The rapidly rising cost of food, energy and other daily staples could allow many Americans to reduce their tax bills next year, the I.R.S. confirmed on Tuesday.
Tax rates are adjusted for inflation, which in typical times means incremental movements in the thresholds for what income is taxed at what rate. But after a year that brought America’s fastest price growth in four decades, the shift in rates is far more notable: an increase of about 7 percent.
The implication of the article is that a peasant will enjoy more spending power than in 2022 because his/her/zir/their tax bill goes down (why only peasants? successful Americans are already in the top tax bracket and will stay there). But, of course, this happens only for those peasants whose real earnings went down, eroded by Bidenflation. So the peasant earns less in real terms and also pays a bit less tax, but overall should still have a lower spending power in 2023 than he/she/ze/they had in 2022.
Speaking of spending, at NBAA this week I learned that one can cut costs by renting that mid-engine sports car instead of buying:
Just don’t try to take luggage larger than a 1st grader’s backpack on your weekend getaway. An airline roll-on is at least 3X too large for the frunk (there is no trunk), making this Audio R8 useless as a transportation machine compared to a C8 Corvette.
The seat was also uncomfortable for my 6′ frame. I would be driving with knees on chest. I wouldn’t recommend anyone over 5’6″ in height spending his/her/zir/their massive 2023 tax savings on renting an Audi R8.
Here’s a Facebook profile photo of a person in the San Francisco Bay Area software industry (UC Berkeley grad and former academic!) whom Facebook thinks would want to be friends with me:
Of course, it is good that he/she/ze/they got his/her/zir/their first COVID-19 vaccine shot. That’s something we can bond over. But if the purpose of these profile photos is to encourage people to comply with CDC instructions, no matter how absurd or in conflict with what the Science-following European technocrats have decided (e.g., no vaccines or boosters if you’re under 50 in Denmark), shouldn’t there be a frame for those who’ve gotten what is, I think, their 5th shot?
What’s in this person’s feed? Rage against “Judge Qannon” who is being too friendly to Donald Trump. A note about a female identifying Italian Prime Minister: “Sudden realization: Benito Mussolini became Prime Minister of Italy in 1922.” More about the aftermath of Joe Biden’s raid on Donald Trump’s house. Rage against the illegitimate Supreme Court: “For the record, four of the current court Justices (including the Chief) were nominated by Presidents who lost the popular vote. At least three were confirmed by a Senate majority that represented a minority of the US population. And it was THAT Court that decided that, hey, we don’t like a half-century of American jurisprudence.” Praise for the Inflation Reduction Act (timely, considering that my friends in Berkeley say they’re paying $7 per gallon for gasoline). More rage against Trump. Something about Matt Gaetz going to prison for having sex with “children” (age of consent in Science-following Maskachusetts is 16; were there cash-oriented ladies younger than 16 hanging around Matt Gaetz and getting paid to work?). Rage against the Supreme Court for allowing a state to impose a 15-week limit on abortion care for pregnant people. Excitement that a person identifying as a “woman” has an important job in the U.S. Navy. (answering the question Are women the new children?) COVID-19 statistics and how the vaccinated are impervious to death via SARS-CoV-2. Rage against “Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle for her unilateral decision to overturn the mask mandate.” (It is not always glorious when those who identify as female hold important jobs.)
How about a frame that says “I got my 5th booster and I’m as healthy as the Pfizer CEO“?
After receiving strong bipartisan support in the Legislature, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation earlier today authored by Senator Connie M. Leyva (D-Chino) to establish legal protections for technology users when they receive unsolicited sexually explicit images and videos, also known as ‘cyberflashing.’
Also known as the FLASH (Forbid Lewd Activity and Sexual Harassment) Act and sponsored by Bumble—the women-first dating and social networking app—SB 53 would create a private right of action against any person over 18 years of age who knows or reasonably should know that the lewd image transmitted is unsolicited.
During its legislative journey, legislators in both the Senate and Assembly signed on in support of the FLASH Act, including Senator Lena A. Gonzalez (D-Long Beach) and Assemblymember Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) as principal coauthors and Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D-Winters), Senator Monique Limón (D-Santa Barbara), Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris (D-Irvine), Assemblymember Luz Rivas (D-San Fernando Valley), Senator Susan Rubio (D-Baldwin Park) and Senator Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) as coauthors.
