The national average price of a gallon of gasoline stayed above $3.11 for about 7 months under liberal George Bush, but under catastrophe Barack Obama we're now well into our 19th month above $3.11.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Monday, August 27, 2012
The New Republic Can't Spell The Name Of The Mayor Of LA
The New Republic has trouble spelling the name of the mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Ramón Villaraigosa:
What, then, could be the path to a Republican resurgence? The first thing would be to break the Democratic hold on the minority vote by winning back a reasonable share of the Hispanic vote—say, 40 percent or more, which Republicans once got. Success in this case depends on advancing policies on immigration that win favor among Hispanics, but it also may hinge on Republicans take the side of Hispanics in a battle over scare public resources with blacks. One could see this kind of black-Hispanic division surfacing in 2005 Los Angeles mayoral election pitting James Hahn, who enjoyed black support, against Antonio Villagarosa.
Well . . . who wouldn't?
Liberal Al Hunt Projects "Ideologue" Onto Traditionalists And Free-Marketeers
Liberal Al Hunt at Bloomberg, here, bemoans the erosion of liberal Republicanism and hurls the "ideologue" epithet at conservatives:
'Movement conservatives are motivated by ideology, sometimes small-government economics, other times the religious social agenda. They range from Paul Ryan, the small-government, economic policy-savvy vice-presidential candidate, to Todd Akin, the Missouri Senate contender who last week suggested that it is rare for women to become pregnant as a result of rape, saying “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”'
To a liberal Republican, apparently, preventing murder and national bankruptcy are unrealistic and idealistic causes.
Conservatives, on the other hand, are nothing if they aren't against ideology, and for life and economic solvency.
Conservatives define ideology as visionary speculation of an idealistic and unrealistic sort. They abhor notions of the perfectibility of man, and therefore also of man's social arrangements. They are not dreamy enthusiasts like President Obama who believes that "our union can be perfected."
Conservatives are ever mindful that human nature is a mixture of good and evil, and that just as self-government, the prerequisite of freedom, requires that human nature be checked by the individual's recourse to religion and morality to prevent sin and servitude, government above the individual level must also be limited by recourse to checks on its power to prevent crime and injustice. Above all, conservatives are mindful that there are no arrangements which will guarantee 100 percent success in these matters, only that some arrangements tend to work better than others, taught by long experience and reflection. They know that just because in the long run we are all dead doesn't mean there should be no speed limit signs.
It is a characteristic of liberalism to use intellectual categories like "ideology" not just to promote its (unrealistic) goals, but to attack its political opponents, after the manner of the Marxists who attacked bourgeois ideology. Nevermind that the bourgeoisie has hardly anywhere, ever been so self-conscious as even to think in ideological terms. But Barack Obama does, and self-consciously brings it up even when nobody else has: "I mean, that's my point, is that -- I am not an ideologue. I'm not." The term is left wing in its origin and development, and its continued use by liberals as an epithet and an intellectual category shows the close relationship between liberalism and the left which endures to this day.
This is who Al Hunt is, regrettably, and what liberal Republicanism is: an inherited thinly-veiled hatred of the middle class, which in its love of life and the enjoyment of its fruits stands in the way of the crackpots and schemers.
Romney Is A Total Hypocrite On Hard-Money: To Him TARP Preserved The Dollar's Value!
Hard-money conservatives like Larry Kudlow who think Gov. Mitt Romney is actually serious about maintaining the value of the dollar ought to remember that Romney argued in October 2011 that the TARP bailout was designed to keep the currency worth something:
According to Governor Romney, the $700 billion Wall Street rescue package "was designed to keep not just a collapse of individual banking institutions, but to keep the entire currency of the country worth something."
Noting could be further from the truth and Romney knows it.
TARP was not sold as a program to prop-up the dollar; it was sold as a means of keeping credit markets liquid, to keep banks lending to business, so businesses would keep people employed.
