Making Amends

It's time to explore another example of the U.S. Constitution affecting Americans' everyday lives...

Detail from "The Rectangle" by Frank O. King, in Chicago Tribune, February 16, 1919

But — surprise! I'm not talking about the Eighteenth Amendment today, but the Sixteenth.

"The Coming Serenade" by Sidney Greene in New York Evening Telegram, ca. January, 1919

In a way, the 16th Amendment establishing the federal income tax was necessary for the passage of the 18th, since the federal government was going to need to replace the revenue from taxes levied on alcohol. The federal government had also been heavily reliant on tariffs, which progressives denounced as overburdening lower income groups — since the poor spend a greater percentage of their income than rich people do.

Although tariffs were blamed for inflation, they had the benefit of being a hidden tax, collected a little at a time within the price of goods. The income tax, on the other hand, was initially collected all at once on March 15; payroll deduction wouldn't come around until World War II.

So kwitcherbitchin about how small your refund is this year. That refund is your interest-free loan to Uncle Sam. Your great-great-grandpa not only didn't get a refund, he had better have saved up enough throughout the year to satisfy IRS expectations.

"Guess Who!" by Wm. C. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, February, 1919

When the federal income tax was first levied in 1913, the tax rate was a modest 1% tax on net personal incomes above $3,000, with a 6% surtax on incomes above $500,000. Since the Liberty Loans had fallen well short of their goals to fund military readiness for and participation in World War I, Congress raised the top income tax rate for 1918 to 77% on income over $1,000,000 (the equivalent of about $17,000,000 today). The effective average rate for the rich, however, was only 15%.

Form 1040 in 1916.

As for the typical filer, single persons with income in 1918 of over $1,000, and married persons with income over $2,000 were required to file income tax returns. That first one or two thousand bucks were exempted from income, and there was a $200 exemption for each dependent in a household. New in 1918 was the complication that if one was married only half of the year, one was limited to only half of the marital exemption.

Interest on the purchase of Liberty Bonds was also exempt, but interest paid on loans for the purchase of those bonds was not deductible. In all, federal tax law took up a few hundred pages, compared to over 72,000 pages nowadays.

"Interment Public" by Cyrus Hungerford in Pittsburgh Sun, ca. March, 1919

If Cy Hungerford's take on taxation hackneyed and shopworn, here's one from Nelson Harding from a totally different point of view from all the other cartoonists on this page.

"Swamped!" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 18, 1919

Finally, lets circle back 'round to Frank King, who offered several ideas for repurposing all those soon-to-be unemployed bar rails by installing them in other establishments. They might even, he suggested, turn paying taxes into an enjoyable social activity.

Detail from "The Rectangle" by Frank O. King in Chicago Tribune, March 2, 1919

Because that's why folks went out drinking in those days. So a guy could put one foot up.

Oh, heck, as long as we're back on the subject of Prohibition anyway, here's John McCutcheon anticipating a lot of folks making a run for the border once the United States' taps ran dry.

"When the U.S. Goes Dry" by John McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, March 10, 1919

Mexico must have been sorely tempted to build a wall to keep out all the drunken gringos.

2018 in Headlines

I've been taking photos of the year in newspaper front pages and magazine covers every December 31 for some 45 years now. These days, it's harder to get a comprehensive sampling, now that the local papers have ceded national news to the internet and hardly any newspapers play up international events.

So I have no banner headlines reporting the deadly tsunami in Indonesia, fascist victories in Brazil and elsewhere, the cock-up of Brexit, or the Saudi-Iranian proxy war in Yemen. There were devastating hurricanes, typhoons, and fires; was any one of them more important than the others?

Instead, this year's photo is dominated by the mercurial president of the United States and those "I hire the best people" in his cabinet discovering that he can't hear their advice over the rumblings of his gut.

Here, too, is a collage of my favorites of the cartoons I drew this year. I don't pretend for them to be a comprehensive review of the year, either. They're just the ones I happen to like right now. And since I didn't put them in a slide show, embiggenation is necessitatified.

Toon: Play It Again, Louis

Okay, okay, so it's a cliché to have a cartoon character declare that he is "shocked, shocked!"

But we've been here so many times before. Republicans in Congress pass a tax cut, promising that it will stimulate economic growth. But the economic benefit of the tax cut is as ephemeral as a sugar rush, and as a result, the deficit spikes and the national debt grows that much faster.

