There are people who treat yoga like a form of exercise that should be preformed “to the max” in a 100 degree room, and there are those who light incense and channel mother Gaia in downward dog. Then there are people like me who struggle with a chronically bad back and fairly constant anxiety who have discovered that yoga is about the only thing that can keep us relatively sane and pain free.
Why shouldn't they? There isn't just one type of yoga. I've done "sleep for fitness" style yoga in college which is all about relaxing and stretching. I've also done a style of yoga with a fitness buff friend of mine that left me sweating and panting like a real workout.
It was a joke. I regularly practice yoga also and would happily defend its merit. I just know there are enough yogis in the world that there’s no way that little dig at yoga would sneak by without being called out.
"I think my position on whether we should tax churches is “No, and we should also not tax any other organization — we should tax individuals.”
Love this and I agree. This would effectively eliminate the "charity" loophole that wealthy people use to avoid paying taxes. Wait... I think I just found that 6-7% we were missing.
There are two ways to be old-school liberal: to believe that liberty is the most important among set of very important things, or to believe that liberty is the only thing. The latter is close to the US Libertarian party, which I agree, is effectively indistinguishable from anarchism.
Progressives and libertarians both want to maximize individual freedom.
Sometimes everybody cooperating to solve a common problem gives us more freedom than a knee jerk “no rules are allowed” response to reform. And sometimes “just leave people alone” grants more freedom than “let’s invent a new bureaucracy to chase diminishing returns” does.
They're both anti-carceral, but I'm struggling to think of even a second progressive policy that stands with the individual against government coercion.
And libertarians are fine with slavery so long as the starving worker signs a consent form first.
We can trade barely-informed accusations of ideological malfeasance all day. Fact is that the root of progressivism is not a tyrannical desire to dominate and control but a rational desire to liberate, growing as it does from the same root of liberalism that libertarianism does.
McJunker, this is a very interesting take. If what you are saying is true, and I am certainly not doubting you, then I think the overall optics on Progressivism (why does that look like a typo?) at least from this Libertarian's viewpoint, is 180 degrees different. Either I am misunderstanding the true meaning, or the message is misleading. Either way, if we truly are coming from the same place, then we have a common ground that can be built on. Unfortunately, the loud mouths on both sides would prefer to keep the divide just wide enough so that we can't hear one another. We get to rely on what they say the "the other side" stands for so that you and I can call each other idiots because we wear different colored jerseys. Articulating that common ground is the reason I read Jeff's substack regularly. That, and he is funny as f*ck.
I don't know that you can reasonably compare "progressivism" to "libertarianism." Libertarianism is basically an ideology: property ownership + rights that end where someone else's rights begin.
Progressivism isn't an ideology, but something more like a disposition: generally towards whatever seems fair to well-educated people, but it doesn't have an underlying theory of the world, an underlying set of principles from which flow the rest of its ideas (I already listed libertarianism's, but communism might be something like "class struggle" or "labor theory of value" etc.). To me, progressivism is more a contemporaneous reaction to what seems to make the here and now (and, presumably, the future) more fair and just, but it rarely defines fairness or justice in a rigorous manner (and when it does, we tend to get things like critical social justice, which is inherently illiberal).
Ok, I can reluctantly accept your argument about taxing Churches, but no way in hell (sorry) should they have reserved parking spaces. That's a bridge too far.
The problem with "tax individuals, not organizations" is that the ultra rich end up getting little "income" but have their companies "invest" in a private jet for them and if they do need actual cash they borrow against their stock. So you get people buying private islands while paying relatively few taxes which pisses people off (I'm not happy about it).
Taxing companies doesn't really fix that problem. If those corporate profits were sent back to the investors, they would be taxed like income (or like dividends, but we can make that "just income" if we wanted to).
Those aren't the Ultra Rich, those are the ultra rich guys' managers. The CEO of money management companies actually do things (even if it's only shake hands and say your money is safe with me). The Ultra Rich do NOTHING.
