From 1960 to 2010, the share of federal spending going for “payments to individuals” (Social Security, food stamps, Medicare and the like) climbed from 26 percent to 66 percent…
falling military spending — from 52 percent of federal outlays in 1960 to 20 percent today…
In 1960, federal taxes were 17.8 percent of national income (gross domestic product). In 2007, they were 18.5 percent of GDP…
the Forbes 400 richest Americans have a collective wealth of $1.5 trillion. If the government simply confiscated everything they own, and turned them into paupers, it would barely cover the one-time 2011 deficit of $1.3 trillion…
Obama has provided no leadership. Aside from Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, few Republicans have.
It looks like Mr. Samuelson is writing a contemporary history of America’s financial Armageddon. He has already done the chapter comparing US debt levels to those of the PIIGS. He’s already done the chapter on the ruinous healthcare law, though he was careful to put his criticism in the third person. His criticism of politicians is bi-partisan, but it seems clear enough that he has stronger feelings than he is willing to share in print.
The key to understanding the impact of taxes on the economy is to focus on tax rates, particularly marginal tax rates, defined as the tax rate that applies to the last dollar earned. The tax rate determines how much the producer is allowed to keep out of what he or she produces. For example, at a 25% tax rate, the producer keeps three-fourths of his production. If that rate is increased to 50%, the producer keeps only half of what he produces, reducing his reward for production and output by one-third. Incentives are consequently slashed for productive activity, such as saving, investment, work, business expansion, business creation, job creation, and entrepreneurship. The result is fewer jobs, lower wages, and slower economic growth, or even economic downturn.
In contrast, if the tax rate is reduced from 50% to 25%, what producers are allowed to keep from their production increases from one-half to three-fourths, increasing the reward for production and output by one-half. That sharply increases incentives for all of the above productive activities, resulting in more of them, and more jobs, higher wages, and faster economic growth. Moreover, these incentives do not just expand or contract the economy by the amount of any tax cut or tax increase, as a Keynesian stimulus purports to do. For example, a tax cut of $100 billion involving reduced tax rates does not just affect the economy by $100 billion. The lower tax rates affect every dollar and every economic decision throughout the economy. That is because every economic decision is based on the new lower tax rates…
Similarly, regulations impose increased costs on businesses and consumers, and sometimes flat out prohibit productive economic activity altogether. See, e.g., the Keystone pipeline. Academic studies estimate the total costs of regulation in the economy to be rapidly rising towards $2 trillion per year, or $8,000 per employee. That is close to 10 times the corporate income tax burden, and double the individual income tax. When the resulting effects on the economy are considered, the total losses due to regulatory burdens may total $3 trillion, or one fifth of our entire economy.
These regulatory burdens increase the cost of production, and consequently reduce the net return to the producers, reducing the reward for production quite similarly to taxes. They consequently also slash the incentive for production, reducing economic growth and prosperity. Alternatively, reducing regulatory burdens reduces the cost of production, increasing the net return to producers, and so adds to the incentives for production. The result is increased economic growth and prosperity…
These pro-growth, free market economic policies are the opposite of trickle down economics. They all involve decentralized markets, with prosperity welling up from the people to create a rich and prosperous nation.
We left out the partisan elements of Ferrara’s piece. What’s the point? Go into any faculty lounge in one of our top 50 universities, pick out a humanities professor at random, put him in the Oval Office, and you’d get pretty much what we’ve got now in terms of policy views. Add some Chicago-way thuggishness, and you have as bad a situation as the country has faced in many decades. WFB said “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” He didn’t know the half of it.
Last Saturday, violent groups of Islamic-Salafi radicals burned the famous scientific institute established by Napoleon in Egypt after its first encounter with the West. Some historians consider it the start of modern times in the Middle East. The site, L’Institut d’Egypte, held some 200,000 original and rare books, exhibits, maps, archeological findings and studies from Egypt and the entire Middle East, based on the work of generations of western researchers. Most of the artifacts were lost forever, burned or looted…
In 1258, the Mongols burned the immense library in Baghdad known as the “House of Wisdom.” It held rare writings that have disappeared forever, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and the other cornerstones of Western civilization. All we know today is that these books existed, yet following the terrible fire in Baghdad they were burned forever. The Mongols sought to secure the same objective as Egypt’s Salafis: Erasing the past and keeping only their present.
Earlier this year: “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.” Yeah, right.
