07.13.10
It’s the spending
Brian Reidl of the Heritage Foundation has a great WSJ column on how the argument that W-era tax cuts caused the jaw-dropping growth in deficit projections is a big smokescreen for what’s really going on.
07.12.10
The mattress economy
Interest rates are super-low, yet houses aren’t selling. Businesses are sitting on piles of cash, yet they’re not hiring. Michael Barone says it’s not too hard to see why this is the case.
06.23.10
Lowest level on record
Yesterday the housing news was the 2.2 percent dip in existing-home sales. That was due to the fact that when the time came to report income to the lending institution, a lot of people bailed. Today, it’s a 33 percent drop in May of new-home sales. This one’s due to the end of the new-home buyer tax credit. Kind of points up the argument for permanently and generally low taxes, doesn’t it? Also seems to be a manifestation of the phenomenon Arthur Laffer wrote about in the WSJ a couple of weeks ago: people and businesses moving their activity and investment forward before confiscatory changes in tax policy go into effect – which, as the indispensible economist pointed out in the piece’s title, is going to lead to an out-and-out collapse next year.
06.22.10
Here comes more forcible seizure of what’s rightfully yours
Steny Hoyer says there will be no budget resolution this year, but there will be tax increases.
Pathetic. Chilling. Enraging.
06.14.10
Exposing the “We inherited this mess from W” line of crap by letting someone espousing it run his mouth till he’s completely out of sense
CNN’s Candy Crowley, of all people, while mediating a clash of viewpoints between Mike Pence and James Clyburn, asks Clyburn, “When does the statute of limitations run out on blaming Bush for the current state of the economy?” Clyburn uses his response time to try to make tax cuts look silly, and winds up looking like the silliest ass on the planet as a result. A Freedom-Hater, and not too bright an FHer at that.
I’ll have to zip over to YouTube and see what Mike had to contribute to this circus.
November can’t come fast enough.
06.09.10
Somebody get Madame Secretary some up-to-date briefing papers
The H-Word Creature has been on this kick lately of exhorting various nations, certainly including the US, to raise their taxes. Pretty bizarre on a number of levels. She has recklessly careened into the area of faulty facts, however, by citing Brazil as a model for how high taxes in relation to GDP can turn a country into an economic powerhouse. Turns out, according to her own department’s (that would be State) findings, as well as the CIA World Factbook, it’s the same old story we find everywhere: taxation and regulation are hampering entrepreneurship and driving up the poverty rate in Brazil.
04.21.10
How the FHer apparatus intends to sell the VAT
Use the same playbook they’re using for most everything these days: portray opponents as marginal cranks and kooks.
04.18.10
The next means for the seizure of yet more of your assets at gunpoint
. . . is the newly revitalized cap-and-trade push (all the more insidious given what we know about the science, per the post below), being readied for ram-through by the usual cabal of Freedom-Haters and Reasonable Gentlemen (at least two of whom are women – from Maine).
04.05.10
From “I’m pursuing a high calling” to “at least I have a job”
Excellent Michael Barone column in which he compares the climate of diminished expectations in the age of the Most Equal Comrade with the robust sense of vision and possibility of that 1983 – 2007 era, when people assumed they could make a living delivering what the world deeply needed and they found deeply fulfilling.
03.08.10
It’s not about getting you your money back
Michelle Malkin reprints a Heritage Foundation graph showing which recipients of federal money would be subject to TCM’’s bank tax and which ones wouldn’t – and the correlation between that and which organizations have been paying back their bailout largesse. It’s not the same group of recipients.
03.01.10
The go-to man for writing tax law is embroiled in a big-time tax-cheating scandal . . .
. . . and San Fran Nan says it’s all no big deal. Any Pub in similar straits would have been skinned alive by now.
01.09.10
Scott Brown knows that the way out of this morass is simple, elegant and that it would have swift results
His latest web ad is only 31 seconds long, but that’s plenty of time to let you know how we could solve our economic mess pronto. He didn’t write the message he speaks, as you’ll see. It comes from the last Democrat president who wasn’t a Freedom-Hater.
12.07.09
The war on your freedom – today’s edition
San Fran Nan wants to see a tax on investment transactions. Not only that, she wants it to be “global,” so there’s no escaping it by conducting your sale or purchase overseas.
Any politician running for Congress in 2010 who doesn’t understand that this is war – currently being waged in an orderly, civil, Constitutional way (at least on our side), but war no less than if high-powered rifles, artillery shells and bunker busters were being employed – must get zero support. No RINOs, no Reasonable Gentlemen.
The enemy’s defeat must be total.
09.15.09
Maybe there’s some way to do it without giving rein to the least savory aspects of human nature, but he’s just sayin’
Dennis Prager offers six reasons why an income tax is morally problematic
08.26.09
We’ve said this many times here at BN
The free market can’t work properly unless its participants are moral actors.
Great essay at City Journal by Steven Malanga on the set of virtues that made America the world’s premier economic giant – and a look at their steady erosion since the 1960s.
Two of the money lines come from others whom he quotes. Sociologist Max Weber: “Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and still less its spirit.” Daniel Bell says that what went wrong was that we began “to substitute for religion or morality an aesthetic justification for life.”
08.25.07
“Stunted modes of behavior” are everywhere
In her column today, Diana West very effectively ties together several recent sociocultural developments and show how they spell “The Death of the Grownup.” She’s covering much the same ground that the always-marvelous Joseph Epstein did in a 2004 essay for The Weekly Standard called “The Perpetual Adolescent“, but these new observations of hers add substantive elements to the argument.
08.02.07
The family that drags together brags together
My article in the August issue of Our Brown County on the high-velocity Guffey family.
