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Taxes: Direct, Indirect, Apportioned

October 26, 2015 by Jeff (ILoveCapitalism)

Have you ever tried to read the U.S. Constitution, straight up? I bet your eyes glazed over as soon as you got to Article 1, section 2, clause 3 (which is pretty early in):

Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Reinforcing the same idea is Article 1, section 9, clause 4:

No capitation, or other direct, tax shall be laid, unless in proportion to the census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

What the heck does that mean? I’m re-reading a book which happens to explain it. For historical interest only, I shall explain to you.

A “direct tax” is money that you, the citizen, pay to the government directly. Contrast to an “indirect tax” which is a tax on some product (like alcohol) being manufactured, bought, shipped etc. You pay the tax in the end; but indirectly – because some other party is there as an intermediary: they collect from you, and then the government collects from them.

“Apportioned” means that Congress had to do two things, when it came to the direct tax.

  • Declare the exact amount of money that it wanted to raise (say, $20 million).
  • Declare the amount to come from each State, based on certain rules.

The rules were the “apportionment” part. The amount of money would be apportioned by State population, which would be calculated as: the number of free persons, plus 3/5 the number of slaves (if any).

What was the point of the 3/5 requirement? To make the slave states pay more. Here is a fictitious example. Trigger warning: Maths! and slavery!

Suppose the U.S. had exactly 2 States, Free and Slave. And it needed to raise $180 for the next budget cycle. First, Congress would declare “We need to raise exactly $180. And whiskey taxes aren’t good enough; we want to do a direct tax.”

Now suppose that Free state had 60 citizens (all free of course), and Slave state had 30. So, Free had twice as many. At first blush, Free would have a tax on its citizens where they cough up 2/3 of the money for the feds (which is $120), while Slave state would cough up 1/3 (which is $60).

But let’s say Slave state didn’t only have 30 free citizens; it also had 50 slaves. The 3/5 rule said that Slave state should cough up more.

Applying the 3/5 rule, Slave state had 30 + (3/5 * 50) = (30 + 30) = 60 people for apportionment purposes. So both States had 60 people, for apportionment purposes. So the tax would be apportioned half-and-half. Free state would be designated to cough up $90, and Slave state also $90.

Both states would probably tax their free citizens. So, Slave state would have a higher tax *rate* on its 30 free citizens, to get them coughing up $90. Free state would have a lower rate on its 60 citizens, to get them coughing up $90.

Weird and antiquated, but now you know!

Filed Under: Constitutional Issues, History Tagged With: apportionment, Constitutional Issues, direct tax, history, indirect tax, slavery

Leftists hate hearing about the socialist roots of Nazism

December 9, 2014 by Jeff (ILoveCapitalism)

That’s my embriefening of Daniel Hannan’s title from February: Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism.

Short version of this post: Hannan is awesome, so why not go read it?

Long version: I’ll tease his article for you, then add my comments. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Freedom, History, Socialism in America, World History Tagged With: Communism, daniel hannan, fascism, freedom, history, leftism, national socialism, nazi

About that Fox News interview…

July 30, 2013 by Kurt

If you know a lot of leftists, as I do, chances are you’ve encountered a link to this interview of Reza Aslan by Lauren Green at some point in the past two days or so.  They see the interview as an example of the evil of Fox News.  They claim it illustrates the bias of the network, and that it illustrates how “smart” the author is and how he “totally pwns the interviewer’s assumptions.”

I watched the interview, and I encourage you to do the same, but my main reaction to their claims about it is to think:  Excuse me?  Did we even watch the same interview?  I believe neither the interviewer nor the guest came off particularly well in this exchange.

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Lauren Green comes across as someone who likely hasn’t read the book, but who has read many reviews of the book, and is trying to provoke a response from the author. Reza Aslan, though, comes across as the ultimate disingenuous academic who says, “I am just a historian, I have no agenda whatsoever.”  He keeps reiterating that he is an academic with a PhD, as though that is an adequate defense against bias.  Green could have done a more skillful job challenging his assumptions or his arguments; her questions only serve to make him defensive, and so the interview doesn’t appear to accomplish much for either party.

Nevertheless, I didn’t view the interview as a complete failure for Fox News.  Quite to the contrary, I thought it illustrated that there is more journalistic spirit alive at Fox News than at most of the mainstream press outlets who have interviewed the author or reported on the book.  Why do I say that?  Because, the other morning I had to endure this NPR interview with the same author of the same book, and I heard a lot of claims by Aslan about his book, and his beliefs, but no one challenged those claims or tried to interrogate Aslan’s motivations for writing the book that he wrote.  The NPR interview was so concerned with helping him make his points, that it could have just as easily come from the public relations office of his publisher.

Not surprisingly, the other day NPR’s website featured this story entitled “Reza Aslan Hearts NPR”: “Author and religious scholar Reza Aslan is one of those people who’s at NPR West so often that he blurs the line between guest and employee. We always joke with our regulars that they should have a punch card, and when it’s full, they get their own cubicle.”  Even less surprisingly, today NPR has this sympathetic story about the reaction on the left to the Fox News  interview.

When you compare NPR’s very sympathetic pieces helping Aslan promote both his book and his talking points, with Lauren Green’s somewhat awkward attempt to interrogate him, though, it’s pretty clear to me which “news” outlet is more interested in informing its viewers and letting them decide for themselves.   Green’s interview told us much more about Aslan than NPR’s pieces: it showed us something of his character, it introduced us to some of the controversies surrounding the book, and it raised the question of his worldview and its influence on his writing.

And as it turns out, there is a lot of reason for controversy, as Pamela Geller Robert Spencer points out in her his own detailed post about the controversy (hat tip: Pamela Geller).   Geller Spencer writes:

I don’t care about his scholarly credentials. Even if everything he had said about his degrees had been true, it would confer on his book no presumption of accuracy or truth. I am constantly assailed for lacking scholarly credentials, but as it happens, when it comes to writing about religion I have exactly the same credentials as Aslan, a B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, and an M.A. in Religious Studies. His other two degrees are in other fields.

But anyway, it doesn’t matter: there are plenty of fools with degrees, and plenty of geniuses without them. My work, and Aslan’s, stands or falls on its merits, not on the number of degrees we have. Aslan’s pulling rank on Lauren Green and starting to reel off (inaccurately) his degrees was a sign of insecurity: it implied that he didn’t think his book could stand on its merits, and had to be accepted because he had a lot of degrees. And indeed, his book doesn’t stand on its merits.

I encourage you to be sure to read Geller’s Spencer’s whole post.

To my mind, the reaction on the left tells us more about their fondness for credentials and their disdain for Fox News than anything else;  that the same people who view this interview as an instance of intolerable bias think nothing of the swill served up regularly by NPR and MSNBC should tell us all we need to know.

Filed Under: Faith, FDS (Fox Derangement Syndrome), History, Identity Politics, Liberal Dhimmitude, Media Bias, War on Christians Tagged With: Christianity, fox news, history, identity politics, media bias

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