Wacko Bird Bruce Bartlett thinks Kavanaugh wasn't angry enough

For some unknown reason The American Conservative decided to remind us today about the crack-up of Bruce Bartlett

They reran his 2012 piece detailing his several intellectual crises, in which the libertarian finally gave up and became the liberal, although he denies it.

Nostalgia on the editors part, no doubt, for wound-licking in defeat.

Bruce Bartlett goes off his meds again

Here:

[T]he system is out of balance, creating gridlock even as the public cries out for action on serious problems such as our deteriorating public infrastructure, epitomized by that in Flint, Michigan. ... The government was shut down, increases in the debt limit are constantly at risk, nominations to even the most minor administration positions are blocked and, now, the president has been denied the opportunity, which is his right under the Constitution, to name a new justice to the Supreme Court.

Let's see.

Incompetent Democrats failed to treat the water of the Flint River properly before tapping it, ruining Flint's infrastructure.

Republicans gained seats after the government shutdown. Maybe they should do it more often.

Republicans subsequently extended the debt limit until after Mr Teflon is gone so as not to interfere with the president's many golf outings and vacations.

The president still can name whoever he wants to whatever he wants.

Meanwhile the public cries out for Donald Trump, not action.

Ronald Reagan was a moderate and a demagogue

According to moderate Bruce Bartlett, here, who voted for Obama at least once:

"Although the far right’s mythology paints the Reagan years as the triumph of their ideas, the truth is that he governed very much in the moderate tradition of postwar Republican presidents. Reagan raised taxes 11 times, gave amnesty to illegal aliens, pulled American troops out of the Middle East, supported environmental regulations, raised the debt limit and appointed many moderates to key positions, including on the Supreme Court. But he skillfully kept his right flank protected by using thundering conservative rhetoric, even as he violated his own stated principles on a regular basis."

Rush Limbaugh Repeats The Rich Man's Lies: Middle Class Has "Bulk Of The Money"

Here:

Where this is all going to end up, I'm pretty sure -- we'll see if I'm right; won't be too long, maximum next year sometime, maybe two years -- where this is all going to end up is that the middle class is going to get soaked.  The middle class is going to see their taxes go up, and the reason is, that's where the bulk of the money is. 

You could confiscate all the money the middle class has and run the government for quite a while.  Much longer than if you confiscate all the money the rich have.  There's a reason why the rich are called the top 2%.  There aren't very many of them, folks.  They're only the top two, the top 1%.  And the idea that 98% of the country is not going to have a tax increase under this president is absurd.  Everybody is going to see a tax increase under this president, because his objective is to shrink the private sector and expand the government so that the government becomes the primary source of prosperity and benefits for the vast majority of people.

In 2011, the poorest Americans, those making between $0 and $20K, had total net compensation of $501 billion in the aggregate. The so-called middle class, those making between $20K and $75K per year where net compensation aggregates every $5K up the income ladder constitute piles of cash in excess of $200 billion each, had total compensation of $2.9 trillion in 2011.

The income tranches of the middle are what greedy liberal tax-farmers focus on, as do disingenous rich people, because they stick out like a sore thumb, representing as they do the largest individual tranches for ordinary income purposes and constituting an unbroken line of 11 of them just begging to be ogled. See them here for yourself. You will not find any tranches among the so-called rich in excess of $200 billion. But they make a lot of money nevertheless.

Add it all up and everybody making beyond $75K per year in 2011, which includes the upper middle class, if you piled all their net compensation for Social Security purposes together, would total another $2.8 trillion, just shy of the middle's $2.9 trillion.

If you think this proves Rush's point, you would be wrong. Such net compensation isn't all there is to it, not by a long shot. It's much, much more complicated, and obscure, than that. And that's the way rich people like it. If you can't see their income you can't know how rich they are and they can thus escape becoming a target. That's why so many rich people, and their advocates like Bruce Bartlett who want to tax the middle class and deflect taxes from themselves, insist so strongly that they are middle class just like you.

While net compensation totaled about $6.2 trillion in 2011, personal income was more than twice that. The Bureau of Economic analysis, here, reports that personal income was $12.95 trillion in 2011.