In Montana’s Finley Basin there are known tungsten deposits. An Australian company wanted to bring revenue and jobs to the state by developing the resource. While the property was successfully drilled and recognized by Union Carbide in the seventies, it is now about 200 yards inside a roadless study area. The Forest Service was willing to offer a conditional drilling permit. Among the conditions were these requirements:
– The drill sites must be cleared using hand tools,
– The drilling equipment and fuel must be transported to the site by a team of pack mules,
– The mules must be fed certified weed-free hay, and
– Drill site and trail reclamation must be done using hand tools.
The company gave up. How can America remain competitive in a global marketplace when we are required to use pick axes and mules? How does this help America’s heavy equipment manufacturers like Caterpillar?
Everyone involved in this decision-making process should be terminated 1/21/13. They can stand in the unemployment line with the FTC employees who spend their time investigating Chuck E. Cheese.
The administration is attacking South Carolina again as part of a comprehensive and lawless approach to the 2012 election. Its legal arm made the absurd claim that requiring a photo ID for voting is somehow discriminatory. The state says that the feds are using phony statistics for 207K of 240K voters. AP:
Department of Motor Vehicles executive director Kevin Shwedo said the state Election Commission knew it was using inaccurate data when it released reports showing nearly 240,000 active and inactive voters lacked driver’s licenses or ID cards. Shwedo sent the state’s attorney general an analysis showing that 207,000 of those voters live in other states, allowed their ID cards to expire, probably have licenses with names that didn’t match voter records or were dead.
Of course if your worldview is that discrimination is onmipresent but secretive, any measures to root it out are apparently justified, even if that means that arithmetic no longer matters. HT: PL
A federal judge on Friday barred the NYC’s Taxi and Limousine Commission from issuing permits for taxicabs…Judge George Daniels said in his written ruling that the commission can provide taxi medallions only for wheelchair-accessible vehicles until it produces a comprehensive plan to provide meaningful access to taxicab service for disabled passengers. He said such a plan must include targeted goals and standards and anticipated measurable results. “Meaningful access for the disabled to public transportation services is not a utopian goal or political promise, it is a basic civil right,” the judge wrote.
There are 1.7MM wheelchair users in the country, mostly located in the South and West, and mostly in rural areas. That’s about 0.006 of the population. We couldn’t find out how many are in NYC, even from disabled advocacy groups, so no doubt the number is even smaller than the 0.006 nationally. But it’s even worse than the AP story implies. WSJ:
about 2% of New York City’s roughly 13,000 yellow taxis have equipment that allows wheelchair users to get in and out. The Justice Department said the likelihood of a nondisabled person hailing a cab within 10 minutes is 87%, compared with just 3% for a disabled person.
All NYC buses are wheelchair-enabled, and so are 230 cabs (the MV-1 retails for about $40,000, weighs about 5,000 pounds and gets 13-15 miles per gallon). But waiting times are too long for a cab. So the legal machinery of the federal government spent millions of dollars to sue another government, both sides of which argument were taxpayer funded. If you think this is a good use of your taxes, well, good luck to you. HT: PW
The Justice Department on Friday rejected South Carolina’s law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls, saying it makes it harder for minorities to cast ballots. It was the first voter ID law to be refused by the federal agency in nearly 20 years…”Minority registered voters were nearly 20 percent more likely to lack DMV-issued ID than white registered voters, and thus to be effectively disenfranchised,” Perez wrote, noting that the numbers could be even higher since the data submitted by the state doesn’t include inactive voters.
A federal judge in Charleston, South Carolina blocked Thursday parts of the state’s anti-illegal immigration law approved by the legislature last summer…The first section blocked makes it a felony to transport or conceal a person “with intent to further that person’s unlawful entry into the United States” or to help that person avoid apprehension.
Campaign 2012. Attacking the rule of law on transparently flimsy grounds, and with such brass too. Pretty much what we predicted a year ago. In a way it’s not surprising, but in a way it’s shocking to see how far this country has fallen and so fast. (Imagine the kind of hope and change in store for the country 2013-2017 if these low lifes get away with this next November.)
Final points: (a) the opposition party is MIA on these outrages; and (b) the media, the media — the lead stories of the day are about a $20 a week tax cut for 8 weeks, and morons fighting over who gets to buy a pair of sneakers. A million Americans died in the nation’s wars for this?
When the EPA announced its new air pollution rules this week — designed to reduce power plant emissions of mercury and other to gases — Administrator Lisa Jackson blogged that: “Mercury is a neurotoxin that is particularly harmful to children, and emissions of mercury and other air toxics have been linked to damage to developing nervous systems, respiratory illnesses and other diseases.” At $10 billion a year, complying with the new rules won’t come cheap, and that assumes the EPA’s low-ball estimate comes true. According to the coal industry, this is the most expensive rule the EPA’s ever imposed.
