…and his fiscal innumeracy. But he supports Barack Obama, so that’s OK.
[Update a while later]
The statistic I would like to see is the amount of tax paid relative to consumption. By that measure, it is possible that Buffett’s tax rate was more than 100 percent.
I do not care if he pays very little tax on saving. I would rather he pay zero tax on saving. His taxes are too high, not too low.
That doesn’t fit the narrative.
I quit reading Paul Krugman long ago, so I hadn’t realized that he was now advocating a war on space. Does he have an exit strategy?
I’ll let Maguire properly lampoon it, but I would note something that people rarely do about a payroll-tax cut:
My impression of the general economic consensus is that hiring people to dig and re-fill holes, or monitor for space aliens, does not provide any more stimulus than any other cash transfer to a person likely to spend it. Handing out money on street corners, the Bernanke helicopter drop, and payroll tax cuts should all be in play.
If a proposed stimulative shovel-ready project adds social value (e.g., a usefual bridge, or a useful bridge repair), then borrow the money for it; if the project adds nothing, it won’t be more stimulative than a cash transfer. Krugman’s belief in the power of make-work and his preference for that over tax cuts, is motivated by somethig other than standard economic textbook theory.
The payroll-tax reduction that we managed to get out of the Democrats was on the employee side (as is fitting with their insistence on demand-side, rather than supply-side economics). It is extra money in the employees’ pockets, which they presumably spend. But it does nothing to ensure that they have jobs. A cut on the employer side, on the other hand, would make it cheaper to hire people. This sort of encapsulates the economic divide between the two parties.
There appears to be a subtext in the piece: cometh the hour, cometh the man. But let us not forget that David Cameron’s first instinct, what he chose to promote to the first order of business in a recalled Parliament, was to blame social media, and moot the prospect of shutting down the country’s telecommunications systems at the first hint of a disturbance. Once again, the symptoms and not the causes are being addressed. This is because addressing causes is unpopular and difficult. It is depressing to note that the only prime minister since the Second World War who has had the honesty to candidly and repeatedly speak the truth about the consequences of our post-war welfare fetish was Margaret Thatcher: She pulled no punches, she did not dress up her sentiments or obscure the harshness of her message to such an extent that it lost its meaning, and she revelled in taking on who she saw as the enemies of liberty and of civilization (the socialists at home, the Soviet Union abroad). The result? The economy rallied and Britain was saved from what looked like terminal decline. Her reward? To be generally loathed for being “harsh,” even by many of those who would broadly agree with her.
Mrs. Thatcher’s great strength was that she did not particularly care about being popular — for which, let us not forget, she was rewarded with three election victories. And taking on the status quo is going to make the government unpopular. But David Cameron is no Mrs. Thatcher. The prime minister is not the man to stand up and say what needs to be said. He is still racked with guilt for his privilege and afflicted by that vacuous and peculiarly British concept of “One Nation” conservatism, which seeks to compromise between liberty and safety, and which has largely accepted the post-war settlement as being the foundation of a “civilized” society, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
Still, we can hope.
Tea Party in Space on Hatewatch? Really?
I think that it’s equally impossible to conceive that Obama didn’t know about Gunwalker. Of course, that’s partly because I agree with some of the commenters — this was never an operation that “went south” (well, it did literally, but not figuratively). It did exactly what it was intended to do all along. What’s amazing is that they thought they could get away with it. But actually, given how supine the gun-hating Obama-loving media has been on the story, they may well have gotten away with it had the Republicans not taken back the House.
Day by Day is having its annual fund raiser. Support alternative comics.
I’m not sure what she’s saying here:
We didn’t put a man on the moon because some company thought they might be able to make a profit doing it. It takes vision to involve the common good of the American people without regard for profit. If you’re charting a course for this country and your big idea is “NO WE CAN’T”, then I don’t want you leading this country.
No, Rachel, we put a man on the moon because we wanted to show that a democratic socialist space program was superior to a totalitarian socialist space program. If we’d done it for profit, it would have taken a lot longer, but we’d still be doing it.
Scaring us with bad science fiction isn’t going to work, either:
Science fiction writers used to focus on the horrors of nuclear war and frightened the willies out of readers for many decades. Public worry much more intense than anything the greens can gin up never got the nuclear disarmament movement over the hump — not because nuclear war isn’t bad, or because people weren’t scared, but because the nuclear disarmament movement’s policy ideas emanated from the same cloud-cuckoo-land that the green fantasies do.
Panic doesn’t turn an unworkable policy agenda into something that people can actually do. It can waste a lot of energy and time and cause otherwise capable people to sink months or years of their lives into leprechaun chases, and it can cause pandering politicians to gesture in the direction of your agenda without ever actually doing anything significant — but that is all. And it is not much.
It is, after all, fiction. Sort of like Al Gore’s book, but more entertaining.
Rick Perry shows Michele Bachmann how it’s done in her birth state.
I haven’t formed much of an opinion of Perry yet, other than that he can’t possibly be worse than Barack Obama. Am I put off by his religiosity? Sure, but that’s something that I’ve gotten used to, and I accept that I’m not going to get a serious presidential candidate in my lifetime who doesn’t at least pretend to be religious (though Barack Obama really pushed the envelope, and only survived the Reverend Wright affair because the press did everything it could to cover for him). Fellow agnostic Roger Simon agrees with me.
More thoughts on the Perry candidacy:
Perry is an exceedingly successful Texas politician. He comes from a place that is self-regarding in the extreme (I speak as a native of Oklahoma) and inward-looking. He has never operated outside its borders, and he may be unaware of its parochial character. If he is, he needs to wake up right away – and Mitt Romney is perfectly situated to give him that wake-up call.
Here is what Perry needs to do. He needs to anticipate the assault.
For example, if Obama’s people play anti-Texas prejudice against him, he should mock their advertisements. Indeed, he might do well to hit them hard the day they play this card – by preparing humorous advertisements ahead of time comparing Texas . . . with Chicago. They could touch on corruption, gangsters, population explosion and population implosion, political practices. And it could all be done with a light touch.
He has some other good advice as well.
Peter Hitchens pulls no punches:
As the polluted flood (it is not a tide; it will not go back down again) of spite, greed and violence washes on to their very doorsteps, well-off and influential Left-wingers at last meet the filthy thing they have created, and which they ignored when it did not affect them personally.
No doubt they will find ways to save themselves. But they will not save the country. Because even now they will not admit that all their ideas are wrong, and that the policies of the past 50 years – the policies they love – have been a terrible mistake. I have heard them in the past few days clinging to their old excuses of non-existent ‘poverty’ and ‘exclusion’.
Unfortunately, we have the same problem in this country. Fortunately, we’re not quite as far gone, at least in many states.
More (depressing) thoughts from Mark Steyn and Charles Crawford.
[Update a while later]
Thoughts on “liberal” psychoses.