People like Jeffrey Immelt, Jamie Dimon, Mitt Romney, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates receive tons of income from stocks, bonds, capital gains, dividends, rents, royalties, et cetera et cetera et cetera, adding at least another $6.75 trillion to that $6.2 trillion in net compensation for Social Security purposes in 2011.

To be sure, lots of people who aren't the very rich receive such income, too, but there is no way on God's green earth that there are enough of them in the so-called middle receiving it to say that the bulk of the money is in the middle. The middle class would like to be receiving the bulk of its income as unearned income like the investor class does, but it doesn't for the most part. It works for its money (unless you're a government employee).

No matter how much the boob with the microphone and the subscription to The Wall Street Journal tells you otherwise, the bulk of the money is not in the middle, most people know it, and that's why Obama is succeeding with his class warfare rhetoric. He has picked his targets, personalized them, polarized them and frozen them, and all the rich can do, because there aren't enough of them, is surrender (Warren Buffett), create diversions (the home mortgage interest deduction flap) or tell lies (The Wall Street Journal).

It really is quite pathetic that we do this to rich people in America and pat ourselves on the back for it. It's actually disgraceful in a country which claims to believe in equal treatment under the law that a wealthier earner is discriminated against because we say he must pay taxes at a higher percentage rate on his ordinary income than a poorer earner must pay. And we feel guilty enough about it that we then turn around and create exceptions to these unjust tax rules when taxing income which is not ordinary. Is it any wonder then that more than half of the personal income in the country has fled for refuge to be classified as other than ordinary? The founders thought a tax was equal only if everyone in the country paid the same amount. This consensus necessarily kept federal taxation low and infrequent because the great masses of people could not afford to pay very much.

The least we could do in homage to that old idea of America would be to tax everyone's income in the country in similar fashion, at one low rate, making no distinctions between the income from a job and the income from an investment. Of course, that would mean a pretty low rate compared to what's exacted today, and would necessitate some pretty drastic cuts to spending. A 10% tax on the personal income of the country of $13 trillion in 2011 would have yielded only $1.3 trillion in revenues, far short of the $3.8 trillion or so we spent.

And that, as we on the right keep saying, is where the real problem lies. Unless we slay the spending monster, there will never be taxation equality in America.

Liberals Hate Middle Class: Bruce Bartlett Attacks The Mortgage Interest Deduction

Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction has become something of a fetish for liberals and libertarians in America. The enthusiasm for eliminating the deduction suggests a hatred for bourgeois values.

Liberals use it like a shield to obscure the hidden privileges they enjoy under the tax code, privileges which the vast lumpen proletariat is too dumb to understand. Extracting more revenue from their lessers so that they have more money to play with is the goal of liberals, whose constant refrain is "the money is in the middle." Actually, the money escaping taxation in America is at the top, where nearly $2 trillion of net compensation escapes Social Security taxation, amounting to a tax loss to the feds of about $300 billion annually.

Libertarians use elimination of the mortgage interest deduction more actively. To them it is like a club which they can use as a weapon to drive people from their homes in their effort to turn workers into interchangeable parts, which they can then move around wherever they need them and thus drive down the cost of their labor. If you are unemployed for a very long time because you won't move from your home, to a libertarian like a John Tamny or a Megan McArdle at The Atlantic, you are nothing but a depreciating asset, as she has put it.

Just look how Bruce Bartlett attacks the mortgage interest deduction here, misrepresenting its place not simply by singling it out but also by failing to place it within the spectrum of tax loss expenditures generally:

"The problem, insofar as tax reform is concerned, is that the mortgage interest deduction and that for property taxes reduce federal revenues by $100 billion per year."

If only that were an impressive number compared to the usual categories of tax loss expenditures.

The Joint Committee on Taxation, for example, puts the combined tax loss from deductions for health-related and cafeteria plans at $140 billion.

Tax loss from exclusion of retirement-related benefits comes to $160 billion when you include Social Security and Railroad retirement benefits, capital gains excluded at death, and pension and 401k plan contributions.

The last two together alone come to $91 billion.

Coincidently, reduced rates of tax on capital gains and dividends as a category by itself means a tax loss of nearly $91 billion, more than the mortgage interest deduction at $78 billion. 

