Entries Tagged 'Word of The Day' ↓

While our new President was speaking to Congress for the first time this year, seven speakers put on a Zoom webinar labeled “In Plain Sight: The Racism Hiding in Our Tax Code” — hosted by the m4bl.org.

Moderators Makani Themba, Chief Strategist at Higher Ground Strategies, and Andrea Ritchie, Writer, Lawyer & Activist, joined five other speakers who were experts on law, race, women’s issues and taxation from activist non-profit organizations in the U.S.

Issues they discussed covered far more than IRS’ taxes!

Their focus included state property taxes that fund education; sales taxes that harm the poor; state taxes that are not shared with cities and counties; unequal revenue spending; tax credits that favor those with money; income inequality; wealth divergence; regressive, progressive and flat taxes; revenue sharing for cities who are broke; the balance between military and domestic tax spending; cannabis taxes based on money made by harming the environment; taxes for reparations to African Americans; public health taxes; and taxes on the poor.

Key issues closely related to the title of this zoom group talk, were:

(1) disparities in choice of groups that the IRS doesn’t go after for tax cheating, a subject that our current President has also been recently discussing.

(2) The figure of 380 billion dollars of lost tax revenue from unpaid taxes by richer people was tossed out. (See this article from the Center of American Progress supporting that figure),

(3) the confusing amount of jargon and verbiage used by the IRS in numerous booklets filled with too many pages, and

(4) last but not least, disparate treatment of taxation on two types of income; one for the rich vs. the other for the middle class and the poor, i.e., “unearned income” vs. “earned income”. Continue reading →

Definition: Opportunity cost is the cost of choosing one option, i.e. accepting a job, planting one type of crop, or traveling to one country rather than another) when choosing a different option could’ve turned out to be more profitable.

Pricing Drugs by Using Opportunity Cost Theory

Did you know that U.S. Government Health Agencies are the chief funders of pharmaceutical Research and Development (R&D) in this country?

And! Private Equity firms and Publicly-held firms on NASDAQ buy into pharmaceutical R&D only during the final phase of research?

Our government gets nothing from these corporations for all of the free R&D research our taxes pay for on our behalfs.

Recently in the news, a small company was complaining that they had to turn over their patent rights to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control).

The company, expressing outrage, refused to share its patents. They wanted all the profits from their drug. Even though our government was funding them! (This, by the way, is what libertarian Public Choice economists call “rent-seeking”.)

This attitude is outrageous and absolutely antithetical to the way that copyrights and patents are supposed to work to promote creativity and innovative new products (or new uses of old products).

Academics once shared their knowledge freely with each other through many publications.

But now, our monoplistic Military, Industrial, and Academic Complex has taken over workers’ “intellectual property rights” in the name of defending profits that the “Complex” paid hardly any of the costs for. Continue reading →

Have you ever wondered why sellers of automobiles and trucks are called “dealers,” while sellers of stocks are called “brokers”?

What’s the difference between these two kinds of sellers?  Continue reading →