Our first item comes from the Stupid Laws File: Today in 1956, Ohio youths younger than 18 were banned from dancing in public unless accompanied by an adult, the result of enforcing a law that dated back to 1931.
The number one single today in 1965:
The number one British single today in 1971 was the first number one by a singer from his previous group:
Today in 1977, Patti Smith broke a vertebra after falling off the stage at her concert in Tampa, Fla.
The Washington Examiner:
Don’t believe the happy talk coming out of the White House, Federal Reserve and Treasury Department when it comes to the realunemployment rate and the true “Misery Index.” Because, according to an influential Wall Street advisor, the figures are a fraud.
In a memo to clients provided to Secrets, David John Marotta calculates the actual unemployment rate of those not working at a sky-high 37.2 percent, not the 6.7 percent advertised by the Fed, and the Misery Index at over 14, not the 8 claimed by the government. …
“The unemployment rate only describes people who are currently working or looking for work,” he said. That leaves out a ton more.
“Unemployment in its truest definition, meaning the portion of people who do not have any job, is 37.2 percent. This number obviously includes some people who are not or never plan to seek employment. But it does describe how many people are not able to, do not want to or cannot find a way to work. Policies that remove the barriers to employment, thus decreasing this number, are obviously beneficial,” he and colleague Megan Russell in their new investors note from their offices in Charlottesville, Va.
They added that “officially-reported unemployment numbers decrease when enough time passes to discourage the unemployed from looking for work. A decrease is not necessarily beneficial; an increase is clearly detrimental.”
Then there is the Misery Index, which is a calculation based in inflation and unemployment, both numbers the duo say are underscored by the government. He said that the Index doesn’t properly calculate how Uncle Sam is propping up the economy with bond purchases and other actions.
“These tricks, along with a host of other dubious accounting schemes, underreport inflation by about 3 percent,” they wrote, adding that the official inflation rate is just 1.24 percent.
“Today, the Misery Index would be 7.54 using official numbers,” they wrote. But if calculations tabulating the full national unemployment including discouraged workers, which is 10.2 percent, and the historical method of calculating inflation, which is now 4.5 percent, ‘the current misery index is closer to 14.7, worse even than during the Ford administration.”
WKOW-TV in Madison reports the remarkable statement from Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke:
“If you look at, overall, all the money that state and local governments bring in from the people of Wisconsin, we’re more in the middle,” Burke told a gathering of Madison’s East Side Progressives on Sunday night.Burke was responding to a question from someone at the meeting who asked how she planned to win over more conservative, anti-tax voters.“In terms of a state, we’re not a high tax and fee state,” she said.
Collin Roth begs to differ, and unlike Burke, he has statistics to prove his point:
Not a high tax and fee state? That quote will haunt Mary Burke throughout 2014.
First, Burke avoided taking a position on the $912 million revenue surge, the number one issue facing state government. Deferring on this question is a clear signal that Burke’s strategists haven’t yet crafted a way to spend the money.
Second and more important, Mary Burke doesn’t think Wisconsin is a “high tax and fee state.”
Really?
Some statistics from the Tax Foundation suggest otherwise.
- Wisconsin’s top income tax rate of 7.75% ranks 10th highest nationally.
- Wisconsin’s 2014 Business Tax Climate was ranked 43rd nationally.
- Wisconsin’s Tax Freedom Day is April 20, 11th latest nationally.
- The most recent rankings have Wisconsin’s overall property tax collections per capita rank 12th highest nationally.
But then again, Burke’s experience in the Doyle administration would suggest a different definition of “high taxes.” …
Wisconsin has a long way to go in order to lower the tax burden and reform the tax structure – but at least Gov. Walker and the legislature are making strong attempts to lower taxes each year. In fact, Rep. Dale Kooyenga has made it his mission to get Wisconsin out of the bottom ten of the Tax Foundation’s rankings.Mary Burke on the other hand doesn’t think Wisconsin’s taxes are very high.Her words, not mine.
Gov. James Doyle, you’ll recall, promised to not raise taxes, and then did. The fallout from that continues to hamper the state’s economy today.
