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Post Office Box 1147
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Marblehead, Massachusetts 01945
▪ (781) 639-9709
“Every Tax is a Pay Cut ... A Tax Cut is a Pay Raise”
46 years as “The Voice of Massachusetts Taxpayers”
— and
their Institutional Memory — |
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CLT UPDATE
Wednesday, June 3, 2020
Scandalous deceptions exposed
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Chip Ford's CLT
Commentary
Last Tuesday, May 26, "91
Economists" issued a manifesto calling for a hike in the
income tax, among others.
91 Economists' Letter
CLT immediately responded
the next morning with a statewide news release exposing
their insidious scheme:
Cruel tax hike proposal deceives taxpayers, again.
We followed up with a CLT
Update on Thursday,
The Assault on CLT's Tax Rollback,
and another on Saturday,
Proposed income tax hike draws scrutiny.
One of the points I meant
to mention was just how deceptive that manifesto really
is. One among the 91 More Is Never Enough
economists really jumped out as I scanned the list of
the university- and taxpayer-funded, well-compensated
self-impressed economists was a name that reverberates
in infamy. Note at the top of the right column of
Page 3 of the letter, among the 91 signatories listed
is: Jonathan Gruber of MIT.
Gruber was, first, the
architect of Romneycare.
Then went on to create and manipulate passage of Obamacare.
You might better remember him
for the fraud he committed and lies
he
later boasted of telling, belittling voters years ahead of even Hillary
Clinton's dismissive term "Deplorables":
Passing Obamacare, Gruber
said, was
“a very clever . . . basic exploitation of the lack of economic
understanding of the American voter. . . . The stupidity of the
American voter . . . was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”
You can read more about the
evil economist Jonathan Gruber below in Marc A.
Thiessen's Washington Post column of November 17, 2014,
"Thanks to Jonathan Gruber for revealing Obamacare
deception."
Fortunately there are some honest
economists and one has stepped into the breach and taken head-on the
self-serving 91 deceivers dependent on taxpayers' money for their
personal wealth and standing. Suffolk University Economist David Tuerck is a longtime ally of CLT and defender of taxpayers. In his
CommonWealth Magazine counterpoint on Sunday to the Ali Baba and His
90 Thieves letter, "Beacon Hill Institute says tax increases would
be costly," David Tuerck also highlighted their greatest deception:
A
letter submitted to state leaders by a group
of 91 economists can be seen as the opening
volley in a campaign to raise Massachusetts
taxes. There will be similar demands from
various business groups and from the same
tax-and-spend lobby that agitates for higher
taxes in both good times and bad. At the
moment, the only comfort we can take lies in the
unwillingness of Gov. Charlie Baker to submit to
this pressure. . . .
Finally, the authors make
one observation that shows why academic
economists should never attempt to make
predictions about politics. They say that
their proposed tax increases “could be phased
back as the economy returns to its pre-recession
level.” For the likelihood of that, we
should study the fate of ballot Question 4,
approved by almost 60 percent of Massachusetts
voters in 2000. Question 4 called for the
reduction of the state income tax rate from 5.95
percent to 5 percent by 2003. As it turns
out, it took until 2020 to get the rate down to
5 percent, its reduction having been delayed
time after time by one contrived fiscal
emergency after another.
Economists are often chided
for their inability to agree. With this
episode we have plenty of economics to disagree
with.
The attack on taxpayers has
been launched.
The battle has been joined.
The outcome is in the balance . . .
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Chip Ford
Executive Director |
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Full News Reports Follow
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The Washington
Post
November 17, 2014
Thanks to Jonathan Gruber for revealing Obamacare deception
By Marc A. Thiessen
Democrats are
desperately distancing themselves from Obamacare architect
Jonathan Gruber. He “never worked on our staff,” President
Obama said this weekend in Brisbane, Australia, (even though
Gruber was paid almost $400,000 by his administration, is
the intellectual author of the individual mandate and met in
the Oval Office with Obama and the head of the Congressional
Budget Office to pore over the bill). “I don’t know who he
is,” Nancy Pelosi declared on Capitol Hill (even though she
repeatedly cited him by name during the Obamacare debate).
The reason
Democrats are running from Gruber is the same reason
conservatives should be thanking him: Gruber has exposed
what liberals really think of the American people.
As of this
weekend, there are now seven Gruber videos, in which he
mocks the “stupidity” of American voters and boasts of the
Obama administration’s ability to take advantage of it. In a
new video that surfaced Friday, Gruber explains that the
Obama administration passed the so-called “Cadillac tax” on
high-value employer health plans “by mislabeling it, calling
it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people,
when we know it’s a tax on people who hold these insurance
plans.” Americans would not support a tax on individuals, so
“We just tax the insurance companies, they pass on the
higher prices . . . it ends up being the same thing.” The
ruse, Gruber says, was “a very clever . . . basic
exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the
American voter.”
In another video,
Gruber boasts about how the Obama administration fooled
Americans into paying to cover the uninsured by using
sleight of hand, focusing on their concern over rising
health costs. “Barack Obama’s not a stupid man, okay? He
knew when he was running for president that quite frankly
the American public doesn’t actually care that much about
the uninsured. . . . What the American public cares about is
costs. And that’s why even though the bill that they made is
90 percent health insurance coverage and 10 percent about
cost control, all you ever hear people talk about is cost
control.”