But Republicans are happy because they have successfully transferred that much more of the cost of society from the upper class to the middle and lower classes, and they can point to the national debt as proof that the government can't afford to keep schools open, water potable, or bridges from crumbling, let alone any effort to make health care affordable.

Even so, if the last tax cut didn't balance the budget as advertised, surely the next one will.

As soon as Republicans come up with original economic theory, clichés are all I've got for them.

Ready for Their Tax Cut

Here's an extra cartoon for your Christmas stocking:

As I write, we're waiting to see whether Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) can persuade his party's deficit chicken hawks to increase the child credit in their tax bill to double the current amount. This as a sop to lower and middle class taxpayers so that the Republicans' so-called reforms don't come off as a complete give-away to corporations and the rich.

Republicans and their benefactors have long complained that tax rates for U.S. corporations and the richest Americans are the highest in the world — which they're not, but we have to let that pass for now. They gloss over the fact that the overwhelming majority of these upper-bracket filers end up paying little or no taxes thanks to a wealth of deductions that they have lobbied for over the years.

Slashing the upper income tax rates was supposed to be accompanied by erasing significant numbers of those tax loopholes, but by some miracle, the only exemptions and deductions being eliminated are the ones used by lower and middle class filers. Exemptions and deductions that benefit the top 1% — including many Republican members of Congress — remain or are increased.

For example, during the fall, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson — the 26th-richest member of Congress — withheld his support for the bill, leveraging his vote to pressure lawmakers to add provisions to the bill increasing tax breaks for investors in pass-through entities. The most recent federal records show Johnson has up to $30 million of ownership stakes in three LLCs that generate rental income. Johnson earned between $115,000 and $1,050,000 of income from those investments in 2016.

And if you still believe the theory that coddling the rich will enable the benefits to trickle down to everybody else once their wealth finally achieves some mythical critical mass, think again. They have plenty of other plans for their tax breaks, starting with mergers and acquisitions and ending with trimming the newly redundant employees from their mega-companies.

Well, at least Monopoly Man at the southeast corner of this cartoon is generating jobs for all the attendants at the sexual harassment clinic.

About That Tax Plan

Q Toon: Houses of Baloney

With the firing of James Comey the other day, it seems like ages ago that Donald Joffrey Trump issued his executive order on "religious liberty." Leading up to the signing, everyone expected the order to fulfill the theocratic right's wish list:  undermining marriage equality by creating a right for governmental officials, commercial entrepreneurs, landlords and anyone else to refuse service to same-sex couples; and allowing religious institutions to become a pitch-black money funding conduit for the Republican party.

What the theocrats got instead was a promise to get rid of the 1954 "Johnson Amendment" (named for then-Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, not the Johnson that Johnson complained was restricted by pants with too tight a crotch). Under the amendment, churches and other tax-exempt nonprofit organizations "are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office,"

The theocrats were greatly disappointed.

Here is the translation: religious leaders speaking from the pulpit have nothing to fear from the IRS if they speak about political issues unless they specifically endorse or oppose particular political candidates. Like all non-profit organizations with tax-exempt status, religious entities aren’t allowed to speak well or ill of individuals running for office. But the Johnson amendment precludes only this kind of talk; it does not bar preachers from holding forth on moral issues of the day. That has been the rule for decades. Mr Trump’s executive order merely repeats it.

So your pastor can preach the Gospel According to Making America Great Again all he wants; he just isn't supposed to preach the Gospel According to the Committee to Reelect Trump.

Big whoop, said culture warrior Mark Movsesian at First Things:

In fact, the IRS has given churches a lot of leeway when it comes to speaking out on political issues. As Ross Douthat tweeted last week, one could have followed law-and-religion debates for years and not heard a single complaint from conservatives about the unfair application of the Johnson Amendment, or an argument for removing the restriction on churches’ electioneering. It’s not an issue anyone was talking about.

Or, in the words of Princeton University Professor Robert P. George, the Johnson Amendment is "irrelevant, it’s offensive, it’s ignored by churches anyway."

Furthermore, the Johnson Amendment is an act of Congress, and as such can't be willed away by an executive order anyway. Not that the current Republican Congress wouldn't gladly revoke it: they could easily make sure that the Sierra Club or ACLU still had to obey the rule, but they might find it more difficult to keep the rule in effect for Black churches, liberal synagogues, and mosques of all stripes.

Q Toon: Pussy Hats Galore

Perhaps you wonder why I have someone at the Women's March on Washington protesting Donald Joffrey Trump hiding his tax returns, instead of some traditional women's issue.

