Ben Weingarten

Reader. Writer. Thinker. Commentator. Truth Seeker.

Tag: Taxes

Legendary Legal Scholar Richard Epstein on Classical Liberalism, the Administrative State, Free Speech, Silicon Valley Regulation


READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

Subscriberate and reviewiTunes | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Google Play | YouTube

Follow Ben: Web | Newsletter | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

Advertising & Sponsorship Inquiries: E-mail us.

My Guest

Professor Richard Epstein is the inaugural Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. He previously served as the Peter and Kirstin Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution since 2000. Professor Epstein is also the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law Emeritus and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago where he taught for 38 years. He is a prolific writer who has authored more than a dozen books on topics ranging from private property to torts, and antidiscrimination law to antitrust, a frequent podcaster and one of the most cited legal scholars of the 20th century.

Read More

An interview with Jim Lacy, author of ‘Taxifornia’

Blaze Books sat down for an in-depth interview in TheBlaze’s New York newsroom this past Tuesday with former Reagan appointee and California-based lawyer and political communications company executive Jim Lacy, author of “Taxifornia,” to discuss the major challenges facing California that threaten to turn the state into one big version of Detroit.

Below is our interview, transcribed from our interview with slight edits for clarity. All links are ours.

Make your elevator pitch for why Blaze readers should pick up this book?

Lacy: Well public employee unions are really transforming government throughout the United States and the negative effects of that are being played out in California right now. So what my book does is very closely examines the political control that the public employee unions—specifically the California Teachers Association (CTA) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) have accomplished in the state, and it discloses their swamped political spending: spending that is three, four, five-fold more than traditional special interests like Chevron which is just completely dwarfed by their political spending. AT&T, the California Chamber of Commerce, none of them can match the political spending, and as a result of this political spending, the public employee unions really do have a lock on the outcome of political decisions in the state that effect the economy. And this involves a connection between the problems that we’re having with public employee pension obligations, bankruptcies of local government, and taxes being raised to the very highest levels in all categories.

For two years in a row California has had the highest rate of poverty in the nation according to Obama’s census bureau. The unemployment is still completely out of whack. California has depending upon what survey you read either the first highest, third highest or fifth highest unemployment in the nation. So my theory is that people need to have that information because the information that they are getting right now from the mass media is that California has a surplus and Jerry Brown and the liberal Democrats are doing a great job and the reality is they aren’t – the state’s getting ready to explode economically in a negative way. And so that’s what my book, “Taxifornia,” is about.

Why should non-Californians care about California’s problems?

Lacy: Well we know that the largest municipal bankruptcy in the country was in Detroit right? Well before Detroit what was the largest municipal bankruptcy in the country? It was the city of Stockton, California. Yes again, California leads the nation – it leads the nation in municipal bankruptcies. USA Today says that there are probably ten more cities in California that are ready to go bankrupt. So we have to ask ourselves the question, “Well why?”

A big part of the reason that the municipalities are having these problems is because of public employee pension obligations. And as a result of those, they’re raising taxes. I’ll give you an example. San Jose is the third-largest city in California. It’s also the 10th largest city

in the nation. So your question was “Why should the rest of the nation care?” And what I’m gonna tell you is that because of the way that the liberals and the public employees have controlled California politics, this is what’s coming in municipalities all across the nation. It’s just playing out in California first because the liberals have been in control for so long. The city of San Jose just put together its latest city budget, and they have a reform mayor. The budget’s a $1 billion budget. 30% of the budget is dedicated to paying for pension obligations for public employees that have already provided services. If 30% of the budget today is to service debt on past services by public employee union members, what’s it gonna be tomorrow, two years from now, or three years from now? Because people are living longer, and because of the salary obligations of two generous salaries that the politicians have given.

And I’ll give you an example. In the county that I live in, the average pay for a firefighter is $234,000 a year. That firefighter can opt to retire at age 50 or age 55 and depending upon the calculation from anywhere from 50% to 75% or 90% of that salary over time. In the last 10 years San Jose’s obligations to pay for public employee pensions, which by the way are all underfunded (they aren’t paying enough) have quadrupled to $300 million. So if they’re going to go up exponentially, I would say that probably in the next 10 years it’s quite conceivable that San Jose’s public employee pension obligations will constitute the majority focus of government spending.

So what’s happening in California is that the purpose of government is shifting – government is no longer primarily organized to provide police, fire and public safety services. What it’s primarily organized for right now – the direction that it’s going in — is to provide pensions to past employees. And that’s a real problem. And it finds itself in too-high salaries, and too-generous pensions under defined benefit plans. And there’s a whole reason that we have that in the state, and part of what “Taxifornia” does is reveal that.

Read more at TheBlaze…

Stoll on JFK Part III: Gold, Goldwater, libertarianism and more on anti-Communism

In a wide-ranging interview with Blaze Books in connection with his newest title, JFK, Conservative, Ira Stoll provided his insights on JFK’s political ideology, religiosity, foreign policy views and a whole host of other topics. Below is the final part of our interview, conducted via email. You can find Part I here and Part II here. The interview has been slightly edited for clarity.

In your book you indicate that JFK took a number of public stances that were fiscally and monetarily conservative. Who were some of the thinkers that influenced his economic philosophy?

Stoll: His father was a successful businessman who was quite concerned about the flow of gold. His Treasury Secretary, Douglas Dillon, was a Wall Street Republican who wanted tax cuts. Kennedy’s friend Phil Graham, the owner and publisher of the Washington Post, was also pushing Kennedy for tax cuts to spur economic growth. I also detect in Kennedy’s speeches the influence of a libertarian writer named Albert Jay Nock, author of a book called Our Enemy, the State and of an introduction to Herbert Spencer’s The Man Versus the State, both of which were on Kennedy’s bookshelf.