In yet another
video, Gruber says the Obama administration knew the
individual mandate was a tax, but that if Americans knew the
truth “the bill dies.” So the bill “was written in a
tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office]
did not score the mandate as taxes.” He adds that “the lack
of transparency is a huge political advantage” and that “the
stupidity of the American voter . . . was really, really
critical for the thing to pass.”
President Obama
insists none of this represents the views of his
administration. Asked in Australia whether he had
intentionally misled the American people to get the law
passed, Obama replied curtly, “No, I did not.”
Yes, he did. Put
aside his now infamous lie of the year in 2013 that “if you
like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.” Obama
also insisted repeatedly that the individual mandate “is
absolutely not a tax increase.” In a 2009 interview with ABC
News, George Stephanopoulos pressed him on it no less than
five times. He even read Obama the definition of “tax” from
Webster’s dictionary. Obama was adamant: “My critics say
everything is a tax increase. . . . I absolutely reject that
notion.”
Then, after
Obamacare passed, his administration cynically turned around
and argued before the Supreme Court that it was in fact a
tax. At one point, Justice Stephen Breyer asked Obama’s
solicitor general, Donald Verrilli, “Why do you keep saying
tax?,” drawing peals of laughter.
The reason he
called it a tax is because — as Jonathan Gruber now admits —
members of the Obama team knew all along that it was a tax.
They intentionally deceived Americans about it because if
they had called it a tax, Obamacare would never have become
law.
It’s one thing for
Americans to suspect that their president lies to them. It’s
quite another to hear a key Obama adviser boast of it.
So thank you,
Jonathan Gruber. We now know how the Obama left sees the
American people. We are like children who don’t understand
what is best for us. We need experts such as Jonathan Gruber
to make decisions for us. If we are too “stupid” to agree
with them, they can use our ignorance to deceive us and
enact policies we would never otherwise support. And if
we’re too stupid to catch the deception, well, that’s our
problem.
CommonWealth
Magazine
Sunday, May 31, 2020
Beacon Hill Institute says tax increases would be costly
By David. G. Tuerck
A
letter submitted to state leaders by a group of 91
economists can be seen as the opening volley in a campaign
to raise Massachusetts taxes. There will be similar demands
from various business groups and from the same tax-and-spend
lobby that agitates for higher taxes in both good times and
bad. At the moment, the only comfort we can take lies in the
unwillingness of Gov. Charlie Baker to submit to this
pressure.
The signers of the
letter argue that the pandemic necessitates an expansion of
government services even as state tax revenues fall. But,
before clamoring for higher taxes, the signers might have
waited to get a clearer idea of how much in revenues the
state will have available in fiscal year 2021. It won’t be
until later in June that we have barely enough data to
assess the decline in tax revenue that began in March. And
there are other sources of revenue. The state has already
received $2.6 billion in federal aid and may well receive
more. It has a rainy-day fund of $3.46 billion. Recognizing
as it does the importance of having good data before rushing
out with policy recommendations, the discipline of economics
calls for a more thoughtful approach.
Then there is the
logic they use in making their case. “Balancing the budget
by cutting spending,” they say, “has a more negative impact
on economic growth than balancing the budget by raising
taxes.” That argument is dubious enough when it comes to
economic contractions that begin on the demand side of the
economy but makes no sense at all when it comes to a
contraction like this one that began on the supply side.
As regrettable as
any decline in state services would be, shoring up those
services does nothing to keep a small business going for
another month when it has been shut down in the face of a
state edict. And to say that raising the tax on business
profits is “fair” since the beleaguered businesses in our
state won’t be making much in profits anyway tells us more
about the mindset of these writers than they should want to
reveal. And their logic is faulty. All businesses need
profits in order to attract capital, and Massachusetts
businesses are going to need plenty of capital to satisfy
state rules for reopening. Furthermore, the new taxes would
depress take-home wages as well as profits.
We can also wonder
why none of the signers, with all their resources, bothered
to provide an estimate of the “negative impact” that a tax
increase would have on the state economy. At the Beacon Hill
Institute, we decided to correct for that omission by
running their proposed tax increases through our state tax
model. Our results: a loss of 28,651 private sector jobs,
$2.6 billion in investment, and $3.37 billion in disposable
personal income.
Finally, the
authors make one observation that shows why academic
economists should never attempt to make predictions about
politics. They say that their proposed tax increases “could
be phased back as the economy returns to its pre-recession
level.” For the likelihood of that, we should study the fate
of ballot Question 4, approved by almost 60 percent of
Massachusetts voters in 2000. Question 4 called for the
reduction of the state income tax rate from 5.95 percent to
5 percent by 2003. As it turns out, it took until 2020 to
get the rate down to 5 percent, its reduction having been
delayed time after time by one contrived fiscal emergency
after another.
Economists are
often chided for their inability to agree. With this episode
we have plenty of economics to disagree with.
— David Tuerck is the president
of the Beacon Hill Institute and a professor of economics at
Suffolk University. |
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this
material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes
only. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
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▪ (781) 639-9709
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