Trump, who enacted tariffs on steel and aluminum in 2018 during his presidency, sat with the podcaster in a nearly three-hour long episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan asked Trump if he was “serious” about using tariffs to offset the elimination of income taxes.

“To me, the most beautiful word — and I’ve said this the past couple of weeks, in the dictionary today — is the word tariff,” Trump told Rogan. “It’s more beautiful than love, it’s more beautiful than any — it’s the most beautiful word. This country can become rich with the use, the proper use, of tariffs.”

Trump said he would impose a 200% tariff on John Deere’s tractors if it closed an American factory and moved production to Mexico in September.

“Did you just float out the idea of getting rid of income taxes and replacing it with tariffs?” Rogan asked. “Were you serious about that?”

“Why not?” Trump responded. “Our country was the richest, relatively, in the 1880s and 1890s, a president who was assassinated named McKinley, he was the tariff king. He spoke beautifully of tariffs. His language was really beautiful: We will not allow the enemy to come in and take our jobs and take our factories and take our workers and take our families unless they pay a big price and the big price is tariffs.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has claimed in ads and in speeches that Trump’s plan to impose tariffs would act as a “national sales tax” and insisted that it would cost American families $4,000 a year in higher prices, the Wall Street Journal reported.

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The federal corporate tax rate in the U.S. is currently 21%, as enshrined in former President Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. But Harris seeks to move the tax rate to 28% to draw in funding for plans she would have as president, mirroring a proposal made by President Joe Biden in March, according to NBC.

A 28% corporate tax rate would be “a fiscally responsible way to put money back in the pockets of working people and ensure billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share,” Harris campaign spokesperson James Singer told NBC in a statement on Monday. “As President, Kamala Harris will focus on creating an opportunity economy for the middle class that advances their economic security, stability, and dignity.”

If passed, the law would bring in roughly $700 billion dollars worth of taxes over the next decade, according to projections provided by the Congressional Budget Office. It is lower than what Harris initially proposed during the 2020 presidential race, which would have raised the corporate tax rate from 21% to 35%, where it originally was before Trump’s 2017 tax cuts were passed, according to NBC.

The 2017 law is set to expire in 2025, and Trump has said that Democrats will be “under tremendous pressure” to renew the cuts, warning that failing to do so or making “it impossible to renew” will “destroy the economy,” according to NBC. Trump has also vowed to slash taxes even further should he be elected president in November.

“Instead of a Biden tax hike, I’ll give you a Trump middle class, upper class, lower class, business class big tax cut,” Trump told a crowd at a rally in New Jersey in May.

Singer told NBC that Trump’s policy ideas would “drive up the deficit” and “increase taxes on the middle class,” linking him to the “extreme Project 2025 agenda.” Trump and his campaign have repeatedly said that they were not involved in the creation of Project 2025, a set of sweeping policy proposals put forward by the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.

Harris’ proposed tax hike is among the first of her policy proposals put forward by her campaign since she announced her candidacy in late July. She laid out her vision for American economic policy in a rally speech on Friday, but specifics or cost estimates for some of her ideas have yet to be provided.

Harris is likely to be appointed at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) this week as her party’s nominee. The convention will take place from Aug. 19 to Aug. 23.

The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].

LB 1317 is the fourth major sound money bill to become law this year, as state lawmakers across the nation scramble to protect the public from the ravages of inflation and runaway federal debt.

Under the new Nebraska law, any “gains” or “losses” on precious metal sales reported on federal income tax returns are backed out, thereby removing them from the calculation of a Nebraska taxpayer’s adjusted gross income (AGI).

Supported by the Sound Money Defense League, Money Metals Exchange, and in-state advocates, Nebraska’s sound money measure passed out of the unicameral legislature’s Revenue committee unanimously before being amended into a larger bill.

