The View From the Sinister Side of Life
October 28th, 2008
Look: socialism is a word that has a meaning. It means public control of the means of production. It does not mean taxing the top bracket at 39%. Likewise, “collective ownership” has a meaning, and it does not mean the situation that obtains when the government can repeal tax cuts for the top 5% of the population.
Categories: Economics, Politics, Taxes | No Comments
October 16th, 2008
Everybody seems fascinated by “Joe the Plumber” - the guy who confronted Obama recently and complained that if he buys the plumbing business he wants to he’ll be in the upper 1% of taxpayers who will face increases under Obama’s proposed tax plan, and he just can’t stand the thought of making that much money and paying his fair share of the burden.
Turns out now that most of that is not true, he has no idea what he’s talking about, and all his fears are hypothetical:
“I still don’t know where he stands,” he says of Obama. “I’m middle class. I can’t have my taxes raised any more.”
He also says he actually isn’t in the bracket where Obama would raise his taxes — but he’s worried that Obama will shift the bracket down.
He also said that, in his encounter with Obama, the Illinois Senator [did] “a tap dance…almost as good as Sammy Davis, Jr.”
Right. After 2 books, 8 years of political office-holding just 2 states over from you including 2 years in the United States Senate, an extensive Web site filled with detailed policy plans with explicit numerical parameters on scores of issues, a widely-publicized national convention keynote address in 2004, 2 years of policy speeches during the 2008 campaign, tons of advertising, tons of tons of news coverage, and three public debates, it’s Obama’s fault that you don’t know anything about him. Also, you somehow have a personal right not to pay taxes even when you expect to earn more than almost anyone in your state or the country, you are worried about taxes that you have just made up in your head because you assume Obama’s (but apparently not McCain’s) actual tax plan is a lie, and, finally, you don’t actually make as much money as you said so none of this applies to you anyway but you’re still worried about it. Also, that little black boy tap-dances so fine, just like Sammy Davis!
Well done, Joe. Nearly a perfect score on the:
Idolized Populist Doofus Checklist:
And, somehow, we’ve got to chase this clown’s vote because simply appealing to people who actually know something about the issues, respond to them realistically, and have some sense of the national interest that goes beyond 3% variations in their personal marginal income tax rate would (a) lose the election, and (b) be unforgivably “elitist”.
UPDATE: It gets better: he’s apparently not even registered to vote. Both major-party candidates, in a nationally-televised debate, barely two weeks from an election of watershed historical importance, spent the entire night pandering to one single person, who’s a complete bonehead and not even a voter. Jesus Freakin’ Christ . . . UPDATED UPDATE: He may be registered under a mis-spelled name. As Ben Smith points out, this is part of the problem with the so-called “voter fraud” myth.
H/T: Ben Smith
Categories: Culture, General, News & Current Events, Politics, Race, Taxes | 7 Comments
October 15th, 2008
Earlier today, Uncle wrote:
I can’t find where taxes are lower for anyone under Obama’s plan.
If that’s true, then he’s not looking or not paying attention. See the non-partisan Tax Policy Center’s report (PDF) on the two candidates tax plans. In particular, note Figure 1 on page 41 — for the bottom four quintiles, both candidates cut taxes, but the average increase in after-tax income as compared to current law is much larger under Obama’s plan than it is under McCain’s:
Categories: Politics, Taxes | 3 Comments
October 8th, 2008
Holy crap! Who’s been putting what in Tom Friedman’s Wheaties?
After years of self-congratulatory “big idea” drivel and smug sooth-saying, I’ve noticed that Friedman seems to have been returning to real, thought-out, argumentative analysis lately. And today he apparently woke up with whatever strange, crippling monkey he’s been carrying around all this time finally off his back and decided to take a full cut at the ol’ pill, one time. He starts by treating Sarah Palin like a big fat teeball, but that’s just a warm-up swing. By the time he gets around to how taxes “buy civilization”, and whose interests, exactly, are served by the GOP continually stoking our oil addiction, he’s fucking Babe Ruth.