For our part, we get our mercury from swordfish, about which the EPA also screams trouble. On the other hand, the EPA says that with mercury CFL’s “there is no evidence that the brief exposure to the mercury in a broken bulb presents a health risk to you.” Go figure. (The state of Maine begs to differ.)
BTW, both left and right, AEI and Brookings say that the $10 billion annual boondoggle by the EPA is totally unnecessary. Surprised?
With F.B.I. agents standing guard outside his hotel room on Tuesday, Mr. Holder spoke hours before delivering a speech at the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library here that criticized the largely Republican-led efforts to put new restrictions on voting in the name of fighting fraud. At that moment, protesters were rallying outside the library, some in support of stricter voter identification laws and others holding signs urging Mr. Holder to resign over the disputed gun-trafficking investigation, known as Operation Fast and Furious…
Mr. Holder contended that many of his other critics — not only elected Republicans but also a broader universe of conservative commentators and bloggers — were instead playing “Washington gotcha” games, portraying them as frequently “conflating things, conveniently leaving some stuff out, construing things to make it seem not quite what it was” to paint him and other department figures in the worst possible light. Of that group of critics, Mr. Holder said he believed that a few — the “more extreme segment” — were motivated by animus against Mr. Obama and that he served as a stand-in for him. “This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” he said, “both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”
What rubbish! Imagine he actually believes that. What a sad and angry life, not to mention one that justifies all sorts of vindictive actions to get even with his invisible oppressors. HT: PL
as the Founders knew, it is unwise to give people more powers than you would like them to use. There ought to be a law, I think, that in order to regulate something you have to have some understanding of it. And when people are saying things like, “This is just the rogue foreign Web sites” and “This only targets the bad actors” and “So you want universities to host illegal pirated versions of copyrighted content?,” it’s enough to make you claw out large fistfuls of your hair. No! No! Nobody is hosting anything.
This bill would require service providers to cut off access to entire Web sites where users are deemed to be engaging in copyright infringement, not take down stolen content they posted themselves. That’s already against the law. But no one seemed to be able to express this. When you have a signed letter from the engineers responsible for creating the Internet pointing out that this bill would jeopardize our cybersecurity, balkanize the Internet and create a climate of uncertainty that would stifle innovation, it seems odd to ignore it.
As a general rule, when the people saying that this will have a horrible, chilling impact on something are the ones who created that thing in the first place, and the people who are saying, “Oh, no, it’ll be fine, it only targets the bad actors” are members of the Motion Picture Association of America, it seems obvious whose opinion you should heed.
The bill has now been amended to exclude .com, .net, and .org and only target those darned foreigners, which of course illustrates just how idiotic the bill is. Pirate Bay, anyone? Our question is this: why, after the horrible overreach of government during the past three years, is there a potential majority in Congress to give even more power to the government? Have these people learned nothing at all?
VDH has a good humored, entertaining, and perceptive comparison of the two current GOP front-runners. (Who knows what twists and turns and front-runners lie ahead?) Mr. Hanson did not stress enough one important point, however. Many in the GOP base want a candidate and a president who will wage a tireless war against the sources of disinformation in the country from its cultural institutions, and particularly from the media.
To recap a bit, on the Thursday before election day in 2000, the Bush DUI’s were leaked to Fox and hit the airwaves, an excellent piece of political theater that the Bush campaign should have anticipated. But that was child’s play. On election day, we seem to recall that some early predictions suppressed turnout in the Florida panhandle. In 2004, CBS and the NYT collaborated on a scandal story a couple of weeks before the election about a vast number of weapons that had dissappeared in Iraq.
This was the same CBS that used obvious forgeries of documents from a dubious source in an attempt to sink the Bush re-election campaign against an opponent with some more fact-based problems. And Bush wasn’t very much of a conservative. In 2008 the 12-to-1 opposition media fell all over themselves to praise their candidate, and couldn’t be bothered with his scandals and strange, outlandish rhetoric.
Flash forward. For the most part, neither Solyndra nor Fast and Furious are important scandals. The media collectively yawn over America’s highly secret military technology showing up in mint condition in enemy hands. The media happily participate in staged propaganda events, apparently no longer concerned about objectivity and professionalism, as long as the chosen narrative is advanced.
