Biden’s budget, if actually enacted, would raise costs for families, not lower them. Fortunately, there is zero chance of that happening.

Buttigieg: Biden Will Continue to Fight Deficit by Raising Taxes

On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Your World,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that there is more work to be done on deficit reduction, President Joe Biden will continue to work on reducing the deficit, and that’s why

White House on if Higher Taxes Kill Jobs: Businesses Have Lots of Resources, We've 'Given Them a Lot of Subsidies'

On Friday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Balance of Power,” White House Council of Economic Advisers member Heather Boushey responded to a question on whether the higher corporate taxes pushed by President Joe Biden will harm hiring by saying that “We need to
❌