Free Republic

April 8, 2002, 8:30 a.m. Consumption Junction It may be time to tax what we consume. Bruce Bartlett hroughout most of American history, taxes were levied principally on consumption, rather than income. Except during the Civil War, the federal government was financed almost entirely by import duties and excise taxes until 1913, when our current income tax was imposed. The Founding Fathers favored consumption taxes in part because they are harder to raise to confiscatory levels than incomes taxes. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton had this to say: It is a signal advantage of taxes on articles of consumption...

The storage industry's two favorite professors have completed their annual look at data growth and found once again that data is growing. Peter Lyman and Hal Varian of Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems say that information production has increased by 30 percent each year between 1999 and 2002. Last year alone, the amount of data stored on paper, film, optical and magnetic media reached five exabytes - or 5 million terabytes. This is music to storage vendors' ears, and it should come as no shock that EMC, HP, Intel and Microsoft "supported" the study."All of a sudden, almost...

WASHINGTON - Their lawsuits have been defeated in the courts, and now a Senate bill would tell obese Americans that their weight gain is nobody's fault but their own. The "Commonsense Consumption Act," a bill introduced by tort-reform champion Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would prohibit obese Americans from suing food companies for weight-related medical conditions. A federal judge in New York already threw out two such lawsuits earlier this year. Read McConnell's bill. The legislation also represents another move by Republican legislators to curb class-action lawsuits and the sway of powerful trial lawyers. By a one-vote margin Wednesday, the...

Conservatives are rejoicing. They see the United States already on a path of fundamental tax changes that will accelerate economic growth. "Stealth tax reform," it has been called. That's because relatively few voters are aware of the significance of the changes in the system proposed by President Bush and incorporated in the three tax-cutting measures passed by a Republican-led Congress since he took office. "George W. Bush is the first president to actively understand and embrace the fundamental core principles of tax reform," says Ernest Christian, a founder of the Center for Strategic Tax Reform in Washington. The ultimate tax-reform...

Senate OKs Oil Savings of One Million Barrels a Day WASHINGTON, DC, June 10, 2003 (ENS) - The Senate today passed an amendment to the energy bill now working its way through Congress that requires the President to enact measures to conserve enough oil throughout the U.S. economy to reduce demand by one million barrels a day by 2013. Seen as a clear victory for energy conservation, national security, and oil price stabilization, the bipartisan measure passed the Senate by a vote of 99 to 1. The amendment by Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, was cosponsored by Democrat...

When another collection of self-storage units sprouts up like alders in an old meadow, Coleen O'Connell sees it not as an innocuous sign of the times, but as a symptom.The disease that the proliferation of these steel-sided, windowless structures indicates, O'Connell believes, is "affluenza." It's an affliction that drives many Americans to consume far more goods than they need, and willingly trade away time with their families so they can work to earn more money to buy even more things, she said. O'Connell has a friend who owns so much furniture that she keeps some of it in a self-storage...

In the heart of the Treasury Department, their work deeply under wraps, tax-policy experts are hatching policy options for what could be the Bush economic team's first big idea: shifting the U.S. tax system away from taxing income, toward taxing consumption. But taking what has long been an academic ideal and translating it into real-world tax policy would take a dramatic commitment of presidential leadership, a long education and political campaign, and a bipartisan convergence of political interests, tax-policy experts say. Few of them are holding their breath. "It's true that you can write down a simpler tax system on...

Britain's upper crust are indulging themselves with the latest food fad -designer loaves costing almost $30. The sourdough Poilane loaf costs 50 times more than normal brands, but its French bakers are confident it's worth every penny. They claim the posh bread, which contains just flour, sea salt and water, has a superior taste and extra health-giving qualities. In the UK it is only available from eight Waitrose supermarkets, at £9.62 a loaf, fresh from the Poilane bakery in London's Belgravia. The bread, which measures 31cm across and weighs almost 9kg, is hand-kneaded and baked for six hours in an...

PERTH, Australia (Reuters) - Better, more efficient growing techniques are slashing marijuana prices in Australia and pushing up consumption. Prices of the weed have fallen in real terms by almost 40 per cent over the past 10 years, according to a survey by the Economic Research Centre at the University of Western Australia. Marijuana remains illegal here, but smoking or possessing small amounts has been decriminalized in most Australian states. "Even though marijuana is an illegal substance in Australia it seems that the application of modern production techniques, particularly hydroponic techniques, has led to a substantial increase in supply," said...