One GOP candidate says this: “the people who decide elections, the people in the middle — by the way, people who last time voted for Barack Obama — do not want to have a president elected based on red meat.” The other one might respond that telling the truth is not red meat. The candidates, by the way, agree on most issues. So things seem to have come down to this, at least for a nanosecond: (a) stylistically to an issue of temperament, and (b) substantively to different views about the urgency to challenge the narrative of media employees who swallowed whole the received wisdom of their university days and editorial board meetings.
despite our nation’s long tradition of extending voting rights -– to non-property owners and women, to people of color and Native Americans, and to younger Americans -– today, a growing number of our fellow citizens are worried about the same disparities, divisions, and problems that –- nearly five decades ago -– LBJ devoted his Presidency to addressing. In my travels across this country, I’ve heard a consistent drumbeat of concern from many Americans, who – often for the first time in their lives –- now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up to one of our nation’s most noble, and essential, ideals. As Congressman John Lewis described it, in a speech on the House floor this summer, the voting rights that he worked throughout his life –- and nearly gave his life -– to ensure are, “under attack… [by] a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, [and] minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.” Not only was he referring to the all-too-common deceptive practices we’ve been fighting for years. He was echoing more recent concerns about some of the state-level voting law changes we’ve seen this legislative season. Since January, more than a dozen states have advanced new voting measures. Some of these new laws are currently under review by the Justice Department, based on our obligations under the Voting Rights Act. Texas and South Carolina, for example, have enacted laws establishing new photo identification requirements that we’re reviewing.
Aha! The nefarious photo ID. How stupid does Holder think Americans are, when you can’t cash a check, drive a car, check into a hotel, enter any office building in Manhattan, or board an airplane without one? Here’s a solution that would solve an awful lot of problems. But Holder didn’t stop there:
It should be the government’s responsibility to automatically register citizens to vote, by compiling -– from databases that already exist -– a list of all eligible residents in each jurisdiction. Of course, these lists would be used solely to administer elections
Would voting then become, um, mandatory? The “of course” is amusing, since it highlights that the assertion following it is false. We’ve seen similar tricks for such a long time now. Hasta la victoria siempre! HT: PL
I know the suggestion right now is, is that somehow, well, this Keystone issue will create jobs. That’s being determined by the State Department right now, and there is a process…But here’s what I know: However many jobs might be generated by a Keystone pipeline, they’re going to be a lot fewer than the jobs that are created by extending the payroll tax cut and extending unemployment insurance
Yes, it’s that same fellow who said some other things that make just as much sense. Rubbish here. Rubbish there. Rubbish everywhere. We marvel at how someone can be so disciplined that he can say utter nonsense with a straight face, and keep doing it, time after time after time. But even more than that, we marvel that most of the legacy media are either so corrupt or so stupid and ill-informed that they go along with these risible performances. History should be a cruel judge of this.
We keep looking for someone to explain to us how today’s unserious and disingenuous mantra of Raise Taxes! is going to create any jobs. But of course there is no explanation. It’s street theater, and an attempt at diversion. But like hope, change, pass this bill, and all the other catch phrases that have come and gone, it’s hard to imagine that this one has a shelf life that will last until November 2012.
We suggest a golden oldie from Arizona Congressman Mo Udall in the seventies. He often seemed to have one — completely irrelevant — answer for fixing what ailed the country: Break Up the Oil Companies! The Mad Men re-election team in the White House can use it verbatim, or create a more modern variant: Break Up the Banks! (Oddly enough, if they do that, they will have lurched into a potentially good idea despite themselves.)
Steel mills that needed 100 or 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100 employees, so layoffs too often became permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle. And these changes didn’t just affect blue-collar workers. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs and the internet…
there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes – especially for the wealthy – our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well…
it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked.
It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the 50s and 60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade. I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory. Remember in those years, in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history. And what did it get us? The slowest job growth in half a century. Massive deficits
Poor guy has no clue about the economic miracle of the last 150 years. Poor country has to put up with this drivel. How insulting all that nonsense about bank tellers, ATM’s, silent robotic factories, travel agents and so forth. Not surprising, since he knows so little about important events in relatively recent US history, events like D-Day and the Berlin Airlift. Help!!!
ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called “Demand Letter 3″. That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.” Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information. On July 14, 2010 after ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. received an update on Fast and Furious, ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed Bill Newell, ATF’s Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious: “Bill – can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks.” On Jan. 4, 2011, as ATF prepared a press conference to announce arrests in Fast and Furious, Newell saw it as “another time to address Multiple Sale on Long Guns issue.” And a day after the press conference, Chait emailed Newell: “Bill — well done yesterday…in light of our request for Demand letter 3, this case could be a strong supporting factor
The agenda marches on, silently. It doesn’t matter whether this crew “has the votes in Congress” or not. They know best, and they’ll do what they like until they’re run out of town on a rail.
UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion declared that the rising tuition at California’s public universities is giving him “heartburn.” It should…Basri commands a staff of 17, allegedly all required to make sure that fanatically left-wing UC Berkeley is sufficiently attuned to the values of “diversity” and “inclusion”; his 2009 base pay of $194,000 was nearly four times that of starting assistant professors. Basri was given responsibility for a $4.5 million slice of Berkeley’s vast diversity bureaucracy when he became the school’s first Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion in 2007…since 2006, full-time administrators have outnumbered faculty nationally.
UC Davis, for example, whose modest OWS movement has been happily energized by the conceit that the campus is a police state, offers the usual menu of diversity effluvia under the auspices of an Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations. A flow chart of Linnaean complexity would be needed to accurately map all the activities overseen by the AEVC for CCR. They include a Diversity Trainers Institute, staffed by Davis’s Administrator of Diversity Education; the Director of Faculty Relations and Development in Academic Personnel; the Director of the UC Davis Cross-Cultural Center; the Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; an Education Specialist with the UC Davis Sexual Harassment Education Program; an Academic Enrichment Coordinator with the UC Davis Department of Academic Preparation Programs; and the Diversity Program Coordinator and Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator with the Office of Campus Community Relations.
The Diversity Trainers Institute recruits “a cadre of individuals who will serve as diversity trainers/educators,” a function that would seem largely superfluous, given that the Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations already offers a Diversity Education Series that grants Understanding Diversity Certificates in “Unpacking Oppression” and Cross-Cultural Competency Certificates in “Understanding Diversity and Social Justice.”
The obvious question is how many conservatives are numbered among all these people so concerned with diversity. What a waste. Try the Khan Academy instead — now that’s value for money.
The EPA heaved its weight against another industry this month, issuing a regulation to sharply increase fuel economy. Under this new rule, America’s fleet of passenger cars and light trucks will have to meet an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, a doubling of today’s average of about 27 mpg. By the EPA’s estimate the rule will cost $157 billion, meaning the real number is vastly greater…The only way Detroit can hit these averages will be by turning at least 25% of its fleet into hybrids. But hybrid sales peaked in the U.S. two years ago at 3% of the market and are declining…
Until this Administration, fuel standards were the remit of Congress, via its Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) program. In 2007, the legislative branch raised those standards with a bill requiring the U.S. fleet to hit 35 miles per gallon by 2020, a 40% increase. The industry is struggling to keep pace with those steep requirements. President Jackson is now casting aside 35 years of Congressional prerogative. Because the Obama EPA has declared carbon dioxide a “pollutant,” and because cars emit CO2, Ms. Jackson is citing the Clean Air Act in her bid to commandeer Detroit.
We discussed the absurd, but politically very useful, idea that CO2 is a pollutant, several years ago. We lived in an Age of Foolishness then, and it’s only gotten worse.
This silent command and control agenda, so damaging to the economy and so unremarked — indeed, probably quietly cheered — by most of the media, is one reason for the serial popularity of the anti-Romneys. A substantial portion of the GOP base believes that their candidate will be running against one man next year, but will be running against the media for the following four years. They want clarity over obfuscation, pugnaciousness over acceptance of media biases. There does indeed need to be an arguer-in-chief but it’s not clear that that role and the role of president are really compatible.
The above is a “path to renewal” that “inspires” Americans to a new beginning? Really? (We’ve explained in some detail that, romantic illusions of the media notwithstanding, OWS is unlike the pragmatic anti-draft protests of the sixties that covered themselves in fancy talk if only to hide the naked self interest of many of the protesters.) Still, OWS does have its creative moments, and the Meow Chant seems to be one of them.
preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class. All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic…
the Obama campaign and, for the present, the Democratic Party, have laid to rest all consideration of reviving the coalition nurtured and cultivated by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The New Deal Coalition — which included unions, city machines, blue-collar workers, farmers, blacks, people on relief, and generally non-affluent progressive intellectuals — had the advantage of economic coherence. It received support across the board from voters of all races and religions in the bottom half of the income distribution, the very coherence the current Democratic coalition lacks.
Maybe this can succeed as an election strategy, though we’re dubious in a world where Independents have so decisively flipped their allegiance. But it’s difficult to see how a victory by this coalition results in a coherent governing strategy (particularly if both the House and Senate go GOP).