Not surprisingly, from that perspective TARP has been a spectacular failure -- because as soon as Congress granted then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson a blank check for $700 billion (along with near-dictatorial powers over the American financial services industry and de facto control over the U.S. economy), something changed.
Suddenly, instead of being a program to move illiquid mortgage-backed securities off the books of banks, TARP became a no-strings-attached cash infusion to favored financial institutions and corporations.
Among the insiders who received the no-strings-attached cash were Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Deutsche Bank AG, Merrill Lynch, Societe Generale, Calyon, Barclays Plc, Rabobank, Danske, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Banco Santander, Morgan Stanley, Wachovia, Bank of America, and Lloyds Banking Group – that’s what Romney and Cain were defending.
If borrowing money to spend on circumventing the failure necessary to the proper operation of free markets props up the value of the dollar, it hasn't worked very well.
Since the (first!) bailout of Chrysler signed into law by Jimmy Carter in January 1980 you now need $2.73 to buy what $1.00 did then.
Way to go Brownie!
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| a little hurricane humor there |
Fascist CEOs Agree With Jamie Dimon: We Need MORE Fascism!
And William Cohan buys it, here for Bloomberg, after Jack Welch, Lou Gerstner and Bob Wright all agree with this statement from Dimon:
"[T]he rest of us should hold hands, get together -- collaborate -- business and government together to fix the problems. It’s going to be very hard for government to do it on its own and business can’t do it without collaborating with the government.”
Gee, what a shock. GE, IBM, NBC and JP Morgan Chase and Co. all agree that we should just forget the sins of the past and . . . move forward!
Now where have I heard that before?
Against Obama methinks they doth protest too much. Just the semblance of disapproval is too much for these guys. And with Romney in charge, that farcical posturing will at last be over, and it will be back to business as usual.
I'll bet none of the mothers of these guys ever spanked them once.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Caller To Bob Brinker Claims To Have Collected Nearly 19 POUNDS Of Gold Nuggets!
A guy with a high school education called in to Bob Brinker's "Money Talk" radio program today claiming to have collected almost 19 pounds of gold nuggets and gold dust over the years.
With a purity on average of between say 83 and 92 percent, those nuggets at $1,672 the ounce are worth between . . . $415K and $460K!
What a nice problem to have. He has $40K in the bank, but ten times that in gold.
Previous Bank Trend Treating Gold As Pariah Has Notably Changed
So says Jeffrey Snider of Alhambra Investment Partners here:
The new Basel Rules are positioning gold to enter the all-important ZERO RISK WEIGHTING category (targeted for adoption in 2015). Upon adoption, the new proposed rules would “elevate” gold in the regulatory hierarchy to the same status as cash and OECD sovereign debt in terms of capital ratios and regulatory leverage. Even the FDIC and OCC here in the United States have opened the requisite comment periods to adopt this proposal for US bank treatment. ...
If banks can now, under these proposed rules, keep the physical in their vaults and monetize it as collateral in derivative arrangements (IR swaps mostly), then they have a new outlet to obtain positive cash flows from gold without rendering additional physical selling – an almost exact reversal of the [previous] leasing/swap dynamic. This is also extremely useful if gold is accepted at the zero risk weighting, meaning that it would provide not only direct monetization for gold holders, it would do so with added regulatory and capital leverage (which is all that banks are after for any asset they own). Less selling pressure has been positive for price thirteen years , but it might also lead to banks reclaiming physical stocks from the market place if demand is high as a preferred collateral (which would be the case as uncertainty rises, particularly with regard to currency risk since gold is a good hedge against shifting currency prospects).
Threat From "Regionalism" Mirrors Why Your Rep. Doesn't Know Your Name
If you haven't yet heard of it, the threat from "regionalism" is the attempt to overturn the dominant organizing principle of physical space in America today: the suburbs and the governments formed to serve them. In my most recent local primary election, the Republican candidate favoring the regionalist philosophy not so narrowly won against a challenger who ran opposing it.