The article includes a photo of the bill’s author:
The image is a good example of “lewd” by Islamic standards. The woman shows part of her chest, all of her hair, all of her face. Maybe a prostitute would do that in Kabul, but who else? There are a ton of immigrants from Afghanistan to California. Can they now sue if they receive images like the above? If not, why not? I hope that nobody will say that non-Islamic standards of modesty are somehow superior to Islamic standards.
Join us for an introduction, categorization and explanation of the climate risks facing business aviation. We’ll also include predictions and estimations of the impact climate has on the industry. Participants will walk away from this session with a better understanding of why this is so relevant for our industry, and how climate risks could impact the industry’s future survival.
The first casualty of climate change is diversity, apparently, because “DE&I in Business Aviation – Practical Implementation” is scheduled to conflict with the above:
How can a variety of business aviation organizations, like aircraft operators, FBOs and other service providers, successfully introduce diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) principles into their daily operations? Attend this session to get guidance and practical tips to building your organization’s DE&I strategy.
What’s different this year? Inflation means that ordinary schlubs can pay tax rates that were sold as applying only to the elite. The Obamacare “Net Investment Income Tax” of 3.8 percent on top of ordinary income and capital gains taxes, for example, wasn’t supposed to hit Joe Average. But what if Joe Average tried to escape the lockdowns and school closures in California by selling a house and moving to Texas? Adjusted for inflation in the real estate market, his house might not have gone up in value at all. In other words, his purchasing power from selling the house to buy a different house wouldn’t have changed (probably reduced, actually, in terms of how big a house in Austin can be purchased with the proceeds from selling a house in California). But almost surely he will have more than $250,000 in nominal gains. This is all an illusory inflation-driven “gain” and the tax code recognizes that to a small extent by excluding the first $250,000 of house price inflation. But on the rest of it, Joe will have to pay California capital gains tax, Federal capital gains tax, and an additional 3.8 percent for Obamacare. From the IRS:
The Net Investment Income Tax does not apply to any amount of gain that is excluded from gross income for regular income tax purposes. The pre-existing statutory exclusion in section 121 exempts the first $250,000 ($500,000 in the case of a married couple) of gain recognized on the sale of a principal residence from gross income for regular income tax purposes and, thus, from the NIIT.
How about a wage slave? If he/she/ze/they was earning $170,000 in 2019 and got bumped to $210,000 in 2021, his/her/zir/their spending power is actually lower due to raging inflation. Yet now he/she/ze/they is subject to the 0.9 percent Obamacare “Additional Medicare Tax” due to having income over a fixed threshold of $200,000 (soon to be the price of a Diet Coke?).
What kind of people are paying the bill for all of the great work done by Congress and Joe Biden? From the haters at Heritage Foundation:
In 2018, due to the cruel policies of the dictator Donald Trump, the rich Americans who earned 21 percent of all income paid only 40 percent of income taxes. Separately, keep in mind that the above chart relates to cash income. A person could be in the “Bottom 50%” with $0 in W-2 income and still have a spending power and lifestyle better than someone earning $50,000 per year (in the “25%-50%” column) due to means-tested public housing, health care, SNAP/EBT, smartphone, and broadband. See “The Work versus Welfare Trade‐Off: 2013” (CATO) for the states where being on welfare leads to a larger spending power than working at the median wage. Maskachusetts is #3 in Table 4, with welfare being worth 118% of median salary.
New census data is shining more light on the Bay Area’s pandemic exodus: The region saw the largest drop in median income of any big U.S. metro area as wealthy people moved away — and current residents of all incomes are more likely to relocate soon than in any other major population center.
Household income in the San Francisco metro area fell 4.6% from 2019 to 2021 to $116,005 a year, according to a census report released this month.
The article highlights rich people moving, but, given that some percentage of Americans move every year, the drop in median income could just as easily be caused by no-income and low-income people staying. The article does not note that someone who is signed up to the full package of means-tested benefits (not to be characterized as “welfare”!), i.e., free housing, free health care, free food (SNAP/EBT), Obamaphone, and the new free broadband, is extremely unlikely to move (since it could take 10-20 years on waitlists to get the same package in a different location or state).
So a city or state is guaranteed to hold onto its lowest-income citizens (not to say “poorest” because they may enjoy a median earner’s lifestyle; see below) even when everyone else seeks to move, e.g., due to lockdowns, school closures, social disorder, and high crime.
Ignore the pre-Biden dollar figures and concentrate on the “percentage of median salary” column, which should be valid despite inflation. Prior to the 2020-2022 coronapanic enhancements to welfare, in other words, being on welfare in California yielded roughly the same spending power as working full time at the median wage (and with no risk of exposure to a virus at work and no need to wear a mask for 8 hours per day).
