RFK Jr gets a nicotine fix during Senate testimony

Yeah, that's what we want to see in our next Secretary of Health.

Ciga-reetes, and heroin, and wild, wild Olivia Nuzzis, they'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane.

 

How did Democrat women end up like this?

 

Biden administration delays menthol ban again as election threatens to go uhh . . . up in smoke

The Biden administration has once again delayed banning menthol cigarettes, infuriating officials of public health groups who say the products are responsible for taking hundreds of thousands of American lives.

On Wednesday, the White House quietly updated its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs website to reflect that any final ban on menthol wouldn’t take place until at least March. Even then, it’s expected to take years for menthol products to be off store shelves. The ban was previously supposed to take effect by the end of December. ...

Black Americans are affected most. Nearly 85% of Black smokers use menthols, compared to 30% of white smokers, according to the FDA.

More.

Racist FDA is going to ban menthol cigarettes

I never thought I'd admit that there is, in fact, systemic racism in America, but there it is.

What's next, fried chicken and watermelon?

Story.

Ain't it great to be a Democrat?

Absence of non-East Asian coronavirus fatalities so far makes some wonder if there ever will be any

Time will tell.

There are considerations other than genetic racial predisposition or vulnerability to infection, however.

As the Chinese are now reporting, the coronavirus infection affects older men much more than women. In the initial phase of infection in Wuhan, for example, 68% of patients were men. Strikingly, as recently as 2015, 68% of Chinese men were said to smoke cigarettes, making them predisposed to infection because of impaired lung health.

Still, no death so far has involved someone without East Asian ancestry, which may indicate, as with the SARS coronavirus epidemic in 2002-2004, that fear of a global pandemic resulting in millions of deaths may not be reasonable and that this may remain an East Asian epidemic. It could be that just as sub-Saharan Africa is responsible for 80% of genetic sickle cell disease China may be prone to respiratory disease for some as yet unknown genetic reason.

Clinton-Lewinsky brand cigars will get you every time

Liberal Michigan's mentally disordered legalize marijuana, then turn around and outlaw flavored e-cigs

Michigan becomes first state to ban sales of flavored e-cigarettes

13 million young adults 18-29 use marijuana but the FDA's Scott Gottlieb is shocked, shocked I tell you, by 3.6 million young vapers

This administration, like the rest of this country, is completely effed up.

US orders restriction on e-cigarette sales; youth use surges:

Tampa (AFP) - US regulators Thursday ordered sharp restrictions on sales of e-cigarettes, as national data showed a 78 percent single-year surge in vaping among young people, with two-thirds using fruit and candy-flavored products. ...

"These data shock my conscience," said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, referring to the latest data from the National Youth Tobacco Survey. ...

A total of 3.6 million US youths reported vaping at least once in the past month, the data showed.

"These increases must stop. And the bottom line is this: I will not allow a generation of children to become addicted to nicotine through e-cigarettes," said Gottlieb.

Meanwhile Gallup reported in August that 24% of the 54 million Americans aged 18-29 regularly or occasionally use marijuana, over three and half times as many as vape, but the FDA's Gottlieb isn't in the headlines over that.

The world upside down: FDA to ban menthol in cigarettes as 10 states legalize recreational marijuana

Threat of a looming menthol cigarette ban weighs on tobacco stocks:

FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb plans to announce this week that the agency will move forward with a ban on menthol cigarettes in conjunction with a crackdown on e-cigarettes to curb "epidemic" levels of teen use, senior FDA officials told CNBC last week.

War on cigarettes but utter capitulation on pot

China per capita cigarette consumption is 114% higher than US

The Chicoms consume about 4.7 cigarettes per day per capita, about 7.1 packs a month, despite recent attempts to tax the habit out of existence (2350 billion cigs in 2016 divided by population of 1.379 billion).

Americans consume 2.2 cigarettes per day per capita, about 3.3 packs a month (258 billion cigs in 2016 divided by population of .3231 billion).

Life expectancy in the US is 79 years, in China 76 years.

Deaths per 100,000 from coronary heart disease in China are pushing 100, in the US 78.

