Stopping Obama's Executive Orders

I've said before that there is only one way to stop the left from doing something. That is to take the very tools they create and use those tools against them. Logic, human nature and history all suggest this is true. Why am I raising this point? Because there is only one way to stop Obama's executive orders on immigration, global warming and whatever else: turn his usurpation of power against the Democrats. Let's discuss.

Let us begin with a quick history lesson. The Democrats were fine impounding money until Richard Nixon did it to their favorite programs. They invented the special prosecutor and used it with abandon against Reagan and Bush. They only changed their minds when the Republicans used it against Clinton. Then they raced to kill it. They happily used the Department of Education to nationalize education as they saw fit... until Bush used the same tools they created to impose his views on the country's education system. Suddenly, the Democrats discovered a deep love of state's rights and they demanded an end to federal interference. They loved judicial activism, until conservative judges began using the same tools to reverse liberal laws. The examples go on and on, on many levels. In each instance, the Democrats created some new lever of power which they used to impose their will on the system and an unwilling people, and they only gave up that power when the Republicans finally started using it against them... nothing else stopped them.

Indeed, in each instance, nothing short of the Republicans using this new power against liberal interests had the slightest effect on them. The conservative response typically began with hand-ringing about this being an abuse of power or illegal. Liberals laughed it off. Then conservatives tried to find ways to cut off funding or pass laws to stop the abuse. Again, liberals laughed. Why? Because if conservatives succeeded, all they would achieve was stopping the left from winning more gains... nothing would be reversed. And if they failed, then the liberals could continue to win more gain. Basically, they won no matter what. It was only when conservatives finally started using this power to reverse liberal policies and impose conservative ones that liberals finally saw a real potential for harm to their cause and they rushed to kill these new powers.

Why this matters now is simple: Obama has created a new tool to impose his views on immigration and global warming on the country by Executive Order. The conservative response, as always, is to shout that this is illegal and to seek to cut funding or pass laws stopping Obama from doing this, harrumph! But as the above demonstrates, this is no threat to the Democrats. It's a win-win for them, with the worst case being that they get some of what they want.

That's why we need a change of strategy. To stop Obama, we need to make it clear that we will use the same tools of Executive-imposed non-enforcement to neuter their favorite environmental laws or affirmative action laws or Obamacare provisions. Sure, the Democrats can reverse those actions the next time they win the White House, but eight years of ignoring Obamacare, for example, would be more than fatal to the law. The Democrats will immediately see the risk to everything they have built in Washington and they will freak out and work their butts off to find a way to stop anyone from being able to do this.

That's how you stop Obama, by making it clear that the cost of his ideological tantrum will be the neutering of all the laws they cherish. In fact, some leftists are already worried about this.

BTW, as an aside, there is a real problem with what Obama has done on immigration. His administration may decide not enforce the laws, but he can't grant an amnesty. That means the next administration can still deport these people. Basically, the best he can achieve is to give these people a two year stay of execution. That's hardly going to be worth it to these people, especially if they need to out themselves to make it happen. By comparison, eight years of the IRS not enforcing the Obamacare penalty will crush the system's actuarial assumptions... so will eight years of slow-walking subsidies to insurance providers, etc.

As always, the Democrats have much more to lose from this than we do, provided conservatives are willing to fight fire with fire.

Thoughts?

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GOP: Still the Ideas Party

Given that this whole ObamaCare/shutdown/who's-the-biggest-two-year-old-here thing has seen another attempt to paint the Republicans as obstructionists who only know how to say no to people, etc., it's important to point out that many in our party are in fact trying to come up with positive reform proposals. Take Mike Lee, for example.

Last month, Utah's junior senator introduced a thorough tax-reform plan, one with the potential to steal a lot of the Dems' thunder, if only it can gain traction. Probably not perfect, but the point is it has lots of goody-PR stuff. For instance:

-Lots of tax credits and tax deductions would be eliminated, but mainly for those under a certain income level. Most households making less than $300,000 a year would be unaffected. Moreover, the "charitable deduction" option would be expanded across the board. This is good because, while people like having as many tax write-off options as possible, they also like the idea of a simple tax code, and the fact that the remaining deductions are stacked towards the middle class doesn't hurt.

-Speaking of simplification, the system of tax brackets is greatly reduced under Lee's plan, with a 15% rate for everyone making less than $87,850, and a 35% rate for everyone making more than that.

-There's a lot here, too, for families with children to like: There would be a $2,500 tax credit per child, which would carry over into both income and payroll tax deduction. Lee argues that this would reduce the burden families face in raising kids, shifting it towards those without such obligations. This is a way, he says, of equalizing the de facto tax burden, and while I'm not so sure I personally agree with that, it also has the potential to play very well with middle-class families, the people Obama and Co. always claim to be sticking up for.

And that's the real takeaway here. As we all know, if we're paying any attention to the news feed from the last couple weeks, the ObamaCare trainwreck has people starting to doubt the administration's ability to help out the "little guy," something it's made its reputation on. A huge opportunity may be opening up here to show who has the better plan to strengthen the middle class--that Holy Grail of politics--and this is a place where the GOP can stake out its ground.

I don't want to give the impression that I'm endorsing the plan wholeheartedly. In a perfect world, I'd like a one-rate-fits-all kind of plan, and this particular formulation might antagonize the upper-middle-class somewhat, given the relative hike for those making 100K or thereabout. But that's not the only issue here. What's important to note is the activity some of our people in Congress are continuing to show. This idea can be batted about, revised, maybe even rejected (okay, probably even rejected). But the point is, it's the sort of thing that gets people talking on issues like tax reform. And that's a good thing.

I'm also glad to see the way Mike Lee is going. He has very conservative credentials, both objectively and in how the base perceives him; and while guys like Cruz and Rubio are drawing a lot of lightning, he and others are quietly building conservative agendas. The party needs both types, and good for him for taking the least flashy role.

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How Our Welfare System Discourages Work

There was a fascinating article in The Economist the other day about how our benefits system works to keep people stuck on welfare. Specifically, it cuts off benefits at such a quick rate that only a fool would take a job. Let’s discuss.

The Economist began by acknowledging the massive success of welfare reform in 1996. The Republican-led Congress, with grudging agreement from Clinton, put limits on cash benefits and tightened the requirement for able-bodied claimants to seek work. The Democrats screamed that poor people would end up starving in the streets... never happened. Instead, the result was “impressive,” according to The Economist: people receiving cash benefits fell sharply from 12.3 million people to 4.1 million people and employment skyrocketed among single mothers. Everyone was better off.

Now people are talking reform again for ideological reasons, but there is little creative thinking. Conservatives want to cut or destroy these programs, Democrats want to expand them and eliminate requirements. That’s about as creative as it gets. No one is talking about simplifying the system or killing the bad incentives. Other countries are: Britain is trying to put all of its benefits in one place and put a cap on them and Germany combined its benefit centers with job centers and brought down its unemployment rate. We aren’t talking about any of that.

We should.

The first problem with our system is that it is so complex that it’s not even clear what everyone gets. For example, CATO just did a study which claimed that a single mother would get paid more benefits in 39 states than a secretary would be paid and, in 11 states, the single mother would get more than a first year teacher. Clearly, that would discourage working, right?

Yeah, but CATO didn’t account for the fact that not everyone gets all the benefits. For example, only 15% of those who receive cash benefits (TANF) also get a housing benefit (what CATO counted as the largest benefit). CATO also failed to consider that some benefits (like food stamps and Medicaid) continue even after you get a job. In fact, most people receiving Medicaid and food stamps have jobs.

So the obvious question is that if we don’t know much about how the system actually works, then how can we know there is a problem? Well, the confusion itself is a problem. This confusion makes it hard to determine what works and what doesn’t, and whether or not the system actually discourages employment. Clearing up that confusion would go a long way toward (1) diagnosing the problems, (2) monitoring that people are getting what they need but aren’t taking advantage of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, and (3) making reform more effective.

Further, the system does discourage work, and the Congressional Budget Office has proved it. The CBO examined the Pennsylvania scheme to see what happens as the benefits phase out. TANF vanishes once a person earns $4,900 a year. The Earned Income Tax Credit (given to 9.4 million people), gives a single mother a credit that rises to $3,250 per year if she makes between $9,600 and $17,500 in income each year, but then phases out fast. At $23,000 in income, the single mother loses food stamps and federal housing assistance.

The CBO then viewed these reductions as “taxes” for the sake of comparison. In other words, because these benefits declined as income rose, the CBO counted the loss of the benefits as a tax on the new income. This is actually a great way to look at the reduction of benefits because it shows exactly what the value of working is worth. And what the CBO found was that as the typical single mother earned more income, her effective marginal rate rose from 17% to 95%! Said differently, when you factored in the benefits lost by the single mother as she earns more income, she effectively keeps only 5% of what she earns from her new job.

