Thursday, January 28, 2021
Only You Can Beat Big Tech Censorship by Tom Luongo
When Facebook censors Ron Paul, or Twitter bans President Trump, is that censorship?
Or because these are private companies, does that automatically make it NOT censorship?
Amazon banned Parler, but is it their right as a private company to choose their customers?
That’s the crux of the issue I need to address with you in today’s post-Trump world of social media.
Because make no mistake “Big Tech” repression is a foundational problem facing any society that considers itself even somewhat free. In the wake of the allowed ‘assault on the Capitol’ and the confirmation of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the U.S., the big tech firms which control access to speech went ballistic.
Conservatives along with President Trump himself were wiped from the public square. Any mention of the election being stolen or open support on Twitter of Trump himself was flushed down the memory hole.
This is censorship of the highest order by these firms to put parameters around political speech in the U.S. where such a right is enshrined in the Constitution. None of it is constitutional.
But the problem is far deeper than that. The deplatforming of Parler, one alternative social media platform to Twitter, via corporate collusion by Apple, Google and Amazon was something far more sinister than Twitter silencing the sitting president of the U.S.
This was a blatant hit job by companies stifling competition in the public square for hosting material which is constitutionally protected as ‘free speech.’
But these firms, especially Amazon, who terminated Parler’s server hosting agreement with 24 hours’ notice, lazily applied their vague and ever-changing ‘Terms of Service” to single out Parler and hide behind their status as a private company.
The worst part about this is that libertarians see this as a rational and defensible free market action. And for years adolescent libertarian arguments about corporations being private actors preferable to governments have now been turned around by authoritarians who hang us with our own words.
And we wonder why conservatives look at us like we have four-heads when we make such arguments?
When this attack on free speech began, during the 2016 presidential campaign with the first deplatforming of alt-right provocateurs like Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer website, it was obvious then that these were dry runs for the mass action we’re seeing today, in the name of creating an information-free literal one-party police state.
It was this that prompted former Silicon Valley programmer Andrew Torba to start Gab. Crazed liberals then said,
“If you don’t like Twitter, leave and build your own.”
So, he did. And after the attack on the Pittsburgh Synagogue in 2018, Gab was given the even worse treatment than Parler got last week.
They survived that.
All the while myself and people like Torba were screaming about the duopoly controlling the on-ramp to the mobile web, and no one cared. But we could see this day coming.
And now it’s here.
But this is most certainly not a private property issue as much as it is a contract law issue allowed to fester because of government interference into the marketplace for communications.
Government interference altered the landscape these companies operate in. The grew to the size they are now because of government largesse and federal and state tax revenue into the networks and systems they depend on.
It doesn’t matter that the duopoly is Google and Apple. It could have been Palm and Microsoft. Or Blackberry and IBM. What matters is that the environment wasn’t a level playing field between the companies and the people using the services.
They were paying not only for access but at the same time subsidizing the revenue streams by accepting costs these companies outsourced to government.
It is a cozy arrangement.
The companies outsource their fixed costs and the government outsources their censorship desires that pesky First Amendment forbids them from doing directly.
No wonder the response to the allowed assault on the Capitol was so swift and coordinated.
Think it through folks. Amazon’s AWS doesn’t become a dominant player without those vaunted contracts with the CIA. Parler, at a minimum should have an expectation of service per any legal contractual arrangement, and as such is due damages from Amazon for unilaterally breaching that basic trust.
Facebook doesn’t grow to become the monster it is without strategic investments by quasi-governmental companies like Goldman-Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
Google doesn’t become the ad revenue generating machine if it had had to properly pay its bandwidth costs for the content they forced on us.
Trump nixing ‘Net Neutrality’ put some of that onus back on them, giving ISP’s some latitude to price usage according to their needs rather than Google’s.
All of the above companies, including Microsoft, have been chosen by our government to succeed in this tilted marketplace.
Apple doesn’t dominate the mobile internet in the U.S. without all those user fees and taxes tacked onto the cost of your monthly cellphone bill.
