Depends what is meant by tax breaks. Things like depreciation have to be allowed, as does the credit for foreign taxation paid on foreign profits. But if there are egregious tax breaks on offer then sure. Although I seriously doubt that there’s $113 billion to be had just by cleaning up around the edges. And do note from the above: some part of corporate income tax is paid by the average worker in the economy that levies that tax. Given the CBO’s estimates then some $30 billion to $70 billion will in fact come from working people: which is quite a lot of dimes really.
Basically, Bernie wants to end tax breaks and subsidies the government gives to Big Oil companies, which earn $TEXAS amounts of profit, especially with the opening up of federal lands for drilling, the oil rush in the Dakotas, etc. The reason gas prices are so low is in part because we're in the middle of an oil boom. The main complaint Worstall has is that this might mean that the companies pass the costs of losing those tax breaks on to consumers, so gas prices might rise (Worstall surprisingly leaves out subsidies entirely).
Whether Bernie's math would work out or not requires an accountant, but from a pure economics perspective it's tricky; for the tax cuts/subsidies to be less expensive to the American consumer than to discontinue them, the costs passed on to the consumer would have to be higher - which, granted, when you're talking about transportation needn't be too high, but you'd need a serious mathematical crank-out to figure that one.
Up to you really, I’ve no major opinion either way.
Estate taxes generally only hit people that are superfuckingrich, which is why the superfuckingrich invented trusts and museums and crap to cache their wealth away from estate taxes. It really only affects the Mitt Romneys and Paris Hiltons and Waltons and Bushes of the world, though.
This one I approve of heartily. I’m all in favour of reducing the tax rates on dividends and capital gains. For that’s what standard taxation theory does in fact say, that they should be taxed less than income from direct labour. And the problem is that currently in the US they are taxed more heavily. That Bernie Sanders doesn’t know or understand this isn’t a great reflection on either his intellectual firepower or the skills of those briefing him.
Worstall is playing a weird bit of hookey here; capital gains are taxed depending on your
tax bracket. The things is that long-term capital gains are a lower
effective tax rate than your regular income tax - so Bernie is right, taxing all income regardless of source the same would bring in a shitload more taxes. Worstall is trying to claim that the taxes on
corporate income also applies to the dividends paid out to stockholders and shit - so Worstall is just blowing smoke out his ass.
Not all that important either way. Whatever really.
The Bush Tax Cuts for the top two percent only affects like a couple thousand people.
Those are the people that have benefited the most from tax cuts.. So Worstall is
correct that 98% of Americans wouldn't notice this, except that millions of dollars in taxes from the top 2% would suddenly be going into the economy. Worstall is just being disingenuous.
There’s a problem with this. Which is that Social Security isn’t simply a tax, it’s an insurance policy. Which means that if you’re going to charge people more for buying their insurance then you need also to increase their payouts from their policy. Fine with the idea that contributions should be uncapped as long as payments out are also uncapped. But that’s not something that I think he has in mind.
There's two parts of this, though I don't know that Worstall cares. The first part is that most of Social Security runs on debt that Americans owe themselves in the form of Treasury securities; it's unlikely to "run out of money" by having more people paying out than are paying in, and the only reason we're running a shellgame like taking money out of your paycheck now to pay you later is because that's the only way to do it without literally printing money and giving everyone over the age of 65 or whatever a pension.
The second part is that millionaires don't give a shit about social security. It's a tiny part of their income that goes into it, because there's a cap, and they get a tiny amount out of it when they hit retirement age. Of course, they tend to live
longer than poor people, so they could end up drawing more than they pay in, which is a problem. Bernie basically wants to use uncapped Social Security as an additional tax on rich fuckers so that they help subsidize the aged poor; Worstall basically wants to (by uncapping the monthly payments) make Social Security into a de facto capital gains fund that the government can't tax.
This one is very definitely counter-productive. For two reasons. The first being that if it is true that China has deliberately undervalued the yuan then this actually benefits US consumers. They get to buy stuff from China more cheaply. So, if we insist that they raise the exchange rate of the yuan then the things that Americans buy will become more expensive: that dimes from the pockets of working Americans.
Bernie basically wants a
Tobin Tax. The thing is that at very high levels of arcane economics, like international finance and currency speculation and manipulation, you can make a profit without doing any work or producing any goods.
Say you have US$100. The trading ratio for yuan is 1:10. So you make the trade and have Y1,000. Then you <do arcane economics thing> and the ratio goes to 1.01:10. You trade back your yuan for dollars, and you now have US$101 dollars.
Sounds silly to make a fuss of $1, right? But imagine that you're trading in a volume of
millions of dollars. At a million bucks, a ratio flux of 1% will earn you $10k...and you've produced nothing for that money. A Tobin tax would apply to the earnings from that kind of currency fuckwizardry, and basically eliminate the profit to discourage that kind of activity because it's unproductive.
Worstall considers this "unproductive" because their are unfortunate Chinese millionaires that would be inconvenienced if they couldn't easily move their money into foreign markets, particularly not if they can't make a profit on it.
Well, yes, obviously.
Kind of easier said than done, so I'm not entire with Bernie on this one. These defense programs are "wasteful" only in that the money would be better spent on
other programs, not that the money is spent. Pure research and weapons development programs at the Pentagon are actually pretty good for the economy as a whole. I would definitely shut down the F-35 if the money could go into, say, grants for education.
That’s slightly more problematic. The profits that the drug companies make pay for their research and development into the next generation of interesting drugs to cure our diseases. That’s why we even have a patent system for drugs. So, it’s not obvious that cutting the amount we pay for drugs is a no cost solution. There will be some corresponding decline in the amount the drug companies have to spend on new drugs to cure the diseases we can’t treat yet.
News flash! Drug companies are like other companies, and they do greedhead profit-driven bullshit all the time. Saying that the poor defenseless companies will have to slash their R&D if they lower prices is a bullshit argument. It's why the US has to have
orphan drug programs, because otherwise companies figure the cost of researching and making a drug is too expensive to continue treating the bastards dying from whatever the drug treats.
