Media reports indicate Barack Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, may throw his hat into the Democratic presidential ring, possibly as early as today.

That cannot possibly be good news for Hillary Clinton. Not only does she have Comrade Bernie on her left, now she may have Uncle Joe, who has Obama’s record but without Hillary’s negatives.

Which doesn’t mean Biden lacks negatives, in addition to his inattention to personal space, lack of intellect, strange public behavior and other personal characteristics that gave him the label “assassination insurance.” David Harsanyi notes potential problems with other Democrats:

So let’s for a moment imagine that Biden is a principled politician and wouldn’t say absolutely anything just to become president—this would bethe third time he’d be running for the position. And let’s, for a moment, concede that Biden, after his flirtation with Elizabeth Warren and hiring of new staff, is the sort of candidate that can knock off the front-runner. But then let’s suspend our disbelief and pretend the media will hold the new candidate responsible for his previous positions and votes at least as strictly as they hold Marco Rubio accountable for his wife’s parking tickets.

If they did, they would find that Joe Biden has had, in some sense, more consequential conservative votes on record than any candidate running for president from either party. Or a better way to put it: his greatest legacy is a lack of coherent philosophy and a ton of politically convenient grandstanding.

The one issue that has generated some attention is that Biden authored the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which not only expanded the number of crimes subject to the federal death penalty, but also played a pivotal role in the explosion of incarcerations and the disproportionate criminal prosecution in poor black communities. Joe’s always been a tough-on-crime sort of guy, and as The New York Timespointed out recently

Despite reservations, Mr. Biden, who has served as the Obama administration’s unofficial liaison to the law enforcement community, has not only stood by the 1994 legislation, but has also frequently taken credit for it. As recently as this spring, in an essay on community policing for a book of bipartisan reform proposals put together by the Brennan Center for Justice, Mr. Biden referred to the legislation as the “1994 Biden Crime Bill.”

In addition to the “1994 Biden Crime Bill,” the vice president was one of the biggest proponents of the War on Drugs, taking a leading role in creating federal mandatory minimum laws that have put scores of non-violent criminals in prison. The kind of policies President Obama, Elizabeth Warren, every progressive, and many others have claimed are destructive. Biden also helped create the Drug Czar, a government official that oversees all anti-drug operations. As Biden explained to Timeback in 2008, “I am not only the guy who did the crime bill and the drug czar, but I’m also the guy who spent years when I was chairman of the Judiciary Committee and chairman trying to change drug policy relative to cocaine, for example, crack and powder.”

On the social front, Biden voted for the bigoted, anti-equality Defense of Marriage Act that has since been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Biden voted in favor the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy which pushed members of the American gay community who wanted to fight for their nation deeper into the closet. Surely he will be asked to defend these votes by explaining how he evolved to his current position.

Biden has not only come out against federal funding for abortions, but also voted in favor of a 1999 bill to ban most partial-birth abortions, and in favor of the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Surely if he supported a bill that protected post-viable babies, he must also support Republican efforts to protect viable babies and believe it’s wrong to harvest a baby’s body parts after she’s been born. I look forward to the Catholic Biden’s clarification.

On issues of war and peace, Biden didn’t simply vote for the Iraq War, he was a vocal proponent of going to war. In 2002, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden said that Saddam Hussein was “a long term threat and a short term threat to our national security.” Biden went on to say that there was “no choice but to eliminate the threat.” In October of 2002, he gave a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate advocating for going to war. How Americans–liberals especially–can vote for someone who, when confronted with most important issue of his age, voted the wrong way? “A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics,” as Obama put it.

Before joining the administration, Biden was not only for increasing federal domestic spying programs, but he used to boast that the Patriot Act was essentially a copy of his own the anti-terrorist legislation from 1995. Either this is not true, or Democrats would be supporting the author of the Patriot Act. And Biden was a proponent of expanding the power of FBI wiretaps long before 9/11.