If these companies were operating on their own private satellite and wire networks then they would absolutely be in the right, via the application of private property rights, to set whatever terms of service they wanted.
I, as a libertarian, fully support that.
And also, as a libertarian, understand that public property always creates a tragedy of the commons scenario.
But when you operate in the public sphere, when you move your goods and services on the digital equivalent of the public road system (not a digression I want to get into today) and your corporate charter exists within the framework of U.S. and state contract law it is clear that these companies are neither wholly private entities with respect to their customers nor neutral actors trying to enforce public decency standards.
They are acting in their best interest to stifle competition – Gab, Parler, Minds, etc. – while setting precedents to allow for even further restrictions of speech through lawfare thanks to a complicit and fully cowed legal system.
And herein lies the smart path to reining them in, if it is at all possible at this point, since it’s clear the Biden Administration is ready to reframe all speech critical of the U.S. government as ‘domestic terrorism’ giving all of these companies the legal justification into the future to unperson all dissent.
Removing their Section 230 immunity under the Communications Decency Act is paramount. It will not happen now. The government is in on the grift, folks, so looking ahead to the 2022 election cycle isn’t an option.
They just proved to you your vote doesn’t count, so it means hitting them in the only place they truly care about, their bottom lines.
So, the first thing to do is sue them into the ground. It will be up to the people themselves to hound these companies through both contract law violations and shareholder revolts because they have done irreparable damage to their brands and their future revenue streams.
That is what has to happen right now. Parler’s suit against Amazon is a good start. A class-action lawsuit by every small business in America now wondering about Amazon’s policies should end this nonsense quickly.
A good judge in a sympathetic jurisdiction should side with anyone making a strong case that modern tech company Terms of Service are ‘contracts of adhesion,’ defined as contracts entered into where one party is so much stronger than the other the weaker party is, in effect, coerced into signing it.
The second thing to do is to simply jack-out. Put the screen down. Stop using it as a substitution for real communications and pull back from the brink.
De-google your life, as I have. Close your Facebook account permanently. You will feel better immediately, trust me. I did this two years ago, to the detriment of the marketing efforts of my business, and I have never looked back.
If you need a social network, use Twitter for keeping tabs on things but save your thoughts and your content for Gab or some other, smaller private community you are a part of.
Being a global citizen is a canard they sold us as some true net positive. But it was something designed wholly to drive us mad and deracinate us to the point of having no home, no culture and no real friends.
It’s no wonder they are trying so hard to shut off the escape routes and only allow certain platforms to exist forcing us to interact with people we don’t like while locked in our homes over a wholly contrived public health emergency.
It was always part of the globalist plan.
Ending this starts with the very libertarian idea of simply opting-out. We don’t need to be plugged into their reality-generating nightmares every moment of every day.
But the thing about the web is that it is built on protocols which are themselves censorship resistant. So, the tyrants of today will be the footnotes of tomorrow. We’ve seen early attempts at censorship-proof blockchain platforms like Steemit. It’s still running even though its growing pains nearly killed it.
The next great service is just around the corner because necessity is the mother of innovation. But the first step is accepting the fact that they’ve won this round and it is now time to change the rules of the game.
P.S.: If you want to see what this looks like, just look at what the guys at Wall Street Bets are doing to the capital markets today. Brokerage outages, trading suspended, newly-minted millionaires.
All because a bunch of hedgies got over-confident of their one-way skimming and thinking no one would press their luck to the breaking point.
They have and it is glorious.
You beat them by turning their supposed advantages and bought-and-paid-for rules of the game back on them.
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
Monday, January 25, 2021
Rough Ridin’ with Biden by James Howard Kunstler
Speaking of the inauguration, I don’t know what was more peculiar: Lady Gaga sweeping out onto the capitol dais in Hunger Games drag —and I mean but exactly, down to the golden mockingjay pinned above her left breast — or Garth Brooks post-hymn dash to the exit as though he just heard the repo man was coming for his Gulfstream jet parked across the Potomac at Reagan National Airport.