I think it is interesting from the point of view of journalism that the situation is characterized by rich people disproportionately moving rather than by welfare state beneficiaries disproportionately staying.
This machine has brewed its last cup. How much is the new one?
The $42.39 price is 42 percent inflation relative to the $29.88 price paid in 2017. What does the official government site say? It should cost $35.88 (20 percent inflation).
Separately, if you don’t like the weak Keurig coffee, you might enjoy this one though it is slightly more effort. Keurig is trying to be French press coffee, but with minimal contact time between water and grounds. A standard drip machine like this yields a more intense drink.
There has been a lot of drama in the currency and bond markets regarding the new UK government’s economic policy, which sounds like it is along the lines of what the U.S. did in the 1980s. President Ronald Reagan proposed shrinking government with spending cuts so that tax cuts could be implemented; Congress agreed to the tax cuts, but refused to cut spending and the result was massive deficits, which eventually faded due to economic growth.
The UK government is already somewhat leaner than what we have in the U.S. Heritage says that the UK government consumes 42 percent of GDP, which is a touch higher than the US government (39 percent), but the UK figure includes nearly all health care spending. If we add government-mandated-and-regulated “private” health care to the US number, we get closer to 50 percent of GDP.
The business folks and investors with whom I spoke in the UK were generally positive regarding Prime Minister Truss‘s plan, which they felt would deliver a substantial amount of growth. They attributed much of the hatred and hysteria to an anti-Conservative press. On the other hand, hatred and hysteria in currency and bond markets isn’t usually driven by whatever the Guardian has to say.
One part of Truss’s plan seemed insane to me, i.e., preventing consumers from seeing that prices for energy have gone up. But the French are also doing it. Wholesale electricity prices are up 5X and consumers are paying… 1X. Party On with printed money.
Britain is the only Group of Seven country with a smaller economy today than in the fourth quarter of 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic. In the 40 quarters preceding the pandemic, its economy grew at an annual rate of less than 2 percent more than half the time.
Maybe a country where all of the young people get stumbling drunk every night at the pub isn’t ideally situated for growth?
The government’s tax plan would cancel a scheduled increase in the corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 19 percent and would make permanent a temporary increase in the annual investment allowance, letting businesses deduct the full cost of qualifying plants and machinery up to 1 million pounds in the first year.
This sounds reasonable to me! With a 25 percent rate, a company would have to be crazy to refrain from pushing all of the profits into Ireland (12.5 percent rate and full membership in the EU if frictionless trade with Europe is required). The depreciation simplification should front-load investment and activity and shouldn’t change the tax owed in the long run (spending one million pounds will yield one million pounds of deductions against revenue).
The most questionable parts of the plan are the income tax cuts. Reducing the basic rate of income tax by one percentage point, to 19 percent, will fuel consumption at a time when the Bank of England is attempting to curb inflation.
The prime minister’s proposal to eliminate the 45 percent tax bracket on incomes above 150,000 pounds per year — the top 1.1 percent — was also unwise in the current fiscal and economic environment, …
I’m not sure that a 45 percent rate is revenue-maximizing. At that rate, a Brit would get a great return on pushing activities offshore or structuring activities to get the 10 percent entrepreneur’s rate. The U.S. government is greedy for money and the top personal income tax rate is 37 percent (which works out to 37 percent in Florida or 50.3 percent in California).
It looks like the markets are locking Britain into the same policies that put it on the slow bus to economic mediocrity. Given some reasonable value placed on leisure and drunkenness, the decision to forgo the second job or language study and spend the evening in the pub with friends will be a rational one. For those who are ambitious, the decision to emigrate will likely be a rational one (one of our neighbors in Florida recently arrived from the UK, having accepted a transfer within a multinational industrial products company (held up for more than a year due to coronapanic restrictions on non-walk-across-the-border-and-claim-asylum immigration); he will do the same thing that he did in the UK, but for a much larger market).
What am I missing? My default assumption is that markets are right, but I can’t figure out what is so terrible wrong with the latest British government’s plans. Is part of the explanation that the pound isn’t the world’s reserve currency and therefore the consequences of deficit spending are more severe than they are for the U.S.?
Separately, how can a country full of midgets and randoms fail to thrive?
