Not Tired of Winning XCV
This is one from earlier this year, but admit all the winning and winning, I had not noticed it. It is actually a policy I first heard trumpeted by Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich back in the 1980’s, in the last millennia. I did not hear any campaign speeches about it, nor any mention in the news, nor any public debate.
From a White House press release:
ENCOURAGING INVESTMENT: Opportunity Zones will spur private-sector investment to revitalize hurting communities and unleash their economic potential.
- In 2017, President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which established Opportunity Zones to incentivize long-term investments in low-income communities across the country.
- These incentives offer capital gains tax relief to investors for new investment in designated Opportunity Zones.
- Opportunity Zones are anticipated to spur $100 billion in private capital investment.
- Incentivizing investment in low-income communities fosters economic revitalization and job creation and promotes sustainable economic growth across the Nation.
My comment:
If it were possible to declare an amendment to the Constitution unconstitutional, Amendment XVI surely would be it. The original Constitution held a wiser provision: “No capitation, or other direct, tax shall be laid, unless in proportion to the census…”
Capitation was one of the main drivers of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and the Founding Fathers knew it.
The New York Times, of all things, derided the idea of taxing incomes as “un-Democratic, inquisitorial, and wrong in principle” — that was in A.D. 1894, back when the brainworm of political correctness existed only in an embryonic form in the minds of melancholy German metaphysicians.
In any case, the idea of taxing the income of the poor, even with a graduated tax, to feed the bloated Federal government, even in support of bread and circuses and other supports for the idle poor, is just as the New York Times of the Nineteenth Century described. Giving clerks in a soulless bureaucracy the power to audit the books of private citizens, and therefore giving the political faction in power the power to harass the faction out of power by scrutinizing income tax returns of their leaders and candidates, is a deep affront to the privacy and dignity of a free people.
Relief to poor neighborhoods of the burdens of tax and regulation is wise and long overdue, and is a case where President Trump can rightly say, with more rhetorical sense than logical sense, that he has kept more campaign promises than he made.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