The immense field of ranked American flags deployed silently down the mall in place of annoying US citizens lent a funereal vibe to the proceedings (as in the death of your country), while the thousands of massed national guard troops signaled the paranoia crackling under the surface as Ol’ White Joe Biden stepped forward to commence his party’s punishments against the unWoke (disguised as a call for “unity”). He was surrounded by a virtual wax museum of Deep Staters salivating for the upcoming blood-feast: The Obamas, Hillary and Bill (nodding off), Nancy, Chuck, Mitch… but just who was the Asian chap sitting behind the man-of-the-hour? Secret Service? Or his new minder (courtesy of Uncle Xi)?
As for Mr. Trump, he departed as he had arrived in 2016: stridently contemptuous toward the parasitical oligarchy that finally expelled him like a bladder-stone. The threatened impeachment trial will be a marvel of casuistry — a procedure for removing someone from office who is no longer in office — and also for the transparently flimsy charge of “inciting the insurrection” at the capitol. As if to underscore the absurdity of that, Antifa squads rioted in Portland and Seattle on inauguration night. Their banners expressed less-than-jubilant sentiment for the new regime. The Portland outfit broke windows and spray-painted the city’s Democratic headquarters, faking-out pols who had warned against an uprising of “white supremacists.” Of course, all those arrested would be promptly released without charges — demonstrating just how serious the Wokester officials running those cities really are about criminal anarchy. The grannies swept into the capitol rotunda by Antifa incursionists January 6th won’t be so lucky.
Neither did a much chattered-about military takeover happen during the tension-filled transition hours, though kibitzers on the web insist days later that it remains secretly underway. On his way out, Mr. Trump failed to pardon either Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, a disturbing failure, while he commuted the sentences of a couple of two-bit rap-stars, based on their contributions to advancing human dignity. And whatever Mr. Trump finally rooted out in the way of declassified FBI documents has already disappeared into the DC quicksand.
Much adored as he is for valiantly opposing everything swampish, it might be best now for Mr. Trump to just retire from the political scene and leave the battle to others. He made his point, colorfully and often bravely, considering the astounding bad faith of his adversaries, though he certainly could have articulated the stakes better and with more decorum. He leaves not merely a vacuum but a sucking chest wound of leadership opposing hysterical and tyrannical Wokery. Who will step forward in his absence? Probably someone we haven’t heard from yet. That’s how these things work.
The narrative instructs us that the election is resolved — so shut up about it already. But the election is not resolved. Enterprising gumshoes will be sifting through the evidence, interviewing witnesses, and combing through the thickets of fraud for a long time to come. Crime will be outed, if not prosecuted. Mr. Biden moves under a cloud of illegitimacy. Beyond the lingering election dispute lies all that evidence about the Biden family’s money-grubbing operations in foreign lands, clear down to the money-laundering records. Think that won’t bite eventually?
Nothing else is resolved about the national drift toward the Niagara of woe just downstream of here. Mr. Biden couldn’t have asked for trouble more loudly on Day One than by shutting down deportations of foreign nationals here illegally and signaling an open borders policy. The legions of newly unemployed and financially ruined US small business owners and workers may take a dim view of that. Rent and mortgage moratoria are extended as far ahead as June, as if landlords and mortgage-lenders don’t need to be paid to keep the banking system running. The new president has promised further, and even more severe, Covid-19 lockdowns. The Democratic Party apparently wants to utterly destroy what’s left of the real on-the-ground economy. No incoming US president has gotten off to a more feckless and ill-fated start.
Market Weekly: What Happens After ‘The Churn?’ by Tom Luongo
If you’re a fan of The Expanse (and if you aren’t you should be) you’ll be familiar with the term The Churn. The Churn is the controlling idea for Amos Burton, whose only defining ethos is survival.
Simply put, The Churn is that moment when, “the rules of the game change.” Which game?
Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. Guys like you and me, we end up dead. Doesn’t really mean anything. Or, if we happen to live through it, well that doesn’t mean anything either.
Embedded in Amos’ idea of The Churn, however, is that while the rules change society itself keeps on keeping on. So many people right now are trying to analyze the political situation in terms of The Churn, the normal ebb and flow of who has the upper hand in the power struggle.
