Iowahawk for car czar.
Category Archives: Business
Brilliant Idea
A surtax on small business to pay for nationalizing health care:
Here’s the ugly income-tax math. First, Mr. Obama has promised to let the lower Bush tax rates expire after 2010. This would raise the top personal income tax rate to 39.6% from 35%, and the next rate to 36% from 33%. The Bush expiration would also phase out various tax deductions and exemptions, bringing the top marginal rate to as high as 41%.
Then add the Rangel Surtax of one percentage point, starting at $280,000 ($350,000 for couples), plus another percentage point at $400,000 ($500,000 for couples), rising to three points on more than $800,000 ($1 million) in 2011. But wait, there’s more. The surcharge could rise by two more percentage points in 2013 if health-care costs are larger than advertised — which is a near-certainty. Add all of this up and the top marginal tax rate would climb to 46%, which hasn’t been seen in the U.S. since the Reagan tax reform of 1986 cut the top rate to 28% from 50%.
Combined with the upcoming rise in the minimum wage, remember things like this when Democrats lie about how they’re interested in creating jobs.
Falcon 1 Status
This post is about a half hour before launch. I’m listening to the countdown status on the webcast.
[Update a little before 11 PM EDT]
They’re now at T minus fifteen, on a weather hold, hoping to pick it up in less than half an hour at T minus three something.
[Update just before midnight EDT]
It looks like a successful launch. Congratulations, SpaceX. This is a huge milestone — the first successful delivery of a payload into orbit. Now on to a successful Falcon 9 launch later this year.
[Morning update]
The launch seemed to be entirely successful. Clark Lindsey has some thoughts on the implications. I particularly like the last one:
Sen. Shelby should be forced to watch the launch video over and over…
I’m sure he’s seething this morning, assuming that someone had the moxie to tell him about it.
The Hidden Cost Of Health-Care “Reform”
More Munchausen By Proxie
Thoughts on the economy:
When I think about the economy I think about a plump man who has just been hit by a truck while crossing a street and is in severely critical condition with internal bleeding. Instead of just stabilizing his hemorrhaging, the doctor decides that while the patient is unconscious, he might as well also do a face lift, some coronary bypasses and a stomach-stapling to keep him from gaining weight while he is recovering (if he does recover). After all, a crisis is not to be wasted.
The problem is that all these ambitious operations create too much of a burden for the human body to bear.
Similarly, we have an administration that is simultaneously seeking to end the recession, discussing drastic changes to laws on foreclosures and energy use and completely changing the health care system. I respectfully question whether all of this makes sense.
It’s a good question. And I’m pretty sure of the answer.
Cross Your Fingers
Well, actually, engineers aren’t supposed to be superstitious like that, but here’s hoping for a successful Falcon 1 launch this evening (late afternoon on the west coast).
Paul Krugman Acolytes
…versus reality:
…it should be clear that the Fed causing a housing bubble in order to bring about “soaring household spending” was Krugman’s optimal situation, whether or not he thought it was doable at the time. Given the consequences of the housing bubble that did ultimately happen, that alone should be enough cause for the public to stop listening to this fellow.
But…but…! He has a Nobel Prize! And he writes for the New York Times! The New. York. Times.
Not listen to Paul Krugman? Why, it would be madness!
Next, they’re going to tell me I should pay no attention to Maureen Dowd, or Frank Rich.
[Via Joe Katzman]
A Truth And Reconciliation Commission
Does Boeing need one for the Dreamliner?
When you look at both Boeing and Airbus, you have to ask, can’t anyone play this game? And how did we get in a position in which there are only two manufacturers of large air transports in the world?
The Threat To Innovation
…from Obamacare.
[Update a few minutes later]
…the truest answer as to why we do not accept Medicare is that the service does not focus on what we feel is paramount: practicing effective and efficient medicine in order to ultimately achieve and maintain the good health of our patients. The service’s paltry reimbursement structure coupled with its impossible to-adhere-to regulations doesn’t allow us to offer a complete service to our patients. This complete service includes wellness care as well as the ability to take the time to understand each patient’s unique medical needs and circumstances.
The crux of the issue is that Medicare worries about the forest, in other words, the internal process, money management, reimbursement and policing agreements, data mining, and organizing dozens of internal bureaucracies. These agendas and policing policies help the Medicare service to manage the forest, however these are often in direct conflict with what we feel is key to effective healthcare: taking care of the individual, or each tree.
OK, Dems, want us to have confidence in a “public option”? Fix Medicare first.
The President’s Economic Op-Ed
..and the devastating response:
It was, from the start, a two-year program, and it will steadily save and create jobs as it ramps up over this summer and fall.
Uh-oh. Why are the verbs now in the future tense? And what happened to the specific and oft-repeated prediction of 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year? Those are important language changes, along with the implicit admission that the stimulus has not yet “ramped up.”
This did not have to be a two-year program. Congress could have front-loaded the stimulus had they instead given the cash directly to the American people, as they did on a bipartisan basis in early 2008. We would have saved much of it, paying off our mortgages, student loans, and credit cards (which would not be a bad thing). We would have spent the rest much more quickly than the federal and state government bureaucracies now stumbling through their usual corrupt, slow and inefficient processes. Instead the President handed the money and program design over to a Congress of his own party, who saw it as a big honey pot rather than as an exercise in macroeconomic fiscal policy. The President’s primary macroeconomic policy mistake was allowing Congress to pervert a rapid Keynesian stimulus into a slow-spending interest-based binge.
The President is correct that the stimulus will increase economic growth, mostly next year. That is too late, and later than it could have been had they done it right.
I wonder who actually wrote the thing?
[Mid-afternoon update]
Stephen Spruiell takes it apart as well:
The swift and aggressive action we took in those first few months has helped pull our financial system and our economy back from the brink. We took steps to restart lending to families and businesses, stabilize our major financial institutions, and help homeowners stay in their homes and pay their mortgages.
Let’s examine that phrase, “swift and aggressive action.” For Treasury Secretary, Obama rammed a tax cheat through the confirmation process by claiming he was the only man who could do the job. Secretary Geithner then proceeded to unveil a plan to save the banking system that inspired so little confidence, the Dow fell 300 points upon its announcement. Geithner’s Public-Private Investment Partnership to buy troubled assets from banks has failed to launch, primarily because the Financial Accounting Standards Board loosened mark-to-market accounting rules, thus enabling banks to avoid write-downs on their toxic mortgage-backed securities. Now that banks can hold those assets without booking losses, they have little incentive to sell them at a discount to the P-PIP. With P-PIP looking increasingly like a dud, the adminitration’s only real plan to deal with crippled banks is to cross its fingers and hope the economy grows fast enough to enable them to recover on their own.
Nor has Obama’s Making Home Affordable plan been any great success, as Joe Nocera explained in Friday’s NYT (best summed up by the phrase “drop in the bucket”). As NRO’s editors pointed out when the plan was announced, “The relatively small group of in-deep but creditworthy homeowners who could be helped by Obama’s plan already are positioned to refinance at better rates, or to move from variable-rate loans to low-drama fixed-rate mortgages, without a $475 billion government intervention.” That’s $75 billion for the program and $400 billion to shore up Fannie and Freddie, the real beneficiaries of the deal.
On the other hand, Obama did move swiftly and aggressively to sign the Lilly Ledbetter act, exposing companies to spurious equal-pay lawsuits; to roll back Clinton-era welfare reforms; to use TARP funds to shield the UAW from the full fallout of the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies, and so on. Maybe that’s what he meant.
It’s a barrel chock full of fish to shoot.
[Update late afternoon]