Society & Culture: January 2012 Archives
Um... abortion is safer than birth?
Getting a legal abortion is much safer than giving birth, suggests a new U.S. study published Monday.Researchers found that women were about 14 times more likely to die during or after giving birth to a live baby than to die from complications of an abortion.
It's not safer for the baby though.
(HT: James Taranto.)
Rand Simberg nails the pro-abortion left for opposing abortion prerequisites that pale in comparison to restrictions on guy buyers.
Recently, the Texas legislature passed (and the governor signed) a law with a seemingly modest requirement -- that any woman getting an abortion in the state of Texas be allowed (and required) to see a sonogram of the fetus twenty-four hours prior to the surgery.Note what the law doesn't do. It doesn't prevent a woman from getting an abortion. It (at most) slows her down by one day from doing so, should she choose to go through with it.
Contrast this with the hoops that gun owners must often jump through to purchase firearms -- background checks, waiting periods, purchase limits within a certain amount of time. Or the requirement that they undergo training, spending money and investing time, to get a permit to carry their weapons, even in states where it is allowed. All of these are far more onerous than the simple requirement that a woman have an ultrasound picture taken of her womb, and see it.
He is correct in asserting that "pro-choice" is a misnomer: these leftists are pro-abortion. Is there some reason they're hesitant to embrace that? I'm pro-gun, not just pro-the-choice-to-buy-a-gun. Nothing embarrassing about that. Are they embarrassed to be pro-abortion?
Well, to be honest, they should be embarrassed. Abortion is abhorrent and detestable, and so are the activists who promote it and the industry that profits from it.
The WSJ does a great job explaining why Mitt Romney's tax rates are (and should be) low.
Start with the fact that, like Warren Buffett, Mr. Romney said he makes most of his money from investments, not wages or salary. Thus his income is really taxed twice: once at the corporate tax rate of 35%, then again at a 15% tax rate when it is passed through to him as dividends or via capital gains from the sale of stock.All income from businesses is eventually passed through to the owners, so to ignore business taxes creates a statistical illusion that makes it appear that the rich pay less than they really do. By this logic, if the corporate tax rate were raised to, say, 60% from today's 35% and the dividend and capital gains tax were cut to zero, it would appear that business owners were getting away with paying no federal tax at all.
This all-too-conveniently confuses the incidence of a tax with the burden of a tax. The marginal tax rate on every additional dollar of capital gains and dividend income from corporate profits can reach as high as 44.75% at the federal level (assuming a company pays the 35% top corporate rate), not 15%.
James Taranto points out that inflation also gnaws away at capital gains.
In the case of capital gains--profit on the sale of an asset--there is an additional argument. If you bought stock for $1,000 in 1990 and sold it for $2,000 in 2010, you'd pay taxes on the $1,000 difference--even though part of the appreciation reflects the decline in the value of money. A thousand dollars in 1990 dollars is a bit under $1,650 in 2010 dollars, so you'd pay $150 in taxes on real (after-inflation) income of $350, an effective rate of 43%. Taxing the same income at the current top ordinary rate of 35% would wipe out almost all the gains--and this during two decades in which inflation has generally been low.
The problem isn't that capital is taxed too lightly, but rather than income is taxed too heavily.