But Burke is not the only Wisconsinite who feels this way. Media Trackers reports:
A prominent liberal activist in Wisconsin is claiming that if Governor Scott Walker enacts yet another tax cut, it will be a misuse of “public office and public dollars.” Robert Kraig, the executive director of Citizen Action of Wisconsin, a prominent cheerleading organization for leftwing causes and policies such as ObamaCare, fumed in an interview late last week that another tax cut in Wisconsin would be a form of corruption.
“[I]ts not corruption at the level of Chris Christie, but it is an example of misusing public office and public dollars for personal, political gain rather than the public good,” Kraig said in his organization’s weekly podcast. …
Kraig then charged that by rolling out tax reform plan after tax reform plan, Governor Walker is just trying to boost his political profile headed into a re-election battle. The tax cut proposals amount to, “using the state’s resources for political gain,” he said. Walker is “just staging this stuff out so he can be in the headlines giving away money.” …
While Kraig’s accusation that tax cuts amount to illegal activity are pretty brazen, the voluble liberal policy wonk has a history of engaging in hyperbole to get his point across. In February of 2013 he asserted that if Walker didn’t expand Medicaid according to ObamaCare suggestions, people in Wisconsin would die.
“If Governor Walker turns down billions in federal money for BadgerCare, there is no doubt that many Wisconsinites will die as a consequence.”
Amazingly, his antics haven’t seemed to cost him his credibility with some media outlets who still seek him out for comment.
National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson goes to Texas. (No, this is not about Jerry Jones.)
There are plenty of rich people in and around Dallas, as a walk down Euclid Avenue in Highland Park will confirm, but unlike in New York City’s Upper East Side or San Francisco’s Mission District, Dallas’s outdoor cafes and boutiques are deserted on a typical weekday afternoon: Dallas’s rich are in the main the working rich. Dallas is no longer the Dallas of Dallas, but it still is a city in which the very well off are not at all shy about their money — there are plenty of Bentleys parked in front of the Mansion at Turtle Creek, because Dallas is the sort of place where rich people drive Bentleys and call their nicest hotel “the Mansion.” Those Bentleys belong to energy traders, hedge-fund geeks, restaurateurs, real-estate developers, dentists, importers, exporters — to the extent that there are trust-funders, they’re keeping a relatively low profile everywhere but the charity circuit. …
Rich America is a lot more like Dallas — and even more like relatively understated Houston — than it is like Fifth Avenue. Rich America is working America: Wealthy households contain on average more than four times as many full-time workers as do poor households, and, surprisingly, inherited wealth constitutes a smaller share of their assets than it does for middle-class and poor households. They live modestly relative to their means and for the most part do not work on Wall Street or as corporate executives. The caricature of the rich American as a child of privilege who inherited a fortune and spends his days shuttling between mansions in a private jet is largely a product of the imagination of such would-be class warriors as Elizabeth Warren and Robert Reich, neither of whom lives in Section 8 housing, or even downwind of it.
The relatively minor role of inherited money in the lives of wealthy Americans is worth examining in some detail. Senator Bernie Sanders, the self-described socialist from Vermont, has been known to complain indignantly that “today the Walton family of Walmart own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of America.” But that fact is rather less telling than Senator Sanders imagines it to be. Never mind the Waltons: If you have a net worth of $0.01, then your wealth exceeds that of the poorest quarter of Americans combined — their net worth begins in negative territory and tops out at $0.00.
The Waltons are not typical of rich America. Wealth transfers — inheritances and gifts combined — constitute a small part of the holdings of the rich, whether you define “rich” in terms of income or net worth. For the top income quintile, gifts and inheritances amount to 13 percent of household wealth, according to research published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For the top wealth quintile, they amount to 16 percent. For the hated “1 percent,” inherited wealth accounts for about 15 percent of holdings. Contrary to the story the Left likes to tell about economic inequality in the United States, those numbers have gone down over recent decades — by almost half for the wealthiest Americans. Meanwhile, inherited money makes up 43 percent of the wealth of the lowest income group and 31 percent for the second-lowest. In case our would-be class warriors are having trouble running the numbers here, that means that inherited money on net reduces wealth inequality in the United States (measured as a ratio) rather than exacerbating it; eliminating inherited wealth would have approximately twice as much of a negative effect on modest households as on wealthy ones.
