Brooks Agnew – For thousands of years, the Global Syndicate has had only one true enemy.  It seeks to protect its bowling greens and orphanages full of tasty playthings from this enemy by not just putting up a wall of secrecy and death.  It creates a no-man’s-land for hundreds of miles in every direction to prevent anyone from even thinking about stopping them or sharing in the fun.

Throughout time, there are two classes of humans.  There are the servants and slaves, and there are the masters.  When the servants break free and manage to use their genius or save a few nickels and make some investments and get lucky enough to win a few times, they leave the shanty-towns.  They wander across the no-mans-land, and they see the lights of the garden parties and open 5-star buffets.

But, they are carriers of the dreaded apocalyptic disease, called poverty.  Members of the Global Syndicate are so afraid of this disease, that they create entire governments and armies of police and lawyers to keep it far away from them.

Most of the time, Syndicate officers occupy the highest offices in elected governments.  They write the laws that keep it just the way they want it.  Virtual-Joe’s budget-busting $1.9 trillion stimulus bill was marketed to the slave class as aid for struggling workers (classic slaver talk to the  after the COVID-19 shutdowns obliterated their earnings. The legislation is also, as CNN described it, “a platform for a generational transformation of the economy to benefit the least well-off Americans and alleviate poverty.”

If the administration wants to boost the prospects of less-well-off Americans, it could loosen the shutdowns so they can get back to work. It could increase opportunities for poor Americans to have alternatives to the public school systems that leave their kids ill prepared for the new economy — or at least encourage its teachers union allies to stop resisting plans to reopen the schools (something that hurts the poor the most). That would be transformative.

Democratic leaders are far more concerned about transforming the economy than they are about helping lower-income workers.

At the very least, the new president could halt its attack on the gig economy by dropping his plan to reclassify contractors as permanent employees. We’ve already seen how that plan worked thanks to the “crazy idea” petri dish of California politics. In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Assembly Bill 5, which largely banned companies from using freelancers. Lawmakers touted it as a nationwide model.

The truth is that instead of creating tens of thousands of new full-time jobs, as advertised, the law led to mass layoffs of contractors. The pushback was so severe that the state exempted 100 occupations – and voters approved an initiative that exempted app-based drivers. These contractor workers are actually Americans who rely on these part-time arrangements to get by financially.

There are consultants who serve many clients, fractionally.  They are accountants, engineers, cyber security experts, maintenance personnel, landscapers, and many, many more one-man businesses who get paid on a 1099 status, and do not pay taxes on anything except the profit from that activity.  If they are smart, their expenses are pretty close to the revenue, yielding little if any taxable income.

Keep in mind that California’s budget is awash in surplus money. It’s latest evidence that the state’s draconian coronavirus policies have spared the donor class and the wealthy, who pay the bulk of the state’s income taxes in our highly progressive tax system, but has obliterated workers who are trying to enter the middle class and buy a home and own a car. They pay little in income taxes, so their suffering flies under the radar.

Yet not only has Virtual Joe vowed to support that job-destroying idea at the federal level, but congressional Democrats have decided to help fund the new stimulus package on the backs of these same hard-pressed workers. The idea that the latest free-money scheme needs to be “funded” is wild, given that nothing really is “funded” at the federal level anymore given the $3.3 trillion deficit and $22.5 trillion federal debt.  It takes an average of $17,000 from each slave-class worker and gives him back an average of $2,300 a year.

Congress needed to keep the package underneath a deficit cap, so it came up with a way to ramp up revenue. Basically, Democrats are taking it out of the hide of the people they claim to be helping. To come up with the extra cash, legislators included what amounts to a large tax increase on Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash drivers, as well as other Americans who earn income through what is called the gig economy.

This would include consultants, engineers, advisers, experts, and musicians who have a unique and valuable skill or talent, but who cannot find a job.  So, they make a job.  Besides, once the need is filled, that high-value skilled person is not longer needed, so they are fired.  Virtual Joe wants them hired, fired, and then rehired by the next client.  The paperwork alone would preclude 90% of the clients, so essentially, hundreds of thousands of freelance workers are fired and now have no way to support themselves or their clients.

“Under current law, such online platforms only have to report to the IRS when they pay individuals at least 200 times a year, for a minimum $20,000. The change inserted into a managers’ amendment just before House floor debate on the $1.9 trillion measure would cut that threshold to $600, regardless of how many transactions, generating an estimated $8.4 billion in extra tax revenue through fiscal 2031,” per a Roll Call report by Doug Sword.

This is the equivalent of a homeowner, after spending wildly on a vacation in Cabo, a fancy new mini mansion, and a luxury SUV, is looking for loose change that has fallen beneath the sofa cushions. Of course, these reduced thresholds — something legislators have sought long before the stimulus bill — make it easier for the IRS to grab every penny it claims that it’s owed. That’s another reason welfare statists prefer that everyone be a W2 employee.

They absolutely hate that someone might be earning $150,000 a year by working for themselves 100 hours a week serving 20 clients.  The State wants each of those clients to withhold and pay the tax to the State, even though only a fraction of the money they are paying the contractor is actually for labor.  The rest is for knowhow and tools.  It doesn’t matter to the State.  They are forcing clients to pay the tax.  They don’t want to, so the contractor is essentially fired.

Tech industry officials worry that, as a TechNet spokesperson told Roll Call, the proposal “adds a significant burden to gig economy and small business workers at the worst possible time.”

Once again, we see that Democratic leaders are far more concerned about transforming the economy than they are about helping lower-income workers. In his State of the State speech this week, the embattled Gov. Newsom took jabs at a likely recall election and detailed his “success” fighting the coronavirus, but he also offered a laundry list of free stuff that the California government now provides.

“Rewarding working families by nearly tripling the earned income tax credit and increasing child care subsidies, adding two more weeks of paid family leave, and raising the minimum wage to $14, on its way to $15 an hour,” Newsom said. “Providing first-ever health care subsidies for middle-class Californians so they can afford coverage. Increasing student financial aid and public assistance. Making community college free for two years.”

This approach is coming in an even bigger way to the national level, where boosting taxes, hiking transfer payments, and expanding government programs is preferable to simply helping workers, including hundreds of thousands of gig workers, earn a living.

SF Source Brooks Agnew Mar 2021