Category Archives: Media Criticism

Gillespie Versus Chait, On Deficits

And it’s Nick in a knockout. As always, though, phrases like this seem jarring, and oxymoronic:

What I showed in the post is that in fact federal revenue increased nicely under Bush, despite the tax cuts. Revenues tailed off at the end of his reign of error, because of the recession and the financial crisis (caused largely by idiotic government policies).

Emphasis mine.

How can federal revenue increase when we cut taxes? The answer is that we didn’t cut taxes. We increased taxes. What we cut was the tax rate. This misleading phraseology makes me crazy and if we could get it right, we’d have a strong rhetorical upper hand, but both conservatives and libertarians almost always feed the left with it. As I wrote a while ago:

Both sides of the aisle continually make the mistake — though it’s no mistake on the part of the Democrats — of confusing a tax rate cut with an actual tax cut. Here is a commonsense, as opposed to the Alice-in-wonderland, definition of a real tax cut. It is a reduction in the amount of taxes paid. Conversely, a tax increase is an increase in the amount of taxes paid to — and revenue received by — the government.

That’s it. Almost too simple, isn’t it?

When a politician says that he’s going to either cut or increase your taxes, he is engaging, wittingly or not, in a conceit and a deceit. He says it as though he has the power to do any such thing, when in fact he does not. He has no power except to reduce or increase the rate at which you pay taxes, whether on property, income, or whatever.

Think of it as the difference between a joystick and a mouse. With a computer mouse, you can point directly to the place that you want to be on a screen. With a joystick, you can only control the rate at which you move toward it, and in so doing, the target may move, and it may move faster or in a different direction than you can keep up with using your rate control. Politicians talk about tax cuts as though they have a computer mouse that allows them to pass a law and a specified amount of revenue will roll in, but the reality is that they have a slow joystick, with a nebulous relationship to the eventual goal.

For instance, he can raise your top income tax rate from, say, thirty to ninety percent. Did he increase your taxes by that amount? Only if you’re as stupid as he is. More likely, you’ll just cut back on how much you work, settle for the lower bracket, or do more work off the books, and he’ll end up getting less in taxes from you than before. So did he increase your taxes? Nope.

Similarly, he could cut your rate, and you might be motivated to go out and earn even more, perhaps enough more that you pay more taxes, even at the lower rate. So did he cut your taxes? No. But the wealth of the nation — including your own — was increased.

I also note in that piece the implicit assumption of the statists that all of your wealth belongs to them, and that you should be brimming with gratitude for whatever they allow you to keep, an assumption that some in the UK want to bring to its logical conclusion:

The UK’s tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer.

But of course! Why hasn’t the IRS thought of that?

Anyway, the simple addition of the word “rate” as a modifier of “cuts” in Nick’s sentence renders it non-oxymoronic and sensible, and more care with phrases like this in general would reduce both confusion and obfuscation on this issue by the Chaits of the world.

The Anti-Government Straw Man

We don’t want no government — we want limited government, as the Founders intended, and the Bill of Rights dictates. We want a restoration of the lost 9th and 10th Amendments, and a reining in of the out-of-control interpretation of the Commerce Clause that has served to eviscerate them.

As I’ve noted in the past, when the left has no real arguments against our actual positions, they make up their own for us, and then kick them down. Of course, the headline of my piece from two years ago (which was not mine) wasn’t correct — it was a way to win the election in 2008. This year, not so much…

Good Space Reporting

It’s so rare, I want to applaud it when it occurs. There’s a story at the WaPo that has a good summary of what’s going on in space policy, though I think that the headline is a little understated. It might have been nice to get a little more elaboration on this, though:

The House bill awaiting action would give twice as much money to Russia for transporting astronauts and cargo to the space station as it would give to U.S. companies working to build that capacity.

Insanity. And it doesn’t even mention the fact that this undermines the non-proliferation regime, due to the need to continually waive the requirements for INKSNA (a subject on which I’ll have more tomorrow).

“The President Is Losing It”

I don’t know whether or not this is true, but it certainly wouldn’t shock me if it were.

I disagree that he’s a lock to win in 2012, though. I think the magic is over. The rubes have caught on.

[Sunday morning update]

This post is about Sarah Palin, but I think that this part about the president is right:

Obama would be making a deadly mistake by calling out Sarah Palin for a political cage match. Let me put this bluntly: virtually no one in America gives a damn what Barack Obama says about anything at this point. What could be more predictable, and less interesting, than Obama’s opinion on any given subject? Who wants to contemplate the economic wisdom of a guy who looted the Treasury for a trillion dollars, with less benefit than we could have achieved by stuffing hundred dollar bills into random cereal boxes? Who’s excited to hear about the next plan to convert taxpayer dollars into Democrat campaign funds? Who’s hungry for another hour of tedious excuses about permanently broken markets and the titanic dead hand of George W. Bush? Who wants a lecture on ethical business practices from the titular head of the party that gave us Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters? What use is another hollow foreign-policy speech from a man who sees no global adversary to rival the menace of Arizona? Even Obama’s supporters don’t hear anything he says any more. There’s nothing left to hear.

Unfortunately, speechifying on his radical agenda is all he’s ever had. As I said, the rubes have caught on. There aren’t enough marks left, any more.

Home Depot

This makes me glad that I’m a regular customer:

On CNBC, the founder of Home Depot blasted Barack Obama and his administration as a collection of tenured dilettantes who have never had to meet a payroll in their lives. Greg Hengler offers a couple of juicy excerpts from his appearance, especially when Marcus starts “apologizing” for having created over 300,000 jobs through the kind of entrepreneurship that the current White House wants to discourage.

I don’t think that Obama was tenured, though. And I hope he’ll be out of a job himself in a couple years.

The Tea Parties

…have already won:

What debuted in nationwide protests on April 15, 2009, has taken less than 18 months to become the current driving force in American politics. The Tea Party insurgency will not only cost Democrats dozens of seats in Congress, and likely their majority — it will define the coming GOP presidential nominating process, determine the direction of the GOP for years to come and threaten any remaining plans Obama has for sweeping reforms of education, energy policy or our immigration system.

And it’s driving the establishment, in both parties (e.g., Karl Rove), crazy. So much for Queen Nancy’s “astroturf.” She’s about to be dethroned.