This is solid proof that our system discourages people from working: would you work if you only kept 5% of what you earned? That needs to change. We need to reform the system to reduce benefits more smoothly, and to keep the effective taxation rate lower. In fact, I would suggest that the system should be designed to make sure the effective tax rate never rises above 20% if you want people to have an incentive to work.

Thoughts?

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Don't Buy The Flat Tax Arguments

A short one today. People who advocate the flat tax keep promoting the idea that this will make your taxes simple: “You can send in your taxes on a post card!” And they make claims like the flat tax will eliminate the need for the IRS. This is simply wrong.

To understand why this is wrong, you need to understand something that a lot of people don’t seem to get: concepts like “income” are not specifically defined within the tax code. They aren’t specifically defined because the moment you provide clear boundaries, people slip their income outside the boundaries of the definition.

To give you an example, assume that you define income strictly as “Any money paid in exchange for services you provide.” Sounds like it would work, right? So what happens when people stop paying “money” and instead give property. Suddenly, you can avoid paying taxes by taking “property” that can then be easily converted back into cash. Unless the IRS wants to allow this, it then needs to change the above-definition to add “money or property” or it needs to re-define “money” more broadly to include “anything of value.”

Now we have it though, right? Income is “anything of value paid in exchange for services you provide.” That works. Well, no. Now people stop paying each other for services. Instead, they give “gifts” to people who provide them with services. Again, people have escaped the income definition. Thus, again the IRS must change the definition. What if a third party pays for them? What if you value the property you give the person at $1 when its real worth if $10,000? What if you pay with an option that has a $1 value today, but $10,000 value tomorrow? Etc.

Suddenly, the thing so many people think is easy, (“After all, who doesn’t know what income is?”) turns into a multi-page definition with attached explanation and examples of what is or is not income.

This is how the tax code has grown to become what it is. From day one, people tried to find ways to avoid having their income fall under the definition of income. To fix that, the IRS issued rulings, guidance, and new definitions to catch up to these people. And with each one of these, the code grew until it all resulted in a massive, complex book which spends hundreds of pages defining what is actually income and what isn’t.

This is the problem.

And when people say, “All you do is write your income on the card, so there’s no need for the IRS,” they are speaking quite ignorantly because they don’t understand that the word “income” requires the existence of an IRS to decide what counts as income and what doesn’t. In other words, so long as we are taxing “income,” there will be a need for the IRS to decide what constitutes income.

Further, the people who advocate this have a total blind spot when it comes to deductions. They think that “deductions” are simply 3-4 numbers that you get on a 1099 or out of a tax booklet and everyone will be willing to forgo those for lower rates. They totally ignore the fact that for anyone running a business, “deductions” are ultra important because they define income.

Indeed, if we were to eliminate “deductions” for businesses, we would kill most businesses. How? Consider this. If you took in a million dollars in income through your business, but it cost you a million dollars in things like salary, rent, and supplies to make that happen, then your current tax burden is $0. That’s fair since you have $0 in profit at the end of the year. If we go with the vision promoted by the flat taxers, you would be paying 20% taxes on that million dollars in income... as you have no deductions to reduce it to “profit.” So you will pay $200,000 in taxes on $0 of profit under their system. How long will most business last paying that?

And if they respond, well, we should only tax “profit,” then all those deductions they claim should vanish reappear and your taxes are identical to what they’ve always been... except for individuals who have lost their deductions but still must face the IRS determining what constitute their income.

The flat tax argument is a delusion. It is a delusion spun by people who don’t understand how the tax system works and who are selling you a false view of reality. It is impossible to “eliminate all deductions.” It is impossible to eliminate the IRS so long as income and/or deductions exist. All a flat tax does is lower the rates and shift the tax burden around slightly. It does nothing to make taxes less complicated. It does nothing to make taxes less onerous. It does nothing to end the disincentive to hire people or to start a business.

It is not real reform.

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A Rose By Any Other Name Still Has Thorns

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

-William Shakespeare from "Romeo & Juliet"

Of course, Juliet of the House of Capulet pondered this question as she waxed poetic about her doomed love for her beloved Romeo, the son of her family's sworn enemy from the House of Montague. She pondered that if only his name were not Montague, then they would be free to love each other. No, this isn't going to be a dissertation on R & J. Just bear with me...

The next lines are the gist of the quote:

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title.

Well, fast forward to 2009 and our word odyssey began courtesy of the Obama Administration. In the last five years Obama and his crew of supernumeraries have set about to change the names of stuff. They have raise changing the the names of stuff to an art form worthy of Shakespeare, or maybe George Carlin. Though I am leaning heavily toward George Orwell. Let's review.

How to get passed the studies that found the Earth hasn't been warming for about 12 years? How was Al Gore going to sell us on carbon credits and solar/wind energy if their doctrine of Global Warming wasn't living up to its end of the bargain? When the science did not comport to the name or to their agenda, they put on their re-thinking caps. Yes, "The White House Committee Who Sits At A Big Table and Re-Names Stuff" (oh yeah, there really IS a committee) came up the term "Climate Change" to replace "Global Warming". And with the help of the mass media, "Global Warming" was struck from the lexicon.

Next up was an effort to soften all those those harsh, direct, and mean-sounding Bushisms. So, "Global Terrorism" and "War on Terror" changed to 'Overseas Contingency Operation" or, in the case of Libya, to "kinetic military operation". Acts of terrorism became "man-made disasters" and those who perpetrated such "disasters" were called...well...nothing. The word "terrorist" was just too harsh and "man-made disaster-ist" just sounded stupid.

So last week, in the run-up to Obamacare, our intrepid Committee rolled out their new "rose" from the Obama-nary. "Taxes" will henceforth be referred to as...drum roll please..."shared responsibility payments". Yes. "The White House Committee Who Sits At A Big Table and Re-Names Stuff" have now decided the word "tax" needed an upgrade to a softer, more communal sounding name to make the impending Obamacare tax more palatable. Doesn't the term "shared responsibility payments" make you feel ashamed that you don't want to be responsible for your fair share?

Another way of interpreting what Shakespeare wrote so many generations ago could also be that changing the name does not change what it is. As perfect as Romeo was in the eyes of the 14-year-old Juliet, he still carried the blood of the House of Montague. And only the adolescent mind could think that merely changing the name would changes the definition. Romeo would still have the thorns of the House of Montague even if he were to deny his father and refuse his name. And so it is with changing the name of anything. The rose may still smell as sweet, but the thorns still draw blood. And a tax by any other name is still taking money out of our paychecks for the government to waste.

So, what do we think the next upgrade will be? Will the much loathed Internal Revenue Service change its name to The Office of Shared Responsibility Payments? And when the SRP coordinators (f/k/a IRS agents) come knocking at your door because you have failed to be responsible enough, will you then be reassigned to the Shared Communal Housing for the Unwilling to Share And Irresponsible for 3 to 5 years? I mean that does sound so much better than Federal Prison, doesn't it?

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Rick Perry Is A Mean Doo-Doo Head

Governor Perry's not the most popular guy around here (though that's his own fault), but in fairness, liberals really don't like him either. And they have much dumber reasons for not liking him. Observe.

A little backstory. Here in Missouri, our special legislative session is about to kick into gear, in which the lawmakers vote whether or not to override bills vetoed by the governor. There's several this year; you may have heard of a gun bill that would nullify all federal gun control laws, which won't go anywhere but I wouldn't mind seeing it passed, just to annoy our genius overlords. But I digress. Around these parts, the main thing being discussed is one House Bill 253, which would cut our state income tax from 6 to 5.5%, and the corporate income tax from 6.25 to 3.25%. Whether or not it'll pass, I don't know. Governor Jay Nixon (D) vetoed it, the Republicans have just about a supermajority in both chambers, but a lot of them are coming under pressure from school districts, which are afraid of losing funding if it passes and state revenue goes down. So pass or fail, it'll be close.

What does all this have to do with Rick Perry? Well, given the doubtful situation for the bill and the businesses in whose name the bill is being pushed, Perry decided to make some hay. For the past couple weeks, he's been running ads in Missouri, saying basically, "Hey, Missouri businessmen. Just to let you know, Texas doesn't have any state income tax. Also, it's f@#$ing Texas. So if this whole tax-cut bill doesn't work out for you, we're a pretty welcoming people down here. Just saying." Again, I paraphrase. And he's made a couple appearances in the state, and has the backing of the MO Chamber of Commerce, which I take it is looking to put pressure on the legislators rather than actually suggest businesses leave the state.

