Why they’ll never be enough.
Of course, it’s not really about the revenue. It’s about “fairness,” and “social justice.”
[Update a couple minutes later]
Clinton’s budget surpluses were a result of spending cuts, not tax hikes.
Category Archives: Economics
Rachel Maddow’s Blind Deference To Government
It’s the typical socialist mindset:
This question continues to be a puzzle until you realize that when Maddow says “America,” she means not individual Americans or society but government. And now her fallacy is clear. Frédéric Bastiat identified it in 1850. In his classic, The Law, Bastiat wrote that the “socialist” confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education… We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.
I can see Maddow saying that. One need not be a state socialist, however, to commit this fallacy. It’s done all the time all along the political spectrum. But Maddow offers us a particularly good example.
It’s basically a totalitarian mindset.
Last Day For Space Safety
I’m a little over a thousand bucks beyond the goal, but I still hope to do much better, if I’m going to properly publicize it.
The Democrats’ Fiscal Disaster
Make them own it.
Idiot Obamaphiles
I agree:
It’s hard to know whether to cheer their disappointment or commiserate.
My natural inclination is to tell them to S*** *** **** ** considering that they have subjected us to four more years.
Exactly.
The President’s Budget Bluff
Time to call it.
The “S” Word
Derek Webber writes that settlement has to be an objective of our space policy.
The Augustine panel noted that if the goal isn’t space settlement, there’s no point in having a human spaceflight program at all. The private people (such as Elon Musk) get this, but Congress continues to fail to do so.
Spending
Per capita federal expenditures have almost doubled since Carter, and go up almost regardless of which party is in the White House. Ironically, it was steady only under Bill Clinton, but that’s only because he gave himself a Republican Congress in the second year of his first term. George W. Bush had an opportunity top get it under control, but he was a disaster on that front (the biggest reason he lost the Congress in 2006, which led to even more disastrous spending).
ObamaCare
Will it go the way of McCain-Feingold?
There’s still plenty to litigate, and Roberts, having been burned by the election, is unlikely to give it any more passes.
Where The Debt Comes From
It’s the spending, stupid. And not the war spending.
As Glenn’s emailer notes, it started to skyrocket right after the Democrats took over Congress in 2007. Before that we were on track to a balanced budget. The fiscal crisis would have certainly caused a spike in the deficit with reduced revenues, but absent the insane economic policies of the first two years of the Obama administration, the economy would have bounced back just as sharply as it dropped, as it does in most other recessions.