Sponsor Sen. Ben Hansen said upon news of the formal enactment of his legislation:

Gold and silver are the only forms of currency mentioned in our Constitution and with that comes the people’s ability to use it as such without penalty from the government. Saving, and using, gold and silver is our right and one of the only checks and balances to our federal government’s unending devaluation of our paper currency.

Taxpayers often realize ‘gains’ when converting the monetary metals back into Federal Reserve notes even though the ‘gains’ do not reflect an increase in real value but rather reflect the currency’s ongoing devaluation.

Despite the lack of “real” gains, the Internal Revenue Service imposes capital gains taxes on such transactions. Nebraska has now opted out at the state level, declining to carry the IRS’s position into the definition of Nebraska income.

Jp Cortez, executive director of the Sound Money Defense League, explained during his testimony before the Revenue Committee that the ferocious wave of inflation facing Nebraskans is largely caused by harmful actions of the Federal Reserve:

The state can take a different course and provide Nebraska citizens cleaner access to gold and silver ownership – and these metals are not only a proven inflation hedge but states all over the country are remonetizing constitutional sound money in the form of gold and silver.

Eleven other states already do not charge an income tax on sales of precious metals, with Arkansas, Arizona, and Utah recently enacting such laws. Meanwhile, Iowa, Georgia, Oklahoma, Missouri, West Virginia, and Kansas have been considering similar legislation in 2024.

“Investments in precious metals coins and bullion in Nebraska are now rightly exempt from both sales tax and income tax,” said Stefan Gleason, CEO of Money Metals and Chairman of the Sound Money Defense League.

Neutralizing Nebraska’s income tax treatment of the monetary metals removes significant disincentives in the Cornhusker State against the ownership and use of the monetary metals.

Meanwhile, LB 1317 revises the state’s formal definition of money by adding language that states: “Money does not include central bank digital currency.”

The new law defines central bank digital currency as “a digital medium of exchange, token, or monetary unit of account issued by the United States Federal Reserve System or any analogous federal agency that is made directly available to the consumer by such federal entities. Central bank digital currency (CBDC) includes a digital medium of exchange, token, or monetary unit of account so issued that is processed or validated directly by such federal entities.”

Sen. Hansen said: “I believe we have to be extra vigilant in our assessment and application of a Central bank digital currency to make sure they do not become a danger to our freedom. That’s why we defined in LB 1317 that CBDC’s are not classified as currency in Nebraska, which should help protect against unwarranted mandates for their use in the future.”

Versions of this “anti-CBDC language” have advanced or signed into law in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida, South Dakota, and Indiana . Congressman Alex Mooney has also introduced a federal measure to block the Federal Reserve’s digital currency scheme.

In his testimony, Cortez discussed the potential risks of adopting a CBDC, including creating a greater ability to track all financial transactions, disallowing certain types of purchases, or even completely “turning off” a targeted individual’s access to money.

Nebraska joins Utah, Wisconsin, and Kentucky as states to have enacted pro-sound money legislation into law so far in 2024. Currently ranked 22nd in the 2024 Sound Money Index, Nebraska’s ranking is expected to rise.

About Sound Money Defense League

The Sound Money Defense League is a non-partisan, national public policy group working to restore sound money at the state and federal level and publisher of the Sound Money Index.

The response was for the Federal Reserve to surge interest rates, which cost any consumer who has a credit card or financing for a car or home even more. Even now, inflation is down from a year ago, but remains far above the government’s goal. Blame it on Joe Biden.

That’s according to JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon who was interviewed by the Economist. A report at the Daily Mail confirmed that Dimon questioned the effectiveness of “Bidenomics,” previously known as “Bidenflation,” and “blamed Joe Biden’s $5 trillion economic stimulus for causing inflation.”

Biden has been scheming to raise a lot of taxes, especially on the wealthy “in order to invest in the middle class,” the report said. That’s opposite the wildly successful plan used by President Ronald Reagan to grow the economy during his White House days.

“I’d be careful about that,” Dimon said of Biden’s agenda.