The impeachment idiocy on Capitol Hill is your prime example of this. Petty bureaucrats like Pelosi and Schumer are still thinking in terms of their political futures, the normal rules for using leverage to secure their Party’s future.
Mitch McConnell still thinks playing the role of controlled opposition will keep the fundraising up for the mid-terms. Nikki Haley is already texting people for money for her 2024 bid as the magic GOP brown woman who will save the party after ousting the demon Trump.
And too many people are still caught up in The Churn of the daily headlines to see the much bigger picture of what’s unfolding.
Because, what if, like Amos mentioned in the most recent episode, that this isn’t just The Churn? The changes happening are something different, something foundational.
But only a few of us have had this realization?
What would that look like?
Would that look like a stock market drifting vaguely higher as Treasury bond auctions tail by a few basis points?
Would the normal Churn of Italian politics only briefly cause a spike in yields, because, change at the top will not be allowed?
No change at the top of Germany is exactly what is on the docket for later this year as Armin Laschet won the latest beauty contest to replace Angela Merkel as the head of the CDU.
So, one week the euro is sliding off the edge of the world and the next everything is normal because Christine Lagarde said so?
But no one has really taken in yet the severity and swiftness with which Joe Biden’s staff have taxed his right arm with all the Executive Orders he’s signed and what they mean.
Because these things take time to filter through our lens while we remain mostly in shock at the enormity of the changes which have occurred since the election.
And, I’ll be honest, as ahead of the curve as I like to believe I am about these things, I’m beginning to have doubts even I understand the extent to which the world is changing before our eyes.
I feel a lot like Amos right now finally realizing I’m walking through a post-civilizational landscape where everything looks normal but it isn’t. In his case violent Communists from the fringe of the solar system dropped asteroids on Earth.
For him this was a step-function change. But for many in our world the changes happening aren’t quite so profound yet. The lights are still on, there’s still food in a lot of our fridges.
It looks from where I’m sitting, the markets haven’t woken up to these changes yet. Because of the size and scope of the changes, and just how much of their valuation is a reflection of the false information being fed into them by stupid AI algorithms, the speed at which this realization is happening is far slower than we want to admit.
Normalcy bias is real. Markets never want to believe that cooler heads won’t prevail, because they always have before. But what happens when someone drops a rock from space on us, metaphorically?
How do we react to that?
Would it look like Iron Ore futures at 10-Year highs?
Lumber prices looking like they are a yo-yo in the hands of a sugar-addict?
Or a new technology like bitcoin repricing the world in terms of tangible assets which can’t be counterfeited becoming the vessel of hope for people who were ahead of the perception curve?
If that’s the case what’s gold’s problem? We all know what it is. It’s the same problem everyone else has, the dollar and the people who print them.
Supply chains are breaking, commodity inflation is real, not just because printers go brrr, but because they’ve broken the world on purpose and believe they are the only ones who can put it back together.
I wouldn’t bank my retirement on that. Betting the ‘over’ on central planning incompetence has always been a one-sided trade for me.
Guys like Amos are as good a metaphor for markets as you can get. Amos is just like capital, going along with The Churn ,hitching a ride on whatever the best option is in front of him without a real plan.
And right now capital is walking around in a daze, looking for shelter in a winter wasteland. The people in power continue keep issuing commands, fearful we’ll stop listening to what they have to say.
So they scream louder that they are relevant while more wake up to the reality every day that they are as clueless as the rest of us. I figure we have another six to ten weeks before that reaches critical mass.
Those of us who adapt to this new reality the fastest will be the ones who will survive. Because thinking we’re still in The Churn is a recipe for getting run over.
Saturday, January 23, 2021
What Is an Antenna System? Posted by Ward Silver, N0AX
“System” is a word that gets thrown around a lot. What does it mean from the perspective of an amateur radio operator? Generally, I think of a system as a collection of parts, each with a distinct function, connected together electrically or mechanically to achieve some purpose that none of the parts can accomplish by themselves.
