Over three months after Hurricane Maria, electricity won't be restored to all of Puerto Rico until May 2018

Way to go, Brownie!

Story here.

How to tax the rich and only the rich as originally intended in 1913, and solve a lot of problems

In 1913 when the average Joe made about $800 a year, the first income tax under the 16th Amendment didn't worry him because he didn't pay it and probably thought he never would. The personal exemption for a married couple in the original tax code was $4,000.

Today that $4,000 personal exemption adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index amounts to about $100,000.

Even in 2016 that kind of income is made by fewer than 10% of individual wage earners. Under the original income tax of 1913, 90% today wouldn't have to worry about paying the dreaded income tax either.

Is there a way to return to this golden age of taxation?

I'm here to tell you that I think so, and I say that as a conservative. We could easily simplify the tax code by returning to the status quo which prevailed before the First World War, pay all the bills, abolish Social Security and Medicare taxes, the corporate income tax and all the other little irritating taxes and reduce income inequality in the process. We'd also save a lot of time and money wasted in complying with the tax code's myriad baroque features.

Here's the math.

In 2016 according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis personal income in the United States was $15.9287 trillion.

Social Security's Office of the Chief Actuary tells us that in 2016 there were 163.5 million individual wage earners. If you exempt the first $100,000 of everybody's individual wage income in 2016, including from the rich, you're talking about $6.213 trillion of individual wage income which would be tax-free.

That leaves $9.7157 trillion of personal income left in 2016 to tax, to pay all the bills.

According to The Tax Policy Center, the bills were the total estimated federal outlays of $3.9513 trillion in 2016.

So, the tax is 40.67% (9.7157 X .4067 = 3.9513) on all personal income in excess of $100,000 a year, no itemized deductions, no credits of any kind (this is where they all came from in the first place, because the rich pissed, moaned and complained and bribed the politicians to carve out privileges for them to escape paying).

The rich, all 14.9 million of them, will still have $7.2544 trillion to play with ($1.49 trillion from their first $100K tax-free, just like everybody else, and $5.7644 trillion left over after taxes from the income in excess of $100K).

The rest of us, 148.6 million, won't pay any federal income tax, Social Security or Medicare tax, gasoline tax, or any other kind of federal tax on our $4.723 trillion. The only taxes we'll have to pay will be State and Local Income Taxes, property taxes, sales taxes and the like. Of course rich people will have to pay those too, but that's a problem for all of us and for a different level of politics.

I summarize:

$15.9287 trillion personal income 2016 (BEA)

-  3.9513 trillion federal taxes, all from those making $100,000+ per year @40.67%

-  7.2544 trillion left over for the 14.9 million making $100,000+ per year (top 10%)

-  4.7230 trillion left over for the 148.6 million making less than $100,000 per year (bottom 90%)

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And the budget balances.   

A. Barton Hinkle shows once again that libertarianism is of the left, not the right

Here:

[B]oth parties have grown more extreme in recent years. Congressional Republicans certainly have. Congressional Democrats tend to be more moderate, relatively speaking.

The perception that the Democrats haven't shifted radically left in recent years is due to libertarianism agreeing with what that shift represents more than disagreeing with it. And frankly, the evidence A. Barton Hinkle cites shows how the whole country has indeed shifted left. Not completely, obviously, but shift left it has, and that libertarians can't see that tells you more about libertarianism than libertarianism tells you about libertarianism.

It's not that Republicans have become more extreme. It's that the country's shift to the left has isolated them. And Democrat positions are only "moderate" in the sense that they are now more widely shared. It's the growing isolation of Republican conservatism in the face of these which only makes it seem extreme. It would be more accurate to say that Republican positions have become anachronistic, not extreme.

Hence much of the recent evidence cited by Hinkle which demonstrates where Americans are united today is of the "shift-left" variety, including:

62% now believe in gay marriage when for generations the vast majority of Americans did not, and for millennia human beings did not, and anti-sodomy laws still dotted the land up to 2003;

73% now favor utopian pipe dreams of "alternative energy" when it was coal, oil and nuclear which made America the industrial powerhouse of the world;

73% now unsurprisingly favor euthanasia just 44 years after the Supreme Court made it legal to murder unborn children;

83% favor "medical marijuana" despite the evidence of its risks for human health and well-being;

85% want to let the Dreamers stay;

90% favor universal background checks for weapons purchases;

83% disavow "extremist bigotry" under the influence of multiculturalist indoctrination in American public schools.

And libertarians are pretty much on board with these things, along with most Democrats. That's why all the action is in the Republican Party. The war for its soul continues to animate the present time. The Democrat soul already belongs to the devil.  

German AfD comes in a strong third, Social Democrats crash, Merkel forced to form coalition with FDP and Greens

The UK Telegraph reports here:

The SPD’s decision to return to opposition has limited her options, with a three-way coalition with the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Greens the only obvious option.

However, the FDP is unlikely to countenance the EU reform objectives of France's Macron, and the Greens want to shut down the coal plants Merkel relies on after she shut down the nuclear plants in the wake of Fukushima, which the FDP opposes, making life very difficult indeed for Frau Merkel.