34 lyin' cheatin' Muslim convenience store owners and a guy named "Dale" indicted for conspiracy

From the story here:

A federal grand jury has indicted 35 store owners on federal conspiracy charges for trafficking contraband cigarettes, distributing controlled substances and money laundering . . .:

Mohammed Almuttan, aka Abu Ali, 35, St. Louis, MO

Rami Almuttan, aka Abu Louay, 33, St. Louis, MO

Hisham Mutan, aka Abu Mohamed, 41, St. Louis, MO

Saddam Mutan, aka Abu Ali, 24, St. Louis, MO

Mazin Abdelsalam, aka Abu Mohammad, 38, St. Louis, MO

Najeh Muhana, aka Abu Yazan, 41, Fairview, NJ

Fares Muhana, aka Abu Yamama, 40, Cliffside Park, NJ

Ayoub Qaiymah, aka Abu Faysal, 23, Richmond, VA

Naser Abid, 23, Chicago, IL

Yadgar Barzanji, aka Abu Siver, 47, St. Louis, MO

Wafaa Alwan, 50, St. Louis, MO

Ahmed Abuali, aka Bazilla, 31, North Bergen, NJ

Mohammed Kayed, aka Mohammed Fayez, 21, Clifton, NJ

Momen Abuali, 20, Little Ferry, NJ

Firat Sevindik, 42, Cliffside Park, NJ

Mohammed Mustafa, 30, North Bergen, NJ

Mohammad Karashqah, Abu Yazid, 47, North Bergen, NJ

Fayez Sheikha, 46, Mishawaka, IN

Jihad Shihadeh, Abu Malik, 58, Chicago Ridge, IL

Ismael Abadi, 57, Carol Stream, IL

Abed Hamed, Abed Fawzan, 39, Greenville, NC

Maher Hamed, Abu Alazara, 33, Swansea, IL

Abdel Adi, 25, Oak Lawn, IL

Muhanad Khatib, Abu Alamin, 36, Chicago, IL

Eyad Awad, 38, Chicago, IL

Dale Garbin, 60, Kankakee, IL

Hayder Al Fatli, 40, St. Louis, MO

Kutlay Guvener, 35, Chicago, IL

Saad Al Mallak, 30, Dittmer, MO

Hassan Abdelatif, 29, Collinsville, IL

Mahajir Naz, 32, St. Louis, MO

Talal Abuajaj, 23, St. Louis, MO

Basem Hamdan, aka Abu Ramiz, 57, St. Louis, MO

Zainal Saleh, 29, St. Louis, MO and

Ibrahim Awad, 39, St. Louis, MO

Bring back waterboarding, Mad Dog Mattis can go have his beer and a cigarette

James E. Mitchell, here:

It is understandable that Gen. Mattis would say he never found waterboarding useful, because no one in the military has been authorized to waterboard a detainee. Thousands of U.S. military personnel have been waterboarded as part of their training, though the services eventually abandoned the practice after finding it too effective in getting even the most hardened warrior to reveal critical information.

During the war on terror, the CIA alone had been authorized to use the technique. I personally waterboarded the only three terrorists subjected to the tactic by the CIA. I also waterboarded two U.S. government lawyers, at their request, when they were trying to decide for themselves whether the practice was “torture.” They determined it was not.

No surprise: National Health Interview Survey finds just 2.4% of respondents, WHO WERE MUCH SICKER ON AVERAGE, were lesbian, gay and bi

Except the story never does the math to show how small a minority is LGBT, and never once mentions rampant sexually transmitted diseases among perverts because of their promiscuity, just "distress" from "discrimination" leading to increased alcohol and tobacco abuse.

Here:

Overall, 67,150 survey respondents were heterosexual, 525 lesbian, 624 gay and 515 bisexual. The average age was about 47.

Stephen Moore tells some whoppers: Income was FALLING long before the 2013 increase in the capital gains tax rate

From Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, here:

"When Mr. Obama entered office the capital gains and dividend tax was 15 percent. Then he raised it to 20 percent and then he added a 3.8 percent investment surtax, bringing the rate to 23.8 percent. The tax rose by more than 50 percent. ...