What about “antenna system,” then? What does that include? I consider an antenna system to be the parts and pieces between your radio’s antenna connector and the air in which the electromagnetic waves travel to and from other stations. Not all of those parts and pieces carry current. Your coaxial cable’s plastic jacket is an important part of the antenna system as you’ll find out if it ever gets a hole! The same goes for that tree holding up one end of your dipole.
Parts of an Antenna System
Such a broad definition can make things look pretty complicated, but you can usually simplify a system by sorting the pieces into different categories. From a general point of view, your antenna system is made up of three types of parts: passive mechanical, active mechanical, and electrical. All of those parts contribute to how your station receives and transmits radio waves.
- Passive mechanical parts include things that hold your antenna up, keep it away from or in contact with other objects, support the feed lines, protect connectors and cables, and so forth. In most cases, these parts don’t have much of an electrical effect on how the antenna behaves.
- Active mechanical parts are things that by changing their characteristics also change the electrical behavior of the antenna system. This includes parts as simple as a switch or relay and as complex as a rotator or motor-driven tuning capacitor or coil. These generally have a big effect on antenna behavior and are probably intended to!
- If a part of the system carries RF signal current intentionally, it’s an electrical part. Feed lines, antenna elements, and tuning networks are all types of electrical parts. Parts that carry RF signal current unintentionally include items like the outside surface of coax shields, guy wires that pick up radiated signals, even the ground or a nearby metal roof. If enough current is carried, these are parts of your antenna system.
Let’s consider a simple antenna, say, a half-wave wire dipole for 20 meters fed by coaxial cable. What does that antenna system look like? If you start by designing and modeling this antenna in free-space, you’ll wind up with about 33 feet of wire (clearly an electrical part) having a classic figure-8 radiation pattern.
Since most of us don’t live in free-space (CQ NA1SS!) the antenna will be some fixed height above ground. The height makes a big difference in the elevation pattern, as the figure shows for several elevations. The electrical properties of the ground also determine how much of the signal reflects and how much is dissipated as heat. That makes the ground an important active mechanical part of the antenna system.
The figures above show the difference in elevation patterns for the very same dipole modeled over regular ground at a height of ½-wavelength on the left and ¾-wavelength on the right. Yes, the ground is an active mechanical part of this antenna system.
What is it that holds your antenna at the chosen height? Most dipoles are held up by non-conductive ropes attached to insulators at each end of the dipole. These are (hopefully) passive mechanical parts unless they break or get coated with conductive salt-water spray. But what are those ropes attached to? If they’re tied to or supported by a metal mast or tower you might find that the support begins to act as an antenna near frequencies at which it’s resonant. Guy wires that are resonant near the frequency of operation certainly will have an effect of a nearby antenna, picking up and re-radiating a signal. These mechanical components are passive on some frequencies and active on others.
This figure from the ARRL Antenna Book shows the lengths of guy wires that are at or close to resonance in the eight amateur HF bands from 80 through 10 meters. In the bold ranges, the guy wires act as electrical parts, while elsewhere they are passive mechanical parts. A resonant guy wire close to a beam can result in significant pattern distortion or changes in SWR from the guy wire’s coupling affecting the feed point impedance.
Feed Lines
Then there is the feed line that gets (most of) your signal from the transceiver to and from the antenna. A perfect feed line would deliver all of the power from one end to the other while being completely transparent to the antenna and its radiated or received signals. Real feed lines have loss, though, and that loss increases with frequency. As SWR increases at the antenna, that results in additional feed line loss because the signal makes more than one trip through the feed line before it is all transferred to the antenna. This can make a BIG difference in your signal!
For example, three different antenna systems shown below change the feed line type and location of the impedance-matching antenna tuner. The antenna and its height above real ground are the same in each case. At 80 meters, the system loss in the tuner and feed line are 8.5 dB, and at 10 meters, the loss increases to 12.9 dB!
Changing the feed line to 450-ohm ladder line reduces the 80 meter loss to 1.8 dB and the 10 meter loss to 2.4 dB. If bringing ladder line all the way to the antenna tuner isn’t practical, you might use an auto-tuner directly under the antenna, connected to the transceiver with coax and the antenna with ladder line. This reduces loss even further to 1.2 dB on 80 and 0.9 dB on 10 meters.
