We're Halfway There to a Flat Tax!

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Unleash Prosperity Hotline
Issue #1173
12/31/2024
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Happy New Year Everyone!

1) We're Halfway There to a Flat Tax!

Your esteemed UP co-founders Steve Forbes and Steve Moore make the case in today's WSJ ([link removed]) :

Making the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent would be a good start for Congress in 2025. But it's time to take an even bigger step: creating a simplified flat tax for all. The TCJA got us close to this goal, and a few additional reforms would get it done.

Collapsing the personal-income and corporate tax rates to 15% would have huge economic benefits. America would suddenly have one of the lowest tax rates in the world, resulting in trillions of dollars of new capital flow and a spike in take-home pay.

The piece also notes that only 9% of tax filers today itemize deductions. Almost all of the benefits from the remaining deductions and loopholes benefit millionaires and billionaires. So eliminating all deductions will "make the rich their fair share" but at a lower tax rate for everyone. How could Bernie Sanders complain?

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2) New York Shoots Itself in the Foot with New Carbon Tax

Last week, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a back-door tax increase that charges fossil fuel companies for their carbon emissions. New York now joins Vermont as the second state with a "climate Superfund" law that is spuriously designed to pay for "extreme weather" damage caused by climate change.

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Expect other Blue states such as Maryland and Massachusetts to follow. State Senator Liz Kreuger, the bill's New York sponsor, claims the new Trump administration means other states must now act because "literally the sky is falling when you start to talk about climate issues."

(Someone should teach the Senator what the word "literally" means.)

This tax won't be paid by the oil and coal companies, but rather middle class residents in these blue states. The New York carbon tax is expected to translate into a first-year gas price increase of 12 cents a gallon, but it's designed to quickly go up to a much higher level.

These "green climate" taxes are just a virtue-signaling revenue grab by progressive politicians who want to tax and spend more and feel good about themselves. There is no state politicians can change the temperature of a planet with eight billion people. But they can wreck their local economy.
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3) Joe Biden: The Homelessness President

AEI's Kevin Corinth breaks down the latest number on one of Biden's most shameful legacies: the flooding of our once-great cities with homeless people:

Homelessness grew by a record 18% annually in 2024, following a then record 12% increase in 2023. As shown in the figure below, the recent spike in homelessness is unprecedented. Going back 17 years since national homeless counts began, homelessness never before grew by more than 3% in a single year...

The main reason homelessness grew so quickly over the past two years is the influx of migrants into the United States who have overwhelmed homeless shelters in a handful of areas. Sheltered homelessness grew by just under 150,000 people over the past two years...

From 2022-2024, the areas with the largest increases in sheltered homelessness were places recognized as taking in large numbers of migrants, including New York City (77,352), Chicago (14,590), the Massachusetts "Balance of State" Continuum of Care (8,100), and Metropolitan Denver (6,556). The increase in sheltered homelessness in these four areas totaled approximately 107,000, or 72% of the total increase in the United States from 2022-2024.

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4) Auction Off Work Visas to Highest Bidders to Lower the Government Debt

Yesterday's HOTLINE presented powerful evidence that skilled immigrants create far more jobs than they take. Skilled foreign workers are a gift from the rest of the world to the United States in part because most, if not all, of the education expenses, are borne by taxpayers in the origin countries, but Americans get all the benefits.

Right now the cap on H-1B tech visas is about 80,000 annually with roughly 200,000 of these "temporary" visa holders receiving extensions each year.

However, the demand for these high-skilled workers is about 300,000 per year.

Tech firms in Silicon Valley say these foreign workers are nearly indispensable. In that case, the federal government should auction off perhaps 200,000 a year to the tech companies that employ these workers. If the average bid were $25,000, this would raise $5 billion every year for Uncle Sam - and create an incentive to hire Americans. It's a win-win-win for the U.S. economy, the companies, and the federal taxpayers.

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5) And We Should Auction Federal Lands

One way to resolve the affordable housing shortage would be to follow President-Elect Trump's advice and build houses on federal lands.

Nowhere could this have a greater positive economic impact than Las Vegas, where the urban area is surrounded by federal land. Californians continue to move to Nevada (where there is no state income tax) in large numbers, and the housing stock is constrained by the federal government's vast Nevada land holdings.

Edward Pinto and Arthur Gailes of the American Enterprise Institute call for such a strategy in a Las Vegas Review-Journal commentary (Homestead 2.0), noting:

Sale of a minuscule 0.3 percent (about 800 square miles) of BLM land would be enough for about 3 million to 4 million single-family detached and townhomes...

The greatest beneficiaries would be homebuyers. Building more housing is the only way to ensure homeownership remains affordable for the next generation of Americans.

And this is another painless way to reduce the national debt. No brainer.

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6) Hope You Keep Yours

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