Trump is not Ultra Rich. He used the corporate jet (which was owned by his company). He very much "acted rich" (pizza hut commercial "rich").
I hear the "tax churches!" mantra as yet another egregious example of the modern Left's intermittent amnesia about what the First Amendment was for in the first place. No matter how many times you remind people of things like, oh I don't know, the historical role of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, every few months I will hear someone suggest "We should tax Joel Osteen!" as if they're the first person to ever come up with the genius idea of ignoring the Free Exercise Clause.
I don't hear it quite as often as "we need exceptions to Free Speech to prevent Hate Speech (and I should get to decide what constitutes Hate Speech)" but it still comes up with some regularity.
And what was the First Amendment for, other than the things it says in the text of the amendment? Taxing them all the same as a non-religious equivalent institution seems at least as neutral, if not more so.
They were some of the main organizers in the Civil Rights Movement in the late '50s and '60s, led by a kind of obscure guy named Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jews were the primary backers to the Civil Rights Movement. They were who got rich after all. (This was covered in my Jewish history class in college, they are rather proud of it.)
There were voices in the black community that spoke up in favor of segregation, saying "now that there's no more segregation, the top-flight black folks have up and left." (See: Atlanta versus Baltimore).
I take no stand on the issue, not being part of the community (although the high genetic variability of blacks means that there's Significant Differences between "top flight" blacks and the "lowest tier").
Ah yes, the reverend Tilton. Brings back memories. Back about 1989 a job transfer put me in a new apartment, where the previous resident was apparently considered an easy mark by the religious money grabbers. My mailbox would be full of letters from different 'preachers' and Mr. Tilton figured prominently in the stack. His letters would show up 2-3 times a week with his picture, usually accompanied by his wife and progeny. Always begging for money to save my soul and enhance my (his) life.
Thanks to an Otago, New Zealand, motorcycle rider, I came across an expression that I call "Pascal's Retort". It explains my attitude to those who think the way the Christians in your video do, and goes, "You may be right. You'd stand a better chance of pulling your foreskin over your head to keep your ears warm, but you may be right."
Inasmuch as taxing profits creates an incentive to reinvest revenue, the incentives for taxing profits are much more positive than the incentives of taxing income.
I definitely agree that we shouldn’t be deciding which organizations are worthy of tax exempt status, though. Religious organizations have even more ridiculous deductions, e.g. clergy housing allowance, that really should die.
Are we sure it's unpopular to tax churches? Every person I've ever talked to about this either thinks that we definitely should or is ambivalent on the point. Further, if a church or non-profit is sending all of their money right back out the door to support someone else, then they won't have that much in profit to tax. So it should only hit scumbags like these TV preachers who want to keep all the money that gets sent to them.
Every person you've talked to, presumably, belongs to "new church" which not only is "untaxed" (via Other Exemptions), but also doesn't appear to need to comply with any Freedom of Speech rulings that other churches must.
The (real) Satanists only show up when everyone else does.
It is extremely, extremely offensive to allow "new church" to post its colors on the Allegheny County Courthouse, for an entire MONTH, without letting any other religion do the same. It says that certain people, and certain faiths, are priviledged, and should reign above the rest.
Especially offensive given the ruling of Allegheny County v. ACLU, which created the "shared space" where religions can display decorations (yes, including the satanists), all at the same time.
Gay Pride Month, also seen flying over Kabul on the US Embassy. As a "thing that certain church-ladies believe" and "other church ladies find offensive, and immoral.", it falls squarely in the realm of "church." (as in a religious belief). All the churches that perplexingly display the 6 colors of the "gay rainbow" (as opposed to seven colors, of Normal Rainbows)... Pro. All the Muslims, against. Ditto the mormons.
New Church (aka the lefty "this isn't a church, but somehow we burn incense and chant dead saint Floyd's name in public") is extremely offensive and needs to go back into the "actually a church" box, instead of the "State Must Declare A Preferred Religion and Sexual Expression."
Problem is, people who (online at least) advocate for "churches should not be tax-exempt" all mean that to apply to "that church there engaging in politics" which is "politics I don't agree with".
