The tax cuts enacted a year ago by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Trump have inspired a growing realization that America's tax system is a shambles. That verdict goes beyond the uproar over the new tax law handing corporations a 40% rate reduction and the uncalled-for tax cut benefiting the rich. The dog's breakfast resulting from what politicians and special interests have dumped into the tax code across decades with no sense of a master plan has led to a growing consensus that we are doing it all wrong.

In the United States, unlike several European countries, assets are not taxed, no matter how much they may have gained in value, until sold. Most of the wealth the richest Americans have acquired is not taxed, even as it has grown in value from year to year. On the other hand, Congress sees fit in the laws it passes to withhold taxes from the first dollar earned by every salaried worker and every dollar thereafter.

Leaving assets free from from taxation leads to easily the most deviant and insupportable tax practice: the estate and gift tax, which, save for the rare exception, taxes no one by allowing accumulated value to pass on to… Read More »

Two major reports in recent days tell us that unless we take immediate action to slow climate change, the consequences will be dire. But the world has waited so long to take that action, that there is a growing dread that it's too late. The parameters have to be so severe at this late hour that there is no political will to force drastic changes nor would humans be willing to endure them.

Just as the reports came out — from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the National Climate Assessment that is mandated
by Congress every four years — and just as representatives from the 197 nations that signed onto the Paris climate accord were about to meet in Poland for the U.N.'s 24th climate conference, out came bad news. Instead of the reduction in emissions that all these nations had pledged, the year 2018 is registering an increase of between 1.8% and 3.7% in greenhouse gases emissions. Following an encouraging three-year 2014-2016 trend of flat emissions, the new record high of 37.1 billion metric tons is the second straight year of increase. Mostly, the causes were India with a 6% rise and China with 5%, both heavy users of coal. Even United States emissions were up 2.5%, after declines in seven of the last ten years.

The members had asked the IPCC what needed to be done in order to hold temperature rise to 1.5° centigrade (2.7° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, a notch below an increase of 2.0° centigrade (3.6° Fahrenheit) generally agreed to be a threshold beyond which planetary changes would be catastrophic. The report's answer was that emissions must be cut 50% by… Read More »