Mallard Fillmore

[Rspaight]

Christ. I'm surprised *any* "conservative" has the cojones to make jokes about "liberals" spending money, after five years of Drunken Sailor Bush budgets.

On second thought, nerve has nothing to do with it. They're just living in denial and/or abject ignorance.

Ryan

[Bennett Cerf]

See, liberals believe in ridiculous superstitions like "intelligent design" and they don't understand that the government can't spend more money than it's collected in taxes.

[Rspaight]

With today's installment, we have perhaps the most stupid assertion yet:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/malla ... e=20060412

The stupid duck says:

The costs of operating the tax system eat up an estimated 65 percent of every tax dollar collected from us.

Article cited as source:

Most people are not even dimly aware of the staggering waste involved in subsidy programs. What they see-once they get past the fallacies and euphemisms-is that money is taken from one place and shifted elsewhere. And then, in other subsidy programs, money is shifted back. Farmers are taxed in many ways, and then subsidized in others. Seniors are taxed, and then a lot of their taxes are given back to them in the form of medical care. And so on.

Politicians, policy experts and academics are amazingly complacent about the blizzard of cross-subsidies that now rages. Several years ago I asked a staff member of the Senate Budget Committee whether she was worried about this problem. Not at all. "It evens out," she said. "Everybody pays for everyone else's goods."

This view ignores the overhead costs of subsidies. When you rob Peter to pay Paul, you incur all sorts of losses. Peter's incentives to work, create, and invest are undermined. Very often, so are Paul's. The result is that economic effort, production, and employment are often lower than they would otherwise be.

And of course there are the costs of operating the tax system: compliance costs, litigation costs, tax planning distortions, and so on. A few years ago I made an attempt to add up all these burdens. The total was a 65 cent loss for every dollar of taxes collected.

Not even *close* to the same thing. Not the same ballpark, not the same *sport*. Does Tinsley know how to read, or does he just draw ducks and listen to Limbaugh?

Ryan

[lukpac]

http://reason.com/9402/fe.payne.9402.shtml

Tax compliance costs: record keeping, reporting, filling out forms, and learning about tax regulations. A recent Arthur D. Little study found that the total time businesses and individuals spent on federal tax compliance activities was 5.4 billion hours. This translates into 2.9 million people--the entire work force of the state of Indiana--working full-time all year long. The economic cost of this labor amounts to 24 percent of federal tax revenue. (The detailed calculation of this figure, based in part on cost information from the IRS and Arthur O. Andersen, appears in my new book, Costly Returns: The Burdens of the U.S. Tax System.)

Tax disincentive costs: the loss of production because of the discouraging effect of taxes on investment and labor. In recent years, a number of economists have made calculations of this "excess burden" for a wide variety of taxes. In a 1985 article in the American Economic Review, Michigan State economist Charles Ballard and his colleagues estimate that for each additional dollar in taxes collected the economy loses 33.2 cents of production.

Costs of tax enforcement: resources expended in responding to the tax authority. Each act of tax enforcement--each audit, each notice, each levy--entails a burden for the citizen subject to it. Since these actions run into many millions every year, the time and expense for citizens is significant. Tax avoidance-- setting up shelters, using loopholes, litigation--entails further costs. My calculation of the enforcement and avoidance costs comes to 8 percent of tax revenue.

When the overhead costs are added together, (24 percent compliance costs, 33 percent disincentive costs, and 8 percent other costs), they total 65 percent of tax revenue. Although future studies may come up with slightly different numbers, there is no doubt that the overhead costs of taxation are substantial. This means that every act of self-subsidy entails a significant waste. When the government takes a dollar from Peter to give it back to him later, there is a huge loss attached to the transaction.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/article ... 0907.shtml

Etc.

[Rspaight]

Which is quite a different thing from saying 65% of tax revenue goes to the IRS, which is what someone reading the strip would think.

But Tinsley can't write small enough to adequately explain his statements, so he just goes for the sensational claim and leaves out the fine print.

Ryan

[Bennett Cerf]

It's a "tax fact." It says so right in the first panel. He even has a footnote!

How dare you question the duck?

[Rspaight]

DON'T QUESTION THE DUCK. THE DUCK KNOWS ALL. THE DUCK SEES ALL. ONE DAY ALL WILL ANSWER TO THE DUCK.

Ryan

[lukpac]

Those stupid government workers...

[Bennett Cerf]

Hey, he didn't say they're stupid. He said they're lazy and fat.

[Rspaight]

Bruce Tinsley calling anyone lazy is a solid 10 on the Hypocrisy Scale. Tinsley's work day:

1:00 PM: crawl out of bed
1:30 PM: open corner.nationalreview.com and find talking point
1:35 PM: select picture(s) of duck from library
1:40 PM: (optional) draw new art
2:00 PM: paste in talking point
2:05 PM: take well-deserved break

Ryan

[Bennett Cerf]

From February:

[Rspaight]

Er, what?

[lukpac]

See, those lazy government workers don't work *any* Monday.

[Rspaight]

Much like Tinsley, apparently.

Ryan

[Bennett Cerf]

For some reason not all of these appear on the Jewish World Review site.