…belong to corporations?
Category Archives: Economics
Great Moments
…in unintended consequences.
[Early afternoon update]
OK, for some reason, I can’t get the embed to work. Go view it here.
Class Warrior
Barack Obama won’t triangulate, because he can’t:
That Monday tax deal had to be the worst day of Barack Obama’s presidency. I’d be surprised if this most insouciant of presidents was able to sleep Monday after the statement he issued at the White House about the deal. That was no mere statement. It was a class warrior’s cry from the heart.
He lashed “the wealthiest Americans” three times, not to mention “the wealthiest 2% of Americans,” “tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires,” “wealthy people” and—channeling the French revolution—”the wealthiest estates.” (Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, answering the party’s casting call for the role of Madame Defarge, denounced the deal as “morally corrupt.” Keep her away from knitting needles.)
I don’t buy that all this was said as a sop to the angry left. One month into his presidency, the Obama budget message repeatedly ripped into “those at the commanding heights of our economy.” When at the White House Monday Mr. Obama suggested his next campaign will be “a conversation with the American people” about ending those rates (35%!) for “wealthy people,” I take him at his word. He won’t be at peace until this violation is erased.
…Will the nation’s new economic royalists step forward, rope in hand, to produce enough economic activity to help Mr. Obama to a second term of retribution? Maybe not. According to the National Association of Manufacturers, some 70% of manufacturing concerns in the U.S. have owners whose business is taxed at the individual rate (S corporations and the like). These are the people expected to commit capital to new hires and equipment.
But if an angry, let-me-be-clear Barack Obama just looked into the cameras and said he’s coming to get you in two years, what rational economic choice would you make? Spend the profit or gains 2011 might produce on new workers, or bury any new income in the backyard until the 2012 presidential clouds clear?
No matter how much economic bump Mr. Obama gets in 2011 from extending the Bush-era tax rates, the 2012 election will be fought over a deep national anxiety that he rightly identifies but misinterprets.
I don’t think he’ll be able to fool the people again in 2012, at least not enough to get reelected. Now they understand what he meant in his brief conversation with Joe the Plumber, and they understand what it means to elect a Marxist.
[Update a couple minutes later]
It’s too late for a “third way.”
Obama’s Sputnik Moment
Jonah Goldberg points out the absurdity of it. Here’s a similar piece I wrote a couple years ago on the thirty-ninth anniversary of the first Apollo landing, on why solving the energy problem is completely unlike going to the moon.
Res Ipsa Loquitur
Well, not entirely. Ed Morrissey has some thoughts.
This is what happens when you put in place either economic incompetents, people who actively want to wreck the economy for their own political ends, or both. There are, after all, people who would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.
[Update a few minutes later]
John Kerry was extolling the stimulus effects of unemployment benefits, as in more money returns to the economy for each dollar paid out to the unemployed. If so, why not simply put us all on unemployment benefits and watch the economy grow?
Or perhaps Kerry could advocate a national boat sales tax to collect the sort of revenue that he so carefully had tried to avoid. Or perhaps he might look carefully at zillionaire family trusts and the billions they divert from the strapped federal Treasury. Or perhaps he could take away the tax deductions on third or fourth homes above a certain square footage, maybe ending the deduction for property taxes on multiple homes?
My point? Why do Democrats always go after the orthodontist, electrical contractor, or insurance agency owner, and never the Buffetts, Kerrys, or Gateses? Bill Gates and Warren Buffett will defer more money from the federal Treasury by avoiding inheritance taxes (to channel their profits into their foundations) than all the billions lost this year by keeping tax cuts for small businesses.
Part of the problem is that these new aristocrats aren’t really liberals.
The Holiday Sales Continue
…over at Amazon.
High-Speed Rail
Should China rethink it? Only if they’re smart. Tom Friedman will be very disappointed.
Of course, the more important question is whether or not Congress will cancel the boondoggle before we waste much more money on it.
More On Buffett/Gates
So I was complaining the other day about how Warren Buffett and Bill Gates don’t think were being taxed enough. Peter Foster has the same complaint. Though I’m not sure I’d call Bill Gates a “former capitalist.” It’s not clear to me that he was ever one. Businessmen are not necessarily capitalists (or to be more clear, free marketeers).
Turn Off The Lights In Cancun
The global warming party is over:
Who now remembers Smoot-Hawley, Quemoy and Matsu, and the Teapot Dome? But these were once issues on which the survival of the known world rested. The only global-warming news of this week was the announcement that the House Select Committee on Global Warming would die with the 111th Congress. Mrs. Pelosi established the committee three years ago to beat the eardrums of one and all, a platform for endless argle-bargle about the causes and effects of climate change. The result was the proposed job-killing national energy tax, but with the Republican sweep, there’s no longer an appetite for killing jobs.
Rep. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, the chairman of the doomed committee, organized one final event this week, a splashy daylong exercise in gasbaggery starring the usual suspects assigned to drone on for most of the day about the coming global-warming disasters, the melting of the North Pole and the rising of the seas that would make Denver, Omaha and Kansas City seaside resorts. Wesley Clark was the only former presidential candidate to accept an invitation, and he was a no-show. The star witness of the afternoon session was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an “environmental attorney” who talked about how “clean energy” is nicer than the other kind. Mr. Markey himself, as bored as everyone else, didn’t bother to return after lunch.
The members of the committee can now retire with their scrapbooks of clippings to recall the happy days of hearings about global warming (some of them before “global warming” became “climate change” and “liberals” became “progressives”), about how clean energy could replace smelly oil wells and provide Democrats with the means to enact sweeping climate-change legislation. Who could have foreseen that the only “sweeping” would be the sweeping out of so many Democrats?
Well, actually, absent massive voter fraud, it was pretty much inevitable.
[Afternoon update]
Some interesting climate-related Wikileaks, with a promise of more to come. I wonder how Assange feels about having exposed these corrupt con artists?
Ethanol’s Policy Priviliges
Heading for history’s dustbin? Let’s hope so. Fortunately, all that we need to end them is for Congress to do nothing. Though it would be nice to get rid of the mandates, too. Let the market decide.