Politics, Government & Public Policy: February 2007 Archives

Bettors on Intrade, the new non-sports incarnation of Tradesports, think that John McCain's chances of winning the Republican nomination have fallen below Rudy Giuliani's.

I personally don't think the nominee will be either of these men.

A newly prominent group is working to keep atheists out of government.

Annie Laurie Gaylor speaks with a soft voice, but her message catches attention: Keep atheists out of government.

Gaylor has helped transform the Freedom From Atheists Foundation from obscurity into the nation’s largest group of nondenominational Christians, with a fast-rising membership and increasing legal clout. ...

“What’s at stake is our culture's heritage of spirituality in our civic institutions,” Gaylor said. ...

Its leaders say the surge in membership reflects a U.S. population that is becoming more religious and growing conservative alarm since Democrats' midterm election victory.

“There was a feeling that there was almost a near secular-left takeover of our government and that we better speak up now,” Gaylor said. ...

“We’ve applied some very needed pressure to keep atheists and non-believers out of government office,” said the elder Gaylor, 80. “We hope we’ve done some educating that will be lasting.”

I'm not sure what I think about this.

Here's a claim that America has a de facto flat tax. News to me, but perhaps Ben Bateman or others can comment.

In a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Boston University economists Laurence J. Kotlikoff and David Rapson have found that our all-in marginal tax rate is 40%, give or take a bit. Yes, you read that right: 40%.

Most workers will pay about that much on each dollar of income when all taxes -- federal and state income taxes, sales taxes, taxes for benefit programs, etc. -- are considered.

As a consequence, a 30-year-old couple earning only $20,000 a year has a marginal tax rate of 42.5%, while a 45-year-old couple earning $500,000 pays at 43.2%. There are some exceptions: A 30-year-old couple earning $50,000 a year, for instance, pays 24.4%, and a 60-year-old couple making $150,000 a year faces a tax rate of 47.7%.

The average marginal tax rate on incomes between $20,000 and $500,000 is 40.3%, the median tax rate is 41.8%, and the standard deviation of all of those rates is 5.3 percentage points. Basically, most of us pay about 40%, plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.

There's a table with a bit more data at the bottom of the article.

I suppose Presidents Day should be a celebration of the leaders who have directed our country over the centuries, but to me it just highlights the weakness of our new Democrat majority in Congress. The modern Left has never known boldness of action, resolve in the face of setback or -- God forbid -- contrary poll numbers, or a passionate reverence for the American citizen. The generation of Leftists who matured in the 60s is the foundation for perhaps both the most pathetic and the most dangerous cohort of politicians America has ever known.

The mediocre success in Iraq is the pinnacle of President Bush's originally bold foreign policy to protect America in an age of Islamofascism, but the continual nay-saying and self-flagellation of the Left has slowly bled the will to win from the American people. Thanks to the relentless repetition of "Iraq is Vietnam!" the Left is finally getting its wish and making it so. Just as Congress defeated the American military in that war, the new Democrat majority is hamstringing our soldiers in Iraq and ensuring their eventual withdrawal in disgrace and defeat. It's easy to imagine George Washington and Abraham Lincoln rolling over in their graves.

Bush himself has certainly made enough mistakes during the past six years to deserve criticism of his own, but at least he's trying to make America secure and prosperous. I don't have much more to say on the matter, because it grows so tiresome to continually point out the sedition and cowardice of the Left. The spineless "non-binding resolution" that the House passed last Friday is a perfect illustration of the Democrat's uselessness. They inched to victory last November by promising to "end" the military action in Iraq, but instead of defunding the military and forcing the President to bring them home they could only muster the courage to make an empty gesture. If I had voted for a Democrat last year I'd be incredibly angry: the resolution won't bring the troops home any sooner, but will undermine their morale and embolden our enemies, thereby increasing the loss of life. As usual with the Left, they made a way to get the worst of both worlds.