There is a reason that money earned from work accounts for a relatively large share of the holdings of rich Americans: They work more — a lot more. While Census Bureau data document a very large gap in the prevalence of college degrees among the top 20 percent vs. the bottom 20 percent, there is an even larger and more significant gap — 60 percentage points — between full-time employment for householders in the top income group vs. the bottom income group. There is, to be sure, such a thing as the working poor, but the most salient characteristic of poor households is the lack of full-time workers in them. For the bottom income group, there is an average of 0.42 earners per household, with 68.2 percent of householders not working at all, as opposed to 1.97 earners per household and only 13.3 percent not working for the highest income group. The answer to poverty turns out to be “get a job,” after all — though that should be an aspiration toward which we assist the poor rather than a contemptuous dismissal of their needs.
Family matters. Not surprisingly, 78.4 percent of those highest-income families were married couples, as opposed to 17 percent for the lowest-income group. What this all means in brief is that the highest-income families are composed almost exclusively of two-earner households, the overwhelming majority of them married couples. Those who are inclined to see public policy mainly through green eyeshades may sniff at the social conservatives and their quaint worries about marriage, but there is a very strong connection between how we conduct our family lives and our economic outcomes — the very word “economy” derives from the Greek term for household administration, οἰκονομία. All the best people may roll their eyes at “tiger mom” Amy Chua’s admiration for Asian-American, Nigerian-American, and Mormon domestic culture, but it is difficult to dismiss the results. …
While it would be uncharitable to begrudge the poor the money that is spent on them by the welfare state, especially considering that we spend a great deal more subsidizing the middle class, the fact is that as a practical matter we are running out of ways to spend money on the needy: We already pay for education, food, housing, job training, health care, heating, etc. There are a number of charitable organizations that exist for the sole purpose of providing poor people with appropriate clothes to wear to job interviews. But something is missing — that priceless thing that makes an immigrant into a valedictorian or a successful publican, that inspires people to make the most out of the opportunities afforded by a society that is, for all of its present difficulties, stuffed with them. It isn’t want of material aspiration: There’s a reason that Kanye West makes money singing about his money (“new watch alert” — seriously, that’s a lyric — fortunately, Hublot is easy to rhyme) and why they sell the Robb Report at Walmart. And it’s not just luxury goods: People want better lives — healthier, more productive, and more secure. How to get them there? Mitt Romney might have some ideas about that, but Americans got a good hard look at him in 2012 and said no.
MSNBC reports:
Brian Schweitzer, the former two-term Democratic governor of Montana, is rarely speechless. Once he gets going on a topic, he’s almost impossible to stop. As he builds up steam, he’ll slap his knee to emphasize his points. He’ll slap your knee to emphasize his points. Good luck getting a word in edgewise for that follow-up question.
But at the moment, Schweitzer is rubbing his chin, looking up at the ceiling, searching – unsuccessfully – for just the right words. The question was simple enough: Is there a single thing President Obama has done that you consider a positive achievement?
Finally, he spoke.
“My mother, God rest her soul, told me ‘Brian, if you can’t think of something nice to say about something change the subject,’” he said.
But he couldn’t help himself, slamming Obama’s record on civil liberties (the NSA revelations were “un-effing-believable”), his competency (“They just haven’t been very good at running things”), and above all, Obamacare (“It will collapse on its own weight”). …
Schweitzer’s scorn for Obama has led him to hatch a surprising plan. After turning down a run for Senate this year and settling into a new job as a mining executive, the ex-governor surprised observers by announcing his interest in a possible run for president in 2016. He’s since visited Iowa, the kickoff caucus state, to rail against Obama’s “corporatist” health care law and to criticize Hillary Clinton, the presumed Democratic frontrunner in 2016, for voting to authorize the Iraq war when she was a New York senator.