This has not pleased certain liberal organizations in the state, notably the news outlets. I speak in particular of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (known to some as the "St. Louis Post-DisTrash"), which put on its Indignant Face in the editorial page earlier this week. First paragraph:

A couple of weeks before Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed House Bill 253, the dangerous bill that would give wealthy Missourians a tax cut while starving education and other important state services....

You know they're upset when they don't even wait a few lines of text before the appeals to emotion.

And I'm guessing someone really wanted to work in "starving children" in that lead sentence, but then they thought it would be too on-the-nose.

But can they do ad hominem attacks? Yes, they can:

Mr. Perry likes to brag about his state's lack of an income tax. Never mind that he had nothing to do with it, and that the state's wealth of oil and gas reserves make such a tax unnecessary.

Er, I'm pretty sure his not having anything to do with it is irrelevant. I'm also pretty sure Perry never took all the credit for it. Whatever his faults, he doesn't claim to be responsible for all that is right with the world. I mean, he's not Al Gore.

Don't worry, though; the paper does put forward some actual, you know, facts. Like the fact that Missouri's corporate tax rate is actually much lower than Texas; and that its overall tax burden is slightly less than the Lone Star State's. From this, the editorial concludes, ours is "a low-tax, low-service state. Missouri's problem isn't that it taxes too much, it's that....we don't invest nearly enough in schools, in transit, in our future." So the "argument," for lack of a better word, is this: Missouri's taxes are very low, so there's no reason for businesses to leave for Texas, and really they should be higher to give us more services and make the tax burden worse than in Texas. Ummmm.....okay.

And just to let Perry know he's not wanted here, the Post-Dispatch adds: "Missourians don't unite behind many things these days, but we don't take too kindly to strangers not respecting our borders."

Unless they come from Washington, of course.

I assume that in this case the paper thinks it's speaking for all Missourians, including the rich ones who want tax cuts for themselves while they heartlessly starve state government. And probably children.

Do I have a point here? Not really. All things considered, the effects from the bill will be a wash either way, I'm guessing. And I'd rather not see our businesses leave the state for Texas, though I don't begrudge Perry trying to lure them away. But I do find it interesting/amusing, how liberals such as the Post-Dispatch's editors keep pushing their ruinous policies, and then when people try to escape those policies and their consequences, denounce them as traitors to the sacred Fatherland. Maybe that's what Ned Flanders meant when he said "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."*

*There's a chance I have Ned Flanders confused with someone else.

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Trickle, Trickle, Trickle....

"Trickle-down economics." "Voodoo economics." "Reaganomics." Ooh, I'm getting a chill down my spine. I am referring, of course, to the poorly understood and very maligned idea that is "supply-side economics," with a title much newer than the idea itself. What is it, and why do liberals say it doesn't work? Let's discuss.

What we call supply-side only got its name in the '70s, thanks to some of Nixon's economic people, and frankly, that alone should be reason to look for a new title. But it has a long pedigree, going back to Adam Smith and other greats of the time. It's not so much a philosophy of the size of government as a question of how to get the most bang for your (literal) buck where state revenue is concerned. And it is a simple idea, really: Very low taxes may not bring in a sufficient amount of revenue, but high taxes strangle the productive capacity of taxpayers, causing them to earn less income, therefore they pay fewer taxes, therefore the government gets less revenue as well. The trick is to find an optimum tax rate at which citizens earn the most income and pay the most taxes. In twentieth-century circumstances, that generally means tax cuts, especially on the most productive members of society--the rich.

There have been lots of criticisms of this idea, some of them rather sophisticated and pointed, admittedly. All too often, though, especially when voiced by partisan leftists, such critique devolves into "tax cuts for the rich," "Republicans looking out for their fellow fat cats," etc. And also, liberals have claimed that these policies don't work, that they only benefit the wealthy and end up causing economic slumps down the road.

What actually happens when these "unfair" tax cuts go into effect? Let's look at one of the more famous extended examples of this working, those terrible "Roaring Twenties" of the Coolidge presidency.

After a nasty recession in the early '20s, Harding and then Coolidge pushed through, over intense opposition from progressives in Congress, a drastic tax cut. Top rates went down to 25 percent, lower than they have been at any point since. What happened? Well, if you're even passably familiar with 20th-century America, you probably know there wasn't a sudden economic collapse, a bankrupt government, a disintegration of law and order, etc. U.S. GDP grew by 59 percent between 1921 and 1929, and even more importantly, during this same period, annual tax revenue over the same period grew from about $300 billion per year to $700 billion per year.

But the other feature of these 1920s tax cuts is especially worth dwelling on. So top earners, i.e. the rich, saw the greatest reduction in tax rates. That means the rich bore less of the total tax burden under Republicans Harding and Coolidge, right? Well, actually, no. Statistics show that when the first of the 1920s' Revenue Acts was passed, those making over $100,000 paid about one-third of all taxes per year. By decade's end, after all the tax cuts had taken effect, said group paid two-thirds of the total burden. Conversely, while those making over $100,000 saw their average income increase by a healthy 15 percent, those earning between $10,000 and $100,000 saw a whopping 84 percent growth in income. In other words, the farther down the economic ladder one was, the better deal one got from these "tax cuts for the rich." It might be noted further that minorities weren't excluded from this good fortune; black Americans saw a rapid improvement in their standard of living over the decade, until by 1930 their unemployment rate was slightly below that of whites.

Since I mentioned "Reaganomics" as one of the derogatory terms used by critics of supply-side policies, it bears mentioning how things went when similar policies were tried in the '80s. Reagan began his administration with across-the-board tax cuts, provoking the inevitable caterwauling from liberals; once more, the government did not fall apart, but saw a doubling in annual income tax revenue over the course of the '80s. Moreover, the top 1 percent's share of the tax burden rose by 40 percent, despite having their income tax rates lowered from 70 to 28 percent, while the bottom 60 percent saw a 20 percent drop in its share. As in the '20s, there was remarkable growth among the lower and middle classes, with particular expansion among middle-class and small business-owning African-Americans.

That these periods of prosperity were followed by economic downturns in the '30s and early '90s should be taken into account, of course. But by the same token, we cannot and should not ignore the very real economic improvements up and down the ladder that took place after the implementation of supply-side policies. They made a positive difference in America.

But if liberal mockers of supply-side really want a target to unload on, I can give them one just as good as Reagan. Namely, a President who cut the tax rate for top earners from 91 to 70 percent, proportionally a far greater cut than, say, G.W. Bush undertook; a man who argued high taxes caused low revenue and defended tax cuts on capital gains as a means of "obtaining capital and thereby the strength and potential for growth in the economy." His name was John F. Kennedy.

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Entitlement Reform, Yeah, but...

There was an interesting article the other day about comments by White House hacks David Axelrod and Melody Barnes. Both said the same thing about entitlement reform and taxes. This got me thinking, but they won’t like the answer I came up with.

By way of background, entitlements are slowly eating the entire federal budget and soon there won’t be any money left to do anything more than cover entitlements and pay the interest on Obama’s debt. This will get much worse soon too as the number of retired baby boomers is expected to soar. Like locusts, they will drain the system dry. The solutions being proposed to fix this are: N/A.

Solutions that could solve this problem include (1) pushing back the retirement age, (2) lowering benefits, (3) means-testing benefits to cut them off for people who don’t “need” them, (4) increasing co-pays and fees on things like Medicare, and (5) tax increases on workers.

According to Axelrod and Barnes, the Democrats understand that entitlements are out of control. They also are willing to fix the crisis. . . BUT they need tax increases to be part of the equation. And the reason isn’t what you think. According to both, the Democrats know that tax increases can’t solve this problem and they are only looking for tax increases as a means to provide them political cover with their base. Said Asselrod:

“What we’re saying is that if you’re going to ask Democrats to vote for entitlement reform, then that you have to at the same time have revenue increases on the other side of the equation in order to move forward.”

Barnes added:

“You’ve got to link arms and jump ship together.”

The thinking is that entitlement reform will anger Democratic constituents so the Democrats want the tax hike to anger conservatives equally so they don’t get crushed in the next election. Ok.

Here are my thoughts. First, I don’t think conservatives are as opposed to tax hikes as the Democrats want to believe. I believe the conservative opposition is rational rather than principled. In other words, conservatives aren’t opposed to tax hikes no matter what, they have simply learned that there’s no good reason to accept hikes. Basically, since government spending never goes down, we’ve learned that agreeing to tax hikes only gives the Democrats more money to spend. It’s called throwing good money after bad. IF conservatives could be assured that the taxes would actually go to fixing the problem, AND we got genuine cuts in addition to make the government smaller, then I think conservatives would be willing to accept tax hikes. . . even at the risk of incurring the wrath of a man called Grover.