He said Bidenomics is more of an industrial policy, to help particular industries. He’s opposed those in the past, but sees them now as usable within a few narrow confines like national security.

“If it relates to supersonic missiles, I think we should do it. If it relates to holding down the Chinese people, I think we shouldn’t do it,” Dimon said. “There shouldn’t be social policy around that, it shouldn’t be political it should be purely economic.”

He also was critical Biden’s massive stimulus spending. He has continued concerns with inflation, which spiked nearly to the double digits just a year ago. And while that rate has slowed somewhat, those price spikes that hit consumers so hard then now are the base level for the new price surges they are seeing now.

Biden, as the octogenarian campaigns for another four years in office, has been promoting his “Bidenomics,” which involves a lot more taxes.

However, polling shows Americans widely dissatisfied and unhappy with Biden’s work on the economy. Nearly half have confirmed they are “a lot worse off” since Biden took office and largely abandoned economic goals of President Trump.

Biden’s first term has focused largely on promoting the LGBT, specifically the transgender, ideology, as well as abortion.

Article cross-posted from WND News Center.

The automotive arm of a large Chinese corporation, Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, is looking to gain a foothold in the U.S. market and may get a boost from President Joe Biden’s administration.

A Chinese conglomerate is looking to gain a foothold in the U.S. auto market and may get a boost from President Joe Biden’s administration.

Polestar — founded in 2017 by the Chinese corporation Zhejiang Geely Holding Group and its Swedish subsidiary Volvo — has most recently made inroads with the U.S. auto industry by becoming the latest in a series of auto companies to commit to using U.S.-based Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS), a standardized charging port configuration for electric cars, according to Reuters. In addition to utilizing the NACS — which was partially subsidizedby the Biden administration — Polestar is hoping that some of the all-electric SUVs made at its upcoming South Carolina factory will qualify for a $7,500 consumer tax credit offered through President Joe Biden’s cornerstone climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which subsidize the purchase of electric vehicles, Yahoo Finance reported in late March.

The company will first launch a premium version of its upcoming Polestar 3 SUV in mid-2024, starting at roughly $84,000, but that price point would surpass the $80,000 threshold for SUVs to qualify for the credit, Yahoo Finance reported. To take advantage of the tax credits, Polestar plans to launch a cheaper variant with fewer amenities soon after production begins.

The Biden administration has made competition with China a priority as relations between the two nations have soured in recent months. While IRA tax credits do not directly finance the Chinese conglomerate, the administration expects that tax credits will help sales of qualifying vehicles — such as the upcoming Polestar 3 variant.

“These commitments are part of President Biden’s Investing in America agenda to spur domestic manufacturing, strengthen supply chains, boost U.S. competitiveness and create good-paying jobs,” reads a White House fact sheet. The statement continues, arguing that the IRA “adds and expands tax credits for purchases of new and used EVs—helping bring the benefits of clean energy to communities across the nation.”

The more expensive Polestar 3 variant could still qualify for the $7,500 tax credit through a provision that allows some leased electric vehicles to qualify for the credit regardless of country of origin or cost, Yahoo Finance reported. Foreign automakers lobbied heavily for this exemption, and some analysts expect it to make leasing the primary way U.S. consumers acquire electric vehicles, at least in the near future, Bloomberg reported.

“It will be a big milestone for our brand,” Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath said in a 2021 interview with CNBC, referring to the South Carolina factory. “The expression of the car will be so much Polestar and show where our brand is going in the future ahead.”

Geely chairman Li Shufu is a rare Chinese business leader who does not have membership in the Chinese Communist Party, but does serve as a member of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which describes itself as a “national political consultative body” advising the Chinese government. The firm’s $1.8 billion purchase of Volvo from Ford in 2010 was largely financed by low-interest loans from a trio of Chinese cities, where the company would eventually locate a pair of factories and a technology center, according to Reuters.

