Tag: News

Island Living: Vanuatuan Taxes

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The FAIRtax folks, who advocate for replacing income and corporate taxes with a unified national sales tax, posted an interesting piece about the remote Pacific nation of Vanuatu (“FAIRtax in Vanuatu?“).  It discusses how the archipelago boasts incredibly low taxes:  a 15% value-added tax (“VAT”), and a business license fee of 5% (presumably, 5% of a business’s total annual revenue).

I’m personally agnostic on the adoption of a national sales tax in the United States.  I do believe it would be much better than the income tax, which I absolutely loathe, and which requires a complex and oppressive bureaucracy to administer.  I also resent sending the IRS all of my personal information every single year, including how many miles I drove and what sheet music I purchased (although those are great for those sweet, sweet tax write-offs).  If it were practical, I’d much rather see a national sales tax, or even a return to old-school tariff regimes.

The problem is that, should we ever adopt a national sales tax, it will likely accompany the national income tax.  A national sales tax also places a great deal of strain on States and localities.  Good luck having a 10% national sales tax and a 6% State sales tax (as we do in South Carolina) and a plethora of local-option sales taxes (about 2% here in Darlington County; higher in neighboring Florence County).  Tack on hospitality taxes, and it adds up fast.

For example, in neighboring Florence County, eating out automatically comes with a 10% sales tax:  the 6% State sales tax, plus local sales and hospitality taxes, totally 10%.  If we had a conservative 10% national sales tax on top, your $5 footlong (already gone—part of America’s mythological past) becomes $6 immediately.  20% sales tax means $1 of taxes for every $5 spent.  A $500 item would cost $600.

I still think that’s preferable to the income tax, and instead of creating a disincentive to work, it would create a disincentive to spend.

But I digress.  For a small nation like Vanuatu—population of around 300,000—a national sales tax makes sense.  It’s a small enough area geographically and demographically that it the national sales tax is, essentially, akin to a State sales tax.  As the article from FAIRtax.org notes, the island has something of a clean slate:  no welfare, no government pensions, etc.  Most people are subsistence farmers, and tourism is the major industry.

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You Can’t Cuck the Tuck IV: They Cucked the Tuck!

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It’s been nearly three years since I last wrote an installment of You Can’t Cuck the Tuck, but not because I grew disinterested in Tucker Carlson’s insightful commentary.  Quite the opposite:  his powerful, succinct analysis of our current ills has only deepened my respect for him and his worldview even more.  That he delivers his critiques with mirth, laughter, and good humor only strengthens them.

Sadly, Fox News—an organization that hasn’t done anything particularly interesting since Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld—has embraced cuckery and kicked The Tuck to the curb.  The last vestige of FNC as a truly conservative option in the space of mainstream cable news is now gone.

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Trumparion Rising

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It’s official:  God-Emperor Donaldus Magnus is running for President in 2024.  It’s a Thanksgiving Miracle!

We all knew this announcement was coming, but making it official seals the deal and ends any lingering speculation.

Here’s another announcement of far less significance or magnitude, but one of importance to yours portly:  The Portly Politico officially and formally endorses President Donald J. Trump in the Republican primaries and for President of the United States.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Feelin’ Musky

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

It’s official:  Elon Musk owns Twitter!

After months of wrangling and negotiating, including Musk incorporating some dread game and walking away from the deal, it’s finally done.  Musk walked into Twitter headquarters last week carrying a kitchen sink, in a fun visual pun. It’s the kind of lighthearted whimsy for which the innovative billionaire is known.

The Left is melting down, thinking that a man who not long ago supported the Democratic Party is suddenly going to turn the platform into a recruiting site for Neo-Nazis (all four of them that actually exist).  No Leftists panicked when Jeff Bezos—a far less lovable, far more tyrannical—figure purchased The Washington Post, turning it into a propaganda organ for Amazon.

Ah, but Elon Musk supports free speech—or, at the very last, far freer speech than any progressive wants.  Free speech is anathema to the Left, because their ideology doesn’t hold up to the scrutiny of daylight.  Free inquiry undermines the carefully constructed narratives of the Left—human-caused climate change; diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE); systemic racism—and, therefore, represents a major threat to their political power and control.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Malfunctioning Robots

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

After two years under the befuddlingly tyrannical rule of a mentally-impaired geezer, our electoral standards have slid to meet the lowered expectations of our time.  Now a mentally-impaired greaseball wants to be the United States Senator for Pennsylvania, and until a disastrous debate performance that was impossible to ignore, it seemed that Pennsylvanians were willing to vote for him.

To be clear, I take no pleasure in the profound illness of another person.  John Fetterman suffered a stroke—a terrible thing—but he is still pursuing public office.  As much as Henry Clay disliked Andrew Jackson in the 1824 presidential election, he wasn’t going to throw his support behind Secretary of Treasury William Crawford of Georgia (the election was thrown to the House of Representatives; Crawford was in third, but had suffered a major stroke and would pass away soon afterwards, with Clay giving his support to John Quincy Adams).

But we’ve grown accustomed to power-hungry wives and political parties propping up brain-dead puppets in public office.  Indeed, the historians of the distant future will no-doubt look back at our time and think of it as The Age of The Impaired.  We celebrate every manner of impairment—transgenderism, paralysis (both moral and physical), gluten intolerance, etc.—as some kind of special mark of holiness.

Of course, we should treat such people with compassion, but we shouldn’t be electing them to public office, no matter how good it makes us feel about ourselves to do so.  Public service is hard, even for the able-bodied and clear-minded.  Being a United States Senator is exceptionally difficult—and a position with incredible amounts of power and prestige.

