The Number One Cash Crop

Tax and Spend

Yes another study has shown that marijuana (the US Constitution was printed on cannabis paper and the the sails of the Mayflower were made of cannabis as were of course the original Levi's jeans) is the top selling crop in the USA, selling more than corn and all vegetables combined.

Before the Income Tax the US government (and now the states are in on the act) got most of its tax revenue through taxes on alcohol and customs taxes (luckily that has gone by the way-side through quote-unquote free trade). But again that was before the US war machine kicked into gear and more money had to be raised.

We should go back to making illegal drugs legal and then taxing them, that would reduce taxes on things we want to encourage (income and investment). The only reason that weed is illegal (besides the fact that it makes you stupid if you smoke it) is because the Dupont and the Hearst families said it should be. Why should just select people set our public policies for us?

Vulgar Economics

Death and Taxes

Karl Marx in Das Kapital (up there with Mises' Human Action and Smith's Wealth of Nations as the treatise on political economy) described how the mainstream economists before him practiced "vulgar economics" which put commodity production ahead of people. There is a newish study that verifies these results. The study shows those who have the most to gain by having children before the end of the tax season (eg December 31 as opposed to January 1) do so. Eg people are planning the birth of their children to minimize taxes!

This is indeed per Marx' definition vulgar. But of course as Workers has mentioned before do not hate the players, hate the game. The wealthy (most of them it is presumed anyway) worked hard and had good ideas to earn their money. It's the tax system which sucks. It just takes too much money from those that earn it and it sets up incentives for game playing and tax minimization (not to mention untold hours - billions of them - needed to fill out the tax forms) as opposed to a low steady predictable rate. I would much rather be named January than December.