Chinese electric vehicle firms have increasingly been making progress in both Europe and the U.S., leveraging their sheer dominance in mineral supply chains and technical know-how in electrical vehicles to muscle into Western markets, Politico reported on Monday. Roughly 5.4 million electric vehicles, around two-thirds of the global total, were registered in China last year, and 19% of all cars sold in China last year were fully electric.

Chinese automakers “are leveraging their specific product know-how over incumbent European brands that employ a lot of people to make engines,” an anonymous auto manager told Politico. “[Volkswagen] would need to lay off half its staff” to meet the efficiency of its Chinese competitors, the manager added.

Several major clean energy projects — particularly in battery manufacturing and power generation — looking to take advantage of IRA tax credits rely on Chinese technology or intellectual property.

Geely, Polestar and The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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That offends, the court ruled, the Takings Clause of the United States Constitution.

The fight at hand involved a condominium formerly owned by Geraldine Tyler in Hennepin County, Minnesota, but the same facts have played out over and over across the nation in recent years. In fact, some state laws authorized this specific action.

In this case, Tyler owed about $15,000 in unpaid taxes and penalties, so the county “seized the condo and sold it for $40,000, keeping the $25,000 excess over Tyler’s tax debt for itself,” the court said.

She sued, charge the county unconstitutionally retained the excess value of her home in violation of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment and the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment.

Lower courts dismissed her charges. But the court’s ruling said Tyler plausibly charged the retention of the excess value above her debt violated the Constitution.

The ruling said that the excess value of confiscated property protected by the clause “depends on state law,” but state law “cannot be the only one because otherwise a state could ‘sidestep the Takings Clause by disavowing traditional property interests’ in assets it wishes to appropriate.”

“History and precedent dictate that, while the county had the power to sell Tyler’s home to recover the unpaid property taxes, it could not use the tax debt to confiscate more property than was due. Doing so effected a ‘classic taking in which the government directly appropriates private property for its own use.’”

Such a concept, the justices schooled Minnesota authorities, “can trace it s origins at least as far back as the Magna Carta.”

The ruling noted that “most states” today “require excess value to be returned to the taxpayer whose property is sold to satisfy outstanding tax debt.”

Minnesota, however, set up its process to provide “no opportunity for the taxpayer to recover the excess value from the state.”

“Significantly, Minnesota law itself recognizes in many other contexts that a property owner is entitled to the surplus in excess of her debt. If a bank forecloses on a mortgaged property, state law entitles the homeowner to the surplus from the sale. And in collecting past due taxes on income or personal property, Minnesota protects the taxpayers’ right to surplus.

“Minnesota may not extinguish a property interest that it recognizes everywhere else to avoid paying just compensation when the state does the taking,” the ruling said.

The court rejected outright the county’s claim that Tyler “constructively abandoned” her home.

Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the opinion of the court. Tyler, now 94, had purchased the condo in 1999 and lived there for years.

Then she decided it would be safer for her in a senior community, and moved. But nobody continued paying the property taxes and soon the county added $13,000 in interest and penalties.

Roberts explained Tyler sustained “a classic pocketbook injury sufficient to give her standing.”

“The taxpayer must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but no more,” he said.

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Senate Bill 33, primarily sponsored by Sen. Duey Strobel (R – Saukville) and Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara (R – Appleton), and cosponsored by Rep. Shae Sortwell, enjoys wide support – and would align Wisconsin with the policies of 42 other U.S. states.

Senate Bill 33 would exempt “precious metals bullion,” defined as coins, bars, rounds, and sheets that contain at least 35% gold, silver, copper, platinum, or palladium.

In 2019, Rep. Shae Sortwell (R – Two Rivers) introduced a similar measure that didn’t not receive a hearing. But upon introduction this year, Senate Bill 33 already has seven Senate sponsors and 16 House sponsors.

Imposing taxes on the exchange of Federal Reserve notes for monetary metals (i.e. gold and silver) has become an unusual and outmoded practice in the United States… only 8 states still engage in it.

