Congressional Republicans Introduce a Trump-Pleasing Tax Hike | top bitcoin mining hardware

Congressional Republicans Introduce a Trump-Pleasing Tax Hike | top bitcoin mining hardware

 

Granted, the 2 percent south-of-the-border remittance tax is a much broader and cleaner proposal, but it faces many of the same potential pitfalls, namely that only around half of money transfers as it is go through regulated channels, which means making that more expensive will drive more people to black market solutions like Bitcoin, as in Venezuela.

Funding Act, imposing what he describes as a "2% fee on remittances sent south of the border." The bill has yet to be posted online as far as I can tell, but according to The Plainsman of Auburn the tax would apply to monies sent to "more than 40 Latin American countries." Rogers's sales pitch: "This bill is simple – anyone who sends their money to countries that benefit from our porous borders and illegal immigration should be responsible for providing some of the funds needed to complete the wall. This bill keeps money in the American economy, and most importantly, it creates a funding stream to build the wall."

Traditionally, nationalistic controls on capital flows have not been associated with liberal democracy and the rule of law. According to a skeptical analysis published last week by the World Bank, other countries currently considering such a levy include "Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia…and the United Arab Emirates." Previous efforts in Gabon (2008) and Palau (2013), "have not worked," World Bank author Dilip Ratha asserted, because the "tax collections were found to be insignificant."

As Nick Gillespie pointed out a year ago, after then-candidate Donald Trump proposed cracking down on remittances to pay for his wall, the idea is fundamentally corrupted by "the assumption that the government has the right to unilaterally stop people from spending the money they earn and possess; that the feds have a right to tell you where you can and cannot go or even send checks." That has not stopped the likes of National Review from editorially endorsing such a nationwide tax.

World BankWorld BankThe United States is by far the leading source of remittances in the world, with its residents sending to other countries $135 billion in 2015, some 23 percent of the global total, according to research published this month by the international banking conglomerate BBVA. Monies sent to Latin America and the Caribbean accounted for 38.5% of the U.S. total, BBVA estimated, led by Mexico ($27 billion, or more than the country's annual oil revenue), then Guatemala ($7 billion) and the Dominican Republic ($5 billion). As a percentage of the host-countries' GDP, however, Mexico's 2.6 percent lags far behind Haiti (24.7 percent), Honduras (18.2 percent), and Jamaica (16.9 percent).

There is no reason to assume that the bulk of these funds derive from illegal immigrants. Of the 41 million or so foreign-born residents of the United States, an estimated 11 million are not authorized to be here, and are probably less likely than their legal brethren to use money conduits that are traceable by the feds. (And as any Cuban can tell you, there are plenty of U.S.-born hyphenated-Americans who wire money back to the island, further broadening the pool of donors, and again underscoring the truism that measures taken against illegal immigrants also pinch the freedom of natural-born citizens.) The money they send back is critical in ameliorating poverty and jump-starting economic activity. In other words, it helps create the kinds of conditions that may keep an increasing number of would-be migrants at home.

According to the World Bank analysis, "In 2016, migrant remittance flows to developing countries amounted to $440 billion, more than three times the size of official development aid flows. In many countries, remittances are the largest source of foreign exchange. In India and Mexico, they are larger than foreign direct investment; in Egypt, they are larger than the revenue from Suez Canal; and in Pakistan, they are larger than the country's international reserves."

Not wasting their money on design talent, anyway. ||| G20G20For this reason, the G20, the global club of rich nations led by the United States, agreed in September 2014 on a "Plan to Facilitate Remittance Flows," with the intention to reduce the worldwide average tax on remittances from 8 percent down to 5 percent. From that (jargon-flecked) document:

    The Group of Twenty (G20) recognises the value of remittance flows in helping to drive strong, sustainable and balanced growth. Remittances represent a major source of income for millions of families and businesses globally, and are an important avenue to greater financial inclusion. For the poorest and most vulnerable, access to remittance flows provides a sustainable path out of poverty, as more than half the world's adult population have limited access to finance. In 2014, remittances to developing countries are expected to reach $436 billion, far exceeding Official Development Assistance. Remittances to and from G20 countries account for almost 80 per cent of global remittance flows.

OK, so maybe a remittance tax is a philosophically suspect idea that hampers global anti-poverty efforts. Still, would it work? Preliminary studies and anecdotal behavior patterns point to no.

Candidate Trump's somewhat convoluted plan from a year ago tying remittances to the wall involved basically threatening Mexico with such a tax in order to extract a lump-sum payment, and when that fails amend the Patriot Act to make wire transferrers prove their citizenship or else face taxes on their shipments. Though the idea faded, it was treated seriously enough that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released an exhaustive analysis that guesstimated the wide band of potential effects like this:

    one scenario with no change in the amount of remittances and low administrative and enforcement costs could provide $0.41 billion in potential net revenue for border protection. In contrast, another scenario with a 75 percent reduction in remittances after the fine and high administrative and enforcement costs would generate potential net revenue of only $0.01 billion. In some cases, the cost incurred by CFPB could be more than the revenue from the fine.

So best-case scenario, $410 million in pocket change. That's not much of a wall.

Granted, the 2 percent south-of-the-border remittance tax is a much broader and cleaner proposal, but it faces many of the same potential pitfalls, namely that only around half of money transfers as it is go through regulated channels, which means making that more expensive will drive more people to black market solutions like Bitcoin, as in Venezuela.

