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Media Infiltrations: Republicans and the Populist Temptation  Wall Street Journal February 9, 2010 Why Taxing Stock Trades Is a Really Bad Idea Wall Street Journal January 6, 2010
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Chronicle of the Conspiracy
Join us as we discover, document, expose and challenge the bad people, the bad institutions and the bad ideas that stand in the way of wealth creation -- and show you how to fight back!
Saturday, May 13, 2006
GREG MANKIW IS SO POLITE! But he just can't help using his blog for a little liberal bullshit-busting.Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 5:21 PM |
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IGNORANCE? BIAS? BOTH? When the Democrats were hyping the extension of Alternative Minimum Tax relief -- positioning it as a higher priority than extending low tax rates on dividends and capital gains -- the media narrative was always how "19 million middle class taxpayers will be ensnared" by AMT if nothing were done. Well, now a Republican congress has done something about it. They've extended AMT relief, with almost every Democrat voting against doing so. And what's the new media narrative?
Whether a disgruntled public will give them much credit, however, isn't clear. The bill mostly extends tax cuts that...are renewed each year anyway...So AMT relief is now for "upper middle-income"? What happened to "middle class"?It...will extend for one year recent changes to the alternative minimum tax to prevent it from hitting more upper middle-income families.
And AMT relief is "renewed each year anyway"? Sheesh!
Update... Here's a rundown on the 15 Democratic representatives who voted "aye" on extending the tax cuts. They're mostly in close races -- and they figure it's to their advantage to look conservative on this issue.
Update [5/14/2006]... Reader Mike Stahl writes:
Just a comment about your AMT note. I find it amazing that the Left (or any politician) is all of a sudden so concerned about the AMT. After all it essentially prevents taxpayers above a certain income level from "sheltering" income. Of course the shelters are a bunch of political sacred cows such as child tax credits which I guess makes a semantic alteration of "tax shelter". However it would seem that for those who live in a high local and state tax state, utilize multiple deductions to avoid paying income tax and you are in a "Upper Middle Class" income bracket that one might advocate leaving the AMT as it is in order to promote real tax reform. I do not enjoy any deductions for children, child care, etc. etc. and with an income of ~130 k almost all other tax advantaged programs are phased out for me. As such I take it in the shorts at tax time. Consequently I have no sympathy for those having to pay AMT at this time. To be sure though, I fundamentally regard taxation as theft.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:26 AM |
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THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET IS... ...none of the graduating students wanted to hear these morons, anyway. But now they get to feel virtuous about it.
SAN FRANCISCO May 12, 2006 (AP)— Democratic chairman Howard Dean and several officials backed out of giving graduation speeches at the University of California, Berkeley, to avoid crossing a picket line for janitors....Several other Democrats also backed out of speaking at university ceremonies, including U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, state Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, Assemblywoman Carol Liu, and state Sen. Liz Figueroa, who's running for lieutenant governor. ...About 20 janitors picketed outside the main undergraduate commencement Wednesday. Union officials said janitors were upset over revelations that university executives received millions in bonuses and other perks.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:01 AM |
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I HOPE THE STATE REMEMBERED TO SEND A THANK YOU NOTE California is incredibly dependent on just a few taxpayers for its tax revenue growth:
California took in a record $11.3 billion in personal income tax receipts in April, $4.3 billion more than it collected last April. It's almost certain that a significant chunk of April's haul came from Google employees -- perhaps one-eighth or more of the tax receipt gain...The art of setting tax rates: setting them high enough to shear the sheep as closely as possible, without killing them. Via Dynamist. Thanks to reader David Duval for the link.Fourteen of Google's top executives and directors sold $4.4 billion worth of stock last year, according to Thomson Financial... Assuming the 14 insiders had acquired the shares at very low cost and that all were in the top 10.3 percent state-tax bracket, they could have owed the state close to $450 million in capital gains tax on their stock sales.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:01 AM |