So, as we mock Donald Trump supporters for their ambivalence to the actual policy positions of their candidate, let’s remember that the other party may feature both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Biden’s erratic voting record–he supported the embargo on Cuba, for instance, promising in 2009 that the administration would not overturn it–makes all the sense in the world when you view it in context. When we set aside Biden’s smarmy Mr. Magoo-ishness, it’s worth remembering that although Biden may cast himself as some kind of dependable alternative to Clinton, and he would almost certainly be a stronger candidate than Hillary, he is also an escape hatch for those concerned about the ethical problems of an equally calculated candidate.

There is also his difficulty in not casting others’ work as his own, noted by American Thinker in 2008:

Political insiders have long known about Joe Biden getting caught plagiarizing almost word-for-word a speech given by British Labour politician Neil Kinnock. In fact, that killed his 1988 presidential campaign.
But a more serious plagiarism charge has been out there even longer – that he plagiarized in law school. That is something that can get you thrown out if proven.

Sweetness & Light remembers this 1987 New York Times article:

According to the people familiar with the record of the 44-year-old Senator from Delaware, he was called before the disciplinary body at the law school during his first year because of charges that he had committed plagiarism on a paper. Mr. Biden entered the school in 1965 and graduated in 1968.

CBS News tonight quoted an aide to Mr. Biden as saying he had been exonerated. However, an academic official said Mr. Biden had been found guilty, “threw himself on the mercy of the board” and promised not to repeat the offense. This, according to the official, persuaded the board to drop the matter and allow Mr. Biden to remain in law school. Mr. Biden’s office declined to clarify the circumstances surrounding the case, saying the Senator had insisted on handling the matter himself at the news conference. [….]

Unsurprisingly, the New York Times article actually downplays the Kinnock plagiarism. For Mr. Biden didn’t just plagiarize his words, he plagiarized his life.

From a concomitant article in the (FL) St. Petersburg Times:

Biden’s way with words now seems to be a liability

JOHN HARWOOD
Sep 20, 1987

… But it was just last month that Biden appropriated an inspirational speech by British Labor leader Neil Kinnock. Kinnock told of ancestors who played football after long days underground in the mines, who recited poetry poetry and paved the way for him to become the first in his family to attend college.

When he saw a tape of Kinnock in action, Biden said Thursday, “it was a connect. I mean, I could tell how that man felt. That’s how I feel.”
So he used it – changing the names but little else – at a debate last month in Iowa. But instead of crediting Kinnock, he told the audience he thought of it on the way to the debate…

Biden acknowledged Kinnock’s language didn’t fit his family perfectly. His father was in used car sales, his grandfather was a mining engineer. But he had been told and “assumed” that other relatives had worked in the mines. And, “to make it clear,”  members of his mother’s family had, indeed, been to college…

Doubtless Democrats will find Biden’s non-liberal positions more damning than cheating and plagiarizing.

James Taranto:

“When it comes to paying taxes, most Americans think the wealthy do not pay their fair share,” observes the New York Times’s Patricia Cohen. The Democratic candidates for president agree. In last week’s debate, Bernie Sanders railed: “Let me tell you, Donald Trump and his billionaire friends under my policies are going to pay a hell of a lot more in . . . taxes in the future than they’re paying today.” Inevitable nominee Hillary Clinton put it more gently: “Right now, the wealthy pay too little, and the middle class pays too much.”

Cohen means to assure her readers that a policy of punishing the rich would serve other ends as well:

But what could a tax-the-rich plan actually achieve? As it turns out, quite a lot, experts say. Given the gains that have flowed to those at the tip of the income pyramid in recent decades, several economists have been making the case that the government could raise large amounts of revenue exclusively from this small group, while still allowing them to take home a majority of their income.

It is “absurd” to argue that most wealth at the top is already highly taxed or that there isn’t much more revenue to be had by raising taxes on the 1 percent, says the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel in economic science, who has written extensively about inequality. “The only upside of the concentration of the wealth at the top is that they have more money to pay in taxes,” he said.