This is a very good example of system-level analysis with real benefits for even this modest antenna system. You don’t have to have stacked Yagis or be operating UHF moonbounce to be rewarded by considering your system’s behavior. (There is a more complete discussion of this system in the Transmission Line System Techniques chapter of the ARRL Antenna Book where these figures are used.)
The feed line may also pick up a significant amount of common-mode current from the antenna, whether it is a dipole, a beam, or some other kind of antenna. For coax, the common-mode current flows on the outside of the shield, acting just like a “third wire” attached to the antenna’s feed point. (Open-wire feed line also has common-mode pickup with the current flowing equally on both wires.) The effect on feed point impedance and radiation pattern is unpredictable, and the common-mode path may conduct RF into your station where it can cause RFI. For these reasons, many antenna systems include a common-mode “choke balun” made from ferrite cores or by coiling the coaxial cable. Considering common-mode current paths is an important element of antenna system design.
Troubleshooting Antenna Systems
With experience, you’ll learn that troubleshooting an antenna really means troubleshooting the whole antenna system. If you think you have an antenna problem and you can’t see it lying on the ground or with half the driven element broken off, you’ll need to start at one end and work your way through to the other. For example, the author recently had an end-fed antenna that seemed to be misbehaving pretty badly, but after a few trips to the backyard raising and lowering the antenna, nothing looked obviously broken. As it turned out, one connector of a short coax jumper inside the station between a power meter and antenna switch wasn’t completely tight, and while it looked okay visually, it certainly wasn’t electrically! Getting the connector completely secure solved that problem, but the cause wasn’t what I initially expected.
This is a typical antenna system for a simple HF station. Along with the add-on tuner, you might also have an antenna switch, power meter, band-pass filter, and other accessories. Notice that the ground system is also included in the antenna system. Where would you start testing if your antenna suddenly “went deaf” and had a high SWR? An end-to-end visual inspection is a good way to start, and sometimes the problem is something obvious.
Let’s say the inspection doesn’t identify the problem. Now is the time to put on your Antenna System hat and perform one test at a time to isolate the part with the problem. You can start at either end, but the most convenient method is to start at the station and replace the entire antenna system with a known-good dummy load attached as directly as possible to the output of the radio. Assuming the radio puts out full power without complaint, you then begin working your way toward the antenna. Replace each part in turn with a substitute or bypass it entirely with a known-good jumper connected to the dummy load. It helps to take notes of each test in your station notebook just to remind yourself of what you’ve tested and what you haven’t. Sooner or later, you’ll discover that moving the dummy load to the “other” side of Part X makes the problem reappear. Voila–you’re a system troubleshooter! Make sure to note the problem and its solution in the notebook, too.
There is a whole chapter on Antenna System Troubleshooting in the ARRL Antenna Book, with the introductory section written just for beginners. The chapters on Transmission Line Systems and the various basic types of antennas will help you understand all of the different elements of antenna systems, whether you have a dipole, a mobile whip, or beams. The more you know about antennas, the more tools you’ll have in your antenna systems toolbox. There’s a chapter on antenna measurements and instrumentation, too.
Some Darned Thing
Finally, I wouldn’t want to discuss troubleshooting without mentioning the inevitable “Some Da(r)ned Thing” or SDT. In my nearly forty years of electrical engineering, with a lot of troubleshooting experience of many different kinds of systems, I’ve learned to expect the unexpected. As Isaac Asimov observed, discoveries often result not from “Eureka!” but from “That looks funny…”
While you’re testing and inspecting, develop an ear for that little voice whispering observations. Maybe something smells a little hot or is a little discolored? What’s that wire hanging down on the output of the matching network? Where did the wing-nut go that was supposed to be holding down the gamma rod clamp? Is that a bird’s nest in the dish feed horn? The cosmic microwave background was discovered when Bell Labs personnel thought pigeon droppings were raising the noise floor of a big dish antenna! These things are never in the design documentation, but soon your “system sense” will keep you on the lookout for SDTs.