So problem solved right? //scratches head

Hmm. Actually, no....

... why do WE want to fix entitlements?

Entitlement reform will hit our people more than theirs. Indeed, the people who will be hurt are oldster and veterans. . . they vote for us, so why do we want to be seen voting to take their benefits away? And why should we also agree to tax the middle class (our other supporters) in exchange for being allowed to inflict pain on the rest of our supporters? That doesn’t make any sense.

Moreover, the Democrats are the party who love government, not us. So why should we do anything to upset our voters just to help make government work? If the Democrats love it so much, let them do their own dirty work. Not to mention that as the entitlement problem grows, the real harm will be to the government’s ability to do anything. Indeed, as the share of the budget going to entitlements grows, the share available for all the programs the Democrats love will go down. Fixing entitlements just frees up that money for more Democratic party time. Why do we want that?

So yeah, I think conservatives would be willing to agree to tax hikes if we believed they would actually fix a problem, but I don’t really see any reason WE should fix the problem. The Democrats created this mess. Since at least the age of Reagan, they’ve fought every attempt to fix it, even when they could have done so with only tiny changes, so let them fix the mess on their own now.

I know a lot of Republicans have recently decided this is the magic bullet that will somehow win us something or other, in fact, the "think tanks" seem to have become obsessed with the issue. But frankly, the more I think about it, this is a really stupid idea for us to run on... “Hey, we’re gonna cut your benefits so the Democrats can keep all their other programs going!” It sounds like a change of focus is needed. We need to focus rhetorically on “protecting” Social Security and Medicare and condemning the Democrats for letting these programs die. Then make the Democrats do the dirty work of proposing benefit cuts. Alternatively, if we are going to trim these programs, then the Democrats will need to agree to across-the-board cuts in their programs.

Thoughts?

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This Week in Foolishness

Whether you're liberal or conservative, there are few things more enjoyable than seeing someone you dislike really stepping in it. Happily for conservatives, liberals, being liberals, tend to do this quite a bit. Let's review some recent examples.

The Maher-Trump Smackdown. If you were to rank buffoons on a scale of 1 to 10, Bill Maher would probably merit a 1.9 and Donald Trump a 2.6, and what direction that scale goes in is for you to decide. I guess I'd take the Donald over the skeevy HBO host, but really, I wish they'd both go away.

Still, on some level, I have to admire Trump just a bit. On Monday night, Maher, a guest on Jay Leno, demanded that Trump prove he is not the result of "his mother having sex with an orangutan." If the billionaire did so, Maher promised to pay $5 million to the charity of his choice, cheekily suggesting Hair Club for Men. First off, this may well be the oldest line in the book where Trump is concerned, and does little to prove that Maher is in fact a "comedian"; secondly, everyone ought to have known by now how he would react. Within 24 hours, Trump's lawyer (or one of them; I'm assuming he has an entire branch of the legal service on retainer) had sent Maher's office a copy of the Donald's birth certificate, showing that his father was in fact of the Homo sapiens variety, and demanded payment of the aforementioned $5 million. Probably to rub it in, Trump's requested charities (he asked that the money be divided among several) did not include Hair Club for Men, but did include Hurricane Sandy Victims, the March of Dimes, and the American Cancer Society. That should teach Maher not to shoot his mouth off for a while. Like, a week.

Crap California Does, Volume 18. If there's any part of the U.S. thoroughly immune to reality, it would of course be the Golden State. I could write a whole blog post just about that, but let's stick to one aspect of it--their tax silliness. Back in 2011, Sacramento passed some substantial tax increases, which naturally hit businesses and the rich the hardest. Presumably chortling to themselves, "Those people threatening to fold their companies and leave the state! They wouldn't dare!!!" Governor Brown and company made plans for increased spending from the new revenue--only to find that the new revenue wasn't appearing, which simultaneously caused the state's budget deficit to rise from $9 to $16 billion. The Democrats' response to this was to heroically pass Proposition 30 this past Election Day, raising taxes in the state yet again.

I trust you can guess what's coming next.

Yep. In the first five weeks following Election Day 2012, California saw a drop in tax revenue of roughly a billion dollars. This, while state agencies increased their spending even further, in expectation of the dollars Prop 30 was going to magically produce. As a result, California's deficit has increased to a nasty $27 billion.

Feel free to laugh for as long as you can forget that all those idiots are leaving the state in droves and screwing things up for the rest of us in our own homes.

Guns, Guns, Guns! Ever since the ghastliness of Newtown, Connecticut, the Left has been shamelessly beating the drum on gun control, proposing everything from an assault-weapons ban to universal background checks (never mind that none of this would have prevented the massacre). The much-demonized NRA has been threatened invited to participate in this "dialogue" on guns in America, which of course only means that they're expected to tearfully confess their lack of vigilance and concern and promise to meet the anti-gun lobby in the middle. Their failure to do so has brought on the usual round of denunciations and warnings that "there will be consequences" for their refusal to compromise. Apparently, said consequences include....increasing NRA membership?

The Association revealed Thursday morning that it has gained 100,000 members in the past three weeks, raising total membership to 4.2 million. A spokesman expressed the hope in a press release that they hoped to cross the 5 million threshold before this "debate" has run its course. And given that a membership costs $25, this influx means that, from several viewpoints, the NRA may well emerge from it more powerful than before.

All of which is meant, not only to amuse you (hopefully), but also to encourage you a bit. As we look for ways to beat the liberals, keep in mind--they may end up beating themselves. Thanks, liberals.

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The Theater of the Absurd

Politics often involves theater, that’s unavoidable. But right now, our politics seems to have become the theater of the absurd. Brace yourself. Things are about to get ugly.

● Debt Ceiling Showdown: The Republicans are gearing up for a huge fight over raising the debt ceiling. It’s going to be a slaughter. In fact, this is turning into a textbook example of what not to do:

1. You never announce that you are planning to hold the country hostage over some future event. That’s the surest way to get the public to turn against you because you’ve basically announced that you plan to cynically hurt people in the name of getting something you want. Yet, that is what the Republicans have done, they’ve actually bragged about their ability to get goodies out of Obama by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. Wow.

2. You never take hostages without a good reason. Yet, the Republicans haven’t come up with their list of demands. This has disaster written all over it. By announcing their plan to take hostages this early without the slightest hint of a reason for doing so, the Republicans just pitched the media the perfect softball. The media can now attack them as cynics who want to hurt the country for partisan reasons, and without that list of demands, the Republicans have left the media with total control to frame the issues and the arguments.

Moreover, without a list of demands, i.e. goals, it’s impossible to define victory or to develop a plan on how to achieve it. Further, without such goals, it becomes impossible to get everyone on the same page, which is a recipe for infighting, especially with responsibility-free purists screaming bloody murder from the sidelines to help their ratings and fundraising.

3. You never remind people of the other times your plans blew up on you before you try something like this. Yet the Republicans have already started connecting this to the fiscal cliff fiasco and are even foaming at the mouth about shutting down the government again... the same maneuver that neutered a much stronger Newt Gingrich. Yee haw.

I am now 95% sure that the Republican Party is just being played for parody.

● Chuck Hagel: With Leon Panetta leaving as Secretary of Defense, Obama has appointed former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel to replace him. Hagel is being attacked by the left over some gay slur he made in 2008 and because they don’t like the fact he’s a Republican, even if he does endorse Democrats. So they want him gone. Enter the Republicans.

The Republicans are upset because: Hagel was one of the only Republican critics of the Iraq War, he voted against US sanction on Iran and Libya, he tried to lift the embargo on Cuba, he described the Defense Department as “bloated” and said it needed “to be pared down,” and he apparently made some disparaging remarks about the influence of the “Jewish lobby.” So they are banding together to bring him down.

The most likely result is that the Republicans beat their pudgy chests for a while and then Hagel gets confirmed with 60+ votes, proving Republican impotence. A worse result would be that they take him down, doing the left’s dirty work for them, and Obama appoints a hard-core Democrat who sails through easily and does significant damage to the Defense Department.

More parody.

● Harrumph Tax Evaders: Finally, just to prove that idiocy isn’t purely domestic, the Prime Minister of Britain, who looks increasingly like a Cupie Doll to me, huffed and puffed and whined about those big bad international companies who avoid British taxes. Rather than fix Britain’s tax laws, which are what allowed these companies to avoid paying taxes, Cupie wants some sort of tax treaty or something to keep companies from following the rules established by Britain to avoid British taxes. Take that Starbucks!

Does this seem like a joke to anyone?