Americans overwhelmingly live in the suburbs not in the least because they like it. There they have four walls of their very own, some green grass to enjoy and a little peace and quiet away from the bustle of life and the crime associated with large cities. Love of country-like living also happens to be an important inheritance from our English past, from which we get the ideal of the country gentleman, the garden and the hunt. Our estates are often less impressive and the ideal not so self-conscious, but few of us can imagine a better way to live.
The war against this way of life has taken many forms in recent times, the war against the SUV and now against the gasoline engine itself being prominent examples. What better way to deprive us of our dream than to compromise our access to and enjoyment of it? Another is to force us back into trains, where TSA VIPR units will soon be frisking us as frequently as they do now at airports. Yet another is to take away the tax deduction for mortgage interest, to make home ownership in the suburbs itself less appealing economically. So many forces are arrayed against the way of life of millions of normal Americans that one might be forgiven for thinking it is all some vast conspiracy.
Lately the war against our preferred way of life has taken shape in the drive toward "regionalism", a dreary subject to most Americans which is really a sleeper threatening to deprive citizens of representation and extend a trend which has been at work since at least the 1920s. At that time in America the US House of Representatives, chiefly controlled by Republicans, voted to circumvent the constitution and fix the number of representatives at the then current number of 435, when on the constitution's principle we should have by now at least 10,267 members in the US House. That's the reason your congressman doesn't know your name, and why you probably don't know his.
Today Democrats and Republicans in various places are uniting to extend this trend by forming alliances on behalf of "tax sharing" districts and "amalgamated" governments at the local level in the name of squeezing "efficiencies" out of larger scaled units. In fact the real motivation often turns out to be finding new sources of revenue to pay the exorbitant salaries, pensions and health care benefits of unionized government employees who have been promised the moon by big cities but which can no longer afford it, if they ever could.
There is a new book on the subject by Stanley Kurtz, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, and an important article here by Wendell Cox, REGIONALISM: SPREADING THE FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY, a short and helpful introduction to the subject, from which this excerpt:
"[S]pecial interests have more power in larger jurisdictions, not least because they are needed to finance the election campaigns of elected officials, who always want to win the next election. They are also far more able to attend meetings – sending paid representatives – than local groups. This is particularly true the larger the metropolitan area covered, since meeting[s] are usually held in the core of urban area[s] not in areas further on the periphery. This [gives] greater influence to organized and well-funded special interests – such as big real estate developers, environmental groups, public employee unions – and drains the influence of the local grassroots. The result is that voters have less influence and that they can lose financial control of larger local governments. The only economies of scale in larger local government benefit lobbyists and special interests, not taxpayers or residents."
Friday, August 24, 2012
It Takes One To Know One: Liberalism Believes In Nothing
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| "Caesar ... and Christ; they had them both. And the word is spreading only now." |
Oh dear, here, but if the author only understood that he also believes only in death:
[B]y now the base knows what Governor Romney believes, too. By now we all know what Governor Romney believes; by now his beliefs are more manifest and less mysterious than that of any candidate who’s ever run. Governor Romney believes nothing. ... What’s happening in and to the Republican Party this past week isn’t an aberration; it’s happening because of what the party has become . . ..
It's like a bad episode of Star Trek, in which The Enterprise visits a planet bent on civilizational suicide but must follow The Non-Interference Directive and let it go all to hell.
Election 2012: TARP Republican or TARP Democrat? Some Choice! Same as 2008!
They are the TARP men! Goo Goo G'Joob.
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.
Mish Complains About "Useless" College Degrees, And Lousy Google Translate
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| "You're umbday in any language" |
In ye good olde days, a college degree came with a foreign language requirement in addition to demonstrated facility with the finer points of English.
Holders of college degrees could reliably be counted on to read something in Italian, German or French and put it in a presentable form in their own language. In addition to knowing how to type, the skill supplements the work, say, of a financial blogger, unless your name is Mish, who has a degree in civil engineering.
On August 21 he's trying to plumb the depths of stories about the European Central Bank, noting here:
Every day I get links from Spain, Italy, Germany, and Australia. The first three frequently cause problems. Translation from German is particularly difficult.