The rich may benefit a lot from the tax perspective from the mortgage interest deduction, but they benefit more than anyone from reduced rates of tax on capital gains, and Bruce Bartlett knows it:

For most people, income is simple: it means wages or perhaps a pension or Social Security benefits. Income from capital – dividends, interest, rent and capital gains – seldom enters into the calculation. The vast bulk of such income is earned by the ultrawealthy, like Mr. Romney.

Bruce Bartlett has made it a regular habit to sniff at the proposals of Republicans, who recently restored the mortgage interest deduction plank in their platform, the real inspiration for his screed.

In this he reminds me of no one so much as Katie Couric when she went nosing around the "unwashed middle" before her ilk got hosed off in the November 2010 elections. But liberals still have a certain air about them.

I think they need another bath.

The Growth In Income Inequality Wasn't A Bug, It Was A Feature Invented By Liberalism

If you generally tax some income at one rate and other income at a lower one, what do you think would happen over a long period of time?

Obviously you would see income shift to the category taxed at the lower rate, to the extent that this is possible for those earning it.

This is what has happened with income from capital gains, the tax rate on which has been much lower by law than the tax rates paid on ordinary income.

That's the long-term lesson from the data, the salience of which seems to elude Bruce Bartlett writing for The New York Times:

For most people, income is simple: it means wages or perhaps a pension or Social Security benefits. Income from capital – dividends, interest, rent and capital gains – seldom enters into the calculation. The vast bulk of such income is earned by the ultrawealthy, like Mr. Romney.

According to the Tax Policy Center, in 2011 those in the middle of income distribution got about 70 percent of their income from labor and only about 3 percent from capital. By contrast, those in the top 1 percent of income distribution got 30 percent of their income from labor and 35 percent from capital.

The disparity is even more pronounced when one looks at the distribution of aggregate capital income. The total came to $1.1 trillion last year. Of this, 86 percent was earned by those in the top 20 percent of households, ranked by income. But this figure is misleading, because within the top quintile, the vast bulk of capital income went only to those at the very top. ...

[T]he tax code makes a sharp distinction between income from labor and income from capital. Wages are fully taxed at rates as high as 35 percent by the income tax, plus taxes for Social Security and Medicare. In contrast, realized capital gains and dividends on corporate stock are taxed at a maximum rate of 15 percent and do not bear any taxes for Social Security or Medicare.

Income inequality in America has grown precisely for this reason, and it is an artifact of progressivism, and of liberalism generally.

The contemporary distinction between capital gains and ordinary gains got much of its impetus under FDR, when the modern tax code differentiated for the first time between capital gains held for 1, 2, 5 and 10 years, exempting from taxation 20 percent of gains, 40 percent, 60 percent and 70 percent, for the respective holding periods. Considering how steep and confiscatory marginal tax rates became after 1916, the provisions under FDR look like a bone thrown to the rich. What these reforms did, however, was cement the trend toward tax avoidance for the rich which had been introduced earlier.

Originally capital gains had been taxed as ordinary income up to a rate of 7 percent, which was the top marginal income tax rate for the first three years of the modern income tax. But as marginal tax rates on ordinary income skyrocketed after 1916, the low 7 percent capital gains rate continued to apply until 1921, after which the rate was 12.5 percent, regardless of holding period and despite the fact that marginal income tax rates soared to 63 percent and higher as the years marched on.

So from the very beginning the rich were given their privileges in tax avoidance by making distinctions between income while the broad mass of the people got soaked with income taxes on their ordinary income. The steeply progressive rates made it appear that the rich were paying their fair share when in effect they had recourse to a back door to ameliorate their condition through the capital gains code provisions. Liberalism was nothing if not hypocritical. 

If our tax policy goal today is to reduce income inequality, as seems to be the prevailing notion among liberal and liberal-leaning commentators, we ought to reconsider that history and appreciate better how tax policy is often just pushing on a string. To a conservative what leaps to mind is making taxes on ordinary income look more like taxes on capital gains income by flattening rates, not the other way around, raising capital gains rates to look more like progressive income tax rates, and broadening the base up the scale by capturing all income of all kinds for Social Security and Medicare before considering broadening the base down the scale by abolishing tax loss expenditures like the mortgage interest deduction. 