Meanwhile the anti-Islamist AfD is set to take seats in the parliament, the first time the right has been represented there since 1961.

Striking electrical workers suspected in cable vandalism leading to 80,000 New Yorkers losing cable, internet and phone

I felt a great disturbance in The Farce.

From the story here:

Spectrum crews spent the day fixing cables on Henry and Sackett Streets, blaming vandalism and pointing to the rise in outages since its electric workers went on strike. ... Over the summer, charges were dropped against a striking worker blamed in similar sabotage pending further investigation.

The price of the latest continuing resolution will probably be a big tax increase

The last time we had a really big continuing resolution, defying "regular order", the Republicans gave away the store in exchange for lifting the export ban on oil.

Exports began in early 2016. The price of West Texas Intermediate crude has actually risen 51.6% since then, from an average of 31.68 in January 2016 to 48.04 in August 2017.

Larry Kudlow thinks Trump is a genius for clearing the deck with the debt ceiling, hurricane emergency funding, continuing resolution deal with the Democrats because now Congress can finally get down to tax reform and pass it before the end of the year.

Watch your wallets, I say. 

Meanwhile, we get "broken window fallacy" nonsense from The New York Times about Hurricane Harvey

Destroy the previous products of GDP which produced GDP of their own, and presto! More GDP!

Might as well just print the stuff on steroids and spend it.

About 21% of taxpayer money and borrowings is already misallocated to expenditure by the federal government. Some of that is absolutely necessary, but even that is not spent well.

Hurricanes aren't called disasters for nothing.

Here:

Ellen Zentner, chief United States economist at Morgan Stanley, said that although Hurricane Harvey’s impact on national gross domestic product in the third quarter might be fairly neutral, “the lagged effects of rebuilding homes and replacing motor vehicles can lost longer,” providing a lift to gross domestic product in the fourth quarter and beyond.

On the other hand, an extended rise in gasoline prices could have a more immediate effect. Each 10-cent rise in the price of gasoline is equivalent to a $10 billion tax on consumers, Ms. Zentner said, so “should higher prices be sustained, it would rob other categories of spending as dollars are diverted to filling tanks.” ...

The economic impact of the storm will not be clear with any degree of accuracy for a while. But given Houston’s commercial importance — and its perch along a well-trod hurricane zone — economists and others have long taken it for granted that an epic storm would hit the region eventually, so have a head start on the numbers.

You know, we could make a LOT of money if we took our "allies'" oil "off the market", so to speak

Over 42,000 still without power in southwest lower Michigan 42 hours after storm

About 27 hours after the storm hit, nearly 100,000 are still without power in southwest lower Michigan

Trump's right, gas should go lower

After all, gasoline was $1.02 as recently as January 2002.

What's not to like this July 4th: Hillary's not president and gasoline averages $2.22 nationally

Wind energy turbines kill 368,000 birds annually, but kitties kill far more

Reported here in early 2015:

Now, federal wildlife officials are cracking down on wind farms caught killing bats and birds. A peer-reviewed study issued last summer estimated turbines kill as many as 368,000 birds annually. ... House cats kill at least 1.4 billion birds annually, and possibly up to 3.7 billion birds, according to a 2013 federal study. And a single natural-gas flare at a liquid natural gas plant in Canada killed an estimated 7,500 birds in a single night.

Mother Of All Bombs tested on the wrong target in Afghanistan, prolonging the 16-year war

They bombed caves. If they had meant to end the war, they would have bombed the Kajaki dam instead, ending electricity and opium production in Helmand Province instantly:

Trump reverses Obama's Clean Power Plan, lifts ban on coal mining leases on federal lands

Another promise kept. Now if we could just get back all the income we lost because Obama deliberately did nothing about middle class jobs for eight years.

From the story here:

The Clean Power Plan required states to collectively cut carbon emissions [CO2] from power plants by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Michigan ranks fourth in the nation for power outages, first on a per capita basis since 2011

Reported here.

And in Crain's Detroit Business, here.

Maybe up to 1 million lost power in Michigan, but mlive says "millions"!

The age of hyperbole rolls on.

Everything is awesome.

Here:

Mlive: 800,000 lost power in Michigan on Wednesday, two days later more than 615,000 still in the dark

Of those still without power, 515,000 are served by DTE Energy, 100,000 by Consumers Energy.

The story is here.

Detroit News: Almost 700,000 without power in Michigan according to just two power companies

The story is here.

Here's the Consumers Energy outage map, accounting for only about 194,000 customers who lost power today in the wind storm which gusted as high as 64mph here in Grand Rapids (our power never went out, oddly enough, even though our phone and internet did):

Reuters/CNBC oil headline says Russian production cuts stall, when the truth is Russia is cheating

So who's working in sympathy with the Russians now, huh?

"US oil settles at $52.61 a barrel, down $1.22 after Russian output cuts stall" says the headline.

"Russia's February oil output was unchanged from January at 11.11 million barrels per day (bpd), energy ministry data showed, with cuts remaining at 100,000 bpd or just a third of the levels pledged by Moscow under the agreement with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries" says the story, here.

Headline should have read: "Russian oil output cuts fall 66% short of those promised two months in a row".