With 42 states now having eliminated sales taxes on purchases of gold and silver, the Badger State may be the next state to do so – although similar bills are moving forward in Mississippi, Kentucky, and Maine.

Passage of SB 33 would remove a major disincentive to holding gold and silver — a move that has become especially pertinent at a time when inflation is ripping through the economy and wreaking havoc on family budgets.

Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution prescribes that gold and silver are money, and imposing a tax on the exchange of one money for another is inherently illogical.  But there are other strong public policy reasons why so few states still impose sales tax on precious metals purchases:

• Levying sales taxes on precious metals is inappropriate. Sales taxes are typically levied on final consumer goods. Computers, shirts, and shoes carry sales taxes because the consumer is “consuming” the good. Precious metals are inherently held for resale, not “consumption,” making the application of sales taxes on precious metals inappropriate.
• Studies have shown that taxing precious metals is an inefficient form of revenue collection. The results of one study involving Michigan show that any sales tax proceeds a state collects on precious metals are likely surpassed by the state revenue lost from conventions, businesses, and economic activity that are driven out of the state.

The harm is exacerbated when you consider that all of Wisconsin’s neighbors (Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, and Michigan) have already stopped taxing gold and silver. This harms in-state businesses. Most recently, Tennessee ended this tax in 2022, and Arkansas and Ohio eliminated this tax in 2021.

• Taxing precious metals is unfair to certain savers and investors. Gold and silver are held as forms of savings and investment. Wisconsin does not tax the purchase of stocks, bonds, ETFs, currencies, and other financial instruments.

• Taxing precious metals is harmful to citizens attempting to protect their assets. Purchasers of precious metals aren’t fat-cat investors. Most who buy precious metals do so in small increments as a way of saving money. Precious metals investors are purchasing precious metals as a way to preserve their wealth against the damages of inflation. Inflation harms the poorest among us, including pensioners, Wisconsinites on fixed incomes, wage earners, savers, and more.

In 2023, other bills to restore sound, constitutional money have already been introduced in Alaska, West Virginia, South Carolina, Missouri, Minnesota, Tennessee, and more.

Currently Wisconsin is tied for 45^th out of 50 in the 2023 Sound Money Index. Passage of SB 33 would significantly improve Wisconsin’s standing.

About the Author

Jp Cortez is a graduate of Auburn University and a resident of Charlotte, North Carolina. He is the Policy Director of the Sound Money Defense League, an organization working to bring back gold and silver as America’s constitutional money. Follow him on Twitter @JpCortez27. Article cross-posted from Activist Post.

In “The Coming Slavery” (1884), Herbert Spencer observed that legislators often fail to perceive that they have set in motion a train on a destructive course. Given the political momentum, he argues, “The question of questions for the politician should ever be—’What type of social structure am I tending to produce?’”

If most of our politicians have failed to ask this question, citizens should remind them of it now. Who benefits from the $1.65 trillion omnibus package? How does it enhance or restrict freedom? And how do spending programs affect the mindset of future generations? The answers should make everyone reach for the brakes.

An Equitable Platform

One problem is that the current appropriations package is full of programs that redistribute wealth to advance a target moving faster than a bullet train: “equity.” Voters’ race, geographical location, and employment significantly shape their benefits.

Consider the beneficiary of one of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s earmarks: $477,000 to the Equity Institute in Rhode Island. This “education-based nonprofit organization” works to “cultivate antiracist, people-centered communities for all learners.” To do so, the institute  advances “an evolving definition of education equity,” insisting, “criteria for success when advancing Educational Equity must be based on the quality of individual and community life as opposed to standardized test scores.” If those criteria are opaque, the government’s criteria are more so.

The “Unleashing American Innovators Act of 2022,” for instance, amends existing legislation to enable the Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office to encourage innovation and new patents among particular groups. It ends the preferred list with “any geographic group of innovators that the Director may determine to be underrepresented in patent filings.” The Director may spend your tax dollars based less on the quality of invention than on who innovates and where.

