I periodically mock Republicans for being the stupid party. Yes, some of them probably mean well, but they have this lemming-like instinct to throw themselves on hand grenades.
But I noted back in April that the supposedly right-wing Christian Democrat party in Slovakia put on a display of stupidity that was so mind-boggling that it made GOPers look like rocket scientists.
Notwithstanding their original protestations to the contrary, the Christian Democrats (who were the lead party in the governing coalition) decided to support the bailout of Greece.
And when Slovakia’s pro-freedom SAS Party (part of the governing coalition) refused to support this terrible idea, the top Christian Democrat politicians decided that the bailout was so important that they struck a deal with the Social Democrats to get their votes in exchange for early elections.
Which, of course, meant that Social Democrats prevailed and the Christian Democrats lost power. And, much to my dismay, the Social Democrats are now poised to repeal the flat tax.
But that terrible development is only happening because the Christian Democrats were so breathtakingly stupid that they threw away power in the first place. And they gave up power so they could do something bad for Slovakia. Amazing.
It seems stupidity is infectious, because something similar is now happening next door in the Czech Republic.
Just as was the case in Slovakia, there’s a supposedly right-wing government in charge of the Czech Republic. So you would think that this government would be focused on controlling spending and lowering tax rates.
But that’s based on the assumption of competence, intelligence, and principles. Those characteristics seem to be in short supply. Here’s an excerpt from a report in the Washington Post.
The lower house on Wednesday rejected a 1 percent increase in the sales tax on retail goods and a 7 percent income tax increase for the highest-earners. The parliamentary refusal came after six lawmakers from the conservative Civic Democratic Party of Prime Minister Petr Necas voted against because they said the tax hikes are against their party’s values. Necas said Thursday a new vote should take place in three months and the government is linking it to a confidence vote. If that vote also fails, the coalition government will fall.
Just in case you’re not familiar with the workings of parliamentary systems, the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic is throwing a tantrum and threatening to have an election (which he almost certainly will lose) and turn the country back over to the leftists.
“Read my lips, let’s screw the people”
Unless, of course, he can convince a handful of principled lawmakers from his own party decide to stab taxpayers in the back and support a big tax hike. But not just a big tax hike. The Prime Minister wants to get rid of the flat tax by imposing a special, Obama-style class-warfare tax rate on the so-called rich.
I hope the six lawmakers mentioned in the news report hold firm, even if they’re only doing the right thing for non-principled reasons. It soon will be very obvious that they are/were on the side of the angels and that the Prime Minister and the other members of the party are a bunch of hacks who are willing to screw taxpayers in a lame and pathetic effort to buy votes with other people’s money.
I’m not sure which politician is most deserving of scorn. Is it Prime Minister Necas, who is channeling the spirit of George H.W. “read my lips” Bush as he leads his party over the cliff? Or is it Prime Minister Radicova of Slovakia, who got her party tossed from power because she decided her nation’s taxpayers should support the corrupt vote-buying schemes of Greek politicians?
Or maybe I should augment the list by including other supposed right wingers of Europe, such as Sarkozy, Merkel, Cameron, and Rajoy, all of whom seem to specialize in betraying taxpayers.
I’ve had friends tell me that this is inevitable because smart right wingers go into business, leaving the dregs for politics. It’s just the opposite for the left, they say. The smart leftists have no desire to dirty their hands with real work (Obama viewed his tiny bit of experience with the private sector “working for the enemy”), so they gravitate to government.
I think that’s way too simplistic of an explanation. I suspect the answer can be found in the insights of public choice economics, which explains that government and politics are corrupting institutions.
Perhaps that’s why it is so rare to find right-wing politicians – such as Reagan and Thatcher – who generally do the right thing.
Dan, you Need A Much Bigger Pulpit! Stop Philosophizing, which will not change a thing and RUN FOR OFFICE!!! If not you, who then and if not now, when?
This explains why my grandparents emigrated from there 100+ years ago.
The explanation may be simpler still. There are no right wing parties in Europe (and barely one in the U.S.) – if by ‘right wing’ one means ‘tending to favor liberty over government control’. There are only various shades of Social Democrat in Europe (except for the more honest, more consistent communist/green parties).
The situation is even worse. There is no side of angels. The protesting MPs are just unhappy that they’re not in the government under Nečas’s rule. So this could probably be described as stretching muscles before the party’s nation conference. It does NOT have anything to do with taxation or right-wing principles.
And it’s already been reported that they’ve agreed to a “temporary” tax-hike for one year.
+1 for this writing
greeting from the Czech Rep.
It is not only against their values, it’s also against their party’s election pledges. And also against pledges of the other coalition party, that controls the Ministry of Finance.
Before the election, both so-called right-wing parties were fear mongering about the left-wing. “They will rise taxes and increase the state debt”, they warned. Since then, the state debt grew from 1.2 to 1.5 trilions of CZK and the governement wants to increase the VAT again.
They already increased it, but it had no effect (people just spent less). So now they think perhaps it was too little. The PM denies the Laffer-curve effect, he says it failed because of the “bad mood in the society”.
BTW there are some real right-wing parties in Europe. They are just not so popular… yet.
+1..
i wish i never born in czech republic and i was never “slavic”…….
i wish that my grandparents, parents, whoever emigrated and i should never know about some fucking czech republic and all other russians..:/
This article is very misleading. There is, in fact this situation in Czech republic, but it is not this stupid. In CZ there is no flat tax, in fact, in CZ we have progressive tax system, which is caused by the tax abatement. The 7% tax for the richest is because there is a limit for social security, which effectively decreases the income tax by 7%.
As for the 1% increase in the sales tax, I would think, that this is caused by the incompetence of the government to save money. In any case, I’m still happy, that they increase the taxes and don’t make the budget deficit bigger.