Yes, it was a women's march we witnessed on all seven continents last Saturday, but marchers represented many concerns. After all, the Dakota pipeline, immigration and global climate change don't just affect men, you know. I know personally at least one protester who did in fact carry a sign raising the issue of Donald Joffrey Trump evading taxes.

(If only there were some form he could release to prove he is not a tax cheat!)

I had been toying around with the sentiment expressed on this woman's protest sign, trying to come up with a setting in which to present it, when on Sunday morning, KellyAnne Conway gave me what I thought would make the perfect capper to it.

There's so much lag time between Sunday and Thursday! What was once a clever idea has turned into a cliché. Every cartoonist published cartoons with the administration's new term for its baldfaced lies on Monday morning; the internet memes were already flooding social media feeds before the NFL conference championship kickoffs.

(On the other hand, I remarked on "alternate realities" here over a month ago.)

It shouldn't be long until I find some obscure LGBT issue to draw about all to myself. When I do, hands off my idea, everybody else!

Thompson Gubernatorial Toons from the Archive

These are some cartoons I had dug up and posted on my old GeoCities web page when Tommy Thompson made his eminently forgettable run for the presidency in 2007.

Thompson came into office as Governor of Wisconsin in 1987 making a lot of talk about cutting the budget. While Politifact has ruled that "Wisconsin’s overall tax burden went down while [Thompson] served as governor from 1987 to 2001," his budgets from 1995 to 1999 contained $188 million in general tax increases. The 1995-97 budget also contained $120 million in increased fees.

A column by Bruce Murphy this week argues that taxes went up considerably during his tenure as governor.

"A study by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau found that in his first 12 years of office, state spending rose by 101 percent — more than twice the rate of inflation. ...
"During Thompson’s first 12 years in office, the average Wisconsin citizen’s income tax payments rose by 127 percent — more than two-and-a-half times faster than inflation. Sales taxes rose by 90 percent, nearly twice as fast as inflation. As a study back then by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance found, income taxes had soared because in 1986 the state stopped “indexing” the income tax rates to account for inflation."

(Dave Blaska blames a good deal of the increase in taxes on Thompson's Democratic predecessor, Tony Earl. But now that blaming one's predecessor is anathema to conservative thought, let's just ignore Mr. Blaska, shall we?)

The catch was that Thompson was so gosh-darned passionate about spending for some pet items that it overwhelmed his gosh-darned passion for cutting taxes. He pushed through a voucher plan to spend public tax money on private schools. His other passions included trains, state worker pensions, and concentrating power in the Governor's Office (in particular, asserting control over the Department of Natural Resources).

Thompson's conservative legacy is based largely by the establishment in 1997 of Wisconsin Works, or W-2, replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Like President Obama's Health Care Reform, W-2 was extremely complicated, with a lot of moving parts; a program to extend health care benefits to low-income families with children was added to W-2 in 1999.

Conservatives loved W-2, and that's how Thompson ended up as George W. Bush's Health and Human Secretary (when the post he really wanted was Transportation).

But let's return to the issue of the measure of conservatism as it's defined today. Again, from Bruce Murphy:

"Thompson crowned his tenure as a tax-and-spend governor with the passage of an outrageous 1999 law that sweetened the state pension system’s payoff for Thompson and other veterans. The law was championed by union leaders and Thompson and passed by a bipartisan legislature, sweetening an already generous state pension plan at a long-term cost of $5.5 billion.
"As with the infamous Milwaukee County pension plan, Thompson’s was skewed to deliver the big benefits to the insiders, the employees with the biggest salaries and longest tenure.  The lifetime value of Thompson’s already generous pension, for instance, grew by $111,000. "

While these pension plans won Thompson the endorsement of the state's public employee unions over his Democratic opponents in 1994 and 1998, they have not endeared him to the current Governor, whose first actions in office have been to unilaterally scuttle the agreements.

In the end, Thompson left his successor, Scott McCallum a precariously balanced budget when he left for Washington D.C.  in 2001.

Hovde Wants Singaporean Tax Rates

In Wisconsin senatorial candidate Eric Hovde's latest TV ad, the Republican hedge fund manager stands before a graph showing that U.S. corporate tax rates are higher than those in eleven other countries around the world.

Of course, the fact that the U.S. spends more on defense than all those other countries put together might have something to do with those tax rates.