Senator Bernie Sanders is also focused on a particular group in his $50 million Worker Ownership and Readiness and Knowledge Act. Sanders introduced the legislation in 2009. His colleagues then balked, but this year nearly everyone boarded the omnitrain.

Under this act, “The secretary shall establish with the Department of Labor an Employee Ownership Initiative to promote employee ownership.” Sanders calls it “modest but effective legislation” that will “go a long way to ensuring workers have the tools they need to have a seat at the table they worked to build.”

The program identifies “key groups, such as retiring business owners, senior managers, labor organizations, trade associations, community organizations, and economic development organizations,” all of which it educates on the means and benefits of employee ownership. But what are the long-term consequences of promoting this shift, apart from, of course, solidifying a voter bloc?

In its current format, this legislation seems innocuous because it is voluntary: there is outreach, education, and assistance. What Spencer emphasizes, however, is that what begins modestly expands into massive programming with increasing legislation and escalating costs: a runaway train with no brakes.

Tracks to Serfdom

Perhaps the future beneficiaries of the innovation grants will be delighted to share the metaphorical tables they invent with their employees, who then become owners. Or, perhaps Spencer was right that the more the government does, the less incentive people have to invent:

Each generation is made less familiar with the attainment of desired ends by individual actions or private combinations, and more familiar with the attainment of them by governmental agencies; until, eventually, governmental agencies come to be thought of as the only available agencies.

Will the next generation simply plod down the well-worn tracks of government assistance for every endeavor? And how much will that funding increase over the next decades?

Such a trend has long-term consequences financially as well as intellectually. As the government’s gravy train gains momentum, so does government’s incentive to raise taxes to fuel it.  Individuals have less money to apply to their own interests and must work more hours every day to pay for socialism. This was, for Spencer, “the coming slavery”:

it matters not whether his master is a single person or a society. If, without option, he has to labour for the society, and receives from the general stock such portion as the society awards him, he becomes a slave to the society. Socialistic arrangements necessitate an enslavement of this kind, and towards such an enslavement many recent measures, and still more the measures advocated, are carrying us.

Without claiming “enslavement” today, we can acknowledge that the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 will increase the national debt, as well as the political momentum toward the governmentalization of social affairs.

Halting that process requires taxpayers to exhibit the same savvy shown by Agatha Christie’s legendary Hercule Poirot. The detective, faced with a body on the Orient Express, finally realized that literally all the passengers on that train had a hand in the murder. Likewise, voters must accept that the majority of our elected representatives supported the passage of the omnibus, whether openly or through earmarks.

It’s time for us to acknowledge the society they are creating and to hold them accountable. If our current legislators won’t apply the brakes on this train, we need to do so in the next election.

Article cross-posted from AIER.

Under the American Rescue Plan, third-party payment facilitators like Venmo, eBay, Etsy, and Airbnb are now required to send Form 1099-Ks to individuals reporting 2022 gross annual income of as little as $600. That’s $50 a month.

The previous annual reporting threshold was $20,000. The lower reporting threshold shouldn’t affect people’s tax liability—at least in theory.

Income that was untaxable before the reporting change should still be untaxable. However, simply receiving a Form 1099-K will make many taxpayers believe they have a tax obligation, even when they don’t.

Some personal transactions between friends, family members, and roommates—such as reimbursements for shared rides, rent aggregation, and gifts—will be mistakenly classified as business transactions and reported on 1099-Ks.

Or a taxpayer who sold, say, $800 worth of used books and electronics on eBay in 2022 may wrongly assume he owes tax on the full gross income reported on his 1099-K. But if the taxpayer sold the used goods for less than he paid for them, he should be able to deduct those costs and avoid additional taxes.

The IRS claims the new 1099-K reporting will allow the agency to identify unreported income, increase tax collections, and reduce the tax gap.