What we saw with Fetterman—much like Marco Rubio’s glitching out in 2016—was an Establishment robot malfunctioning on live television.  I’m only being mildly hyperbolic—Fetterman can only process incoming sounds via a computer.  That’s a miraculous bit of technology, but do we want a cyborg serving as one of the 100 men and women of the US Senate?  Even if we did, would we want one that was constantly breaking down in stressful situations?

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Martha’s Migrant Crisis

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Apologies for the delayed post this morning, readers.  After a particularly grueling (but productive!) week and around three hours of sleep, I wasn’t prepared to write a post Friday night, and instead dozed off on the couch watching a Spanish-language horror movie.  —TPP

The big news this week is that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sent a few dozen illegal immigrants to an upscale island vacation destination on the taxpayers’ dime.  Normally, I’d see this move as what these things usually are:  another example of scofflaws getting rewarded while the law-abiding foot the bill.

But these are not normal times, and the cost to Florida taxpayers was well worth the message sent:  if you progressive elites like illegal migrants so much—often at the expense, in terms of treasure and blood, of the naturalized and native-born citizens you’re sworn to protect—then surely they won’t mind a few dozen border hoppers lounging around Barack Obama’s palatial estate.

For conservatives out there concerned about the cost of these illegal immigrant vacation junkets, think of it as part of the State of Florida‘s advertising budget:  instead of spending money warning people to look out for cyclists or some other wasteful public service announcement, Floridians are getting a major return on their advertising dollars.  The speed with which the Martha’s Vineyarders (Vineyardians?) expelled the dusky hordes from their sleepy progressive utopia is an object lesson in how little elites really believe anything they say.  It’s also a pretty effective way of highlighting, on a small scale, what border towns experience every day, and to a far greater magnitude.

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Loomer and Liz

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Today Laura Loomer—the most censored woman in America—is taking a stab at the Republican nomination for her congressional district in Florida, which includes The Villages, the massive retirement community.  She’s running against incumbent Daniel Webster, who skipped the Trump impeachment vote and is therefore, according to Loomer, complicit in it, as well as some swarthy nobody who might get a couple of percentage points.

Laura Loomer’s election—if she wins the primary, she’ll very likely win the very pro-Trump Florida 11th congressional district—would be a major boon for the America First movement, and would be yet another repudiation of the Establishment Republicans who are content to fiddle about an “insurrection” while the nation burns.

That very same Establishment suffered a major defeat last week, when busybody and daddy’s princess Liz Cheney fell to a Trump-endorsed candidate in the Republican primary for Wyoming’s single congressional district.  Cheney’s defeat was a drubbing of epic proportions:  she only garnered 28.94% of votes cast, with her opponent Harriet Hageman winning with 66.33% of the vote.  Talk about a “repudiation of the Establishment Republicans,” am I right?

It’s a tale of two candidates.  Liz Cheney represents the ossified, corrupt, dynastic, moralistic, staid, boring, ineffectual, kabuki theatre style of politics that has haunted our dear Republic for the last century.  Loomer, on the other hand, is the bold, persecuted, spicy, fun, energetic, bombastic future.

If she wins today, it’s icing on the cake of Cheney’s defeat.

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TBT^2: Phone it in Friday XI: Coronavirus Conundrum, Part IV: Liberty in the Age of The Virus

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The Virus is like a bad movie series that just refuses to die.  There was a controversial but impactful first release that everyone was talking about, even if they didn’t see it.  Then there was the lackluster sequel, which still enjoyed some popular support, even though ticket sales were down.

Now it feels like we’re on the tired third film, which is a watered-down, ineffectual finale (one hopes) to a premise that is played out.  Sure, critics love it, but audiences are tired of its antics.

What still seems to make it into the script of every one of these films is the part where the government bureaucrats lock everything down and release a bunch of ghosts into Manhattan (uh, wait, what?).  Meanwhile, we all kind of sit by and twiddle our thumbs and put our masks on dutifully.

What happened to the band of merry wastrels who tossed tea into Boston Harbor, rather than comply with an odious monopolization of the tea trade?  Or the plucky scofflaws who made it impossible to enforce the Stamp Act?  I’d rather disguise myself as an Indian (feather, not dot) and caffeinate the water supply than put a mask on again (but that would be cultural appropriation, of course).

In short, why don’t we get a backbone, instead of cowering behind masks and locking ourselves indoors?  We’re literally cowering before an invisible enemy with a 99%+ survival rate.

Well, liberty is never easy.  Better to stay inside watching movies and disconnecting from reality, eh?

With that, here is 29 July 2021’s “TBT: Phone it in Friday XI: Coronavirus Conundrum, Part IV: Liberty in the Age of The Virus“:

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TBT: Big News: TPP is Going to the Dogs

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One year ago today was the eve of my picking up Murphy, my now-nine-year-old female bull terrier.  I had no—well, little—idea of what to expect, but rereading this post, I can see how excited I was.

Murphy has turned out to be the perfect dog for me.  She is house-trained and loving, and pretty much likes to eat and take long naps.  Naturally, we’re a perfect fit for each other.

She is also stubborn—a trait of the breed—and likes to do things her way, but she knows who the boss is, even if the boss is a bit of a sucker and a softy.

It’s been a good year with my old girl, and I’m praying for many more.

With that, here is 21 July 2021’s “Big News: TPP is Going to the Dogs“:

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