A Schweitzer presidential candidacy would be a long shot by any measure. He has no national profile and a heterodox political persona that’s served him well in rural, libertarian, and energy rich Montana but doesn’t necessarily sync with the average Democratic primary voter. Clinton, while still undeclared, is such an overwhelming favorite that donors-in-waiting are already competing for territory.
But what Schweitzer does have is a message that’s unique in the likely Democratic field. The former governor is gambling that Democrats won’t just want an alternative to Clinton in 2016–they’ll want a complete and total rejection of the Obama presidency. …
The left-leaning issues Schweitzer is most passionate about– single-payer health care, civil liberties, pulling troops out of Afghanistan – are areas where Obama has run into trouble with progressive activists. But he skews right on issues like expanding domestic oil and coal production and protecting gun rights, where Obama has held relatively strong with his base.
A third-generation rancher rarely seen without a bolo tie, Schweitzer gained a devoted following in Montana espousing “prairie populism”–an approach that included vetoing Republican bills with a hot branding iron and airing campaign ads where he blew away federal ID cards with a shotgun. He holds an advanced degree in soil science, which he put to use in Libya and Saudi Arabia working on agricultural projects before he got into politics. He practices his Arabic by chatting up New York cabbies.
Schweitzer’s background, besides giving him a plausible presidential résumé, has produced a trademark rhetorical style that’s equal parts homespun and worldly. Former Montana GOP chairman Erik Iverson described it to msnbc as “part policy wonk, part P.T. Barnum.” The governor will recite a blizzard of facts, dates, and quotes about the Middle East, for example, but always stop to throw in a sound bite Alan Jackson could understand.
“People say to me: ‘Brian, you lived in the Middle East, you understand the Middle East,’” he told msnbc. “It’s confusing to most people, you know? The uniforms that they wear, some have got towels some don’t, some hang down, some are white, some are Shia, Sunni, Wahhabi, what are all these things, how are the Kuwaitis related to the Saudis, blah blah blah.”
He added, “Look, let me get this clear before you say that you understand: Good guys and bad guys in the Middle East? There are no good guys. It’s bad guys and allies.”
There was a time that this kind of talk made Schweitzer a hot presidential prospect. After George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, progressives immersed themselves in Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas?,” a book that theorized Republicans used their blue-collar “authenticity” to trick working-class Americans into voting against their own economic interests. On sites like Daily Kos and MyDD, some activists saw Schweitzer as a logical antidote.
“He counters the cultural language of the right, which is not just policy – it’s, ‘Those New York or Cambridge liberals and academics are trying to change our lives!’” David Sirota, a progressive author and activist who worked on Schweitzer’s campaigns, told msnbc. …
“When you choose your next national leader, ask them how they’re going to be different than Bush,” Schweitzer told msnbc. “Ask them how they’re going to be different than Obama.”
All I can say is: Run, Brian, run! I’d rather vote for a Democrat like this than an America-hater like Obama, or Hillary Clinton.
Today in 1968, Jimi Hendrix recorded “All Along the Watchtower,” musically assisted by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and Dave Mason of Traffic:
The number one album today in 1978 was the best selling movie soundtrack of all time:
In the midst of tax reform discussions, the MacIver Institute makes an interesting contribution:
The idea that the government can help stimulate economic growth and create new jobs sounds like a productive idea on the surface. Using taxpayer funds to invest in companies that create jobs is a good thing, right?
Not so much, according to the data compiled by the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy. Specific tax credits, subsidies, grants and other incentives only help the few. They may even harm economic development – the exact opposite of what the incentives strive for. …
Matt Mitchell, a Senior Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, looked to see if government incentives were all they cracked up to be. He discovered that states with more incentives per capita actually have slower real economic growth.
“If local subsidies worked as advertised, we’d expect to see greater economic growth in those states that give away more subsidies. But simple analysis of [Louise] Story’s data suggests that, if anything, there is a negative relationship between per capita subsidies and economic growth,” Mitchell wrote for Mercatus Center.
