Stop favoring speculators and investors over them.
That applies to both parties. The Republicans could make this an electorally popular strategy, but too many of their donors would object.
I would note, though, that if you’re going to tax capital gains more, you need to provide a way to factor out inflation, because a devaluation of the currency doesn’t provide a true capital “gain.”
Notes from a climate-change “denier”:
Gradually I have found myself more impressed with the arguments of the climate change skeptics–the reviled “deniers”–than with the Michael Mann school of hockey stickology or the IPCC striptease in which it discards its pretences to “settled science” a glove at a time without ever getting down to bare truth.
…In my own field, anthropology, I have lived through the replacement of “consensus” on the idea that the makers of the so-called Clovis spear points, which go back 13,500 years, were the first Native Americans. The “Clovis First” theory always had doubters but it dominated from the 1930s until 1999, when archaeologists in large numbers accepted the evidence of older populations. Likewise, there was a long-established consensus that Neanderthal and modern Homo Sapiens did not successfully interbreed–though here too there were always some dissenters. We now know for a certainty (based on the successful sequencing of the Neanderthal genome) that our species did indeed mix, and modern Europeans carry a percent or two of Neanderthal genes.
In time, scientific controversies get resolved, often by the emergence of new kinds of evidence that no one originally imagined. Views that are maintained, to some degree, by a wall of artificial “consensus” die hard. That, of course, was one of the lessons of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which inaugurated the long vogue for the word “paradigm” to describe a broadly accepted theory. Kuhn’s work has often served as a warrant for those who see science as a social project amenable to political manipulation rather than an intellectual endeavor with strict standards of evidence and built-in mechanisms for correcting mistakes.
Thus when the “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) folks insist that they command a “consensus” of climate scientists, they fully understand that they are engaged in a political act. They intend to summon the social and political dynamics that will create a “consensus,” by defining the skeptics as a disreputable minority that need not even be counted. It is a big gamble since a substantial number of the skeptics are themselves well-established and highly respected scientists, such as MIT’s Richard Lindzen, Princeton’s Will Happer, and Institute of Advanced Studies’ Freeman Dyson. But conjuring a new “paradigm” out of highly ambiguous data run through simulation computer models is tricky business and isn’t likely to produce a “consensus” all on its own.
No, it always needs help from demagogues with an agenda.
Usually, we have to play “Guess that party!” In the case of the Kansas City shooter, we get to play “Guess his motive!”
Police would link at least 12 such attacks to the same .380-caliber weapon before they ultimately arrested 27-year-old Mohammed Pedro Whitaker. On Thursday, they swarmed his home in the south Kansas City suburb of Grandview, where a tributary of highways converge and where many of the attacks had happened.
In Whitaker’s home, police said, they found a .380-caliber handgun. After weeks of fear, they told the press they had their man, and not longer after, Whitaker was charged with 18 felonies. (It’s not clear if Whitaker, who has not entered a plea, has a lawyer, and he is being held in lieu of $1-million bond.)
No motive has been publicized, and police declined to speculate.
Emphasis added. I’m sure they decline to speculate, but the rest of us are under no politically correct strictures to do so.
I wonder if that’s the name on his birth certificate? Am I allowed to ask questions like that?
…a lot more often than we’ve previously believed. I’m not sure, but I think that one of the reasons Ed Lu wrote the foreword to my book is that he shares my concern that our risk aversion will prevent us from mitigating the real risks.
Some history lessons.
And Putin isn’t a genius. He just looks like one in comparison to the fools Obama and Kerry.
On a day that over a dozen sherpas were lost in an avalanche, thoughts from Keith Cowing on the parallels between Everest expeditions and space exploration. I discuss this in the book.
It’s growing at an alarming rate.
Damn you, global warming. DAMN YOU!
Judith Curry disagrees with Kerry Emanuel on now to evaluate climate risk.
The interview is available on Youtube now.
May have finally been found:
“The David Fish email proves the IRS originated and fed to Senate Democrats the idea of threatening conservatives with criminal prosecution for engaging in political speech – specifically with an eye towards the 2014 cycle. It’s the strongest proof yet that there should indeed be criminal prosecutions, not of conservatives but of the IRS bureaucrats who conspired to suppress them,” said Phil Kerpen, the president of American Commitment and one who has followed this issue closely since it first become public knowledge.
Interestingly, sources close to the House Committee on Ways and Means, one of the congressional panels looking into the issue, is not at all certain the document containing the Fish email was given to the panel subsequent to a rather broad, comprehensive subpoena of the IRS.
There is also this message from Lerner, also made public as a result of the Judicial Watch FOIA. In it she writes, “As I mentioned yesterday – there are several groups of folks from the FEC world that are pushing tax fraud prosecution for c4s who report that are not conducting political activity when they are (or these folks think they are). One is my ex-boss Larry Noble (former General Counsel at the FEC), who is now president of Americans for Campaign Reform. This is their latest push to shut these down. One IRS prosecution would make an impact and they wouldn’t fell so comfortable doing the stuff. … So don’t be fooled about how this is being articulated – it is ALL about 501(c)(4) orgs and political activity.”
Gee, what does this remind me of? Oh, that’s right:
Al Armendariz, the EPA administrator in the Region 6 Dallas office, made the remarks at a local Texas government meeting in 2010. He relayed to the audience what he described as a “crude” analogy he once told his staff about his “philosophy of enforcement.”
“It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean,” he said. “They’d go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they’d crucify them.
“And then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years,” he said.
Armendariz went on to say that “you make examples out of people who are in this case not complying with the law … and you hit them as hard as you can” — to act as a “deterrent” to others.
And in the IRS case, Catherine Engelbrecht was the designated crucifixee.
These totalitarians should not be allowed anywhere near the reins of power.
John Hinderaker has been looking at the documents, too:
…the emails are heavily redacted. Almost all of the redactions cite exemption b5, which is very general; it covers any document or portion of a document that would not have to be produced in a civil action. Actually, if documents fall within the scope of a Rule 34 request, the circumstances under which they do not need to be produced are quite narrow. While it is impossible to judge the appropriateness of a redaction without knowing what has been blacked out, there are a number of instances where it is hard to believe that any normally recognized privilege would apply.
Given what we’ve seen already, imagine what they’re still trying to hide. It’s hard to imagine all this inter-agency coordination without White House involvement. I’ll bet that it’s tied to the campaign, too.
[Update a few minutes later]
The IRS behavior has clearly become more sinister:
Yesterday was a significant day in the IRS abuse scandal. The scandal evolved from being about pesky delays in IRS exemption applications to a government conniving with outside interests to put political opponents in prison.
This is not America.
[Friday-morning update]
“In short, it was a politically motivated witch hunt.”
[Bumped]