I never held much hope that anything significant would come of the ex-communist countries. I have always viewed their revival as a temporary backlash to decades of statism, to be promptly reversed upon creation of some prosperity to redistribute.
It is just not that easy for people who have lived for so long under heavy statism to abandon mandatory collectivism. Especially when the beacon of individualism itself (America) is now declining fast to the same sirens of an easier and fairer, flatter effort-reward curve prosperity. The same siren song that has so bamboozled more or less every other nation in the rest of the world – and the permanent and irreversible sub-par growth trendlines that inevitably accompany these mandated flatter effort-reward societal arrangements. No wonder Europeans are at least consoled by the fact that the current American president is also leading America to the same Euro-path to decline. They, correctly, sense that if no country in the world pursues policies of prosperity then the European decline will not quite stand out as much. Europeans loathe to admit that their welfare states lead to slow growth rates — and thus inevitably decline. They’ll do anything to refrain from this admission, even bring down America if they could, so Mr. Obama fits them just fine for this purpose.
The ex-communist countries of Europe are also in very bad company, having jumped from under the philosophical spell of the late 20th century failing empire (the soviet Union) to the failing empire of the early 21st century (the European Union). Eastern Europeans fail to realiza that. They still seem to think that anything “western” will lead to sucess. Realizing that they really jumped onto the early 21st century titanic by joining the EU would be just too much to bear for people who just recently rid themselves of communism. It is very unlikely that the rest of Europe, in the turbulent pitchfork desperation that accompanies decline, will let such things as flat taxes stand within its borders. It is only a matter of time before these ex-soviet satellites are absorbed into this newest incarnation of European mandatory collectivism: The pan-European redistributing welfare state. But when the pitchforks talk, prosperity walks. These countries are too small, and still too weak to resist being dragged down the flatter effort-reward curve road to decline. The same decline that the rest of Europe is now headed into, at an ever increasing speed. Mandatory compassion will bring the predictable cruel outcome: systemic loss of prosperity.
But the event horizon of American prosperity is also close. Americans are now in line to exchaust, one after another, all futile HopNChange shortcuts to an easier prosperity, before eventually crying uncle ans start considering alternatives. But, by then, it will be too late, way too late.
The movie of decline is playing its well-oiled script. Naïve Americans think HopNChange is an American invention. What a joke indeed!
Unlike the US we still have some democracy at least. We’re not running petrodollar system and we don’t exploit people in the third world countries.
Americans should really focus on their ultracorrupted political system and don’t comment on others about whom they knew nothing.
There is one thing that needs to be corrected – these six MPs are NOT angels. That’s a real laugh. They are a bunch of petty schemers who use the firm-on-principles stand as an excuse for their effort to bring Nečas down…
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Sir,
the current right-wing Czech government is dealing with issues brought about by the previous right-wing government, which slashed taxes, as well as government spending in 2008. Contrary to their expectations, the state revenues plummeted. Innitially, they could point a finger and say “hey, don’t blame our policy, it is the crisis which is to blame”.
But today the Czech economy is roughly in the same condition as in 2006-7, yet the state revenues are way below that. Current right-wing government introduced harsh austerity measures, but that was not enough to cut the state debt (which was the main topic of their election campaigns).
Since the Minister of Finance is the same person who introduced the tax cuts in 2008, he will not just revert the changes he made in 2008, as that would mean admitting failure. Instead, they are fiddling mostly with value added tax, which has the harshest impact on the poor.
The previous socialist governments were also running debt, but they could show large investments into infrustructure, education and science for that, all of which are very well paying off (the Czech Republic got most foreign investment among the post-communist Central-Eastern European countries). The right-wing government is running a debt, but they can only show slashes in education funding, defense funding, police funding, healthcare, etc.
So basically the right-wing has already lost the next election and right now they are merely struggling to cut the borrowing needs of the state in order to be able to show that they were able to fulfill the single most important election promise of previous elections.
Last but not least, the Czech Republic has currently regressive tax for high earners. The income tax is progressive to a certain nominal limit (around US$4.000 per month), from which it remains flat. Even if the current government taxes the high earners more, that will only mean that they will start paying only same proportional amount as the middle class.
[…] in the Czech Republic, the current right-of-center government decided to scrap the flat tax for “fairness” reasons. I’m sure that will really be comforting to the Czech people as the economy suffers from less […]
[…] in the Czech Republic, the current right-of-center government decided to scrap the flat tax for “fairness” reasons. I’m sure that will really be comforting to the Czech people as the economy suffers from less […]
[…] in the Czech Republic, the current right-of-center government decided to scrap the flat tax for “fairness” reasons. I’m sure that will really be comforting to the Czech people as the economy suffers from less […]
wow!!!!!
[…] recent years, we’ve seen a couple of nations repeal their flat tax systems. A few governments also have sabotaged their nations’ private Social Security systems. There […]
A Fairtax, national retail sales tax, on goods and services on with no person or business filing a tax return would take the politics and paperwork out of taxes. The politicians would lose their SUGARDADDY lobbyists and the economics would be much better.
@pinkpigy
Racist much? I know how much you may not like what you see in this article, but wishing you were never born Czech simply reeks of ethnocentrism. Wishing you weren’t Slavic comes off as racist.
I was born in China, which was and still is Communist. But do I regret being born in China? No! I just accept that fact and move on!
@Michael Sauka
The Czechoslovakia (or whichever country that land was part of) at that time is not the same as today’s Czech Republic. Don’t conflate the two.
@sysel CZ
Thank you for your sober comment. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
And Daniel, if your articles each have comments sections, why do you not respond to them? It’s never a bad time to encourage healthy debate.