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Hypocrites and Fools

I really did not want to talk about this Connecticut school shooting. We’re about to go into Christmas mode, and it strikes me as disrespectful and depressing to discuss this. BUT the left is in full exploitation mode and it’s pissing me off. So I’m going to make a few points myself.

(1) The left is despicable. This guy hadn’t even stopped shooting and they were gleefully rushing to microphones to politicize this event. Show me a single leftist who didn’t start screaming about gun control. And that’s not all. These same people who claim to care about the victims made death threats to NRA members. Vile hypocrites. Obama’s press secretary tried to connect this to tax hikes. Teachers unions have tried to turn this into demands for more money. And liberals everywhere are masturbating thinking about Obama’s meaningless speech: “Oh, it was like the Gettysburg address... for dummies.” Some of them are even trying to hide their own shame by claiming that the people politicizing this issue are the people who refuse to politicize it. All of you on the left are despicable.

(2) Liberals are to blame for this killer. Yes, I said it.

Liberals dismantled the mental health system in the 1960s. Rather than fixing it, they just turned people loose, and they left a legal system that is incapable of dealing with the mentally ill.

Liberals run Hollywood. Hollywood exploits gun violence for profit and makes it cool to solve your disputes with violence.

Liberals run the media, the same media which glorifies these killers and gives them exactly what they crave – fame. Even now, these same journalists who wring their hands about guns continue to try to outdo themselves to glorify this guy. They want to report on everything that made him tick. They want pictures of his life, to explain his motives, to understand his needs and desires. They want to get rich and famous making him important.

Liberals trade in hate. THEY have built a culture based on pitting one group against another, THEY traffic in jealousy, spite as policy, race-baiting and fear as a substitute for loyalty. THEY whined about Sarah Palin using a cross-hairs image, yet THEY talk about “enslavement” and “a war on ___” and “hostage taking” and every other violence rhetorical image you can imagine. Liberals are to blame for the hateful culture we have right now. And let me add that anecdotally, Liberals make up the majority of internet trolls. THEY are the ones who post hateful rhetoric, who make death threats on twitter, who call for the imprisonment and execution of the people they don’t like... like the Rich or Republicans or Jews.

(3) Gun Control Is Stupid and It’s An Evasion. I understand that liberals are stupid. They don’t grasp logic. But even they should understand that gun control is not an answer. This killer was in violation of dozens of laws, and not one of those laws stopped him. Adding more laws won’t help. And even if they could somehow ban guns outright, that wouldn’t have stopped him either. Timothy McVeigh didn’t use a gun, nor did the 9/11 terrorists. Nor did Andrew Kehoe, who blew up killed 45 people, including 38 children, and wounded 58 more in 1927. All those mass murderers of grade school kids in China used knives. Offering gun control as a solution is as idiotic as Weight Watchers telling dieters to ban forks from their house. It’s stupid. It won’t work, and they know that.

In this case, all the whining about gun control is an evasion. This is liberals trying to evade responsibility for the fact they are the cause of this. It is their behavior, as outlined above, which has created the angry, hateful culture which spurs these guys on.

So don’t feed me this crap about “it’s time to act.” If it was time to act, then you liberals would stop being such hateful creatures. You would stop trying to steal that which does not belong to you and you would stop trying to demonize those who disagree with you. Seriously, I hope Santa brings you all a big old bag of go f*ck yourself.

- - - - - -

In other news, I am still beating my head against the wall on the fiscal cliff stuff. Boehner proposed a millionaire tax, the same tax hike that Pelosi proposed early. This was a great move, and yet, the right is going insane. Drudge is stupidly playing up the idea that Boehner has morphed into Pelosi and talk radio is whining about Boehner being a sell out.

Lost in all of this idiocy is something key. Why are the Democrats voting against the millionaire tax? Talk radio land isn’t asking that.

According to Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, the only reason Pelosi ever proposed a millionaire tax in the past was “as a political ploy” because she knew the Republicans would vote it down and then they would look like they support the rich. Naturally, that worked. And talk radio backed that to the hilt at the time.

Now talk radio is horrified that Boehner is proposing it and they are slamming him as a sell out. Yet, none of them have asked why Pelosi won’t agree to this now? Hoyer’s excuse is that it wouldn’t bring in enough revenue, but that argument makes no sense in two ways. First, if it doesn’t bring in enough revenue, then doesn’t that mean Obama lied about only taxing the rich? Funny how talk radio missed that point.

Secondly, even if it doesn’t bring in enough revenue, who don’t the Democrats who claim to hate the rich agree to it and then seek other tax hikes to get the rest? Could it be that they don’t really hate the rich after all and this is just an act. . . as I’ve been saving since forever? Could it be they know they can’t get other taxes later once people realize that someone other than millionaires will pay it?

I am no fan of Boehner, but he finally did the right thing and it exposed something massively important. Yet, conservatives have missed this point because they are too busy whining about the poor millionaires whose taxes might go up and attacking the guy who handed them a golden nugget. Wake up idiots. Maybe Santa will bring our talk radio hosts a clue?

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Exodus of the Ignorant

Arg... not again. They’re on the move again. Just as happened in the 1990s, Californians have begun another exodus away from the land they soiled. Why has no one built a wall yet to keep them in? Have we learned nothing?

By way of background for you Easterners, in the 1990s, California ran into a brick wall. Decades of idiocy caught up with the state and their attempt to double down on stupid, surprisingly, only made things worse. Soon they were fleeing the mess they made to Oregon, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona and probably others. Each time they arrived in these pristine lands and immediately set about trying to recreate the mess they had left. Thus, places like Colorado went from “rugged-individualist” and “live and let live” (yet sane) libertarianism to “dude, you don’t have a law to protect ____” dipsh*tism. That’s how Colorado ended up with high taxes, state workers having the right to unionize (something they don’t even have in union states like West Virginia), and a transgender bathroom law which lets perverts hang out in women’s bathrooms so long as they claim they feel more natural there. . . or they’re selling pot.

Well, another two decades of idiocy have made California worse, and so here they come again. . . the next wave. This time Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Washington and Oregon are the targets. Why are they leaving California you ask? Because it’s a basketcase.

California spends most its budget on salaries, retirement and health care for state employees. In every category, it pays its employees way more than any other state. In some cases, it pays more than twice as much for the same positions. The reason for this is that California’s unions, particularly the police and prison guard unions, negotiated automatic pay increases in their contracts in the 1990s, which have kept their incomes growing no matter what. So now, the average worker in California makes $60,317, with the highest paid worker actually earning $822,000. The next highest state is New York, where the average worker earns $55,650. That’s a huge difference. But it’s actually worse than that: California’s average is more than $10,000 higher than the averages in 47 of the other 49 states, and nobody comes close to the top end salaries in California.

Then there’s overtime. Last year, California paid an average of $8,741 per employee in overtime, coming to just about a billion dollars. By comparison, liberal New York paid $5,199 for a total of $415 million. Conservative Georgia paid only $1,378 for a grand total of $12 million. Why does California need all the overtime? Union rules.

California also has a huge unpaid vacation problem. Most states cap the amount of unpaid vacation you can accrue at 30 days or some low dollar amount. New Jersey allows employees to accrue up to $15,000. California has no cap. One employee retired last year and got a check for $608,821 in unpaid leave. This has resulted in a $3.9 billion liability waiting to be paid. Again, union rules.

Then come pensions, a real killer. California’s Highway Patrol convinced the legislature to pass a law which grants the employee 90% of their top salary as a pension after thirty years of service. This has since become the standard pension plan throughout the state and in many cities. This has resulted in an increase in California’s pension obligations from $300 million in the 1990s to $3.7 billion today. It also led directly to the bankruptcy of several cities.

The result of this is a budget that is beyond broken. Services are being cut. School funding has fallen and California now ranks 35th nationally on that – they used to be number one at one point. Taxes are being raised all over the place. The highest income tax bracket in California is now 13.3%. The state sales tax is 7.25% before local taxes are added which can bring it up to 9.25%. The state gas tax is the second highest in the country at 48.6 cents per gallon. And none of this even touches upon crashing home values, soaring property taxes and fees, environmental regulations that have choked off farming and made electricity sporadic, etc.

This is the fault of voters. The voters voted for tax cuts and spending hikes throughout the 1990s and 2000s, which set the current problems into motion. They approved every goodie anyone asked for. Now they are voting for spending hikes and tax hikes on the rich to solve the problem, which is making the problem even worse. The voters also keep sending Democrats to the Sacramento to manage this problem and those Democrats bend over backwards to help the unions get more goodies. And their plan to get bailed out by Washington are a pipe dream.

Essentially, California voters opted for an economic suicide pact and now they are paying for that. . . only, they aren’t paying for it. . . the rest of us are because they are fleeing the mess they made. They are headed to other states where things haven’t been messed up yet, and the first thing these asshats will do is start to wonder why their new states don’t have all the great laws California had which set the crisis into motion.