I think Prosperity Gospel etc. are scams, and churches shouldn't be telling you who to vote for (but at the same time, yes a priest or minister can preach a sermon on doctrine even if that is "abortion is wrong"). But if you're going to strip churches of tax-exempt status for meddling in politics, that means *all* churches.
Those all count as "political messaging" too. That's the problem: "your church is interfering in politics, my church is only being basic human decency".
Wow. Every paragraph of this I was like yep, but even better would be... and then you'd talk about that thing in the next paragraph.
There are people who treat yoga like a form of exercise that should be preformed “to the max” in a 100 degree room, and there are those who light incense and channel mother Gaia in downward dog. Then there are people like me who struggle with a chronically bad back and fairly constant anxiety who have discovered that yoga is about the only thing that can keep us relatively sane and pain free.
I knew someone would show up here defending the merits of yoga!
Why shouldn't they? There isn't just one type of yoga. I've done "sleep for fitness" style yoga in college which is all about relaxing and stretching. I've also done a style of yoga with a fitness buff friend of mine that left me sweating and panting like a real workout.
It was a joke. I regularly practice yoga also and would happily defend its merit. I just know there are enough yogis in the world that there’s no way that little dig at yoga would sneak by without being called out.
Ah, gotcha :)
"I think my position on whether we should tax churches is “No, and we should also not tax any other organization — we should tax individuals.”
Love this and I agree. This would effectively eliminate the "charity" loophole that wealthy people use to avoid paying taxes. Wait... I think I just found that 6-7% we were missing.
Er, what? I'm not following how this eliminates the charity "loophole."
Jeff, watch it. You're beginning to sound a bit libertarian here. You're going to lose your progressive credentials.
I’m an old school liberal, there’s a good amount of overlap between what I believe and what libertarians believe.
Or what old-school libertarians believed. The official party has gone kinda anarchist.
There are two ways to be old-school liberal: to believe that liberty is the most important among set of very important things, or to believe that liberty is the only thing. The latter is close to the US Libertarian party, which I agree, is effectively indistinguishable from anarchism.
Progressives and libertarians both want to maximize individual freedom.
Sometimes everybody cooperating to solve a common problem gives us more freedom than a knee jerk “no rules are allowed” response to reform. And sometimes “just leave people alone” grants more freedom than “let’s invent a new bureaucracy to chase diminishing returns” does.
They're both anti-carceral, but I'm struggling to think of even a second progressive policy that stands with the individual against government coercion.
Well, except progressives don't want to leave me much money to be free with.
And libertarians are fine with slavery so long as the starving worker signs a consent form first.
We can trade barely-informed accusations of ideological malfeasance all day. Fact is that the root of progressivism is not a tyrannical desire to dominate and control but a rational desire to liberate, growing as it does from the same root of liberalism that libertarianism does.
McJunker, this is a very interesting take. If what you are saying is true, and I am certainly not doubting you, then I think the overall optics on Progressivism (why does that look like a typo?) at least from this Libertarian's viewpoint, is 180 degrees different. Either I am misunderstanding the true meaning, or the message is misleading. Either way, if we truly are coming from the same place, then we have a common ground that can be built on. Unfortunately, the loud mouths on both sides would prefer to keep the divide just wide enough so that we can't hear one another. We get to rely on what they say the "the other side" stands for so that you and I can call each other idiots because we wear different colored jerseys. Articulating that common ground is the reason I read Jeff's substack regularly. That, and he is funny as f*ck.
I'm with you except that in my experience, progressives want to liberate me from my money. Libertarians don't. Therein lies the distinction.
Libertarians want to make you free to be left alone. Progressives want to make you free from having to work to live.
I don't know that you can reasonably compare "progressivism" to "libertarianism." Libertarianism is basically an ideology: property ownership + rights that end where someone else's rights begin.