Devils Tower, MT | February, 2015 Submitted by AE7AP
1.6-miles, +821 ft, -160 ft
The Devils Tower hike is a beautiful one that climbs a series of benches through open range and timber. It is nicest in the spring, before it gets too hot. The summit offers panoramic views of the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness, the Helena Valley, and the surrounding mountains.
Directions From York: Head north towards Nelson for 4.7-miles to Favorite Gulch Road; Turn Left (West) on Favorite Gulch Road – proceed for 0.5-miles; Turn Right (North) on FS-4125 & proceed for 0.5-miles. Note that road conditions may be poor during wet weather. Park at the 4-way intersection just before the road begins to descend down Owl Gulch.
Walk west, following the 2-track. Leave the two track when it turns right (north) and cross the jackleg fence. Follow the footpath as it ascends in a west-northwesterly direction. The path will fade out at the crest of the bench. Follow the bench crest northerly, and continue following it as it arcs to the west and dead-ends into the side of a forested ridge. Climb straight up the hill to the crest of this final ridge/bench and follow the ridge/bench northerly over the false summit to Devils Tower.
Thursday, January 21, 2021
The Case Against Biden’s Class-Warfare Tax Policy, Part IV January 21, 2021 by Dan Mitchell
I’ve shared three reasons why Biden’s tax plan is misguided (the tax code is biased against rich taxpayers, the tax hike would have Laffer-Curve implications, and it would saddle America with the world’s highest corporate tax burden).
For Part IV of the series, let’s explain why every piece of his plan will backfire.
There are three main arguments for higher taxes, though I don’t find any of them convincing.
- Spite and envy against successful entrepreneurs, investors, innovators, and business owners.
- Bringing more money to Washington to finance a larger burden of government spending.
- Bringing more money to Washington to ostensibly lower the burden of deficits and debt.
For what it’s worth, Biden’s proposed spending increases are far larger than his proposed tax increases, so we can rule out reason #3.
So we have to ask ourselves whether reasons #1 and #2 are compelling.
And when considering those two arguments, we also should ask whether those reasons are sufficiently compelling to justify throwing millions of Americans into unemployment and reducing the nation’s competitiveness.
The answer should be a resounding no.
In a column in the Wall Street Journal from last July, Philip DeMuth elaborated on the damage that would be inflicted by Biden’s class-warfare agenda.
Mr. Biden has proposed to reinstate the Obama tax rates for top earners while simultaneously imposing an unlimited 12.4% Social Security payroll tax on earnings over $400,000. …Mr. Biden proposes to eliminate the capital gains reset to fair market value at death. For long-term holdings, much of that gain is merely inflation, created by the government’s failure to maintain price stability, so this is effectively a tax on a tax.
The remaining gains are usually from corporate earnings, which were already taxed once, when they came in the door. It will be difficult to keep your business or farm in the family if the Biden scheme forces it to be liquidated to pay the death taxes. …If a President Biden has his way, the top capital-gains tax rate will be 39.6%—the same as for ordinary income. This could be a triple whammy: cutting the estate tax exemption in half, eliminating the capital gains reset to fair market value, and then doubling the capital-gains tax rate. A small step for the government, a giant loss for the American family. …The former vice president’s ambitious spending programs would more than offset any new revenue from his tax proposals. …This isn’t a debate between growing the pie vs. redistributing the pie; it is about everyone settling for a smaller pie.
The final two sentences deserve extra attention.
First, nobody should be deluded that tax increases will be used to reduce red ink. Yes, Biden is proposing to collect a lot more money, but he’s proposing about $2 of new spending for every $1 of projected tax revenue.
Brian Riedl’s Chartbook has the grim details on Biden’s spending agenda.
Second, the point about “growing the pie” is critically important since even a very small reduction in long-run growth will have a surprisingly large impact on household finances within a few decades.
The bottom line is that living standards in the United States are significantly higher than living standards in Europe, in large part because fiscal burdens are not as onerous in America.
Biden’s plan to make America more like France, Italy, and Greece is not a good idea.