"Wages have stagnated under Mr. Obama as taxes have risen on capital."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nice try at hiding the chronology, Moore, but no cigar.

Real median household income and real gross private domestic investment crashed in tandem and in concert with the 2007 recession. The investment side rebounded quickly, but real household income did not, and still hasn't. What's more, the whole phenomenon preceded any increase in the capital gains tax rate, which didn't pass until January 2013, with Republican support by the way. 

And it won't do to talk about wages stagnating, either. Real incomes have actually fallen, and fallen big. Employers figured out that the 2008 crisis gave them the cover they needed, their golden opportunity, to shed millions of expensive workers and rehire younger, cheaper ones. It's the biggest scandal in recent history, much bigger than the lies about ObamaCare, but no one is going to talk about it, least of all libertarians who are happy that the business inputs cost less.

The incredible rebound in investment is on the backs of all this labor shed in the crisis, helped along by rock bottom interest rates for those who are first in line for the money: bankers and businesses.

So-called conservatism never looked so bad.  

Is Obama's Interminable Recourse To Racism Charges Marijuana-Induced Paranoia?

Obama recently blamed the sudden drop in his popularity on racism in the country, a surprisingly paranoid response from someone who has won two national elections rather decisively.

Maybe he's still smoking more than cigarettes in the White House (on the night of Benghazi, perhaps?):

Christian Thurstone, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado and the head of the teen rehab center Adolescent STEP: Substance Abuse Treatment Education & Prevention Program, told ABC News recently that 95 percent of patient referrals to the program are for marijuana use.

“Anecdotally, yes, we’re seeing kids in treatment here who have paranoia and seeing things and hearing things that aren’t there,” said Thurstone. “Adolescent exposure to marijuana [raises] risk of permanent psychosis in adulthood.”

For more from this story, go here.

Obama thinks he has achievements, which must mean he is suffering a psychosis

From the long story in The New Yorker, here, by image-accommodating biographer David Remnick:

As Obama ticked off a list of first-term achievements—the economic rescue, the forty-four straight months of job growth, a reduction in carbon emissions, a spike in clean-energy technology—he seemed efficient but contained, running at three-quarters speed, like an athlete playing a midseason road game of modest consequence; he was performing just hard enough to leave a decent impression, get paid, and avoid injury.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Let's see.

Starting with the economic rescue, Obama said at the time in early 2009 that he had more than enough on his plate without having to worry about the financial crisis.

So who fixed that?

Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve. While everyone was fixated on the controversy over TARP and the crony capitalist, fascist character of that bailout in the mere hundreds of billions of dollars as millions of Americans were losing their homes, behind the scenes the Fed was providing multiple trillions of dollars of short-term loans to just about any bank or business in the world which was in trouble, at rock-bottom low interest rates which homeowners could only dream about, right into 2010. They all got fixed while 5.6 million Americans went on to lose their homes through 2013.

And what did Obama do in response to that?

Disgracefully fire Bernanke in public by saying he'd overstayed his time at the Fed, but that came only long after everything looked like it was truly stabilized. And I do mean "looked". The fact of the matter is extraordinary measures remain in place at the Fed because the banks' condition is still not healthy enough to do without them. When those end, the crisis will be truly over, not before. The rescue is still underway, with no end in sight.

Then there's the 44 months of job growth claim. Well, the truth is we are in the 72nd month of the jobs recession as we speak today, the longest jobs recession in the history of the post-war by a long shot. Bush's had been the longest previously, at 47 months. And it is estimated that the current jobs recession will not be over for another 6 months, which means we'll finally have matched the number of payroll jobs which existed at the time the recession began, but only after about 6.5 years have gone by.

But that says nothing about a return to normalcy. Include the shortfall which exists in the numbers because of net population growth over the period and the country will still be in a serious jobs deficit once the jobs recession is over, and for a long time to come without some major driver for jobs appearing on the scene.

Finally, I'm not sure how anyone measures a reduction in carbon emissions when China keeps them billowing into the air at a record rate, burning coal and oil in huge quantities. Obama can point to the closing down of coal power plants in this country if he wants, but all that does is make American electricity more expensive as China's waves of pollution waft ever eastward over the Pacific, polluting our air, water and farmland.