It has been said that those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it. They should have said, “Those who are intentionally ignorant of history are destined to repeat it repeatedly. . . dude.”

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Hate Is The New Black

Damn you Belgium!! France needs solidarity. Without solidarity, how can one take what is not theirs? And you, Belgium are not helping. For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m talking about France, and Britain to a degree.

France is about to raise their top income tax bracket from about 50% to 75%. They have also imposed a host of fees, particularly on capital gains, and they’ve made it almost impossible for entrepreneurs to sell their businesses. No doubt France will be a paradise soon.

Except, France is being betrayed. Some rich people object to this idea of paying over everything they own and they’ve done the most despicable thing imaginable: they’ve fled to Belgium. Yep. Hundreds of the richest people in France including actor Gerard Dépardieu have all fled to Belgium to avoid the taxes. This brought a truly hateful response from the French left:

● A socialist MP called for Dépardieu “to be stripped of his nationality.” Ho ho ho.

● One minster said this was “anti-patriotic” and represented giving France “the finger”. . . something I would do if France mattered. . . to anyone.

● The left leaning paper Liberation called him “a drunken, obese petit-bourgeois reactionary.” But I question how he can be both obese and petit at the same time?

● France’s Prime Minster said Dépardieu and others like him are only doing this “because they want to get even richer!” The bastards! Then he whined that “We cannot fight poverty if those with the most, and sometimes with a lot, do not show solidarity and a bit of generosity.” No doubt said minister lives like a monk. Anyway, I’ll have to remember that 75% of your income is now considered “a bit of generosity.”

//sigh

You know what the problem is here? LACK. . . OF. . . VISION.

Why are we dancing around this? Rich people are evil. They stole everything they have. So why do we even let them have a single penny? It’s not like they earned it. Why not just take everything Mr. Dépardieu has? He doesn’t need it. All he needs is a nice bunk in a concentration camp where he can make designer shoes while he learns to be happy with less. And why stop with the rich? The middle class has more than they need. Frankly, I’d like to see coal miners be forced to poop scoop my yard. . . they earn too much to be allowed to keep it too. What good is solidarity if we can’t use it to make slaves of people we don’t like?!!

In all seriousness, I am pretty stunned at the hate the left is spewing these days: rich people should be stripped of their assets and their income because they have more than you do. . . better hope no one has less than you do. Doctors should be forced to work for free because they are rich. . . we just know it, they’re probably Jews too. Companies are following the tax rules WE set up so they can avoid taxes. . . those rotten bastards! Kill... kill... kill... what’s yours is mine comrade.

Some government douche in Britain said this weekend that companies like Starbucks are “keeping money from people who need it,” as if people have a right to someone else’s money? He then foamed that they could have used the money Starbuck legally didn’t pay to build a hospital (to fix their horrific medical system) or to train young Britons to work as tech monkeys in this hospital. Apparently, it takes $30 million to beat the binge-drunk out of them and teach them to type in what people tell them when prompted.

This whole attitude just amazes me. Does this mean I can rob Warren Buffett so long as I only take 75% of what the bastard has in his wallet? Can I rough him up in the process too?

We really have entered a dark period of human history again where greed and jealousy and hate have become public policy. Slavery is back in vogue, only now we use nicer words for it -– regulation, taxes, fairness, solidarity -- but the thought is still the same... I have the right to make you work for me.

When I read Atlas Shrugged the first time, I enjoyed it. It made a lot of sense but it seemed unrealistic. Nobody could be as stupid as the spiteful, greedy leftists in her book. . . or so I thought. Yet, within a few years, I could see Rand’s points being made in very subtle ways throughout society. Still, I had no idea these idiots would really run wild and make her book look tame.

What a world.

Oh well, where did I put Warren’s address...

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Conservatives: Repetition As Insanity

These days, conservatives and the Republican Party make me think of a quote from Mugatu from Zoolander: “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.” Seriously, Einstein said that insanity is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, yet that is what is going on everywhere on the right, so why can’t people see this?

Consider the Republicans. They are in deep trouble. The party is toxic to half the electorate and that part is growing. Yet, you suggest that we need to at least stop scaring and hating these people and you get told “that’s pundit speak” and we can’t sacrifice our values to win these people. Our “values”? Is the purpose of the Republican Party really to stop rape victims from getting abortions, stop a few thousand gays from calling their marriage-like relationships “marriage” and whine about deporting Mexicans who will never be deported? Or you get this, “we’ll never win them all”. . . as if we needed 100%. This is like saying there’s no point in trying to stay healthy if you can’t be at your ideal weight immediately.

But the most frustrating one is this. Putting the social issues aside, the Republican Party just doesn’t stand for anything. Seriously. What vision does the Party offer America? Well, take a look. Pretty much since Bush, the Republican vision of America has centered entirely around the Bush tax cuts. . . nothing more. What do those tax cuts mean to average people? Do they promise jobs? Do they give you a chance to buy a home, start a business, raise a family, send the kids to college, ensure your health, protect your retirement? No. They’re just a hodgepodge of minor breaks here and there that amount to something like $400 a year to average people. They do nothing to create incentives to get people to start businesses. They do nothing about excessive regulation. They do nothing to make markets more fair or more open or competition more intense. They do nothing to make America better.

Then Obama took office and he created Obamacare. He also passed a whole bunch of new regulations. Suddenly, the Republican agenda doubled in size! Woo hoo! Now they also wanted to repeal Obamacare and rescind those regulations. Inspiring. Seriously, think about this. This promise basically amounts to “we want to return the healthcare system to the mess it was in 2008.” In fact, that’s exactly what the entire Republican platform is: we want to return everything to the glory days of 2008... deep into the recession.

That’s not a winner.

And the fiscal cliff shows this again. Now is the time to either step aside and let Obama have his agenda and suffer the consequences or to fight for something that will rally the American people. So what are the Republicans fighting for? Making sure the Bush tax cuts won’t expire for rich people. In other words, they are fighting to make sure the rich can party like it’s 2008 as well.

How less inspiring can a party be than to stand for this? And why in the world does no one seem to realize how stupid this is? This has been the Republican position since the mid-2000s and in that time they lost every single election except 2010, which had special circumstances because people were freaked out about Obamacare.... yet they think this is an effective strategy. At some point, don’t you realize that 10 years of losing in a row means you’re doing something wrong? Yet, Boehner and the rest are proudly standing before cameras saying they would rather plunge the country over this (fake) “fiscal cliff” than not see their vision of a return to the glory days of 2008 be enacted. Good grief. The price for this idiocy, by the way, is that the GOP is getting battered in polls with 53% blaming the GOP for the fiscal cliff and 27% blaming Obama.

Yet, they aren’t alone. I’ve heard several talk radio hosts lately who are whining that if they were in charge, things would be different... harrumph. See, they aren’t as weak as the Republicans, no siree. They wouldn’t be planning to surrender to Obama on this important issue of protecting the rich from tax hikes. They would tell Obama, “if you don’t agree to keep the Bush tax cuts in place for the rich... to get us back to the glory of 2008... then I’ll send the country right over the (fake) fiscal cliff!”

Think about this. The Republicans are following a game plan that has cost them every election since 2000 except for 2010. And talk radio is attacking the Republicans for being weak and then bragging how if they were in charge, they would do exactly what the Republicans are doing right now. . . to the letter. Moreover, they are shouting down anyone who suggests that a platform of “2008 forever... with venom” is a bad idea. This is insanity.

Is it really so hard to see this?

Is it really so hard to recognize that when something doesn’t work. . . you. . . don’t. . . keep. . . doing. . . it?

Maybe I am taking crazy pills.

On the plus side, it sounds like both Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio get this. Add them to the list with Bobby Jindal.

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Liberalism: Still Not Working

After Obama's re-election, many of us at Commentarama swore not to help the liberals or moderates in any way and to let them burn from their own bad decisions. And happily, it looks like that will be happening sooner rather than later. Observe.

The Liberal Mismanagement of Government Continues. This is even more evident at the state than the federal level. A study of the best- and worst-managed states in America revealed that 4 of the top 5 are Republican strongholds, just as 4 of the bottom 5 are deep, deep blue. California (surprise!) comes in dead last, with the nation's second-highest unemployment rate and its worst credit rating, while according to the Tax Foundation, its business tax climate is the third-worst. Rhode Island, Illinois, and New Jersey provided misery with its company, the Garden State enjoying a crushing debt of 91.6% of its percentage of revenue. North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Utah, meanwhile, enjoy very low unemployment rates and levels of debt, with Moody's credit agency attributing the latter's stability to its "tradition of conservative fiscal management." Words the blue states don't understand, that is, because that would be racist and hurting the poor or something.

