Is the Left trying to stigmatize them like sex offenders?
I think that turnabout is entirely fair play in this case.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Starbucks
Is it a cult?
“Fixing the debt” is hardly an uncontroversial imperative. There are, for example, economists who object to the “austerity” it requires. (Schultz could order baristas to write “F–k Krugman” on their cups–now that might have some impact.) There are also activists on both sides who argue, with varying degrees of sincerity, that going over the “fiscal cliff”– the “time-sensitive” part Schultz mentions– is better than “coming together” on one of the deals that’s being talked about. There are even those who note that going over the cliff is a way to “fix the debt,” since the “cliff” is made up of tax increases and spending cuts.
I’m not saying what Schultz did is or should be illegal, certainly not in a Citizen’s United world. If he wants to run a hybrid coffee-shop-political-organization, that’s fine with me. But maybe he should have made that clear to his workers when they signed up.
Why bother? What “right thinking” person would disagree?
The Battle Of The Narrative
How private citizens can fight ObamaCare:
…we should not let the government escape responsibility for problems they’ve created. This will becoming increasingly important as more ObamaCare problems emerge, such as patients being denied treatments by government-spawned “Accountable Care Organizations” (ACOs) or by government bureaucracies such as the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) and the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF).
If we let the government shift responsibility for ObamaCare’s problems onto the residual private sector, those problems will eventually be used to justify a government-run “single payer” system. On the other hand, if Americans hold the government appropriately responsible, we stand a chance at adopting genuine free-market health reforms.
Of course, single payer was always the goal for these “liberal” fascists. It’s the usual drill of the Left; pass a law that effs things up, blame the eff up on “deregulation,” and then pass more laws to “fix” it (Dodd-Frank being an excellent example of the genre). Don’t let them get away with it.
Maria Bartiromo
…commits a terrible act of real journalism, to much-deserved cheers.
It’s not about revenues. It’s about class warfare and Marxism.
Newtown
Some reflections:
One Rhode Island professor issued a call — later deleted — for NRA head Wayne LaPierre’s “head on a stick.” People like author Joyce Carol Oates and actress Marg Helgenberger wished for NRA members to be shot. So did Texas Democratic Party official John Cobarruvias, who also called the NRA a “terrorist organization,” and Texas Republican congressman Louis Gohmert a “terror baby.”
Nor were reporters, who are supposed to be neutral, much better. As The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg commented, “Reporters on my Twitter feed seem to hate the NRA more than anything else, ever. ”
Calling people murderers and wishing them to be shot sits oddly with claims to be against violence. The NRA — like the ACLU, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers or Planned Parenthood — exists to advocate policies its members want. It’s free speech. The group-hate directed at the NRA is ugly and says ugly things about those consumed by it.
As with most things that Leftists call people, when they call them “haters,” it’s projection.
The Community Reinvestment Act
Yes, Virginia, it did cause the housing and financial crisis. Unfortunately for the Leftist narrative that it was caused by “deregulation during the Bush era.”
In a just world people like Jamie Gorelick and Franklin Raines would be in jail.
Time For Some Common-Sense Publishing Controls
My thoughts on the morons in the media and politicians who don’t understand the Second Amendment, over at PJMedia.
Taxpayers Aren’t Stationary Targets
The lesson of Gérard Depardieu:
Economists as far back at J. B. Say and Gustave de Molinari in the 19th century understood this. As Molinari wrote in his 1899 book, The Society of To-morrow, “The laws of fiscal equilibrium set a strict limit to the degree within which it is possible to impose new taxes, or to increase the rates of those already in force. The relative productivity of taxes soon shows when this point has been overstepped, for then returns not only cease to rise, but immediately begin to fall.”
Things can work in the other direction too. Other things being equal, cutting tax rates can prompt revenues to rise. This is not to say rising revenue is a good thing. As Milton Friedman once said, if a tax-rate cut brings in more revenue, the rates weren’t cut enough. Hear, hear!
Nevertheless, revenues can increase after a rate cut. Case in point: the rate cuts of 2001 and 2003, the so-called Bush tax cuts, which President Obama (until yesterday) had been hoping would expire for the top 2 percent of earners. According to the Congressional Budget Office, revenues increased from $1.9 billion in 2003—when all the cuts kicked in—to $2.3 billion in 2008 (in constant 2005 dollars). At that point the Great Recession hit and of course revenues then fell. Tax revenues always fall in a recession because when people lose their jobs they stop paying the income tax. Companies also pay less as economic activity slows down. When would-be tax raisers today complain that revenues are a smaller percentage of GDP than in previous years, that is the reason. It’s not that the tax rates are too low.
It’s not about revenue. It’s about “fairness.” That is, it’s ultimately about “need” and “ability,” i.e., Marxism.
Related: “The truth is, politicians are telling lies.”
This is not an ideological argument about the moral advantages of a smaller state: it is simple economic necessity. As the man said, there’s no money left. And the only ways that anybody can think of for the state to get more of it are either futile (taxing the “rich”) or destructive of any possibility of recovery (more borrowing). What began as a banking collapse has turned into a crisis of democratic politics. Is this what we have to look forward to? The process of campaigning and voting will be an irrelevance: all parties will tell pretty much the same lies. Whichever one is marginally more credible than the others will gain power (probably in coalition with another bunch of liars), and then have to do what needs to be done in whatever desperate, underhand ways it can devise. Nobody will feel that he got what he voted for, because what he voted for was impossible.
And low-information voters believe them, which is how Obama and other Democrats got reelected. But the piper will be paid. As Glenn says:
Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debt that can’t be repaid, won’t be. Promises that can’t be kept, won’t be.
But as with any bubble, the issue isn’t if, but when.
Totalitarianism And Mass Murder
Want to know how it happens? It starts like this:
“I have always been opposed to the death penalty in all cases…”
“Even mass murderers [like Breivik] should not be executed, in my opinion.”
“GW deniers fall into a completely different category from Behring Breivik. They are already causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of future people. We could be speaking of billions, but I am making a conservative estimate.”
Once one is declared an enemy of the people, all becomes possible.
The “Assault” On Logic And Facts
…by the Left and the media (but I repeat myself) continues.