Criticizing Sarah Palin is truly shooting fish in a barrel. But . . . there was one thing she said in the debate with Joe Biden that really sticks in my craw. It was when she turned to Biden and declared: “You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.”
I only wish she had been asked: “Governor Palin, if paying taxes is not considered patriotic in your neighborhood, who is going to pay for the body armor that will protect your son in Iraq? Who is going to pay for the bailout you endorsed? If it isn’t from tax revenues, there are only two ways to pay for those big projects — printing more money or borrowing more money. Do you think borrowing money from China is more patriotic than raising it in taxes from Americans?” That is not putting America first. That is selling America first.
Sorry, I grew up in a very middle-class family in a very middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, and my parents taught me that paying taxes, while certainly no fun, was how we paid for the police and the Army, our public universities and local schools, scientific research and Medicare for the elderly. No one said it better than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.” . . .
[P]utting the country in the position where a total novice like Sarah Palin could be asked to steer us through possibly the most serious economic crisis of our lives is flat out reckless. It is the opposite of conservative.
And please don’t tell me she will hire smart advisers. What happens when her two smartest advisers disagree?
And please also don’t tell me she is an “energy expert.” She is an energy expert exactly the same way the king of Saudi Arabia is an energy expert — by accident of residence. . . .
At least the king of Saudi Arabia, in advocating “drill baby drill,” is serving his country’s interests — by prolonging America’s dependence on oil. My problem with Palin is that she is also serving his country’s interests — by prolonging America’s dependence on oil.
Damn. I haven’t heard such a clear or uncompromising statement about what taxes are for since I can remember. And selling America to China and Saudi Arabia? About time someone said it.
He hit that one out of the park. Hope somebody notices.
Categories: Culture, Economics, Energy, Foreign Policy, General, News & Current Events, Politics, Taxes | 4 Comments
August 25th, 2008
Nothing is lamer than when one of the “reasonable” conservatives tries to make a fact-based argument about politics. George Will tried it today and is now still wandering around the Science and Nature section of Barnes & Noble, gibbering like a loon.
Obama recently said that he would “require that 10 percent of our energy comes from renewable sources by the end of my first term — more than double what we have now.” Note the verb “require” and the adjective “renewable.”
By 2012 he would “require” the economy’s huge energy sector to — here things become comic — supply half as much energy from renewable sources as already is being supplied by just one potentially renewable source. About 20 percent of America’s energy comes from nuclear energy produced using fuel rods, which, when spent, can be reprocessed into fresh fuel.
Uh, no, George. You know jack shit about nuclear energy, and your claim doesn’t even make sense on its face. “Renewable” energy doesn’t mean re-using unspent fuel - that’s just recycling. And you can’t reprocess “spent” fuel - it’s . . . “spent”.
It sounds to me like he’s confusing reprocessing partially spent fuel rods from ordinary reactors, and transmuting non-fissionables in “breeder” reactors. Breeder reactors are often described as “making more fuel than they use”, which is true in the sense that they output more fissionable material than is input to them. But doing that requires a steady input of non-fissionable material, usually low-enrichment uranium (but there are other designs). So you’ve still got to keep digging radioactive crap out of the ground and shoveling it in there to get any energy out. It would be more accurate to say they are non-renewable generators capable of using a wide range of fuels (by transmuting non-fissionable ones into fissionable ones). And they’re going to play exactly no role in energy production in the next four years: there are very few breeder reactors in the world today, and most of those are shut down or obsolete; breeders were banned in the US because they generate huge amounts of nuclear material requiring reprocessing, raising the danger of the diversion of plutonium from the output stream. There are ways to make it almost impossible to use that plutonium for nuclear weapons, but all of the fissionables are potential contamination sources for “dirty bombs”, which are much more likely to be a terrorist weapon that an actual fission bomb anyway.
