Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers

Tag Archives: Taxes

America’s Politicized Tax Enforcement Is a Harbinger of Decline

May 7, 2015 5:51 am / 22 Comments /
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
(Everett Collection/Dreamstime)

(Everett Collection/Dreamstime)

Why did Rome and Byzantium fall apart after centuries of success? What causes civilizations to collapse, from a dysfunctional fourth-century-B.C. Athens to contemporary bankrupt Greece?

The answer is usually not enemies at the gates, but the pathologies inside them.

What ruins societies is well known: too much consumption and not enough production, a debased currency, and endemic corruption.

Americans currently deal with all those symptoms. But two more fundamental causes for decline are even more frightening: an unwillingness to pay taxes and the end of the rule of law.

Read more →

Posted in: America's Future, Political Culture, Taxes, History, Obama Administration / Tagged: , ,

Egalitarian Grandees 

May 28, 2014 7:28 am /

If you’re loudly green, you can have a carbon footprint the size of Godzilla’s.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Photo by Chris Jackson via Getty Images

Photo by Chris Jackson via Getty Images

Charting liberal hypocrisy is now old hat. From academia to the Sierra Club, elite progressives expect to live lives that are quite different from what they envision for the less sophisticated. No one believes that Elizabeth Warren would wish affirmative action to work for everyone in the way that she herself subverted it. Nor would we expect Warren not to be in the 1 percent that she so scolds — any more than we would assume that Al Gore would not leave a carbon footprint as large as those of thousands of the less environmentally sensitive put together.

First lady Michelle Obama recently lamented that “many young people are going to schools with kids who look just like them.” And she added: “And too often those schools aren’t equal, especially ones attended by students of color, which too often lag behind.” But that anguish should not mean that the Obamas have put or would put their children in the inner-city public schools the way President and Mrs. Carter did with Amy.

Read more →

Posted in: The World, Economy, Identity Politics, Popular Culture, Culture, The Middle Class, Economy / Tagged: , , , , ,

The Democratic Disasters to Come

October 21, 2013 11:14 am /

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media 

The defunding wars are over. The accusations are fading. We are back to reality. Of course, America’s long-term prospects, at least in comparison with other countries’ futures — whether in terms of demography, military power, food-production constitutional stability, energy sources, or higher education — are bright.Photo Credit: roberthuffstutter via Flickr

But short term, we are walking over landmines that threaten to blow up the normal way of doing business, and pose far more harm for Democrats than for Republicans.

Zero Interest

The real story about the debt is that by the end of Obama’s eight years, he will have matched the borrowing of all previous presidents combined.  Yet incredibly, the present huge sum of $17 trillion in debt is serviced at the same cost that we paid over 15 years ago. Such free use of money without raging inflation is almost historically unprecedented — and it won’t last.

Indeed, we are paying today about the same amount in aggregate annual interest payments, in non-inflation-adjusted dollars no less, as in 1997 — even though the 2012 figure of $17 trillion in debt is about three times larger than it was a decade-and-a-half ago. That anomaly is possible only because today’s interest rate of about 2.2% is only a third of what it was back then. Read more →

Posted in: America's Future / Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

What Are They Fighting Over?

October 15, 2013 10:29 am /

by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner 

The deficit this year may fall to below $700 billion, but that is still huge at a time of a record near $17 trillion in debt, and comes despite a supposedly recovering economy and more revenue, despite recent sequestration cuts, despite dramatic Apples_apple_piegains in U.S. domestic energy production, despite the return of the Clinton-era tax hikes to the top brackets, and despite the end of the war in Iraq and the wind down in Afghanistan.

Wars, tax cuts on the wealthy, and out-of-control defense spending were all in the past variously cited as causing these huge deficits. In fact, the more compelling causes were always chronically slow economic growth, out-of-control federal spending, and the exemption of nearly half of America from paying any income tax at all.

No wonder we have a deadlock, when the best medicine for restoring fiscal health—stronger GDP growth through suspending Obamacare, opening up federal gas Read more →

Posted in: Debt and Deficits / Tagged: , , , , , ,

Obama: Transforming America

October 1, 2013 1:29 pm /

From energy to foreign policy to the presidency itself, Obama’s agenda rolls along.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” — Barack

Photo Credit: Michael Shane via Flickr

Photo Credit: Michael Shane via Flickr

Obama, October 30, 2008

“We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.” — Michelle Obama, May 14, 2008

There certainly is no question that Barack Obama wants to change the United States. And there clearly is no doubt that such fundamental transformation is difficult, given our tripartite system of government — even though Obama entered office with large Democratic majorities in Read more →

Posted in: Political Culture, Race in America, Second Term Policies / Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

Big Government’s Abuses of Power

May 23, 2013 4:06 pm /

Monitoring AP but not detaining Tamerlan Tsarnaev–there is a common theme.

by Victor Davis Hanson

National Review Online

Government is now so huge, powerful, and callous that citizens risk becoming virtual serfs, lacking the freedoms guaranteed by the Founders. Read more →

Posted in: Human Rights, Mainstream Media, Taxes / Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Krugman’s California Dreaming

April 11, 2013 10:10 pm /

by Victor Davis Hanson

National Review Online

It is rare, even in the case of Paul Krugman, to read a column in which almost everything that is stated is either wrong or deliberately misleading. But his recent take on California’s renaissance is pure fantasy. Read more →

Posted in: California, Public Figures / Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

America in the Age of Myth

April 6, 2013 10:07 pm /

by Victor Davis Hanson

PJ Media

We live in a mythic age — but mythic in the sense of made-up.

The Coastal Aristocrat

In the last thirty years, I have probably spoken 200 times at a coastal university of some sort, most of which were on the Eastern seaboard. Read more →

Posted in: Political Culture / Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Obama’s Non-Triangulation

March 16, 2013 4:11 pm /

by Victor Davis Hanson

National Review Online

After the election, dozens of op-eds — I wrote one myself — cautioned the president about second-term overreach, focusing on how either hubris or simple fate has seemed to do in most modern second presidential terms. Read more →

Posted in: Commentary / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The California Mordida

March 14, 2013 5:24 pm /

by Victor Davis Hanson

Tribune Media Services

California now works on the principle of the mordida, or “bite.” Its government assumes that it can take something extra from residents for the privilege of living in their special state. Read more →

Posted in: California / Tagged: , , , , , , , ,
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