I absolutely love this idea: The Bad Boss Tax

[jmowreader]

75. The idea of a bullshit Bad Boss Tax?

First things first: I have no idea why the Democrats won't propose indexing the minimum wage to inflation, except that maybe they just don't want to give the Republicans ANOTHER thing to campaign against them on. You know the spiel: This JOB KILLING regulation...

The Modern Day Republican is so bad and so consistent, if the stripe in the middle of the road was still white and Obama suggested changing it to yellow, the GOP would claim this idea would cost 300,000 workers in the White Road Paint Manufacturing Industry their jobs...and then they'd all go straight to church and pray like hell no one figures out the people who make white road paint also make yellow, or that there ain't but 200,000 paint manufacturing workers in the whole land. Can you dig it?

There's a very good reason this idea sucks: Do you really want your boss to crawl THAT FAR up your ass? Do you want her to keep a list on a clipboard of all her subordinates who are on the forms of public assistance that will kick in the Bad Boss Tax, so that the next time sales drop by five percent she knows exactly who to lay off permanently? Do you want employers to pass around a map overlay of the low-rent districts so they can plot the addresses of anyone applying for a job? "Ol' Joe here would be perfect but he lives in an area that's got a 73-percent WIC participation rate, so I think Ol' Joe here should apply at someone else's company." Do you want "failure to disclose all forms of public assistance received immediately upon approval" to become a termination-level offense?

Y'know, I get the strange feeling that changing all the refundable tax credits for business that exist in the tax code to non-refundable credits would pay for all public assistance programs. And right now y'all are going "huh?" I shall explain. There are two broad categories of tax loopholes: deductions and credits. A deduction directly alters your taxable income, which indirectly changes your taxes. At the 35-percent corporate flat rate, a $100 deduction reduces your taxes by $35. A credit directly alters your taxes - a $100 credit lowers your taxes by $100. There are two kinds of credits, nonrefundable and refundable. If you can take advantage of a nonrefundable credit, the most it can lower your taxes to is zero. If you owe the government $1 million in taxes before the credits are applied, and you have a $2 million credit, it stops working when you stop owing the government anything. Refundable credits bring you money after your tax bill falls to zero.