In other blue-state news, the city everyone loves to stay the heck out of--Detroit--has now become so chaotic that one Michigan state senator has proposed dissolving the city altogether and putting it under county administration. The good people of suburban Wayne County can't wait for that, I bet. And back in California, the city of San Bernardino is now being sued by the state's public-employee pension agency, which says that even though the city has declared bankruptcy, it is still required to pay those big, big pensions, even at the expense of education, police services, etc. The agency is also reportedly trying to prove that you can, in fact, extract blood from a stone. So I heard.

In the "Further Proof That Tax Hikes Are A Bad Idea" Department: The British government announced earlier this year that it's been forced to surrender on its 50% tax rate for millionaires. Well, it didn't actually say that, but it did announce a slight lowering of the rate to 45%. And not a moment too soon: the Daily Telegraph pointed out recently that the number of Britons declaring income of more than 1 million pounds (that's what they call "dollars," Americans) fell from about 16,000 in 2009-10 to 6,000 two years later, rebounding somewhat to 10,000 after the government's announcement. One Conservative MP argued that this policy cost the state 7 billion pounds in revenue.

The reason why should be obvious to everyone here--overtaxed rich people either move their income out of the country, take advantage of loopholes, or stop producing it altogether--but sadly, it's not so obvious to our fellow Yanks. (My apologies to all Southerners reading the blog.) The latest ABC/WashPo poll shows that 60 percent of Americans, including 39 percent (!) of Republicans, favor raising taxes on those making over $250,000 a year--far outnumbering those who favor entitlement reform, even simply raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67. Good job, citizens. The $80 billion a year that tax hike will bring in should keep the federal government running. For, like, a couple weeks.

And Speaking of the Middle Class: Has anyone figured out yet whether the Obama administration really believes it can solve the debt crisis by heavily taxing the rich and not touching anyone else, or if they're just lying to middle-class voters and letting them believe that? Because I honestly don't know. Anyway, clearly a lot of people do believe that--but maybe not for long. In January, the payroll tax rates set by Congress are set to increase by nearly half, a change which will cost the average middle-class household an extra $1,000 per year. Ironically, given that about 160 million people are in the income categories affected, this may well raise more revenue than the tax hikes on the rich--and thus the dirty little secret of American economics: the bulk of national wealth doesn't lie with the rich, it lies with the middle class. Needless to say, the Obama spokesmen aren't exactly publicizing this pending change.

So if you're middle class, you may be about to get screwed out of a bit more money (and I haven't even mentioned the jailhouse shiving that is the Alternative Minimum Tax). Sucks, I know, but hey: You broke it, you bought it. We did try to warn you, didn't we?

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Please Stop Being Stupid

Have you ever watched someone planning to make a huge mistake? Of course you have, you’re a Republican. . . you see that every day from your party. The latest mistake-pending involves Grover Norquist’s tax pledge. I support the fact the party is finally planning to abandon Grover’s idiocy, but I can’t help feel that we’re just substituting another form of idiocy.

Ok, let me get this out of the way... “Grover”? WTF? Who names their kid “Grover”? And if that is your name, for the love of God, change it! Seriously, how ridiculous must Grover Norquist’s middle name be if he prefers Grover?

All right, here’s the deal. Grover came up with a pledge twenty years ago whereby anyone wanting to “prove their conservatism” would pledge never to raise taxes in any way shape or form. Everyone signs this. . . until recently. About two years ago, Grover ran smack dab into thinking conservative Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who realized that Grover’s tax pledge was stupid. Rather than leading to lower taxes and an improved economy, this stupid tax pledge became a tool which Republicans used to justify supporting subsidies for big business because any attempt to cut those subsidies (like slashing ethanol subsidies and tax breaks) resulted in howls of betrayal from Grover, who claimed said Republicans were “raising taxes.” In effect, what sounds like a good anti-tax pledge became a pledge to protect the benefits cronies got for themselves.

We’ve talked about this before and I think this is ludicrous. The tax policy the Republicans should be pushing right now is exactly what Romney was pushing – lower rates across the board and wiping out all the distorting, crony industry and company specific deductions that people like Charlie Rangel have shoved into the code. Rip all that crony crap out of the code. . . breaks for filmmaking, breaks for whiskey makers to open plants in Puerto Rico, breaks for ethanol makers, etc. We also need to cap the home mortgage deduction and end the state income tax deduction because these just work as subsidies for liberal states.

Grover doesn’t like this, but who cares about him. . . the man is named after a dog, folks!

Moreover, right now, I’m all in favor of massive tax hikes on the rich (defined as anyone making $150,000 a year or more) because people need to feel the pain of Obama’s idiocy.

Again, Dogboy won’t like this, but who cares.

So I was quite happy to hear that Republicans were starting to abandon this idiotic pledge. Unfortunately, I’m not sure they’re doing this for the right reasons. I see two reason why this pledge should be abandoned (three if you count my opposition to pledges in general): (1) to end cronyism and move us toward a flat tax that doesn’t favor liberal states and rich, liberal voters, and (2) to make people pay for voting for Obama by giving them what they voted for.

Yet, the reasons given by reliable conservative Rep. Peter King (NY) and by Sen. Saxby Chambliss (Georgia) for abandoning the pledge sound like all the wrong reasons. In particular, they both have said that “the world has changed and the economic situation is different.” And they want a genuine deal to solve the debt crisis and the fiscal crisis for the good of the country.

Good grief.

There is a huge difference between letting the other side have the things that will explode in their faces and collaborating. It’s stupid to collaborate with someone who is not acting in good faith. . . like Obama. This is the same stupid impulse that the Republicans always fall for. They will go into the negotiations in good faith. Meanwhile, Obama will savage them for protecting the rich and wanting to kill the poor. They will murmur something about “for the good of the nation.” Then they will agree to all of Obama’s tax hikes on the middle class and small business, and they will demand some minor cuts that aren’t real cuts. Obama will demand tax hikes on the rich, the Republicans will refuse and Obama will agree. Then he’ll march out to the podium and accuse them of raising taxes on the middle class, while protecting the rich from tax hikes. He will dump all the cuts on their lap as well. He will then claim that they stood in his way of getting what he wanted, so they are to blame for the economic consequences to follow. And they will smile like baboons.

Pardon me for a moment. . . motherf*$#% goddam f%$#@^ idiots!!!!

I’m back.

Why is this so hard for Republicans? This is what the Republicans should be saying:

“The President won the election and we’re going to work with him to make sure President Obama’s economic policies are in place because that is what the voters wanted.

He is right that the deficit he created has put the country at risk of bankruptcy and must be fixed. He added more debt in his first four years than all other presidents combined and that needs to stop.

And he is right that the rich have not paid their fair share during his first term because Nancy Pelosi’s Congresses created too many loopholes which the rich and which multinational companies exploited. That’s how companies like GE, run by Mr. President’s job’s czar, could earn record profits and pay no income tax... zero dollars, as they shipped jobs overseas. We are glad that President Obama has finally found the courage to do the right thing and to close those loopholes and we stand with him. We want to remove all $4 trillion of these crony loopholes from the code.

We also agree that we need to raise rates on the rich. We have heard the President’s supporters calling for a 90% tax rate, but we don’t support that. We will, however, support a return to the 50% top tax rate under Reagan, and we would agree to a 25% surcharge on millionaires and billionaires like Warren Buffett and his businesses. It’s time the rich paid their fair share.

We’re also happy to make any cuts the President suggests. Name them and we’ll send you the bill, Mr. President.

Let’s do this Mr. President.”

Do you see what I’m doing here? I’m forcing Obama to either impose devastating tax hikes on his supporters or put him in the position of defending the rich and those very loopholes he ran against. . . and expose himself as a lying hypocrite to his supporters. I’m forcing Obama to take the blame for every cut that happens because they will all be things he proposed, cuts his supporters will hate. And I’m forcing Obama to take the full blame for what will happen economically. And I lay the blame for everything on the Democrats.

That is how politics needs to be played. Unfortunately, as seen above, the Republicans continue to do it backwards. They allow themselves to be blamed for everything while getting nothing they really want because they are playing by the wrong set of rules. Wake up idiots.

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This Means War!

With Black Friday upon us in a couple days, I thought I would discuss something shopping related. Specifically, several countries have decided to go to war with the most powerful organizations on this planet. My money is on Google and friends.

For those who live under a rock (or in West Virginia), it will come as a great surprise that many governments are out of money. They have promised WAY MORE in benefits than they could ever afford and they put those promises on the old credit card. Now the bill is due and they are struggling to find someone to stick with the tab.

