Executive Orders Under Cover of Fire

With all the media attention being paid to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress today, now is a perfect time for an American president to launch some pet policy that would not fare scrutiny well. Thus, White House spokesman Josh Earnest seized the opportunity Monday to announce that President Barack Obama is “very interested” in the idea of raising taxes through executive action.

Whether he was joshing or in earnest was hard to say, as always, but the White House spokesman was quick to add “Now I don’t want to leave you with the impression that there is some imminent announcement, there is not, at least that I know.” This was unsettling enough, even before he further added that “the president has asked his team to examine the array of executive authorities that are available to him to try to make progress on his goals.” All this came in response to a question about a proposal from self-proclaimed Socialist and Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders to raise up to $100 billion dollars by closing various corporate tax loopholes through executive action, which we expect the president would find very interesting, and as Earnest himself admitted, “The president has certainly not indicated any reticence in using his executive authority to try and advance an agenda that benefits middle class Americans,” so we take it as more or less a policy statement.

Nit-picky conservative types will note that the Constitution is rather explicit about the legislative branch having the sole authority to levy taxes, but it says the same sort of old-fashioned blather about immigration law and carbon regulations and any number of other things that no one seems to care much about these days, and lately all that Constitution stuff doesn’t seem to matter much. Some insufficiently-lobbied corporation or another will surely find it cost efficient to challenge any executive ordered tax increases in court, and the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress might yet find some means of resistance, but the past many decades of congressional delegation to the executive bureaucracy provide enough legal precedent to stretch the case out over many years, and it will likely take even longer than that for the Republican leadership to stiffen its spine. If corporate tax increases are so written by the all-powerful president, so it likely will be done.

How a hefty $100 billion corporate tax hike would “advance an agenda that benefits middle class Americans” will of course go unexplained. Many middle class Americans work for corporations, and are unlikely to benefit from new taxes that hinder their employers’ international competitiveness at a time when the American economy is already suffering from the world’s highest corporate tax rates, and every last one of us buys something or another from a corporation, so we’ll be paying the taxes that corporations will merely be charged with collecting. Some additional revenues will be raised, we suppose, and assurances will surely be offered that the money will be spent wisely, but the most likely argument we can surmise is that not only those darned corporations but all the people who work for them and anyone who occasionally buys something from them must be punished.

Somehow or another this should advance the agenda of the president’s party, which every leap year always seems to find a majority of Americans who will fall for this sort of thing. When the corporate employees get their pink slips, and the corporate customers notice increased prices, they’ll be all the more eager to punish those hated corporations. If that pesky Netanyahu is still grousing about such minor matters as Iran getting nuclear weapons, it will be all the easier.

— Bud Norman

A Bigger Bite of the Apple

These words are being written on an Apple computer, and there is a good chance that you are reading them on one. We are grateful to the folks at the Apple computer company for this valuable contribution to modern literature, whatever faults they might have, and therefore wish them well in their current spat with the United States government.

The United States government has so many spats brewing at the moment that you might have missed it, but a Senate subcommittee spent much of Tuesday grilling Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook about his company’s shockingly unpatriotic tax dodging. By all accounts the company has paid every penny of taxes that the law demands, which adds up to such an astounding amount of money that Apple might be the world’s biggest contributor to the national treasury, but some Senators are nonetheless shocked that Apple isn’t voluntarily paying many billions of dollars more out of pure love for country.

Apple freely admits that it has availed itself of a number of complicated laws to shelter much of its considerable foreign earnings from America’s corporate income tax, and the Senators think it is unfair for the company to do so. Sen. Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, said the company was using “gimmicks” to avoid paying taxes, and Sen. John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, said the company was exploiting “egregious loopholes that exist in the tax code.” All of the gimmicks and egregious loopholes the Senators refer to are laws passed by the Senate, of course, but apparently it is unsporting for a company to take advantage of such generosity. One way to get more money out of Apple would be to lower the nation’s corporate income tax rate, which is by far the highest in the world, and otherwise amend the tax code to make it economically feasible for companies such as Apple to increase its businesses while paying a reasonable but helpful portion of their profits to America rather than the less-greedy foreigners who offer shelter, but the Senators seem to prefer slicing the goose wide open and grabbing all the golden eggs at once.

The only Senator to side with Apple during the hearings was Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, whose opening and closing speeches were so brilliant that even we cannot improve them. Although we fret that Paul might have the same kooky isolationist streak as his father, libertarian hero Rep. Ron Paul, his performance at the hearing provided yet another reason to regard him as a rising political star. Among other fine arguments he noted that none of his fellow Senators ever pay more than they are legally required, and that it is rank hypocrisy for them to expect others to cough up more than the law demands. We would have seized the opportunity to remind the public how Bill and Hillary Clinton were so scrupulous as to deduct the value of the used underwear they donated to charity, but this is a mere quibble.

There is some irony in Paul rushing to Apple’s defense, given the company’s long history of donating to Democratic candidates and publicly identifying itself with Democratic causes, but perhaps having a Senate subcommittee treating its executives like Michael Corleone in “Godfather II” will cause the company to reconsider its political policies. Admitting its capitalist tendencies might endanger the Apple’s hip and up-to-date image, which has done almost as much for its success as the innovation, reliability, and value of its products, but it could prove more helpful to its bottom line. Besides, the way things are going for big government lately, capitalism might soon be perceived as hip and up-to-date.

— Bud Norman