I had an exchange online with an old friend and a few people he knows. I am posting the text of it, anonymized with a couple minor edits, because the debate and what happened after is such a great snapshot of the left.
Old Friend:
Westerners are not taught that the hoarding of wealth is an act [...]
Jim Pethokoukis on why Mitt Romney’s 15% tax rate is actually too high:
We shouldn’t tax what we want more of. And the real problem with the capital gains tax isn’t the rate or how it is structured, but what is taxed: gains on investments, which are savings put to work. Economists of all stripes have [...]
It seems the geniuses in Philly’s city council plus Mayor Nutter have decided a really good way to make Philly more competitive is to make it more expensive to hire people. They have decided to prohibit companies from asking about an applicant’s criminal history until after their first interview. The only exception is for law [...]
A government, like a family or a corporation, can support some number of economically unviable undertakings. But at some point, no matter how pleasurable or good intentioned they are, piling on too many economically unviable endeavors threatens those that are viable. The problem with Progressivism is that it cannot, even in theory, limit itself to [...]
If higher tax rates are the answer to our debt crisis, why is Europe in such serious trouble?
In one my classes today, our professor asked how many of us were gun owners. I’ll spare you the details but it was a logical, if surprisingly blunt, question given the subject of the class that day.
4 out of 14 students answered yes. Of the 4 gun owners, two were women.
If this is a representative [...]
One thing that’s abundantly clear is that the left does not value economic growth. The younger lefties, particularly, don’t seem to comprehend that their high standard of living today is the result of growth and can only be sustained with continued growth. They fail to understand that many of the things they take for granted [...]
The subject of campaign finance restrictions came up in one of my classes recently. Quite a few people, leftists of course, just couldn’t grasp why restricting campaign contributions is a restriction on speech. I’d like to offer a set of questions to demonstrate why money is speech. If your answer changes from yes to no [...]
Jon Corzine, the leftwing former governor of New Jersey, whose high tax, big spending, overly regulatory policies helped drive the state towards bankruptcy, has now driven his investment firm into bankruptcy because he over-invested in the bonds of European countries that, as a result of following his preferred leftwing high tax, big spending, overly regulatory [...]
If it passes, Obama’s so-called jobs plan has no chance of working. He seems to think businesses and consumers are going to make long term hiring and spending commitments based on short term incentives.
If you run a business and reach the very reasonable conclusion that the tax and regulatory climate is going to be ugly [...]
During the fight over the debt ceiling, I kept hearing from the left that the rich need to pay their fair share. Setting aside the fact that the top 5% earn 35% of income but pay 60% of taxes, and the fact that higher tax rates on the wealthy produce less tax revenue, I expect [...]
As I have mentioned many times, I am not a fan of political parties. I am more sympathetic to the Republican Party because it sometimes does the right thing on taxes, spending, regulation and freedom, in contrast to the Democrats who invariably get it wrong. But I generally view political parties as unhelpful, if unavoidable.
Given [...]
Apparently, before he was sent to a watery grave, Osama bin Laden complained that Al Qaeda had an image problem: it didn’t appear religious enough. So, Bin Laden proposed renaming Al Qaeda to “Restoration of the Caliphate Group.”
This is buried in the middle of an AP piece but it is, I think, quite significant. The [...]
The latest estimate of unfunded federal liabilities is $62 trillion over the next 20 years. According to USA Today, that’s $534,000 per household (I’m not sure how they are defining household).
My math puts that at $200,000 per person over the next 20 years, or $10,000 per person per year over the next 20 years. That’s [...]
See if this sounds familiar.
Government creates a subsidy for a favored industry. This attracts more businesses than the market can support. The subsidies are used up and industry cries “Waaaaaah! Save us! We need more subsidies or we’ll go out of business.” The taxpayers get soaked in the beginning and soaked in the end.
Could be [...]
In the aftermath of Obama’s recent proposal that Israel’s borders should be redrawn to something resembling its 1967 borders, I have seen several commentators argue that we have not been an honest broker between the Israelis and Palestinians. They mean, of course, that we have favored the Israelis over the Palestinians.
If you consider the conflict [...]
There has ben a lot of discussion by the academic left about whether the killing of Osama Bin Laden was justified. The people questioning the OBL killing don’t seem to question that a nation has a right to defend itself from a direct attack, but are raising the question of whether that is applicable here.
I’m [...]
Ask yourself this: is it better to be poor in a rich country or poor in a poor country. The answer, I think, should be clear. If you take the time to understand why it’s better to be poor in a rich country, you will recognize that it has profound implications.
Policies that depress economic growth [...]
A report was recently released detailing the truly appalling treatment of the elderly by NHS in the UK. You can scratch the word “elderly” from the real world conditions I suspect. People who will do the types of things documented in the report will not limit their cruelty to senior citizens.
In this joyous season of fights over cutting federal spending, I merely note the following.
U.S. Population: 307,000,000
Federal Spending: $3.55 trillion
Federal Spending per person: $11,564
Federal Spending for a family of four: $46,254
U.S. Median Household Income: $49,777
So, before factoring in state income taxes, local income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes, etc., the federal government is [...]