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Friday, May 12, 2006
JOKE OF THE DAYPosted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:52 PM |
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KRUGMAN'S MODEL FOR HEALTH CARE REFORM? Only if it is applied exclusively to Republicans! And be sure to check out the byline on this story.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:29 PM |
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Thursday, May 11, 2006
OUR DEMOCRAT HEROES, PART II The Senate voted today to extend the 2003 tax cuts on dividends and capital gains. The 54 to 44 vote was assisted by three Democrats' "ayes":Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Here's the hall of shame of Republicans who voted "nay":
Chafee (R-RI)
Snowe (R-ME)
Voinovich (R-OH)
Among the GOP, a notable "aye" was McCain (R-AZ). The realiably unreliable Specter ("R"-PA) abstained.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 6:06 PM |
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JOKE OF THE DAY
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:53 AM |
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OUR DEMOCRAT HEROES Here are the fifteen Democrats who voted "aye" yesterday when the House extended the 2003 tax cuts on dividends and capital gains:
Barrow
Bean
Boren
Case
Cramer
Cuellar
Davis (TN)
Ford
Gordon
Marshall
Matheson
McIntyre
Melancon
Peterson (MN)
Salazar
And here are the two GOP traitors who voted "nay":
Boehlert
Leach
And bringing up the traitorous rear, Congress's only overt Socialist:
Sanders
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:14 AM |
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Wednesday, May 10, 2006
WE CAN NEVER SAY THIS OFTEN ENOUGH ...and we have George Reisman to remind us today. Inflation is not rising prices. Inflation is a declining dollar. Here's how Reisman puts it:Gold is now at $700 per ounce, and rising. ...a $20 United States gold coin known as a Double Eagle...contains approximately one ounce of actual gold, which means that at today’s market price of gold, it’s worth $700. And this means that one gold dollar is worth $35 of today’s paper dollars. And that means that one gold dime is worth $3.50 in today’s paper money. This last, of course, is roughly what a gallon of gasoline costs in today’s paper money. Which means that a gallon of gasoline costs just 10 gold cents.So why does a gallon of gasoline cost $3.50 in the paper money? Well, one explanation is that we’re expressing the price of gasoline in terms of a money that is itself very cheap and getting cheaper... The key point here is that our money is getting cheaper and that’s why prices are rising.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 7:58 PM |
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PLACE YOUR BETS Gotta love Tradesports:
The Exchange has listed a 0-100 contract on the possibility of a former Taliban Ambassador being admitted to Yale University on a degree-granting program...The contract will expire at 100 if Mr Hashemi is admitted to Yale on a degree-granting program on/before 11:59:59 ET on the date specified in the contract [August 31, 2006].
The contract will expire at 0 if there is no such admittance of Mr Hashemi to Yale on/before this time.
[N]ote: The contract will expire based upon admittance by the University. Whether or not the individual takes up this offered place will not affect the expiry.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 7:54 PM |
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SHOOTING BACK (AND IT'S ABOUT TIME) Here's a victim who's not sitting still for Paul Krugman's McCarthyite treatment. Senator James Imhofe's office writes:
Paul Krugman of the New York Times writes in his column this week [link] that conservatives who agree with Senator Inhofe that “man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” believe in a “bizarre conspiracy theory.” In other words, according to Krugman, it’s unconscionable to even raise questions about the science behind climate change, and those who do risk alienation by at least one liberal columnist.Thanks to Dave Hogberg for the link.FACT: Senator Inhofe called man-made global warming a hoax, not a conspiracy. To perpetrate a hoax is to actively promote a falsehood for some purpose, while a conspiracy requires secrecy. But there is nothing secretive about global-warming alarmists' claims that the science is settled, and those claims are false. In an open letter sent last month from 60 top climate scientists to Prime Minister Harper of Canada is simply more proof that there is no consensus regarding the science behind climate change. In part, that letter reads:
While the confident pronouncements of scientifically unqualified environmental groups may provide for sensational headlines, they are no basis for mature policy formulation. The study of global climate change is, as you have said, an ‘emerging science,’ one that is perhaps the most complex ever tackled…‘Climate change is real’ is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural ‘noise.’