For example, a Google-translated headline on Welt Online reads ECB chief demonstrates German banker. ...
With the help of Bran from Spain, Andrea from Italy, and "EM" from Germany I can frequently provide much better translations of foreign articles than I could otherwise.
Then three days later he complains here in a lengthy diatribe that colleges today turn out too many useless degrees:
Yet colleges churn out thousands of graduates, year after year, with perfectly useless degrees.
Clearly his own degree has failed him, not in the least because, even after all that, he still doesn't recognize it.
Education And Health: Inflation Is Highest Where Government Interferes The Most
Mish has the chart and discussion here.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Rasmussen Polling Also Shows Florida As A Must-Win For Romney
Based on Rasmussen's electoral college map tonight, Gov. Mitt Romney must win Florida to prevail against Obama.
Rasmussen shows Obama presently with 247 and Romney with 206 electoral college votes, and just six states in toss-up status (unlike RCP's ten in toss-up status): Colorado (9), Iowa (6), Wisconsin (10), Ohio (18), Virginia (13) and Florida (29).
My hunch is Obama figures Iowa is key to himself because he's counting on heavily union-dominated Ohio going his way, but Obama is so far making an effort not to telegraph this fact. Together those two toss-ups put him at 271, just enough to win. That's why he's spending so much time in Iowa after the pick of the 42 year old Rep. Paul Ryan by Romney, and why Byron York is fixated on Iowa in a recent column, but for the wrong reason. Iowa is more winnable for Obama than it is for Romney. In other words, Obama is theoretically right now conceding in a worst case scenario Florida, Virginia, Wisconsin and Colorado to Romney, which together give Romney only 267, not enough to win, because he believes he can win in Iowa and Ohio.
A Romney loss in Florida and an unlikely sweep of all the rest of these Rasmussen toss-ups means Romney still loses with 262.
Romney must prevail in Florida to win, if Rasmussen's map is correct. That's why Romney has focused on Florida right out of the box in sending Rep. Paul Ryan to Florida to appear there with his mother, reassuring the seniors on Medicare.
This election is going to be about the economy in general, but spending for Medicare is the tip of the Republican spear, while the president parries with appeals to the youth vote, which in Iowa turns out second only to Minnesota. For a state Romney at one time early decided not to contest in the primaries, Sen. Rick Santorum's narrow victory there identified Iowa to Obama as a state vulnerable for a candidate Romney.
The Des Moines Register reports here on five visits to Iowa by Obama in recent days:
The sitting president of the United States is coming back to Iowa next week to do some more campaigning, on the heels of a super-sized three-day visit to the state last week.
Obama is spending so much time in such an insignificant place because of the electoral math somewhere else, combined with the probability of winning Iowa's youth vote.
Female Domestic Violence Lawyer Used "Legitimate Rape" Phrase In '09 Newsday Article
But when Rep. Todd Akin uses it it's wrong?Well obviously! He's a man, a Protestant, and holds an MDiv degree from a theologically conservative seminary, making him once, twice, three times a . . . baddy.
Here:
Lois Schwaeber, director of legal services for the Nassau County Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said cases where people make false reports of rape hurt all legitimate rape victims seeking justice. But she said prosecuting someone who has made a false report will discourage real rape victims from coming forward as well.
10tv In Ohio Uses "Legitimate Rape" In April 2012 Headline
But in August 2012 Rep. Todd Akin can't use the phrase "legitimate rape" and remain the Republican nominee for the US Senate from Missouri?
The story is here.
Here is the screenshot:
Female Reporter Speaks Of "Legitimate Rape" For Long Island Newsday In 2009
But for some reason Rep. Akin made a mistake using the words "legitimate" and "rape" together.
The story is here by Ann Givens:
On the one hand, they will want to discourage people from lying to law enforcement, and show that there will be consequences for doing so, experts said. On the other, they don't want to discourage legitimate rape victims from coming forward, or discourage people who lied at first from telling the truth later on, experts said.