Sometimes I get scared that I take politics too seriously. Am I off my rocker to consider Democrats evil for their resolution? Maybe I should look at it like most of our politicians apparently do: it's just a game! Let's see who compromises and twists enough to trick the voters into electing them in 2008! Woo!

Bah.

The Heritage Foundation has a nice piece describing how Social Security works, and my favorite part is their description of the "trust funds".

The Social Security trust fund consists only of spe­cial-issue Treasury bonds. These bonds are special in that they can only be issued to and redeemed by the Social Security trust funds. They cannot be sold in the open market. ...

Because these are special-issue bonds that are payable only to the Social Security Administration, the SSA cannot sell them to a third party to raise money to pay benefits. This reinforces the fact that these bonds are really nothing more than IOUs from one branch of government to another. They are not a real financial asset.

Until relatively recently, these bonds existed only as entries in a record book. Now, however, when a new bond is issued, it is printed on a laser printer located at the Bureau of the Public Debt office in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The bond is then carried across the room and put in a fireproof filing cabinet. That filing cabinet is the Social Security trust funds. ...

According to the OMB, there are only four ways that Congress can repay these bonds: raise other taxes, authorize the Treasury to borrow the needed funds from the public, reduce spending on other federal programs and use the savings to redeem Social Security’s bonds, or simply reduce Social Security benefits. None of these options is easy or attractive.

Social Security is doomed, and the longer we take to recognize it the worse the fallout will be.

Barack Obama first declared that the lives of American soldiers lost in Iraq were "wasted", but then scrambled to take the statement back.

During his first press conference as a presidential candidate at Iowa State University, Obama, discussing his opposition to the Iraq war, said the war "should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged, and on which we've now spent $400 billion, and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.'' ...

Obama, in an interview with the Des Moines Register right afterward, told the paper, ''I was actually upset with myself when I said that, because I never use that term,'' he said. ''Their sacrifices are never wasted. . . . What I meant to say was those sacrifices have not been honored by the same attention to strategy, diplomacy and honesty on the part of civilian leadership that would give them a clear mission."

Waste:

1. to consume, spend, or employ uselessly or without adequate return; use to no avail or profit; squander: to waste money; to waste words.

Perhaps Senator Obama will soon explain to us how the returns we've gotten in Iraq for the lives of our soldiers have been useful, adequate, and profitable.

Stories of post-Katrina stupidity and wastefulness come in bursts, and the government's own incompetence is compounded by the seemingly limitless greed and dishonesty of Katrina victims as a group. (I'm sure there are many honest Katrina victims, but they're sure overshadowed by the fraudsters who stole taxpayer money and the bums who are still living in government housing.)

The Federal Emergency Management Administration has determined nearly 70,000 Louisiana households improperly received $309.1 million in grants, and officials acknowledge those numbers are likely to grow.

In the chaotic period after two deadly hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, slammed the Gulf Coast in 2005 - Katrina making landfall in late August, followed by Rita in late September - federal officials scrambled to provide help in hard-hit areas such as submerged neighborhoods near the French Quarter.

But an Associated Press analysis of government data obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act suggests the government might not have been careful enough with its checkbook as it gave out nearly $5.3 billion in aid to storm victims. The analysis found the government regularly gave money to more homes in some neighborhoods than the number of homes that actually existed.

The pattern was repeated in nearly 100 neighborhoods damaged by the hurricanes. At least 162,750 homes that didn't exist before the storms may have received a total of more than $1 billion in improper or illegal payments, the AP found.

Blaming the government for incompetence is easy and right, but we shouldn't hesitate to condemn the fraudsters who stole our money in the name of victimhood.

Western Missouri and Oklahoma have been without power for weeks and buried under ice, and yet the residents of those areas are somehow managing without FEMA or fat government checks. Maybe the people of Louisiana could learn a lesson by turning their gaze northward.

Hillary's threat to take Exxon's profits is completely antithetical to the American dream, and even downright unpatriotic if you think about it. Consider it: the federal budget this year is $2.9 trillion, none of which was earned. Exxon made money for its owners by actually running a business, not by sticking a gun to our collective head and taxing us. What's more, their profit isn't abnormally high by any stretch of the imagination.