“I also ran a series of econometric tests, sometimes controlling for other factors (regional effects, the initial size of state economies, and economic freedom) and sometimes not. In every test I ran, per capita subsidies were negatively associated with state economic growth and often the relationship was statistically significant (I should note that the Mercatus measure of economic freedom was always positively and statistically significantly related to growth).”
Many studies have shown the economic value of having a lower tax burden. Businesses and workers pay less to the government, so they have more to spend and invest in the economy. That, however, is the argument for lower taxes in general.
Tax credits, instead, create an unfair playing field. Only businesses that qualify for the tax credit are rewarded, which may give them an advantage over other firms in the market.
Scott Drenkard, an economist with the Tax Foundation, testified late last year in front of the Indiana Commission on State Tax and Financing Policy about tax policy.
“Even though credits lower the tax burden of a particular tax filer, in most cases we see them as poor tax policy,” Drenkard told the commission. “Some businesses might get the benefit of a preference, but other businesses that aren’t engaging in whatever activity is deemed “favorable” are stuck paying the full sticker rate of the tax.”
Typically these credits favor large firms with political connections. …
Boeing plans to begin production on their new 777X plane in 2017, and more than a dozen states rushed to offer incentives to the plane manufacturer, according to the Journal Sentinel. Wisconsin is one of the states that planned to make an offer.
As stated above, Washington already approved $9 billion in tax credits. But, Boeing still considered leaving the state until the labor union also approved a new contract that Boeing agreed to.
Experts argue that offering these massive incentives are actually an admission of failure. A state with a great business climate should be able to attract business without the need for extra incentives. If tax credits or other incentives are needed, the state is admitting it needs to work on making the climate better for all businesses.
A commonly used phrase among economists is, “the best economic development program is to not need one.”
A PEW study argues that such incentives could also drive other firms out of the market because of higher costs. …
The key to a productive economy is for producers and consumers to find an equilibrium where supply and demand meet each other at a certain price and quantity. When businesses sell a product or service in a fair market that is typically what happens. …
Government incentives, however, change the environment between producers and consumers. Instead of providing a product or service that consumers demand, businesses will provide whatever they are incentivized to provide. In short, a company will expend resources to gain a government incentive, rather than produce what the consumer actually wants.
This is known as “rent seeking.” Rent seeking is socially wasteful and in the end will hurt consumers with higher prices and less competition. …
While it may seem like a good idea to provide incentives to businesses in a state, the data shows that it is anything but. The government picks winners and losers, creates an unstable economy, and businesses will eventually make whatever gets them the best incentive from the government.
It is simple. Low (or non-existent) taxes that are more equitable across the board and fewer “winners and losers” incentives will lead to greater prosperity within a state. After all, the best economic development program is to not need one.
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that business climate, as readers know, is based on additional issues besides taxes, improving the business tax climate (in which Wisconsin ranks an abysmal 43rd according to the Tax Foundation) requires a few things.
The corporate income tax, which applies to subchapter-C corporations, needs to be eliminated, as does the personal property tax. The only property taxes businesses should pay should be for building-related services (police, fire, EMS, etc.), not for the buildings’ contents. The good news is that neither of those taxes contributes much to state finances, so eliminating them would have a relatively small impact.
The tax that needs reducing is the personal income tax, which is 10th highest in the U.S. Owners of sole proprietorships, partnerships and subchapter-S corporations don’t pay corporate income tax; they pay personal income tax on their companies’ profits. This year, income over $14,540 for a married couple filing jointly is taxed at 5.84 percent. That is a higher rate than Illinois’ income tax rate for any amount of income, even after Illinois’ 67-percent income tax increase.
In the case of the two previous paragraphs, the incorrect response is to reduce taxes by increasing other taxes. The income tax and the sales tax were created and, in the latter case, increased twice to provide property tax relief. Guess what the most unpopular tax still is? The property tax. Raising taxes to reduce another tax only increases taxes.
My favorite Martin Luther King quotes:
A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.
A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.
A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.
All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable … Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. … I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.
If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values — that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.
Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control.
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.
The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.
The number one British single today in 1966:
The number one single today in 1968:
The number one single today in 1975:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 