Here's the screenshot:
Orlando Sentinel Quotes Orange County Official Saying "Legitimate Rape" In 2010
Rep. Todd Akin can't use the words together, but she can?
The story is here:
"There is potential that the recent cases involving false allegations of sexual violence will negatively influence legitimate rape victims from coming forward to receive recovery services, report the crime to law enforcement and ultimately hold their offenders accountable," she says.
Here's the screenshot:
George Neumayr: Romney And His Republicans Are Not Authentic Conservatives
So says George Neumayr for The American Spectator, here, and so do I:
An authentically conservative party would find Romney's unprincipled position far more chilling than Akin's gaffe. If unborn children gain or lose their right to life depending upon the circumstances of their conception, then the party has already conceded that that right doesn't exist. Ronald Reagan understood the implications of that concession and never wavered in his defense of the right to life of all unborn children, not just some of them. ... For all the talk about "pragmatism" and "diplomacy" this week from country club Republicans, they didn't display any towards a candidate who won a primary fair and square.
How One Conservative Voted Against Materialism And The Imperial Presidency In 1976
From Bill Kauffman, here:
[T]he Port Huron Statement, and SDS, emphasized the core principle of decentralization, of breaking overly large institutions and even cities down to a more human scale, “based on the vision of man as master of his machines and his society.”
“We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things,” declared the authors. The line might have been written by another Michigan lad, Russell Kirk of Mecosta. Kirk was no New Leftist, though he did later befriend—and in 1976 voted for—Eugene McCarthy, the peace candidate of the 1968 Democratic primaries, the distributist-inclined Catholic intellectual who befuddled his conventional liberal supporters with talk of a salutary “depersonalizing” of the presidency, of reducing that office to its constitutional dimensions, shorn of the accreted cult of personality.
Mitt Romney: Today's Symbol Of The Fatal Impoverishment Of Conservatism
"[T]he conservative movement is enfeebled, intellectually and in backing, at the very hour of its popular ascendancy. (By the way, America’s bigger men of business, with very few exceptions, never have been of any help to really conservative causes; if they think of politics at all, it is much as they think of professional sports teams: 'Winning is the name of the game.') This may become a fatal impoverishment. ...
I am not implying that conservative folk should set to forming a conservative ideology; for conservatism is the negation of ideology. The conservative public man turns to constitution, custom, convention, ancient consensus, prescription, precedent, as guides—not to the narrow and fanatical abstractions of ideology. I am saying, rather, that unless we show the rising generation what deserves to be conserved, and how to go about the work of preservation with intelligence and imagination—why, the present wave of conservative opinion will cast us on a stern and rockbound coast, perhaps with a savage behind every tree. Conservative leaders ought to declare, with Demosthenes, 'Citizens, I beg of you to think!' ...
So it is that thinking folk of conservative views ought to reject the embraces of the following categories of political zealots:
Those who urge us to sell the National Parks to private developers.
Those who believe that by starving South Africans we can dish Jesse Jackson and win over the black vote en masse.
Those who would woo the declining feminists by abolishing academic freedom through a new piece of 'Civil Rights' legislation.
Those who instruct us that 'the test of the market' is the whole of political economy and of morals.
Those who fancy that foreign policy can be conducted with religious zeal, on a basis of absolute right and absolute wrong.
Those who, imagining that all mistakes and malicious acts are the work of a malign or deluded 'elite,' cry with Carl Sandburg, 'The people, yes!'
Those who assure us that great corporations can do no wrong.
Those who discourse mainly of the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderburgers, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
And various other gentry who abjure liberalism but are capable of conserving nothing worth keeping."
-- Russell Kirk, 1986 (here)
Catholic Republicans Gang Up On Protestant Todd Akin
Laura Ingraham calls him a liar, Sean Hannity gives a prominent forum to Ann Coulter, who likens Akin to Eliot Spitzer and elsewhere calls him a swine, and Hugh Hewitt encourages him to drop out. Oh yeah, and throw in the VP nominee, well after the deadline.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Old Republican Fools For Romney
"The hoary fool, who many days
Has struggled with continued sorrow,
Renews his hope, and blindly lays
The desp'rate bet upon tomorrow."
-- Matthew Prior
Ann Coulter Champions Exception For Abortion In Cases Of Rape On Hannity
Why is it we hear the loudest shrieks for mortal sin from the mouths of Republican Roman Catholics?
The Voting-Third-Party Line of the Day from Forbes.com
-- John Quincy Adams
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.
Paladins of Economics Eschew the Mob and Excuse the Fed
So says Brian Domitrovic for Forbes, who thinks the Fed's bad habits are congenital.
Domitrovic calls attention to the glaring omission of monetary reform in Mitt Romney's economic proposals, about which his hundreds of recent endorsers from the economics profession have likewise said not a word:
This is a worrisome tendency in economics, on two counts. The first is that the vox populi is probably onto something. Why should the profession risk being wrong on such an important issue?
There is perhaps no institution in our government that has been so cornered by economists as the Fed. The Fed is the place most dominated by the credentialed Ph.D.’s of the profession. It would rankle economists to concede that despite this capture of the Fed by their ranks, the Fed was at fault for causing the worst economic crisis in eons. It would implicate the profession in the whole mess.
Gee, just maybe it's because the capture has gone precisely in the other direction: economics professionals profit from the status quo which puts them in the center of the system which puts them and their friends first in line for the funny money. Why do you think people so desperately worship the presidency in this society, and so desperately want to possess it?
Read the whole thing here.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Byron York Doesn't Get It: EVERY Toss Up State Matters If Romney Loses Florida
Mitt Romney can take a loss in a New Hampshire or an Iowa, give or take, but if he loses in Florida he cannot. Romney absolutely must win in every single other toss up state if he loses Florida, from Iowa to New Hampshire to Nevada to Ohio to Wisconsin to Virginia to Colorado to North Carolina, in order to win.
Iowa doesn't have a special meaning, especially now if it's really true that Michigan moves into the toss-up column as Real Clear Politics says today. Rick Santorum did especially well here in Michigan with pro-life Democrats, who also helped pick Todd Akin in Missouri, and Romney's throat cut to Todd Akin today isn't going to play well with Santorum's supporters, an incident which post-dates the poll taking Michigan out of the leaning-Obama category. The broader point is that 56 percent of Republican primary voters in Michigan picked someone other than Romney: either Santorum, Gingrich or Ron Paul. Romney might have capitalized on the new poll had he not flubbed on Todd Akin. It just shows Romney is still not a skilled politician.
Mitt Romney has emphasized protecting Medicare in Florida as a matter of first importance because he knows Florida is the key to his victory in November. If he can convince seniors there, he can convince them anywhere. Florida makes it easier to win in this bad environment, but without it, it's going to be very much more difficult.
Mitt Romney has emphasized protecting Medicare in Florida as a matter of first importance because he knows Florida is the key to his victory in November. If he can convince seniors there, he can convince them anywhere. Florida makes it easier to win in this bad environment, but without it, it's going to be very much more difficult.
Misguided story here.
Mitt Romney Just Lost My Vote
Romney should quit not just for the good of the Republican Party, but for the good of the nation. Surely the Republican convention can come up with someone better than this man Romney, whose political convictions are as uncertain as Barack Obama's biography.
Otherwise Romney is certainly going to lead the Republican Party to defeat in November, just like John McCain did in 2008, and a bunch of us who haven't gone broke already will promptly do so while the likes of David Frum tell us it's no debacle. Only in the Republican Party can conservatism be transformed from opposition to the welfare state in 1965 into support for Medicare as a matter of principle in 2012. And you feared Barack Obama would transform America.
The only thing Romney is proving in the case of Rep. Akin is that Republicans once again don't know how to fight, and don't understand how politics works.
Winning parties like the Democrat Party rally around their own when they are in trouble, and at the minimum do not make things worse for themselves by joining in on the criticism of individuals who make mistakes. A good recent example is Rep. Charlie Rangel who has been censured by the US House but is still standing, and quite happily so. Republicans, by contrast, have a habit of rushing at the first sign of trouble to distance themselves from members who come under fire, and end up isolated and alone, resorting to their own devices to survive.
No one but a fool wants such for friends. The voters can smell that smell for what it is: lack of self-confidence. And then they vote accordingly.
My hunch is Missouri will have a new senator named Todd Akin come November, and America will have another four years of Barack Obama.
We deserve it.
Not Only Is Rep. Paul Ryan A Hypocritical Catholic, So Is Radio Talker Sean Hannity
Just now he said he's fairly libertarian on the issue of contraceptives and doesn't object to their use by Americans.
That's not the position of the Roman Catholic Church, to which he belongs and readily and publicly subscribes.
What we're witnessing in America isn't just the shallowness of the beliefs of rank and file Catholics, but also of their most public representatives.
Obama must be thrilled.
Water Is Nineteen Times Rarer Than Gold
"Bodies are much more rare and porous than is commonly believed: water is nineteen times lighter, and by consequence nineteen times rarer than gold . . .."
-- Sir Isaac Newton
Even On The Most Generous Interpretation Of The Data, Rep. Akin Of Missouri Is Right
The wildest estimates of pregnancy resulting from rape range from as few as 200 to as many as 83,000, the latter representing many self-reported cases.
As a percentage of all pregnancies, 83,000 pregnancies represents almost 1.4 percent of the total.
Calling that rare evidently is impermissible among liberals, and frightened conservatives like Rush Limbaugh. But if 1.4 percent isn't rare, I don't know what is.
The sorriest spectacle today is how conservative talk radio is throwing Todd Akin under the bus.
Romney/Ryan Response To Akin On Abortion Contradicts Roman Catholic Teaching
Will Rep. Paul Ryan, a Roman Catholic, get a pass from the Roman Catholic Church for opposing its teaching on abortion?
In response to the inelegant remarks of Republican Senate hopeful Rep. Todd Akin from Missouri, the Romney/Ryan campaign says it does not oppose abortion in the case of rape, which is not the position of the Roman Catholic Church.
The New York Times reports, here:
The Republican presidential ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan was quick to distance itself from Mr. Akin’s remarks.
“Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan disagree with Mr. Akin’s statement,” the campaign said. “A Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape.”
Rep. Ryan's position permitting abortion in instances of rape constitutes formal cooperation in a crime and self-excommunication according to the Roman Catholic catechism, here:
Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life. "A person who procures a completed abortion incurs excommunication latae sententiae,"77 "by the very commission of the offense,"78 and subject to the conditions provided by Canon Law.79 The Church does not thereby intend to restrict the scope of mercy. Rather, she makes clear the gravity of the crime committed, the irreparable harm done to the innocent who is put to death, as well as to the parents and the whole of society.
Rep. Akin's position against abortion in all circumstances is identical to Catholicism's whereas Rep. Ryan's position explicitly contradicts his own religion.
That's the Republican Party: where conservatives like Rep. Akin are not welcome, but open hypocrites, and fudgepackers from the Log Cabin crowd, most certainly are.
"Valuations Remain Unusually Rich"
So says John Hussman, here:
Valuations remain unusually rich on our measures . . . it should be of some concern (though it is clearly not) that the price/revenue multiple of the S&P 500 is now above any level seen prior to the late-1990’s market bubble. Prior to that time, the highest post-war peaks were in 1965 (which was not followed by a deep or immediate decline, but marked the onset of what would ultimately become a 17-year secular bear market), and 1972, just before the S&P 500 lost nearly half of its value.
The Shiller p/e bears him out (esp. the post-war peak on January 1, 1966 at 24.06 vs. nearly 23 today, and the post-war nadir of 6.64 in July/August 1982, a 72 percent decline in valuation over the course of the secular bear and the mother of all buying opportunities since the war):
The price for performance remains steep.