Factual omissions by the reporter op/ed writer, total revenue. $377.64 billion for the year. For those who can’t calculate percentages, and percentages are critical when you look at profits, income statements, little things like that. The way you do it is to divide the profit number by the revenue and then move the decimal point over a few places. See what I mean? All of a sudden that $39.5 Billion is a mere 10.46%

If you owned a business that had revenue of a million dollars yet showed a profit of $104,600, would you feel elated or more like you had an off year?

Another omission, Exxon paid $27.9 billion in income taxes last year.

Hillary is quick to seize the profits of well-run companies, but what about Ford's $12.7 billion loss? Why not take some of Exxon's profits and pay off the losses of Ford's owners? Ridiculous? Of course it is! The government produces nothing and earns nothing, and it has no right or power to condemn the companies that do. Every American should be applauding Exxon for running such a successful business that contributes so much to our society.

Hillary's proposal to seize Exxon's profits is worse than what Hugo Chavez is doing by nationalizing Venezuela's oil industry. At least if the company is nationalized the government bears the potential losses as well as the potential profits. Hillary just wants the profits and intends to let the owners hang if the company posts a loss! She's not only a thief, she's a fool, because who would bother running any sort of company under those conditions? This is the idiocy of socialism.

The profits of Exxon -- and every other "evil corporation" -- belong to its owners: investors, mutual funds, pension funds, and so forth. Neither Hillary nor the government earned that money, and it doesn't belong to them.

I've written about the electoral college several times, always noting that it is here to stay despite periodic efforts to "reform" it. The present National Popular Vote Interstate Compact plan is different from earlier schemes, however, in that it attempts to create a electoral cartel of large states who agree to vote together to undermine the power the Constitution gives small states.

A movement to upend the Electoral College in favor of a popular presidential vote aims to sweep state legislatures this year, starting with Colorado.

The state Senate here last week approved a bill that would award Colorado's nine electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins a majority of the vote nationally, regardless of how the candidate performs statewide. There's just one caveat: The legislation only takes effect if states with a combined 270 electoral votes -- a majority -- approve their own National Popular Vote Interstate Compact bills.

Lofty as that goal may sound, organizers say it's within reach. Already, 25 states have introduced the legislation and another 20 have it in the drafting stage. Passage in the 11 most-populous states would give the compact an electoral-vote total of 271.

Those same 11 states could never muster the votes to amend the Constitution, but they're within their rights to form a cartel as described. The key differences between an amendment and this cartel strategy are that changes in population could gradually undermine the cartel, and each state in the group could decide to leave and vote freely again at any time.

I see this plan as harmful to our Republic and very disadvantageous to the interests of most voters, but since the cartel would be inherently much weaker than a Constitutional amendment I'm not going to get too worked up about it. I still think the chances of passage in the various states are slim to none, but even if the cartel does come about I don't think it will last long.

I expect posts like this to be an ongoing series this election season. The Democrats are busily devouring Senator Joe Biden for his "clean black" comment (rightly so, in my humble opinion), and considering the debacles of the last two Democrat presidential campaigns I expect the infighting to be fiercer than ever.

In a critique of the Democratic field, he said of Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois: "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," he told the New York Observer, a weekly. "I mean, that's a storybook, man." ...

Talk-show hosts and bloggers seized on the Obama comment, but they also invoked criticism from a leading liberal blogger. "Really, if we live in a just world, this will be the end of Joe Biden's political career," read a post on DailyKos.com "It's clear his career has dragged on one election cycle too many."

I couldn't agree more! Democrats play dirtier politics than anyone, so the real question is will anyone survive the primary season?

The left's feeding frenzy will certainly help the right, but it would sure be nice if there was a promising Republican candidate on the horizon. Maybe a combination of Romney's personality and ethics with Newt's brains..... I wouldn't mind a ticket with Romey as President and Newt as VP in a Cheney-like role.