I hope that everyone had a good Latinx Heritage Month (September 15-October 15 because the Mayan calendar is used?). The Democrats seem to have rebranded themselves the “Abortion Care for Pregnant People Seeking Reproductive Health Care Party”. We flipped on the TV after school last month so that the kids could enjoy a U.S. Open match. A commercial for Val Demings came on. Mx. Demings is challenging Marco Rubio for a U.S. Senate seat. During a spot that mentioned no issues other than abortion care, our 7-year-old learned the following words and phrases: abortion, rape, abortion, incest, abortion, sexual assault, incest, and abortion. The ad was then repeated multiple times during the match. No ads for Mx. Demings that were not abortion care-related were shown. I’m sure that the transition to focus on abortion care over all other issues has been carefully tested by Democrats with respect to motivating voter turnout, etc., but I wonder how well it will work with the Latinx. Consider that in Latinx America, where democracy is the prevailing form of government, abortion care for pregnant people in all stages of pregnancy, as is available as part of reproductive health care in a variety of Democrat-run U.S. states, is not available. In fact, voters in many Latinx American nations have settled on near-total bans on abortion care for pregnant people in reproductive health care settings. If the Latinx in Central America are not passionate about offering abortion care to every pregnant person, why will the Latinx in the U.S. vote for politicians whose principal promise is abortion care for every womb?
Marco Rubio wants to criminalize doctors and ban abortions with no exceptions for rape and incest. I’m fighting to save our freedoms.
I am still afraid of catching COVID. As a young, healthy, bivalently boosted physician, I no longer worry that I’ll end up strapped to a ventilator, but it does seem plausible that even a mild case of the disease could shorten my life, or leave me with chronic fatigue, breathing trouble, and brain fog.
Rather, [the ravages of COVID] emerge during the middle phase of post-infection, a stretch that lasts for about 12 weeks after you get sick. This period of time is so menacing, in fact, that it really ought to have its own, familiar name: medium COVID.
Dr. Karen has plenty of company in the halls of medicine:
Yet many have inferred that COVID’s dangers have no end. “What’s particularly alarming is that these are really life-long conditions,” Ziyad Al-Aly, the lead researcher on the veterans studies, told the Financial Times in August. A Cleveland Clinic cardiologist has suggested that catching SARS-CoV-2 might even become a greater contributor to cardiovascular disease than being a chronic smoker or having obesity.
The last point shows how great Science is. Consider a 300 lb. human who has spent the last 2.5 years Following the Science by staying home and snacking, thus avoiding catching SARS-CoV-2. Compare to Novak Djokovic, who has been infected with the deadly virus at least once. A layperson might imagine that Djokovic is healthier than the couch whale, but Science tells us that the 300 lb. Playstation hero is the better insurance bet. (The Biden Administration agrees, which is why the plague-ridden unvaccinated Djokovic is still banned from entering the United States.)
COVID is so deadly that people are dying before they can be dragged to the hospital:
By the end of the Omicron surge last winter, one in four Americans—about 84 million people—had been newly infected with the coronavirus. This was on top of 103 million pre-Omicron infections. Yet six months after the surge ended, the number of adult emergency-room visits, outpatient appointments, and hospital admissions across the country were all slightly lower than they were at the same time in 2021, according to an industry report released last month. In fact, emergency-room visits and hospital admissions in 2021 and 2022 were lower than they’d been before the pandemic.
Keep wearing your cloth mask inside the world’s most packed art museums:
The pervasiveness of medium COVID does nothing to negate the reality of long COVID—a calamitous condition that can shatter people’s lives. Many long-haulers experience unremitting symptoms, and their cases can evolve into complex chronic syndromes like ME/CFS or dysautonomia. As a result, they may require specialized medical care, permanent work accommodations, and ongoing financial support. Recognizing the small chance of such tragic outcomes could well be enough to make some people try to avoid infection or reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 at all costs.
Long COVID is real and we should expect an expansion of deficit spending to feed the author’s industry, plus tons of money shoveled out to those who spend years at home with Netflix and Xbox. “At all costs” means go to the theme park, get into a packed airliner for a vacation rather than drive, go to the grocery store in person rather than having a Latinx essential worker deliver, etc., while wearing the simple cloth or surgical masks that Dr. Fauci suggested in the spring of 2020. Here’s someone avoiding COVID on October 10, 2022 at the Louvre (fortunately, the ventilation system got a big upgrade during the reign of Emperor Napoleon III):
And here’s a simple mask blocking SARS-CoV-2 in what turned out to be the least crowded room within the Versailles chateau:
