These are stable, too:
CNBC. Propagandists for the regime.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Harold Meyerson Thinks The Rich Got One Sweet Deal From The Democrats
Because the capital gains tax rate was raised only 33% from 15% to 20% instead of rising 164% to equalize it with the fiscal cliff deal's highest ordinary income tax rate of 39.6% on the richest Americans. Yikes! Can you imagine?
For The Washington Post, here:
"The tax deal Congress passed last week raised the top rate on wages and salaries from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. The rate on income from capital gains and dividends, however, was raised to only 20 percent from 15 percent. There has been no rending of garments nor gnashing of teeth from our super-rich compatriots; they got one sweet deal."
But it's a point conservatives should ponder more because Meyerson writes of common ground we share.
For one thing, there is love of country in Meyerson's article, a desire to see Americans benefit from investment domestically where it throws off all sorts of additional beneficial economic effects, instead of seeing those accrue to communities in foreign lands. American business long ago became unpatriotic in service to the almighty bottom line, which is why your job went to Mexico and then to China. This ushered in a process which has made the American worker more equal to the poverty of the foreign worker, instead of the other way around. But higher taxes on investment capital aren't going to reverse that. Only disincentivizing foreign investment and rewarding domestic investment will, which is a point which illuminates a conservative principle.
When it comes to economic inequality, conservatives should consider Meyerson's observation that the biggest gains overall in recent decades have come in investment income to wealthy investors, not in ordinary income to the rest of us. He doesn't say so, but it illustrates a conservative principle: When you want less of something, tax it. That is precisely what has produced the situation he decries. We have taxed ordinary income exorbitantly compared to investment income and consequently we have less of the ordinary income variety and more of the investment income variety. And we also actually reward foreign investment in the tax code, allowing unpatriated profits to escape taxation. To get more gains in ordinary income, we should equalize tax rates between ordinary and investment income . . . just not at progressive income tax rates. Conservatives should press for a world in which all money is treated the same in the tax code by taxing income of all kinds at one low uniform rate. Income inequality has to begin somewhere, and it begins in the tax code, not in the profits of Warren Buffett.
Similarly with supporting an aging population, it would be nice if there were a little liberal outrage, and a little conservative outrage for that matter, for the way the federal government conspires to suppress interest rates with a weak dollar policy. This punishes savers, but especially the old who expected and need return on capital to take care of themselves instead of depending on government. A strong stable dollar which has the same value when you are 80 as it had when you were 8 is what we need, but sadly our entire class of elites is committed to monetarism, which at its root means the dollar of 2013 could hardly be less equal to the dollar of 1913 than it is.
There is a theme here involving inequality, expressed in lower-wage foreign workers, ordinary income punished with higher relative taxes, and devalued savers' dollars, which could unite liberals and conservatives, and also the country, if only it had an effective advocate in a statesman who had the audacity to point out that big business and big government seem to be joined in common cause against the best interests of the American people. None dare call it fascism.
US Government 10yr Bond Yield Pops 10% On Fiscal Cliff Deal
But quickly cools, meaning the bond market's opinion was Meh.
By way of contrast, yields plunged roughly 33% between July and September 2011 from the 3s to the 2s in the wake of the debt-ceiling mini-compromise.
The five year yield nadir was about 1.38 in late July 2012. Yields today are almost 35% higher than that, but are still 50% off what they were in early January 2008 near 4.
Interactive chart here.
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Velocity Of Spending Money Falls To Early 1990s Levels As Americans Hoard It
Meaning money isn't changing hands for new goods and services like it had been after 1996. M1 has skyrocketed from $1.4 trillion in 2008 to in excess of $2.4 trillion today (here). That's about $21 billion a month over four years being withheld from spending by consumers.
Another bubble bursts.
Rock Valley College In Illinois Cuts Part-Timers To 25 Hours To Avoid ObamaCare
As reported here:
"Rock Valley College took action last week to pare down the hours of their Continuous Part Time employees to 25 hours. Beginning in 2014, public and private employers, who have part-time employees, will be required to offer insurance benefits to those employees who work an average of 30 hours per week or face a financial penalty.
"New part-time employees at RVC are being hired with a 25 hour maximum. At this time the college cannot afford the insurance expense or the penalty for not providing the health insurance."
Nebraska Wendy's Cuts Hours For 100 To Avoid ObamaCare
As reported here:
"A fast-food chain is slashing employee hours so franchise owners don't have to pay health benefits. Around 100 local Wendy’s workers have learned their hours are being cut. A spokesperson says a new health care law is to blame.
"The company has announced that all non-management positions will have their hours reduced to 28 a week."
Liberal hysteria at thinkprogress.org here inflates the reported number to 300:
"Not long after the owner of the Olive Garden and Red Lobster chains admitted their anti-Obamacare campaigns hurt more than helped, the owner of a Wendy’s franchise in Omaha, Nebraska plans to cut 300 employees’ hours to part-time to avoid providing them health care coverage."
How else do you miss that detail in both the first and last paragraphs of the story unless you didn't bother to read it?
Job Leavers Today Represent Just 8% Of The Unemployed
Job leavers today represent just 8% of the unemployed. Historically when this metric reaches 15% it appears predictive of a recession. Just two recessions occurred when the metric was below that, near 12.5%. Coincidently those were the two worst recessions in the post-war period from an unemployment perspective, with total unemployment peaking near 10% in 1982-83 and 2009. They were also the only two recessions where the percentage of unemployment from job leavers plunged below 7.5%.
Monday, January 7, 2013
Rush Limbaugh Adopts The Class Warfare Of Obama/The Wall Street Journal
Today, here:
The middle class still is, in an aggregate sense, where all the money in the country is. That's where all the money is in the economy. The rich do not hold all the money.
This is the voice of a very rich man who is under attack by a leftist president and a leftist consensus which says that the rich do not pay their fair share, the voice of a man who is not reasoning as a conservative but emoting as a rich man. If he reasoned as a conservative, if The Wall Street Journal reasoned as conservatives, we would be seeing something other than the suggestion that the leftists go victimize the middle class. Like the bank robber, this thinking, if it can be called thinking at all, maintains that you should tax the middle class because that's where the money is.
As such what Rush says is not conservative, but purely reactionary in the worst sense of the term: it responds to an historical development in which it finds itself the victim and seeks escape instead of statesmanship. This is what you get from a Rush Limbaugh, who abhors learning. You wouldn't get that from a William F. Buckley, Jr.
It goes without saying that it is absurd to suggest that all the money is in the middle, but apparently we must insist that it is not so.
The middle quintile of households made a median income of almost $50,000 in 2011. Generously speaking, this approximates to every single income in the country in 2011 making between $35,000 and $65,000 annually, 35 million workers, accounting for $1.7 trillion out of $6.2 trillion in net compensation, just 27% of the total pie. The bottom end of the richest quintile, on the other hand, begins somewhere just north of $100,000 annually, 10 million workers, accounting for $2.1 trillion out of $6.2 trillion in net compensation in 2011, significantly more at almost 34% of the total pie.
But this is no way for a conservative to look at it.
The founders of the country envisioned equality of contribution from taxation, which the original constitution required to be direct, apportioned according to population. This is why taxation was always very low, because the poor could not afford it. This is also why we have a census in the constitution, not so that we may learn how many Americans are of Italian descent, but simply how many there are, for tax purposes. If it is pleaded that the constitution has been changed to permit indirect taxation, it is still more originally American to insist on equality of treatment under the tax code. The real problem with America is that originalist principles were thrown under the bus in the early 20th century by progressives like Teddy Roosevelt, and enshrined in constitutional amendments under people like Woodrow Wilson.
Equality of treatment under the law is the principle conservatives should be trumpeting. But you will listen for that in vain from Rush Limbaugh.
The progressives like Wilson, a Presbyterian whose grandiose ideas bordered on the fanatical and are reminiscent of no one so much as George W. Bush, misused Christianity by insisting that "to whom much is given, much is required" in arguing for progressive taxation, and forgot that "no one can be my disciple who does not say goodbye to everything that he has". The actual price of Christian discipleship was everything you had, whether you were rich or poor. But in the secularized, immanentized bastard version of this under progressivism, the price became distorted so that the richer you were the more you owed, the poorer the less. It is little wonder that for that the rich demanded more, and eventually got it, in special rules in the tax code designed especially for them, which since that time have evolved into the elaborate distortions and complexities of the tax code we face with trepidation and consternation today.
In a very real sense when it comes to the tax code, The American Century has been the most un-American one of all, and the crying need of the time is to reverse it and refound the country anew on the original American principle of equality of treatment.
Rush Limbaugh: Turd In The Conservative Punchbowl
On Rush Limbaugh's role in the decline of American conservatism, as recounted by Andrew Ferguson for The Weekly Standard, here:
The idea that conservatives should have a special interest in high culture—the best that has been thought and said, sung and played, carved and drawn—has been selectively applied. In speeches and in the [Mars Hill Audio] Journal [Ken] Myers has often raised the question of why political conservatives, who defended the literary canon, the Great Books, with such energy in the eighties and nineties, went limp when it came to defending other traditional forms of cultural expression.
A watershed may have been reached when Rush Limbaugh, who would replace William Buckley as conservatism’s chief publicist in the early ’90s, chose as his show’s theme music a Top 40 track by the Pretenders—a self-conscious contrast, Limbaugh has said, to the baroque trumpet concerto that opened Buckley’s TV show Firing Line. Buckley’s fanfare had signaled that he aspired to something lively but elevated, slightly at an angle to the surrounding popular culture. The Pretenders’ guitar riff was meant to signal that Limbaugh’s conservatism would have none of that stuffy stuff: He was fully at home with what had become of American culture and wasn’t terribly curious about what had come before.
Which is why Rush Limbaugh isn't much interested, either, for example, in the original principle of direct taxation in the constitution. American history doesn't exist for Rush before 1913, which is why Donald Trump, who believes in tariffs on China, doesn't qualify as a conservative. Rush only learned the bad stuff from Buckley . . . like how to excommunicate people from the movement. "Stripped-down" isn't just for punkers.
Is FINRA Bent On Driving Out The Little Broker?
Inquiring minds will wonder, after reading this:
Since 2007, there are 12.5 percent fewer brokerage firms, 5 percent fewer branch offices and 6 percent fewer registered representatives in the financial services industry.
According to Treece’s data, there has been a 26 percent increase in the number of disciplinary actions taken against member firms, a 31 percent increase in the number of firms expelled from the industry and a 65 percent increase in the number of individuals expelled. After three hours, the Finra brass apologized to Treece.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
China Commits $350 Million To Develop Thorium Power
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has the story here, and tells you better than I can why you should care. What's old may become new again.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Obama Finally Cracks The 51% Barrier
It only took two months of diligent counting, but Obama has finally garnered 51.03% of the popular vote in Election 2012, entitling him to a tax increase on the 0.31% of Americans at the top of the income ladder, or so he says.
Mitt Romney got 47%, but not the now proverbial 47%, who are about to find out that tax increases on the rich amounting to $60 billion a year divided by 148 million Americans comes to a handout of just 405 bucks each. Don't spend it all in one place.
And the libertarians, fittingly, got the 0.99%, the actual support of Occupy Wall Street which, like all crackpots, claimed to represent nearly everybody in the 99% while crapping on your front stoop, which free expression libertarians are all for.
Data here.
Here We Go Again: The Wall Street Journal's Lies About The Middle Class
Like their opponents on the left, maybe because as libertarians they are genetically related to the left, The Wall Street Journal likes to assert false premises buried in subordinate clauses of paragraphs addressing a different topic, hoping to gain your assent through rhetorical slight of hand. It's an effective technique used by leftists everywhere to ideologize people, which is to create beliefs which are not supported by facts.
Here they are this morning, squealing like all the other rich libertarian pigs at RealClearMarkets about the raw deal they just got in the fiscal cliff compromise:
"Under the new law, some of the steepest tax increases may fall on upper-middle class earners with incomes just above $250,000."
As much as I get tired of challenging this assumption, the stupendous lie that it is awakens in me just enough disgust to get the old corpuscles going in the morning.
If you make $250,000/year, you are in the top 0.67742% of wage earners in this country, ok? You wouldn't know middle class if it hit you in the ass with a sack of potatoes. You can complain all you want about how hard it is to live in New York City on that income, but it still doesn't make you middle class. I'm not sure what it makes you, but out of 314 million Americans, there are only 1.025 million like you at the top of the income ladder. Like in the dictionary, you can look it up.
I'm not surprised to read lies in The Wall Street Journal. They actually advocate lying, here, or excuse it with the is is ought argument, here. In 2012 lying seemed to be a peculiar fascination of the editors.
That's the difference between the old America and the new one. The old America still believes lying is wrong, whether to ourselves or to others. The new one wants to be free to lie. In fact, it believes that unless you are free to lie you aren't free.
To hell with that.
Friday, January 4, 2013
Americans Have Been Hoarding Spending Money Since October 27th, 2008
That's the last time M1 was at the $1.4 trillion level.
Americans haven't looked back since.
Since that date in 2008, hoarding of spending money has increased at a rate north of 66% overall. Compare that to the previous four year period from October 2004 to October 2008 when money in consumers' spending accounts increased only 8.4%.
Theoretically, in excess of $1 trillion has been removed from consumer spending over the four year period since 2008, but it has been kept in such a way that it is ready to spend, suggesting Americans have been waiting to spend the money, preparing to spend the money, or just plain saving the money in the only accounts they own where they can keep it.
I'll go with the latter.
This is an enormous sum when compared with the actual dollar increase in GDP for the three years from 2009 through Q3 2012 annualized, which is a measly $1.84 trillion. Assuming non-crisis conditions, however, these monies might have been spent instead of saved and GDP would have increased to at least $2.84 trillion instead of $1.84 trillion, or as much as 35% higher than the reality.
I'll go with the latter.
This is an enormous sum when compared with the actual dollar increase in GDP for the three years from 2009 through Q3 2012 annualized, which is a measly $1.84 trillion. Assuming non-crisis conditions, however, these monies might have been spent instead of saved and GDP would have increased to at least $2.84 trillion instead of $1.84 trillion, or as much as 35% higher than the reality.
Parenthetically, notice the fear represented by the near verticality of allocation to this category during the debt ceiling crisis of Summer 2011, and then the resumption of the trend upward.
Another such episode will be upon us shortly.
Bush Tax Cuts Made Permanent, Obama Tax Cuts Expire, Payroll Tax Rockets 33%
And Rush Limbaugh says Obama won a "massive victory"?
It depends on your point of view, doesn't it? If you have a Republican bias, you think George Bush won, which he obviously did. The permanent adoption of Bush's tax cuts by the opposition is a vindication, which Rush somehow can't bring himself to crow about, let alone even acknowledge. If you have a Democratic bias, you think Obama won.
No wonder a caller just phoned in to tell Rush to stop campaigning for the Democrats. She rightly perceives Rush to be making a political mistake, to which Rush responds he's been the best campaigner against the Democrats for 25 years, but to no avail, by his own admission.
Has Rush Limbaugh been good for America? His own answer is No!
Maybe it's time for Rush to quit!
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