Daily Archives: 15 January 2010

How Government Drives Up College Tuitions

This is several months old, but it is fantastic. How can anyone possibly oppose college tuition subsidies? Please listen and learn. Like most government programs, government tuition subsidies punish exactly the people they presume to help.

Yale University

1810-1852 tuition = $33/year or 1.65 ounces of gold
1918 tuition = $160/year (dollars were inflated during WWI) = 8.4 ounces of gold = 32 days of manual labor
2009 tuition = $36,500/year or about 33 ounces of gold = 550 days of manual labor

This was caused not by freedom or greed. It was caused by reckless government subsidies.

Recovery Propaganda

Leave it to the WSJ to report the truth – and then try to paper over it:

Sales taxes declined 9% to $70 billion in the third quarter compared with the year-ago period, the Census Bureau said. Income taxes plunged 12% to about $58 billion. Together, sales and income taxes make up roughly half of state and local tax revenue.

The WSJ then goes on to opine:

State and local tax revenues tend to lag behind the downturns as well as the upturns in the economy because of the time it takes for collections to catch up with depressed store sales and diminished incomes.

This is true for income taxes.

It is absolutely false when it comes to sales taxes.

As someone who ran a registered establishment for more than a decade that was responsible for filing and paying sales taxes (I signed more returns “under penalty of perjury” than I can count during those years!) I can state that it is an absolute fact that sales tax returns are filed and monies are remitted MONTHLY – if there is an upturn in business – an actual upturn – it shows up NOT MORE THAN ONE MONTH LATER in sales tax receipts. Period. (Read more from market-ticker.denninger.net)