But if anyone's contributing to the reduction in carbon emissions in this country, it's the American worker who isn't working. Travel on the road in this country has been stuck at levels first reached between 2004 and 2005 for five long years because so many people no longer have a job to which to commute. Every month that goes by shows the same statistical result: no progress in miles traveled back to the levels of the 2007 peak. It's an odd thing to be taking credit for.

If it is clear from these facts that Obama is delusional and lives in a separate reality, it is also clear from Remnick's story that Obama has to work hard at crafting it, even about what is probably at the heart of his mental problems in the first place: 

When I asked Obama about another area of shifting public opinion—the legalization of marijuana—he seemed even less eager to evolve with any dispatch and get in front of the issue. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

Is it less dangerous? I asked.

Obama leaned back and let a moment go by. That’s one of his moves. When he is interviewed, particularly for print, he has the habit of slowing himself down, and the result is a spool of cautious lucidity. He speaks in paragraphs and with moments of revision. Sometimes he will stop in the middle of a sentence and say, “Scratch that,” or, “I think the grammar was all screwed up in that sentence, so let me start again.”

Why does the smartest president ever have to edit everything, all the time, until it makes sense to him?

Who do you call to have the president committed?

The Economy is NOT Improving: 3rd Estimate of Real GDP Falls to 1.8 Percent from 2.0 for Q3 2011

What a joke the news is today. GDP is revised down and all you hear on the news is Ho! Ho! Ho!

Q2 GDP was 1.3 percent, and Q1 0.4 percent, for an average growth rate in 2011 so far of barely 1.0 percent.

One percent. From 1930 to 2000 growth averaged 3.5 percent a year. That's the normal America, and it isn't anywhere in sight and hasn't been in over a decade.

If the economy were improving truly, GDP would be much in excess of 2.5 percent, the minimum growth needed to accomodate just the natural growth of the population. The last time we had such growth ended a year ago September, spurious as it was, consisting primarily of parasitical spending by government. It wasn't even tax money the government spent. It was borrowed money. For all that, 2010 growth overall was merely 3.0 percent, in 2009 -3.5 percent, in 2008 -0.3 percent.

The personal savings rate since September 2010 has fallen 30 percent.

The ratio of the number employed to the size of the population has fallen back dramatically to levels last seen in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The growth in employment in the post-war period has stalled with the stall in GDP:

Household net worth has fallen 12 percent since 2006, 85 percent of that from the housing collapse.

Without jobs there is no growth in the savings which form the foundation of housing wealth. Without housing wealth there is no middle class which consumes the products whose aggregate value comprises 70 percent of GDP. And hence no advance in GDP.

A rich man can smoke only so many cigars, a Christopher Hitchens only so many Rothmans.

Data here and here from The Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Federal Revenues Came From Tariffs and Land Sales in First Half of 1800s, From Tariffs and Excises in Second Half

A largely forgotten fact when discussing the history and meaning of US tax policy.

Gary M. Anderson and Dolores T. Martin examined the role of land sales in considerable detail in 1987 here.

I provide a few excerpts:

[F]rom 1800 until the beginning of the Civil War, proceeds from the sale of public lands constituted a major source of revenue for the federal government, accounting for 48 percent of net receipts in 1836. ...

After 1820, receipts from land sales became a major component of federal revenues. During 1836, for example, receipts from land sales exceeded 48 percent of total federal revenues. From 1820 to 1860, receipts from land sales averaged 10.8 percent of total federal receipts per annum.

From the program’s beginnings in 1796 until 1862, privatization of the public lands via sales to the private sector scored several major successes. By 1862, acreage equaling about 67 percent of the public domain in 1802 had been sold, and land sale receipts provided a significant, although fluctuating, fraction of total federal revenues. ...

Before the Civil War, proceeds from land sales and tariff revenues were the two major components in federal receipts. The proceeds from these different sources were highly substitutable; one dollar of revenue from land sales could replace one dollar from a tariff and vice versa. There is strong evidence to suggest that this substitutability may have been a significant factor in the demise of the system of revenue-maximizing land sales.