Will might also want to take a look at the Department of Energy’s own Web site, which explicitly lists nuclear (and other non-renewable) energy sources in completely separate categories from “Renewables”, and does not list nuclear energy among its examples of renewable sources on the page for that category.
The rest of the column is equally dumb. He just wanders around yawping at whatever shiny bit of energy policy catches his attention. Spent fuel containment? George knows the way. Electric car industry growth by way of market incentives? That can’t work, because liberals believe in it. (Yes, he thinks that way.) And see here: Obama’s projected 1 million electric cars won’t have enough power because his proposed 80% carbon-emissions reduction would require a cap set at the level of “colonial days” due to the projected 11% population increase over the next 40+ years. (Wow. Science. It’s got numbers in it and everything. Never mind that he bounces from electric cars to population growth to carbon caps to colonial wood-burning stoves like a Labrador chasing a butterfly. It’s all so . . . real-seeming.) Is any of this true? It comes from the American Enterprise Institute by way of George Will, so the answer is almost undoubtedly “no”, but who cares? The whole point to carbon reduction is that we need to shift to other energy sources, not live like colonials. Is Will suggesting that, if we could find large amounts of renewable energy, we should still keep emitting greenhouse gasses anyway?
It doesn’t matter what he’s saying, because, in the very next paragraph, he’s off on (wait for it . . .) marginal tax rates for upper income levels. (Huh. What a shock.) He notes that Obama has remarked in passing that he didn’t want a 60% marginal tax rate, and then states that “Obama’s policies would bring it to the mid-50s for many Americans, close to the 60 percent Obama considers excessive.” And this means - what? That Obama has set his own tax policy to conform to his own beliefs about appropriate maximum levels? What else did Will expect? (Never mind. The paragraph did give him a chance to mention Ronald Reagan twice, which presumably was reward enough.)
Remember, this is the smart conservative.
Categories: Climate Change, Economics, Environment, General, Math, News & Current Events, Politics, Taxes, Technology | 31 Comments
July 7th, 2008
Via RealClearPolitics, McCain is attacking Obama on taxes:
Re: Credibility Gap: Barack Obama’s Vote To Tax Those Making As Little As $32,000
This year, Barack Obama returned to the United States Senate twice to vote in favor of a budget resolution which raises income tax rates by three percentage points for the 25, 28 and 33 percent tax brackets. This would mean a tax increase for those earning as little as $32,000.
While Barack Obama campaigns on a promise of no tax hikes for anyone but the rich, we once again find that his words are empty when it comes time to act. In both March and June, Barack Obama could have put the force of his vote behind his words. Instead, he decided that “rich” now means those making just $32,000 per year.
[Emphasis mine.]
When I read this, I did a double-take: McCain thinks that people who make “just $32,000 per year” are in the 25% bracket? As is typical for Republican tax rhetoric, McCain’s camp is banking on the ignorance of the American public. They’re counting on Americans simply not understanding the tax code.
According to the 2008 tax code, the 25% bracket for single returns (and married filing separately returns) starts at $32,550; one assumes that this is where McCain is getting that number. But it’s a gross mischaracterization to say that an increase on that bracket “mean[s] a tax increase for those earning as little as $32,000,” for two reasons: the standard deduction, and the personal exemption. For the tax year 2008, the personal exemption is $3,500 for a single filer, and the standard deduction is $5,450. This means that the threshold for people who would be affected by the proposed tax hike isn’t $32,000, as McCain claims, but $41,500. By no means wealthy, but an individual with that income shouldn’t be struggling, either. And it’s a real income almost 30% higher than McCain’s figure, not far off of the median household income (including family households).
Consider a single person making $42,000 — $10,000 per year more than McCain’s advertised $32,000 figure. That taxpayer sees an increase in effective taxation of a whopping $15 per year (or about 0.04%). Yep, that tax hike sure would put middle-class taxpayers on the express train to the poor house, no doubt about it!
More detailed analysis below the fold: (more…)
Categories: Politics, Taxes | 2 Comments