Income inequality begins with treating some forms of income differently than others for tax purposes. There may be important social and economic reasons for doing so, such as promoting family formation or capital investment, but it should never be forgotten that you will immediately be introducing inequality into the equation when you do. How you compensate for that is what matters in approximating a just society. 

Bruce Bartlett is so full of it: "More than 90 percent put themselves squarely in the middle"

No they don't. Bruce Bartlett has no scruples left (link):

Social class also involves self-identification. According to the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago, which has been asking people what social class they belong to since 1972, more than 90 percent of Americans put themselves squarely in the middle – belonging either to the working class or the middle class.


This so broadly defines the middle it makes the definition meaningless.

The chief marker of membership in the middle class is homeownership, which the one third of Americans who are renters in 35 percent of the occupied dwellings in the US cannot claim, and they don't, despite what Bruce Bartlett says. They know they are working class, and they admit it.

About equal numbers have said historically that they are either working class or middle class, 45 percent each, by Bartlett's own admission.

Here's his table of the results of the latest self-identification of social class by Americans, which shows an increase in the percentage of Americans self-identifying in 2010 as working class and a more substantial decrease in the percentage of those self-identifying as middle class, just what you would expect during the collapse of the housing bubble and the decline in homeownership:

Even Bruce Bartlett Admits We're in a Depression

Here, where the 1930s is the interpretive lens through which he seems to see everything, including the prospect of fiscal and monetary tightening. Evidently he prefers a looser sphincter.

Is this former Republican sleeping with Paul Krugman?

The Current Tax Code is Already Unseemly and Socialist

Because of the way it massively extracts taxes from the top 50 percent of earners and redistributes the benefits to every class of people, to be sure, but disproportionately to the poorest who pay nothing in federal taxes. They number in excess of 63 million tax filers.

So why can't Bruce Bartlett, here, just say that?

"Perhaps the right and left can at least agree that it is unseemly for those in the top 1 percent of income distribution, with incomes at least 10 times the median income, to pay no federal income taxes. It’s not socialism to ask them to pay something."


"Unseemly"? We're talking 24,000 filers in the top 1 percent. Why isn't it unseemly, and in fact a scandal, that over 5 times as many people in the lowest two quintiles pay no federal income taxes than in the highest three quintiles?

Bartlett well knows that the rich who pay no federal taxes may in fact pay capital gains taxes, and may also be massively financing America's municipalities in the bond market to escape federal taxes, just as he knows the poor who work pay Social Security taxes just like everyone else who works.

That's the problem with the tax code. It's balkanized and hyphenated, just like America, and when only looking at one part of it and from that perspective, it only provokes judgments as distorted as the code itself.

A tax code which taxed all income in all forms and at all levels without exception and at one low rate would go a long way to repairing the divisions in this country.

Unfortunately we don't have very many people in leadership advocating for this.

From the article:

You Can Always Tell A Harvard Man, But You Can't Tell Him Much

Writing for The Providence Journal, Bruce Bartlett of Reagan administration fame relates an illuminating episode for the character of President George W. Bush, who intended from the beginning that his tax cuts sop up the Clinton surplus:

One morning in 2001, one of President Bush’s most senior economic advisers walked into the Oval Office for a meeting with the president. The day before, the adviser had learned that the president had decided to send out tax-rebate checks to stimulate the faltering economy. Concerned about deficits and the dubious stimulatory effect of such rebates, he had called the president’s chief of staff, Andy Card, to ask for the audience, and the meeting had been set.

As the man took his seat in the wing chair next to the president’s desk, he began to explain his problem with the president’s decision. The fact of the matter was that in this area of policy, this adviser was one of the experts, really top-drawer, and had been instrumental in devising some of the very language now used to discuss these concepts. He was convinced, he told Bush, that the president’s position would soon enough be seen as "bad policy." This, it seems, was the wrong thing to say to the president.

According to senior administration officials who learned of the encounter soon after it happened, President Bush looked at the man. "I don’t ever want to hear you use those words in my presence again," he said. "What words, Mr. President?"

"Bad policy," President Bush said. "If I decide to do it, by definition it’s good policy. I thought you got that." The adviser was dismissed. The meeting was over.

The rest should not be missed, here.