Of course the rise in reliance on excises from 1862 onwards could also explain why reliance on land sales declined to almost nothing by century's end, quite apart from the so-called rent-seeking aspects of tariff politics which the authors explore. But they seem not to notice the role of excises.

Excises on alcohol and tobacco ramp up dramatically to $100 million to $150 million per year from 1862, from next to nothing beforehand, while tariffs move up and down around a trendline of $200 million in revenues per year starting also at the same time, having been in the $50 million and below range per year for most of the century prior to the War Between the States.

The importance of alcohol, and tobacco, in the social and economic history of America should not be underestimated, as Daniel Okrent's important recent book on Prohibition has reminded us.

Gotta go. Time to light up and have a drink!

Explaining Property Taxes Then and Now

Critical listeners to recent remarks I made here on The Newsmaker Show with Kevin Doran will have wished that I had done a better job of explaining property taxes in the late 19th century and how their burden on property owners helped create the conditions which led to the tax reform which gave us the Income Tax in 1913.

So do I. Regrettably one can't say everything one needs to when trying to explain something else, especially like Herman Cain's 999 Plan.

If anyone gets the impression that I intended to say that the federal government routinely and directly taxed homeowners then, for example, in the same way homeowners are so taxed today on their property, that would be a mistake, but one which could easily be inferred. The federal government did do that sort of thing three times in the 19th century, but only for very brief periods and only to fund wars: in 1798, 1812 and 1861. Which is not to say there weren't other attempts, notable in the Pollock decision in 1895.

To a considerable extent, however, I have found that the terms "property tax," "excise," "tariff," "ad valorem" and the like get used interchangeably, and confusingly, in discussions about taxes both then and now. We would be better served if we were all more precise in these matters, but even supposed experts talk about this period with such imprecision sometimes that it is difficult to know exactly what people really do mean.

For example, "ad valorem" today gets used, as at usgovernmentrevenue.com, as a category under which to list excise taxes, tariffs, property taxes, etc., as opposed to income taxes, corporate taxes and social insurance taxes. In truth, however, its specific meaning has been more complicated than that.

From that characterization would not know that tax historians often distinguish personal property taxes in the first half of the 19th century as "in rem" from real property taxes in the second half as "ad valorem."

In the case of the former, as in 1798, slaves, for example, were taxed for war preparations with France as personal property. It didn't matter, however, how much one had invested to purchase the slave. Each one was simply taxed at 50 cents. Similarly a tax assessor would count the windows on your house, your horses, your cows, chickens etc. (unless you hid them well) and total them up by kind and assess the appropriate tax, which inhered in the thing, "in rem," not in the value, "ad valorem."

The latter is how the federal government in the 19th century was able to get around the onerous requirements of apportioning direct taxation of property equally according to state population. Instead of the arduous task of trying to tax the whole general sum of an individual's wealth in every state on an equal basis, the value of beer, wine and liquor, for example, produced anywhere could thereby be taxed everywhere the same, proportionally according to its value. In this way there was no need to divide the necessary revenue to be raised according to the population of the individual state, since the basis was the same everywhere beer was sold.

Such taxation is often called an excise, generally understood to fall on domestic produce. We still pay excises to this day, for example everytime we fill up the gas tank, 18 cents on the gallon to the feds. In truth excises are just a special kind of sales tax. A tariff is similar, but taxes foreign imports.

When it comes to the problems of farmers in the late 19th century, who eventually made league with Prohibitionists to install the Income Tax in 1913, theirs was a two-fold problem. Not only did the cost of financing state government fall heavily on them because of property taxation in the state in which they lived, federal excises on their produce represented a double "property tax" whammy. Think tobacco excises.

Viewed from this perspective, government at all levels, it seemed, got them coming and going.

To his credit, Herman Cain is trying to imagine a world in which government gets it for a change, instead of the taxpayer. His way of trying to make that happen is to play human desire to consume off of human desire to avoid paying taxes, by making what we consume each and every day the scene of a skirmish in the battle for limited government, which cannot exist without self-restraint.