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:51 AM |
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WHAT ABOUT "I'LL STILL RESPECT YOU IN THE MORNING?" After all... I don't respect you now. Tyler Cowen (non-exhaustively) lists five great lies of economics. Here are two of his:
2. The model predicts well, don't worry about the assumptions. (As Paul Samuelson pointed out, don't false assumptions, by their nature, involve a very large number of (sometimes implicit) false predictions?)...Here's my nominee:
Economics is a science.Thanks to Chris Masse for the link (as, indeed, Tyler thanks him for the idea).
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:17 AM |
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Tuesday, May 09, 2006
JOKE OF THE DAYPosted by Donald L. Luskin at 6:27 AM |
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Monday, May 08, 2006
MORE OF THE SAME Never mind the hard statistical evidence from the Congressional Budget Office that the Clinton tax increases of the 1990s didn't generate any extra revenue for the government -- and that the Bush 2003 tax cuts on dividends and capital gains more than paid for themselves. The Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby gets his information on economic policy not from the CBO, but from middle-brow liberal intellectual journals. And he's darn proud of it, too, as he kicks off an op-ed yesterday snubbing the President for not reading the right periodicals.George W. Bush is not the sort of president who reads journals such as the Atlantic Monthly. But at least someone at the White House should check out the piece in the new issue by Jonathan Rauch. For honest believers in tax cuts, it's devastating.Blah, blah, blah -- about how tax cuts don't pay for themselves (even though they do -- or, more precisely, the good ones do)... and how government can't control spending anyway, so we might as well raise taxes. Doesn't the Left get tired of quoting itself grinding this shit out? It's inexplicable that Rauch can get his lies published. But why is Mallaby employable writing op-eds that contribute nothing but summarizing Rauch's lies?
Thanks to reader Mike Lion for the link.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:47 PM |
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A QUESTION ANSWERED BY A PICTURE Paul Krugman's New York Times column today:
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:54 AM |
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Sunday, May 07, 2006
EASILY STARTLED Here's an example of what rubs me the wrong way about celebrated Freakonomics author Steven Levitt. In his New York Times column today he writes on the origins of talent:...a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers -- whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming -- are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of cliches that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular cliches just happen to be true.This is typical of the over-heated self-aggrandizing tone that Levitt always assumed, designed to make his pedestrian insights seem like great revelations. In a single paragraph he calls a conclusion "startling" and then says it is a "cliche." Well, which is it? Or is it just startling to a narcissist like Levitt to learn that normal people already deeply know something he apparently didn't? That knowledge, by the way, consists of the profoundly democratic anti-statist truth that human beings capable of making themselves into the people they wish -- they are not genetically pre-programmed robots to be sorted and disposed of by the state.
Update... A Washington friend (who would probably prefer anonymity) writes:
I have always found Jeffrey Archer's summing up of the diligence/talent issue a very accurate picture of the state of affairs.“Never be frightened by those you assume have more talent than you do, because in the end energy will prevail. My formula is: energy plus talent and you are a king; energy and no talent and you are still a prince; talent and no energy and you are a pauper.” -- Jeffrey ArcherHowever, holding "energy" constant, it is talent that distinguishes the king from the prince. Condoleezza Rice, no slouch, has pointed out that she decided to not pursue a career as a concert pianist because it was clear to her, that as good (and diligent) as she was, she'd never be world class.I think recognition that there is something called a gift or talent is critical. Without it, we truly get exposed to dangers of statism, because claims will be made (like with Larry Summers' now famous quip about men and woman and math) that differences in outcomes are because of discrimination, etc.
Agree that the Levitt piece says nothing that is either news or interesting. I also find that it distorts the picture, because it seems to imply that one's proclivity or love for something is independent of one's talent for it.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:13 AM |
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