Progressivism isn't an ideology, but something more like a disposition: generally towards whatever seems fair to well-educated people, but it doesn't have an underlying theory of the world, an underlying set of principles from which flow the rest of its ideas (I already listed libertarianism's, but communism might be something like "class struggle" or "labor theory of value" etc.). To me, progressivism is more a contemporaneous reaction to what seems to make the here and now (and, presumably, the future) more fair and just, but it rarely defines fairness or justice in a rigorous manner (and when it does, we tend to get things like critical social justice, which is inherently illiberal).
Ok, I can reluctantly accept your argument about taxing Churches, but no way in hell (sorry) should they have reserved parking spaces. That's a bridge too far.
The problem with "tax individuals, not organizations" is that the ultra rich end up getting little "income" but have their companies "invest" in a private jet for them and if they do need actual cash they borrow against their stock. So you get people buying private islands while paying relatively few taxes which pisses people off (I'm not happy about it).
Taxing companies doesn't really fix that problem. If those corporate profits were sent back to the investors, they would be taxed like income (or like dividends, but we can make that "just income" if we wanted to).
Those aren't the Ultra Rich, those are the ultra rich guys' managers. The CEO of money management companies actually do things (even if it's only shake hands and say your money is safe with me). The Ultra Rich do NOTHING.
Trump is not Ultra Rich. He used the corporate jet (which was owned by his company). He very much "acted rich" (pizza hut commercial "rich").
Terrific piece. Happy New Year.
I hear the "tax churches!" mantra as yet another egregious example of the modern Left's intermittent amnesia about what the First Amendment was for in the first place. No matter how many times you remind people of things like, oh I don't know, the historical role of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, every few months I will hear someone suggest "We should tax Joel Osteen!" as if they're the first person to ever come up with the genius idea of ignoring the Free Exercise Clause.
I don't hear it quite as often as "we need exceptions to Free Speech to prevent Hate Speech (and I should get to decide what constitutes Hate Speech)" but it still comes up with some regularity.
And what was the First Amendment for, other than the things it says in the text of the amendment? Taxing them all the same as a non-religious equivalent institution seems at least as neutral, if not more so.
What is the historical role of the SCLC? (Quite ignorant Yankee here, would appreciate some explanation).
They were some of the main organizers in the Civil Rights Movement in the late '50s and '60s, led by a kind of obscure guy named Martin Luther King, Jr.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Christian_Leadership_Conference
So Jewish allies. Right (and presumably aligned against the pro-segregationist voices in the Black Community, unless those only arose after Jim Crow.)
"So Jewish allies."
???
"unless those only arose after Jim Crow."
Willingness to accept segregation had pretty well gone away by the 1950s, although black separatism was starting to come into its own.
Jews were the primary backers to the Civil Rights Movement. They were who got rich after all. (This was covered in my Jewish history class in college, they are rather proud of it.)
There were voices in the black community that spoke up in favor of segregation, saying "now that there's no more segregation, the top-flight black folks have up and left." (See: Atlanta versus Baltimore).
I take no stand on the issue, not being part of the community (although the high genetic variability of blacks means that there's Significant Differences between "top flight" blacks and the "lowest tier").
"Jews were the primary backers to the Civil Rights Movement. They were who got rich after all."
Think you have the timeline backwards on that one--they got rich before they backed the Civil Rights movement.
Ah yes, the reverend Tilton. Brings back memories. Back about 1989 a job transfer put me in a new apartment, where the previous resident was apparently considered an easy mark by the religious money grabbers. My mailbox would be full of letters from different 'preachers' and Mr. Tilton figured prominently in the stack. His letters would show up 2-3 times a week with his picture, usually accompanied by his wife and progeny. Always begging for money to save my soul and enhance my (his) life.
Thanks to an Otago, New Zealand, motorcycle rider, I came across an expression that I call "Pascal's Retort". It explains my attitude to those who think the way the Christians in your video do, and goes, "You may be right. You'd stand a better chance of pulling your foreskin over your head to keep your ears warm, but you may be right."
Inasmuch as taxing profits creates an incentive to reinvest revenue, the incentives for taxing profits are much more positive than the incentives of taxing income.