That sounds more covetous than practical-minded, doesn’t it? And Cohen provides data that belie Stiglitz’s first assertion: The tax system is quite progressive, with the overall federal burden rising from 3.6% for the lowest income quintile to 7.8%, 13.7%, 17.0% and 25.7% for the top quintile. The trend continues within the top quintile, for whom the burden ranges from 20.0% for the second decile (i.e., the bottom half of the top quintile) to 33.4% for the top 1% and 34.9% for the top 0.1%.

Still, the burden could be heavier. And for those who aren’t quite as zealous as Stiglitz about punishing the rich, Cohen offers a payoff:

Raising [the top 1%’s] total tax burden to, say, 40 percent would generate about $157 billion in revenue the first year. Increasing it to 45 percent brings in a whopping $276 billion. Even taking account of state and local taxes, the average household in this group would still take home at least $1 million a year.

If the tax increase were limited to just the 115,000 households in the top 0.1 percent, with an average income of $9.4 million, a 40 percent tax rate would produce $55 billion in extra revenue in its first year.

That would more than cover, for example, the estimated $47 billion cost of eliminating undergraduate tuition at all the country’s four-year public colleges and universities, as Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed, or Mrs. Clinton’s cheaper plan for a debt-free college degree, with money left over to help fund universal prekindergarten.

A tax rate of 45 percent on this select group raises $109 billion, more than enough to pay for the first year of a new $2,500 child tax credit introduced by Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida.

How is this any different from enviously imagining what you would do if you got your grubby paws on your wealthy neighbor’s money? And Cohen doesn’t stop with the top 1%. The next paragraph begins: “Move a rung down the ladder and expand the contribution of those in the 95th to 99th percentile . . .,” and imagines raising their overall federal tax burden to 30% from the current 25.2%. The average income in this class is just over $400,000.

There’s an enormous practical problem with this exercise as well. Early in her piece, she observes that for all their talk about “raising taxes at the top,” the Democrats “have not been very specific about how they would do so.”

But neither is Cohen. She imagines an increase in various income classes’ overall federal tax burden, but that is not how taxes are actually assessed. As she acknowledges, the total figure “takes into account the entire menu of taxes—including income tax, payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security, estate and gift taxes, excise and custom duties as well as investors’ share of corporate taxes.”

Exactly what tax laws would one change in order to ensure that the top 1% (or the top 0.1% or the top 5%) gets gouged without harming the middle class? The question is unanswerable—it can’t be done. And as Cohen eventually acknowledges, high-income taxpayers have ways of defending themselves against covetous officials. Example:

Aided by a phalanx of lawyers and accountants, the rich have become adept at figuring out ways to shift earnings that would normally be taxed at the top 39.6 percent rate on ordinary income into capital gains, said the economist Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, who is researching the link between widening inequality and tactics—legal and illegal—used by the wealthy to sidestep taxes.

Naturally Cohen suggests raising the tax on capital gains to match that for ordinary income, but she doesn’t seem much worried about the disincentive effect on investment. (It’s reminiscent of Barack Obama’s assertion in 2008 that he favored raising capital-gains taxes “for purposes of fairness,” even if revenues went down as a result.)

Meanwhile, the main expert she cites calls for new tax breaks to encourage the sort of investment he favors:

“Why give a blank check to all of these guys?” Mr. Stiglitz, the liberal economist, asked. He pointed out that current tax law makes no distinction between, say, investing abroad, speculating in land or building a new factory. A better approach, he said, is to say: “We’ll give you generous deductions if you invest in America.”

The wealthier the taxpayer, the better equipped he is to take advantage of tax-code complications like the “generous deductions” Stiglitz proposes here.

A caption on a chart accompanying Cohen’s piece states: “Taking all federal taxes into account, the richest taxpayers contribute, on average, about a third of their income to the government. But they still enjoy after-tax incomes far higher than those of other Americans.” In other words, wealthy people are wealthier than less-wealthy people. The politics of envy rests on a rejection of that simple logic.