Monday, August 20, 2012
With "You Didn't Build That" Obama Revealed We're No Free Market Economy
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| Barack The Builder-Thief |
"What we have—and have had for a long time—is corporatism, an interventionist system shot through with government-granted privileges mostly for the well-connected–who tend to be rich businesspeople. This system is maintained in a variety of ways: through taxes, subsidies, cartelizing regulations, intellectual “property” protections, trade restrictions, government-bank collusion, the military-industrial complex, land close-offs, zoning, building codes, restrictions on workers, and more. As a result, people can get rich at the expense of the government’s victims. Even some who have prospered apparently by market means have actually done so through government intervention, such as transportation subsidies and eminent domain. Wealth can be transferred in many ways besides welfare and Medicaid, some of them quite subtle. Most transfers are upward."
Obama's flub in "you didn't build that" wasn't some supposed expression of disdain for free-market capitalism, but rather a too-open affirmation of the collusion which exists in America between government and business, a collusion redolent of the fascism of an earlier era.
The line was supposed to be, before it blew up in his face, a gentle reminder to his peeps that they owe their continued success to his stewardship of this system of corporatist largesse.
In stating the obvious Obama has let the cat out of the bag and proven himself an unreliable leader for the game of charades we call the free market economy. He let his guard down and opened a window on this uncomfortable truth about America, that in economics we consider our advocates of free market capitalism analogous to the preachers of fundamentalist Christianity. It's a free country and that's all well and good, as long as you're not really serious.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Government Payments Like Social Security/Medicare Consume 89 Percent Of Tax Revenues
The government collects only $2.66 trillion in taxes but spends $2.36 trillion just on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and the like, summed up as Personal Current Transfer Payments.
If we ran a balanced budget, that would leave just $300 billion for everything else, such as defending the country from our enemies, for which we actually spend about $700 billion currently.
Total current expenditures are running at $3.8 trillion, nearly 41 percent more than we presently take in.
On 1/1/2011 Social Security/Medicare Payments Exceeded Revenues By $329 Billion
Social insurance revenues were $906 billion on 1/1/11, but outlays for Social Security were $703 billion and for Medicare $532 billion on that date, meaning the programs were not self-sustaining, running a deficit of $329 billion.
Romney Has Ryan Reassuring On Medicare Because He Really Needs Florida To Win
The projection (here) back in the second week of April was that 124 electoral college votes were up for grabs in 9 states, with Obama at 233 and the Republicans at 181, who needed at the time 70 percent of the remaining electoral college votes to win.
Today the picture (here) shows the toss-ups reduced to 110 (still in 9 states, though a different mix), Obama up slightly to 237, and Romney up from 181 to 191, who now needs to win almost 72 percent of the remaining toss-up electoral college votes to win, according to the analysis.
In 2008 John McCain lost to Barack Obama because McCain lost in George Bush's red states of Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia (112 electoral college votes) by 1.4 million votes.
A Southern/Western strategy concentrating on Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado and Nevada would still leave Romney 7 electoral college votes short of 270 if he wins the currently projected 191 in addition.
Romney losing Florida would necessitate winning the 191 plus every one of the states in the toss-up category today, including New Hampshire, hence the recent Medicare emphasis in Florida where many seniors live.
An Eastern Time Zone strategy winning Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire and Ohio in addition to the 191 would give Romney exactly 270.
Rep. Paul Ryan Rejects Conservatism For The Government Dependency Culture
Quoted here:
"When I think of Medicare, it's not just a program, it's not just a bunch of numbers, it's what my mom relies on, it's what my grandma had."
"Medicare was there for our family, for my grandma when we needed it then. And Medicare is there for my mom, when she needs it now. And we have to keep that guarantee."
"But in order to make sure that we can guarantee that promise for my mom's generation, for those baby boomers who are retiring every day, we must reform it for my generation."
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Rep. Paul Ryan And His Mother: This Is Not Conservatism
This is Republicanism defending the welfare state. This is not conservatism.
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