Government reports have suggested that small businesses and gig workers account for a disproportionate share of the tax gap; that is, the total amount of tax underpayments and nonpayments. Lowering the 1099-K reporting threshold to $600 per month is clearly meant to address that perceived gap.

To which one may respond, “But isn’t closing the tax gap about stopping millionaires and big corporations from cheating on their taxes? After all, that’s why the Biden administration sought and received $80 billion, so the IRS could expand audits and enforcement.”

The short answer is no.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen did send a letter to the IRS commissioner directing that the new funding not be used to increase audit levels on small businesses or households earning less than $400,000 relative to historical levels. But Yellen’s directive doesn’t carry the weight of law or even regulation. It’s mere political theater.

The IRS can require payment facilitators to send millions of additional Form 1099-Ks to middle-class taxpayers and small businesses and still honestly say that it hasn’t increased its audit level.

The agency can even send more notices to middle-class taxpayers informing them of underreported income discrepancies that must be resolved within 30 days, and this also wouldn’t count as increasing the audit level.

In fact, the IRS could increase the audit level of middle-class Americans to the historically far higher rates from 1980 and make each audit more painful, while still arguing that it technically didn’t raise audit levels relative to historical levels.

There’s a reason the rhetoric about the IRS only cracking down on the wealthy doesn’t match the reality.

Big-government advocates and politicians need Americans to believe that higher taxes will only affect “the other guy”—specifically, the very wealthy and big corporations. That’s how they get their agenda passed.

But there just aren’t enough superwealthy people to soak to afford a big-government spending agenda for long, and countries that do soak the rich have a funny habit of driving out most of their wealth.

So, eventually, they resort to more and more taxes on the middle class.

Western European countries with expansive welfare states tax the middle class far more heavily than the U.S. does. U.S. expansions of social spending and green-energy boondoggles also must ultimately come on the backs of the middle class, one way or another.

The American middle class paid for the 2020-2022 spending spree with the inflation tax and massive new debt—i.e., future taxes. And there are many other direct and indirect ways that taxes ultimately harm the middle class.

One unfortunate consequence of cracking down on $600-per-year Venmo and eBay accounts is that it drives people off these platforms to avoid the IRS hassle, not to mention the identity security concerns of sharing their Social Security numbers with payment facilitators.

This is bad for those companies. Many have seen their stock prices drop 50% to 70%. But it’s also bad for consumers. Those companies facilitate entrepreneurship and the gig economy, and they give small businesses tools to compete against large corporations.

A bigger, more powerful IRS accessing more private information will stifle innovators and small businesses struggling in a slowing economy. It would be nice if Washington would stifle its own runaway spending instead.

Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.

Kamala Harris is arguably the worst offender in the regime when it comes to not answering direct questions with direct answers. Yes, she’s even worse than spoxidiot Karine Jean-Pierre who will occasionally answer simple questions directly. Harris has no such ability. She has talking points that her feeble brain falls back on whenever a topic is brought up even if the question has nothing to do with her answer.

Here’s today’s example:

Q: “Who specifically is footing the bill for student loan forgiveness?”

Kamala Harris: “The same people who are criticizing what we rightly did…”

https://t.co/RwDgBrMuNn

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 29, 2022

She was asked, “Who specifically is footing the bill for student loan forgiveness? We haven’t gotten a concrete answer from the administration yet.”

Harris’s answer was moronic. “Well, let’s start with this. First of all, a lot of the same people who are criticizing what we rightly did in following through on a commitment we made, um, to forgive student loan debt, uh, are the same people who voted for, uh, tax cuts for the richest Americans.”

No wonder she failed the Bar Exam. She doesn’t know how to answer a question with anything that resembles a proper response. It reminds me of this:

The Biden-Harris regime is determined to keep the American people from knowing who is paying for the vote-buying scheme. That’s because it’s the American people who are going to pay for it.

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