Tag: Robert Verbruggen

An Update on America’s Homicide Surge

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.city-journal.org/update-on-americas-homicide-surge

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Last year, Christos Makridis and I used homicide data from the Centers for Disease Control to break down the 2020 homicide spike by geography and demographics. With another year’s worth of numbers now finalized—plus “provisional” numbers stretching into 2022—it’s time for a brief update. The CDC’s data, compiled from death certificates, are especially crucial in a year when the FBI completely failed to collect murder data from many of the nation’s police departments.

The good news is that, after spiking in 2020 and rising a little further in 2021, homicides seem to be falling again. The bad news is that this has been an extremely slow process, with recent numbers still well above pre-2020 levels, even if violence remains far from the sky-high levels of the early 1990s.

The CDC puts the national homicide rate at 7.8 per 100,000 for 2021, versus 7.5 for 2020 and 5.8 for 2019. Here are the month-by-month totals since 2018, including provisional data for the first half of 2022:

Author(s): Robert VerBruggen

Publication Date: 25 Jan 2023

Publication Site: City Journal

The SALT Subsidy

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-salt-subsidy/

Excerpt:

“Taxed twice on the same income”: This is an argument sometimes brought out in favor of the state and local tax deduction, or SALT. But it doesn’t really hold water.

It’s not problematic for different taxes, funding different services, to use the same denominator. County and municipal governments often tax the same property, for instance, and local and state governments often impose sales taxes on the same transactions. In these cases, requiring one tax to be deducted before the other was calculated would just be silly, because legislators would simply increase the second tax’s rate enough to offset the loss, leaving everything back where it started.

With SALT, though, there’s no simple solution like that — federal tax rates apply across the entire nation, while state and local taxes vary from place to place. A federal deduction subsidizes places with high taxes by collecting less federal revenue from those places, while any overall rate increase will hit the whole country. Blue-state lawmakers like Nadler like SALT, and want to get rid of the cap on it, because they want that subsidy, not because it’s fair tax policy.

Author(s): Robert Verbruggen

Publication Date: 15 April 2021

Publication Site: National Review