I definitely agree that we shouldn’t be deciding which organizations are worthy of tax exempt status, though. Religious organizations have even more ridiculous deductions, e.g. clergy housing allowance, that really should die.
Are we sure it's unpopular to tax churches? Every person I've ever talked to about this either thinks that we definitely should or is ambivalent on the point. Further, if a church or non-profit is sending all of their money right back out the door to support someone else, then they won't have that much in profit to tax. So it should only hit scumbags like these TV preachers who want to keep all the money that gets sent to them.
Every person you've talked to, presumably, belongs to "new church" which not only is "untaxed" (via Other Exemptions), but also doesn't appear to need to comply with any Freedom of Speech rulings that other churches must.
The (real) Satanists only show up when everyone else does.
It is extremely, extremely offensive to allow "new church" to post its colors on the Allegheny County Courthouse, for an entire MONTH, without letting any other religion do the same. It says that certain people, and certain faiths, are priviledged, and should reign above the rest.
Especially offensive given the ruling of Allegheny County v. ACLU, which created the "shared space" where religions can display decorations (yes, including the satanists), all at the same time.
Wat
Gay Pride Month, also seen flying over Kabul on the US Embassy. As a "thing that certain church-ladies believe" and "other church ladies find offensive, and immoral.", it falls squarely in the realm of "church." (as in a religious belief). All the churches that perplexingly display the 6 colors of the "gay rainbow" (as opposed to seven colors, of Normal Rainbows)... Pro. All the Muslims, against. Ditto the mormons.
New Church (aka the lefty "this isn't a church, but somehow we burn incense and chant dead saint Floyd's name in public") is extremely offensive and needs to go back into the "actually a church" box, instead of the "State Must Declare A Preferred Religion and Sexual Expression."
Problem is, people who (online at least) advocate for "churches should not be tax-exempt" all mean that to apply to "that church there engaging in politics" which is "politics I don't agree with".
I think Prosperity Gospel etc. are scams, and churches shouldn't be telling you who to vote for (but at the same time, yes a priest or minister can preach a sermon on doctrine even if that is "abortion is wrong"). But if you're going to strip churches of tax-exempt status for meddling in politics, that means *all* churches.
Black churches where Democrat politicians turn up to stump for votes and the minister is leading the service/rally? That church with the rainbow doors and steps? https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/video/oak-lawn-church-paints-rainbow-steps-in-response-to-gov-abbotts-crosswalk-order/ The (in)famously liberal The Episcopal Church, which has a very rich parish in Trinity Wall Street?
Those all count as "political messaging" too. That's the problem: "your church is interfering in politics, my church is only being basic human decency".
We live in very different bubbles, then. If I polled my friends on the topic they'd probably all say "no we shouldn't," or be ambivalent about it.
Fair enough
Does the Value Added Tax say
"hold my beer?"
I came here to say that. We will become Europe with high personal income taxes and a high VAT.
Yes, not ideal. I remember when Texas passed it's first sales tax law with the slogan
"it's only 1% and it will never go up!" Uh, nope, it went way up.....
European VATs are in the 25% - 30% range. And it isn't applied only at the point of sale.
Prices in Norway are hella expensive. Oslo is the most expensive city I have ever been in.
Politicians love it because it is largely unseen and it generates a ton of revenue.
Yes, I've heard of that!
It adds up!
Every point of transfer down the distribution track. Am I saying that right?
Is VAT applied to services?
Yep, all the way down the value chain. So parts would get taxes, and then the ultimate item is taxed.
Not sure about services, but I would assume so.
Love it.
Although, I notice that the option "cut 6-7% of spending" to make up for the lost corporate tax revenue wasn't even mentioned.
Oh, how far we've fallen.
I believe it was Plato who observed "That which can be taxed, will be taxed."
Here endeth the intellectual conversation about the relative merits of different taxation regimes.
Great idea, but good luck selling it in our current populist and vindictive era haha. Keep fighting the good fight, Jeff.