This has resulted in things like the French jacking up their upper income tax bracket. Britain is now planning to impose a massive property tax on expensive homes. The EU tried to milk foreign airlines by imposing a carbon tax that applied for the entire flight, not just the portion spent over EU airspace. Obama and the airlines told the EU no, and Europe surrendered. But they haven’t given up. Fees, surcharges, tax rates. . . they’ve all gone up. And yet, revenues keep falling because of the double-dip recovery Europe is going through. So what is a tiny failing country on a tired continent to do? How about taxing multinational companies?

Good luck with that folks. . . you are out of your league.

France fired its first shot by hitting Amazon with a massive $252 million tax bill claiming that Amazon is shipping into France from Luxemburg to avoid French tax. Sacre bleu! Britain is now doing the same thing. The British government also hauled in Starbucks executives to explain how a company that sold around $5 billion in the UK in the past thirteen years could declare that it only made a profit once and paid a grand total of about $10 million in tax. Starbucks blames high rent. Google earned $4 billion in the UK last year alone and has a 33% profit margin, but managed to report a loss in the UK in 2010 and 2011. What a shame. Google apparently routes their profits. . . er, inventories through Bermuda. France hit Google with a one million Euro tax bill. None of these companies intend to pay.

Britain and France are determined to squeeze money out of these companies, but I don’t think they have the brains to do it frankly. Indeed, as outraged as these countries are, what Google and Amazon have done is legal under UK and French law. That’s the funny part. And the only way to change that would be to change their tax laws to prevent it. But the same fools who created the current system will be charged with fixing this loophole so I doubt they have a chance. Not to mention, a change like this would make local businesses unhappy too and that’s bad for votes.

Moreover, if they do make a real change, then this becomes a question of strength and Britain and France need big old Google and powerful Amazon much more than Google and Amazon need tiny Britain or stagnant France.

My guess is there will be some legal changes that amount to nothing. The locals will be placated by the thought they slayed the dragon, and Google and Amazon will pay some token tax. . . which they will promptly get refunded the following year. Alternatively, Google and Amazon will agree to pay more and will impose massive surcharges so they end up making more by imposing the tax than they will lose paying it. Starbucks, which has physical locations, will just jack up their expenses again.

So act as outraged as you like good people of Europe, these companies aren’t paying another cent.

Germany is doing this too, only they decided to toss a little protectionism into the mix. They just passed a bill which will force Google to pay German newspapers every time their search engine links to one of these articles. In other words, if you run a search for “naked Fritz” and you find an article in The Daily Fuhrer about a group of Germans running naked through the streets toward Poland, Germany now wants Google to cough up some payolla to The Daily Fuhrer. Yeah, that’s gonna work.

Let me spin the likely scenario on this one: Germany passes law. Google makes Germany vanish from internet. For all practical purposes, Germany ceases to matter to the rest of the world. Sales of German goods collapse. Germany begs Google for forgiveness. . . but Google doesn’t forgive, nor does it forget. Polish Army caught unaware by invasion of naked Germans.

The moral to the story is that right now, only two countries are truly capable of standing up to multinational companies: the United States and China. Our markets are so large that these companies need us. Everyone else can pretty much go f* themselves, they are little more than an irritant beneath Goliath’s imported sneakers.

Is this a good thing? No. But it is the reality. . . and something seems wrong with that.

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The Doubleplusgood World of Newthink

“If we all truly believe, then Tinkerbell can fly.” That “thought” forms the preamble of most liberal thinking: reality is what we want it to be. And this week brought us a great many attempts to create new realities that, um, aren’t entirely accurate. So let’s cover what your liberal friends believe now.

● “Equivalent”: I mentioned this in the comments, but it bears repeating. There were a spate of articles this week that called the European (dis)Union “equivalent” or “on a par” to the United States. So in the liberal and European worlds this is now true: Europe = America.

In our reality, the European Union has 9% more population than we do – 332 million to 308 million – yet its GDP is only $12.1 trillion compared to our $16 trillion. In other words, our economy is 33% more powerful despite our population being almost 10% smaller. That means the average American is about 40% more valuable than the average European. Think about how ridiculous this idea of parity is. Would you say that a boxer who weighs 200 pounds is “on par” with one who weighs 280 pounds? Or that someone whose lifespan is 50 years is on a par with someone who will live 70? Well, you might not, but liberals and Europeans apparently would because euroTinkerliberal doesn’t want to feel bad about herself.

As an aside, wanna bet it’s 50% within a decade?

● “Defensive Weapons”: France is contemplating sending weapons to the Syrian rebels. Obama doesn’t want this because, well, those weapons will go straight to terrorists. But never fear, France has assured the world that it would only send “defensive weapons.” Hmm. Presumably these are weapons that can only discharge when pointed at someone who has demonstrated the requisite hostile intent. Or perhaps they only discharge harsh words? No... words can kill. What is going on here is that Tinkerliberals jerk themselves off by claiming moral superiority and they just don’t want to believe that they’re an accomplice to a whole lot of killing, even when they are.

● “Shrinking Banks”: The world’s biggest banks have announced layoffs in excess of 160,000. Most of those layoffs will be mid-level positions and those people are not expected to find new jobs in the sector because there aren’t any. A great many more layoffs are coming but the precise number isn’t known yet because smaller banks haven’t reported and because some of the bigger banks are nasty and prefer to fire people in mass waves of “cause” rather than admit layoffs.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking job losses are bad. But you are wrong. See, we KNOW that Obama has put a jackboot up Wall Street’s collective rear (snicker snicker, yeah right), so it’s a good thing that these banks are shrinking. It means we’ve hurt these rotten banksters. Besides, most of the first wave of layoffs will occur in Britain, which is about to get Tinkerpunked by the “great recovery” (read: double dip recession) because it put all of its fairy dust in the banking sector right before it crashed. So that means the pain felt in New York won’t really hurt because someone else will get it worse! Isn’t that great! :)

See how easy that was? We took “massive permanent layoffs” at a time of “record profits for banks” (read: obscene profits for Wall Street) and we’ve turned it onto “shrinking banks to solve ‘too big to fail’” and to make the banks “financially healthy.”

So you see, these “layoffs” are a good thing because it protects us from predatory banks. Oh, as an aside, did I mention that in 2002, the top 10 banks in the country controlled 55% of all US banking assets but by 2011 they controlled 77%? Or that the big six banks now possess assets equivalent to approximately 60% of America’s gross national product. Tinkerliberal sure taught those banks a lesson!

● Twinkieside: Good grief! It turns out that Mitt Romney killed Hostess. Yep. Venture capital firms just like Bain Capital poured money into Hostess so it would go bankrupt and somehow (see Underwear Gnome Theory) make Wall Street rich! This “theory” comes directly from Tinkerthug Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO who doesn’t want Tinkerliberals realizing that Hostess was killed and 18,500 jobs lost because the bakers’ union didn’t want to take a pay cut like everybody else. Don’t worry Tinkerliberals, your liberal policies don’t really destroy the things you like. . . Mitt Romney does.

● “Ultra-Rich Non-Flight”: Ok, it’s time for real Tinkertortions. Anecdotal (read: worthless) evidence suggests that the ultra-rich, i.e. billionaires, are not fleeing California yet. Oh thank Godzilla! That’s great. It’s great because it means that people don’t really flee from high taxes. Ergo, Tinkerliberal tax policies will really work this time! Hurray!

Now admittedly, there is some irony in this because Tinkerliberals have been claiming that the rich aren’t important because they only hoard wealth and don’t actually create jobs, but I’m sure we’re all big enough to ignore that contradiction. And while it is true that billionaires don’t get W2s because their money is held in complex trusts that hide their assets in tax avoidance schemes, typically in tax havens, meaning this tax won’t actually raise their taxes at all. . . the fact they didn’t flee a tax that won’t touch them certainly means that no one else will change their behavior either, right? Sure it does. Snort a little fairly poop, you’ll see the light. Trust me, this totally means that Tinkerliberals can continue believing that their policies will work just as planned. :)

● “Contemptible Worldview”: Finally, we need to put an end to a little bit of inconvenient truth. The evil, evil Mitt Romney and the Satanic Bill O’Reilly dared to claim that minority voters could be bought with gifts from the government. How dare they! This is such a “contemptuous and contemptible worldview” (source: The Washington Post) that it needs to be repudiated before anyone realizes that it’s also true! No one should be allowed to impugn Tinkerliberals’ honor with their own actions.

So that is what your liberal friends believe now. I can’t promise that they’ll still believe these “truths” next week because liberalism doesn’t work that way, but for now it’s convenient and it’s the official line which they’ve all “come to independently” at the exact same time and using the same slogans.

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