Republicans once believed as a matter of bedrock faith that the free flow of capital, goods, and humans across the southern border was the best way to produce the kind of economic development that depresses illegal border crossings. The loss of that faith, which predates the rise of Donald Trump, has been one of the most disturbing spectacles in American politics.

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And if Bitcoin and other virtual currencies haven't yet become full-fledged alternatives to government money, they have shown promise as havens from capital controls and financial scrutiny. Logically, that has establishment types upset that "non-state actors can use VCs to disrupt sovereignty and increase political and/or economic power," as the Rand Corporation warned.

As it turns out, if you want to be a successful subversive, you probably shouldn't take on the moniker "Dr. Death" as you publicly tout your establishment-challenging ways. That's what Daniel Crowninshield did with regard to the unfinished firearm receivers he sold, to be completed on computer numerically controlled (CNC) mills in his North Sacramento, California, machine shop. Theoretically, customers operated the mills themselves, making the finished firearms legal. But an undercover agent insisted that shop employees did the honors, and Crowninshield got three and a half years in prison.
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What's remarkable about this story isn't just Crowninshield's excessive enthusiasm in marketing his services, however. More important is what this story illustrates about the unenforceable nature of laws that people find oppressive—and the growing vulnerability of such restrictions.

Strictly speaking, Crowninshield's act of defiance was old-school; while he apparently used computer-controlled machines, there's no reason trained machinists couldn't have cranked out those receivers using traditional tools and their own skills—except, that is, for the (not so, as it turned out) plausible deniability that they were being operated by untrained customers. There was enough demand for such services that there was sometimes a line outside Crowninshield's shop, according to an undercover agent. AR-15 receivers invisible to government scrutiny, "in the hundreds at a minimum," were supposedly cranked out at that one North Sacramento operation.

But enthusiasts actually can and do personally operate Cody Wilson's push-button Ghost Gunner CNC mills—which Wired described as "absurdly easy to use." Again, there's enough demand for such services that hundreds of the high-tech machines have been sold, putting the manufacture of finished firearm receivers within reach of people who don't have machinists' skills. And there's no way of knowing how many finished receivers have been quietly knocked out on the devices after they're delivered. Which was the whole reason Wilson developed the Ghost Gunner, after demonstrating that a working, if simple, pistol could be created on a 3D printer.

Of course, this isn't just about things that go bang. Several years ago, Wilson teamed up with fellow crypto-anarchist Amir Taaki to develop DarkWallet, a Bitcoin wallet intended to add an extra layer of anonymity to the virtual currency so that financial transactions could more effectively evade official scrutiny. Development of DarkWallet briefly stalled as Taaki disappeared for a while on a lower-tech mission to shoot at ISIS troops on behalf of the Rojava enclave in northern Syria. But with Taaki back (though under investigation by British authorities over his Syrian adventure), the software is now available in beta form.

"I believe in the hacker ethic," Taaki said about not just DarkWallet, but his overall philosophy. "Empower the small guy, privacy and anonymity, mistrust authority, promote decentralized alternatives, freedom of information," he says. "These are good principles. The individual against power."

For good reason, Wilson and Taaki play central roles in Adam Bhala Lough's The New Radical, a documentary about activists who push the boundaries of technology that empowers individuals against the state. The film received a mixed reception at the Sundance film festival, the Los Angeles Times noted in January—not because of its quality, but because comfortably liberal attendees who like to think of themselves as the good guys realized they were among the targets of anti-authoritarians who look "to create fundamental political change by pushing for one or more of the following: an eradication of intellectual-property laws, radical free speech, fierce encryption to protect that speech, anonymous money (basically, digital currency not controlled or monitored by any government) and a general disdain for traditional legislative structures." And easily available weapons, of course.

Lough's film is a bit of a companion piece to Alex Winter's Deep Web, about Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, and Laura Poitras's Citizenfour, about Edward Snowden. All three films cover techno-activists who have challenged government authority (with high-stakes personal consequences, in the case of the imprisoned Ulbricht). These activists, promoting new means of empowering the old and natural human inclination to tell authority to go to hell, have had a big and continuing impact—perhaps bigger than some of them expected. Just poking government in the eye may have been the original aspiration of Cody Wilson and his allies when they set out to create the original, single-shot, 3D-printed gun.

"At our maximum as an organization, we were always trying to project these images of a future that was unwilled, or unwished for, on the part of our enemy," he told The Verge. "I was never actually trying to say, 'The solution is here, oh my God, we've done it.' I was trying to inject an undeniable nightmare-like scenario for power to receive, the power we believed we were opposing."

Since then, though, headlines about 3D-printed and CNC-machined guns have proliferated around the world, even when the modern technologies have nothing to do with the actual black market-produced weapons in question. This has government officials in full freak-out mode seeking to restrict that which was deliberately designed to be beyond their control.

Likewise, Edward Snowden's revelations about National Security Agency surveillance drives surging popular interest in encryption tools that have become ever-easier to use. This has authorities like FBI Director James Comey in a deep sulk over the public's resistance to surveillance.

And if Bitcoin and other virtual currencies haven't yet become full-fledged alternatives to government money, they have shown promise as havens from capital controls and financial scrutiny. Logically, that has establishment types upset that "non-state actors can use VCs to disrupt sovereignty and increase political and/or economic power," as the Rand Corporation warned.

Of course, the desire to be free has always competed with governments' desire to control. That many people don't automatically knuckle under isn't a new development. What's new, though, is the current wave of technologies making it easier to flip the bird to regulators and prohibitionists.