How do we reconcile the more leftist items on Kennedy’s agenda such as increased social spending with his ideological principles?

Stoll: Increased social spending wasn’t an item on Kennedy’s agenda, at least not in any significant way that he fought for or achieved while in office. He gave a speech or two in favor of Medicare and for increased aid to education, but liberals within the administration were disappointed that instead of pushing for those things he focused on free trade and the tax cuts. Anyway, one can be for a modest government safety net for the elderly, disabled, and mentally ill, and for efforts to expand opportunity to the young through education, as Kennedy was and as many conservatives are even today, while still being skeptical of or resistant to the excesses of the ever-expanding federal welfare state.

Read more at TheBlaze…

An interview with British Member of European Parliament Daniel Hannan: Bullish on the Anglosphere despite impending defaults and revolt-worthy tax levels

In a wide-ranging interview with Blaze Books in connection with his newest title, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World, outspoken British MEP Daniel Hannan provided his insights on American exceptionalism, Western governmental defaults, why he is bullish on the West in spite of such defaults, and a whole host of other topics. Below is our interview, conducted via email. The interview has been slightly edited for clarity.

What would you say to critics who argue that there are strong bedrock principles that have come from cultures outside the Anglosphere (or to paraphrase the President, that he believes “in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism”)?

Hannan: The President was right about one thing. Most Brits do indeed believe in British exceptionalism. But here’s the thing: we define it in almost exactly the same way that Americans do theirs. We believe it resides in certain values and institutions, such as the rule of law, free contract, secure property, jury trials, personal liberty, regular elections, habeas corpus, and uncensored newspapers. In Greece, as in pretty much the rest of the world, people expect – indeed demand – far more intervention from the state. That’s why they’re in the mess they’re in. Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that the President, back in 2009, cited Greece in that answer: with a $17 trillion national debt, he seems pretty keen on taking America in that direction.

It seems as if Anglosphere principles are being implemented to some degree more faithfully by folks in the East than the West. Do you see this trend occurring? What are the implications?

Hannan: Anglosphere principles are transportable. They are passed on through intellectual exchange, not gene flow. They are why Bermuda isn’t Haiti, why Hong Kong isn’t China, why Singapore isn’t Indonesia. But it’s striking that, in the league table of economic freedom, the top four territories are all common law and Anglophone: Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore.

One topic that you do not mention in Inventing Freedom is the effect of the Israelites, Greeks/Romans and others on our political system. Do you see Anglosphere roots in these peoples, or otherwise care to comment?

Hannan: I don’t claim that we invented the idea of law. When Moses came down from Sinai, the fathers of the English were still grubbing about with their pigs in the cold soil of northern Germany. What we invented, rather, was the extraordinary idea that the law is the property of the people. Think of that commonplace, yet peculiarly English, phrase ‘the law of the land’. Not the king’s law, nor God’s law, but the law of the land – the patrimony of every citizen. Even now, people raised in the European Roman-law tradition are astonished by our beautiful, anomalous common-law system. They can’t get their heads around the idea that, instead of writing down a law and then applying it to particular cases, the law grows up, like a coral, judgment by judgment. It’s the property of the people as a whole, not of the state: an ally of freedom, not an instrument of government control.

Nor do I claim we invented democracy: the rooting about with the pigs thing was still going on when Cleon and Demosthenes were making their speeches. But we invented the idea of personal freedom within a democratic system – a very different tradition to the Continental one, inspired by Herder and Rousseau, which elevated the will of the majority over the rights of the individual and which, in the end, whelped the two misshapen pups of fascism and communism.

Our system worked. Anglosphere countries never fell to revolution or dictatorship. Our countries never elected a single fascist legislator, and no more than half a dozen revolutionary socialists. We made the defense of freedom everyone’s business, and people responded.

Read more at TheBlaze…

Ira Stoll on JFK Part I: Tax cuts, tough on military, tough on communists, attacked by left-wingers

In a wide-ranging interview with Blaze Books in connection with his newest title, JFK, Conservative, Ira Stoll provided his insights on JFK’s political ideology, religiosity, foreign policy views and a whole host of other topics. Below is Part I of our interview, conducted via email. The interview has been slightly edited for clarity.

What inspired you to write this book?

Stoll: I grew up in Massachusetts and went to Harvard, and so it was hard to avoid the Kennedys. When the JFK Presidential Library opened in Boston, I went with my parents, with my high school, with my Boy Scout troop. As I got older, I heard my conservative friends dismissing all Kennedys as a bunch of drinkers and philanderers, and I heard my liberal friends admiring JFK for what I thought were the wrong reasons. So I wrote this book to set both the conservatives and the liberals straight and to restore an accurate picture of Kennedy.

Why should skeptical conservatives read this book?

Stoll: This book is the antidote to the false story put out by liberal Kennedy historians and journalists after the president’s death that Kennedy was a liberal. If you want to understand tax cuts and economic growth and peace through strength, you’ve got to understand Kennedy. Even if you think you don’t like JFK, you should buy and read this book — it may well change your mind. It explains why President Ronald Reagan talked about Kennedy as his inspiration for his tax cuts and military buildup. The only way to correct the distortions put out by the liberal historians in their bestselling JFK books — distortions I point out in my book — is to make this book a bestseller.

Read more at TheBlaze…

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén