Today in 1961, the Beatles made their debut as the house band of the Cavern Club in Liverpool, before they had recorded music of their own creation.
Birthdays start with Edward Pattern, one of Gladys Knight’s Pips …
… born one year before Doris Kenner of the Shirelles:
The Wall Street Journal nicely summarizes Barack Obama’s “grand bargain”:
In Chattanooga on Tuesday, the latest stop on his economic inequality tour, President Obama made himself an offer he couldn’t refuse. If Congressional Republicans agree to a corporate tax increase, he said, then he’ll agree to spend more money on his favorite public-works projects. If Republicans bargain hard, will he also offer an expansion of ObamaCare as a sweetener?
We know this sounds like an exaggeration, but that’s the essence of what the President proposed as what he called a new “grand bargain.” Mr. Obama will agree to reform the corporate tax code—a GOP priority and one even the President claims to support—but only if the reform raises more revenue and only if he is allowed to spend that windfall on his priorities.
A White House press release clarified that the President would also like to raise taxes on individuals, not just businesses, while allowing federal spending to rise still higher. But showing they retain a sense of humor in the West Wing, the press release suggests that the President is willing to forgo this tax increase for now because he wants to “work with Republicans.”
This isn’t a serious proposal, and he knows it. It also isn’t bipartisan, since he is offering a compromise with appeal to the ideological spectrum running from Elizabeth Warren to Chuck Schumer. …
The real bipartisan reform opportunity would be to get behind the chief Senate and House tax writers, Democrat Max Baucus and Republican Dave Camp. They’ve been holding hearings on tax reform for years, and Mr. Baucus has even invited all Senators to send him a list of tax provisions they’d like to retain and why.
The rub for Mr. Obama is that both men conceive of using whatever money they would raise from closing loopholes to reduce tax rates. This is crucial to getting rates as low as possible, especially given that the statutory U.S. corporate rate of 35% (plus state corporate taxes) is the highest in the developed world.
But it is also crucial to making reform politically possible. A reform that merely lowers rates a few percentage points has no chance of building enough support to overcome the opposition of companies and interests that will see their tax loopholes closed.
The problem, as ever, is that Mr. Obama simply can’t get over his ideological fixation to keep tax rates as high as possible. We say “ideological” because his own advisers concede that a 35% rate hurts U.S. business competitiveness. Even Japan, the last high-rate holdout among rich countries, is cutting its corporate rate. But recall the famous moment in the 2008 campaign when then Senator Obama was asked by ABC’s Charlie Gibson if he would support higher capital gains tax rates even if they raised less revenue than lower rates. Mr. Obama said yes. …
Even for businesses that might find the proposal intriguing, the simplification in Mr. Obama’s plan seems to apply mainly to those that file under the corporate tax system. Most small business owners file under the rules for individuals, which are not being simplified under this plan and whose tax rates Mr. Obama raised substantially in January. Cutting corporate rates without doing so for small businesses will merely increase the opportunities for tax arbitrage.
On the other side of Mr. Obama’s grand bargain, he offered his usual grab bag of spending that would create more union jobs at high Davis-Bacon wages, more teachers, and more job training, though the federal government already runs more than 40 job-training programs that don’t seem to do much training for real jobs. He also wants more subsidies for biofuels and electric cars—the ideas that worked so well in the first term.
The Weekly Standard also observes:
The New York Times reports that President Obama is reviving an old proposal to lower the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent (and 25 percent for manufacturers). Obama’s push to lower the corporate tax rate to 28 percent comes less than a year after he raised the top individual income tax rate, paid by many small businesses, to 39.6 percent.
In a speech delivered Tuesday afternoon, Obama did not explain why he thinks it’s a sound economic idea to raise the top marginal tax rate on small businesses but lower it for corporations. …
Neither Obama’s Tuesday speech nor his February 2012 corporate tax reform plan explained in detail which loopholes would be closed. During the 2012 presidential campaign, the Obama campaign hammered Mitt Romney for not saying which loopholes he would close to pay for a proposed reduction in individual income tax rates.
“Many small businesses” pay the top income tax bracket because they are organized as subchapter-S corporations, whose taxes flow through to their owners. According to S-Corp, subchapter-S corporations employ one of four Americans. So Obama is perfectly fine with 40-percent tax rates (as of Jan. 1, when the George W. Bush tax cuts ended) on the employers of one in four Americans.
S-Corp is not thrilled with Obama’s proposal:
In effect, the President’s plan calls for raising taxes on pass-through businesses in order to cut them for larger C corporations.
How much? Our 2011 study from Ernst & Young showed that pass-through businesses will see their tax burden rise by 8 percent ($27 billion) per year under budget neutral, corporate-only tax reform. Industries most affected by the tax hike are agriculture (22 percent), construction (9 percent), retailers (9 percent), manufacturing (8 percent), and real estate (8 percent). This same study made clear that pass-through businesses employ the majority of private sector workers in the US.
So the President is proposing to hike taxes on the majority of employers in order to cut them for a smaller segment of C corporations.
Moreover, these estimates came before the recent rate hikes on pass-through businesses, so the total impact of the President’s proposal today should be higher. To the extent the President wants to raise revenue, that too would increase the hit to pass through businesses.
The Washington Post adds, and I assume this is not fiction:
The White House can’t be expecting the House GOP to suddenly cave. They’re trying to do a couple of things. First, expand the idea of a “grand bargain” to mean not just deficit reform but any sort of economic agreement, and challenge Republicans to come up with a counteroffer. Second, try to win support from the business community for a proposal that contains two things they want: tax reform and domestic investments.
Most of all, Obama is simply making clear that tax reform is one of his priorities, as Ronald Reagan did in his second term. “Tax reform is a drama with heroes and villains and a damsel in distress,” Reagan said in 1985, in a speech given in — wouldn’t you know it — Tennessee.
Reagan’s definition of “tax reform” resulted in two personal income tax brackets: 15 percent and 28 percent. (That lasted as long as George H.W. Bush’s tax increase, which resulted in Bush’s presidential election loss.) Obama’s definition of “tax reform” isn’t Reagan’s, nor is it any Republican’s definition. For that matter, it isn’t Bill Clinton’s definition either; he at least cut capital gains taxes with cooperation from Republicans.
The fact that Obama’s “grand bargain” isn’t going to happen doesn’t mean tax reform isn’t necessary. Tax reform that results in lower rates and a smaller bite of our money is necessary. Present tax rates are a major reason for Obama’s flaccid economy, as Investors Business Daily points out:
The fiscal cliff deal he signed at the start of the year hiked taxes a total of $620 billion over the next decade. And ObamaCare added another $1 trillion in new taxes.
Worse, 13 of these took effect in January, according to an analysis by the Heritage Foundation, with many of them hitting businesses and investments.
Among them:
- The top marginal tax rate climbed from 35% to 39.6% on incomes over $450,000. These same taxpayers saw rates on dividends and capital gains go from 15% last year to 20%.
- Personal exemptions and itemized deductions are now phased out on incomes over $300,000. And the full expensing of business investments expired at the start of the year.
- ObamaCare added a 3.8% surtax on investment income for those earning more than $250,000, and a Medicare surtax of 0.9% on incomes above that amount.
- In addition, there’s the 2.3% excise tax on medical devices, and cuts to two corporate tax deductions related to health benefits.
With so many anti-growth taxes all hitting at once, it’s hardly surprising that growth has slowed. The only mystery is why no one is talking about it.
My favorite meteorological blogger, Mike Smith, has a few things to say about the Emergency Alert System …
Is there anything more ridiculous than the government’s Emergency Alert System (EAS)? It is supposed to tell us if there is important weather or news. But, broadcasters already do that.
Last night, we had lots of damage from thunderstorms in south central Kansas. But, the KWCH-TV coverage of the storm got cut off by the “required weekly EAS test.” The audio was cut and the EAS crawl visually overwhelmed the important storm warning at the bottom of the screen.
But, we need it in a national crisis, right? It was not activated on September 11. Do you really believe Fox, CNN, ABC, CBS, won’t cover a story bigger than September 11??
… the “disease” of lightning …
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) tell us men are six times more likely to be killed by lightning than women. Of course, meteorologists have known this for decades.
Okay, but why is the CDC even doing this work? Here is an article from 2009 that reaches the same conclusions. And, one from AccuWeather in 2011 with the same information.
Last time I checked, neither bacteria nor virus nor fungus were part of the composition of lightning. So, it is hardly a “disease.”
We keep hearing the federal government is short of money but there sure seems to be a lot of duplication, mission-creep, and reporting the obvious.
… and the difference between what the feds think is important and what actually is important:
With all of the global warming, NSA, TSA nonsense going in Washington, as usual, our government is focused on the wrong things. Rather than spending money on re-re-determining men get killed by lightning more often than women, let’s focus on the huge threats for which we need government coordination:
Pry, Cooper, and former CIA Director James Woolsey have been recently demanding that Washington prepare the nation’s electric grid for an EMP, either from the sun or an enemy’s nuclear bomb. They want the 2,000-3,000 transformers in the grid protected with a high-tech metal box and spares ready to rebuild the system. Woolsey said knocking out just 20 would shut down electricity to parts of the nation “for a long time.” …
Just two weeks ago, we had a dangerous “near miss.”Imagine living in 1880 without the 1880’s infrastructure: Horses, grain milled by a stream-driven mill, no modern medicines, etc. That is what we would have to deal with — for months — if this occurs.
One of the comments on Smith’s EAS observations:
I work at a radio station and I’ve been cut off live on the air trying to announce a tornado warning by the EAS system giving a “warning”.
That is obviously contrary to the intent of the EAS. Then again, as the New York Times reported in 2002, “No president has ever used the current [EAS] system or its technical predecessors in the last 50 years, despite the Soviet missile crisis, a presidential assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, major earthquakes and three recent high-alert terrorist warnings.” That statement remains accurate 11 years later. There has been only one nationwide EAS test, which didn’t go too well.
If the electromagnetic pulse of which Smith wrote fried everything electronic, no one would be able to hear a presidential message, or any other kind of message unless delivered by someone with a loud voice.
Today in 1964, the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” went to number one and stayed there for longer than a hard day’s night — two weeks:
If you are of my age, this was a big moment in 1981:
There is news on the Wisconsin controlled substances front.
First: The National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws reports:
Legislation is pending in the Senate and Assembly that seeks to allow municipalities to penalize marijuana possession offenders in instances where the District Attorney has refused to prosecute.
Under state law, local governments prosecute first-time marijuana possession offenses involving 25 grams or fewer. Repeat offenses, or any offense involving a quantity of marijuana over 25 grams, is prosecuted in state court at the discretion of the District Attorney. Senate Bill 150 and its companion bill (AB 164) would allow local jurisdictions to enact ordinances allowing for municipal courts to prosecute repeat cannabis possession offenders and/or those charged with possession more than 25 grams of cannabis in cases where the District Attorney has explicitly declined to do so.
SB 150 is sponsored by Sens. Joe Leibham (R–Elkhart Lake) and Rick Gudex (R–Fond du Lac); five Republicans are the sponsors of AB 164. I guess none of those seven must belong in the conservatarian camp.
These bills seem to be an argument about local control — the ability of a city, village or town to enact stiffer penalties for a crime than state law. District attorneys prosecute violations of state law and county ordinances; municipal attorneys prosecute violations of municipal law, although in most communities county ordinances and state laws are codified in the municipal code. While this apparently is about district attorneys and marijuana, the spirit applies to, say, circuit judges who are seen as lenient on, say, underage drinking in college towns. And either opposes the concept of equal protection under law — that something that is illegal in Abbotsford is illegal in Zittau, and the penalty for the crime in Zittau is the same as the penalty for the crime in Abbotsford.
The other issue here is the public’s lack of enthusiasm for the drug war, which hasn’t reduced illegal drug use, but has sucked up government resources. Politicians may lack the guts to propose reducing marijuana-related penalties, but that’s being done in effect by police’s disinterest in pursuing recreational marijuana users, who are, after all, guilty (once proven so in a court of law) of breaking the law. Regular readers know that I am skeptical of marijuana’s supposed benefits, but I am also skeptical of marijuana’s overstated harm. Not enforcing the law, and passing laws that are unenforceable, creates disrespect for the law.
Sort of related is the push by state Sen. Alberta Darling (R–River Hills) and Rep. Jim Ott (R–Mequon) to stiffen drunk driving penalties. One bill (there are Senate and Assembly versions for all of these) would set a mandatory minimum sentence of six months in jail to three years in prison for a drunk driver who injures someone, depending on the severity of the injury. Another would set a mandatory 10-year prison sentence for a drunk-driving death. Another would make a first-offense drunk driving charge where the driver exceeds 0.15 in blood alcohol level a misdemeanor, not a traffic ticket. Another would make third-offense drunk driving a felony. Another would allow the seizure of a car driven by someone arrested for third-offense drunk driving.
Some of these seem to make more sense than others — increasing penalties for killing or injuring someone while driving drunk. I oppose the 0.15 standard because I oppose the 0.08 standard and before that the 0.10 standard. Evidence of drunk driving should be based on evidence of actual impairment, not on the results of a blood test.
With all of these, however, there is the problem the Wisconsin State Journal brought up in April:
Measures that would boost penalties for drunken driving would cost $250 million a year and send thousands more people to jail or prison, according to estimates provided by state agencies that would be charged with implementing the proposals.
The state also would need to spend $236 million to build 17 300-bed facilities to house the expected increase in people serving time for drunken driving, the Department of Corrections estimates.
Those estimates don’t include the extra costs to counties whose jails would house offenders serving sentences of a year or less.
So where will that money — $236 million or more in jail construction and expansion, and $250 million every year — come from? This is a state with a correctly measured (as in by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) deficit nearing $300 million. (Yes, the state budget is legally, not factually, balanced, which puts Gov. Scott Walker in the same place as all of his predecessors, since GAAP-balanced budgets are not required by state law). Republicans correctly blast Democrats for proposing things with total disregard for their cost. Well, this looks like the shoe on the other foot.
The biggest drunk driving problem, based on my years of covering those who get arrested for drunk driving, is repeat offenders, who apparently must be physically separated from their ability to drive. (Not merely from their own vehicle, because it is safe to assume the proposal to seize cars from drunk drivers won’t prevent them from getting another one somehow.) It is remarkable to me that we have so many repeat offenders of not just drunk driving, but operating after driver’s licenses are suspended or revoked. That seems to indicate that the punishment and the chance of getting arrested aren’t much deterrent. (In fact, one school of thought says that increasing penalties serves to encourage those who are driving drunk to try to evade police, with, as you can imagine, potentially disastrous consequences.) Further evidence is in the high failure rate of substance-abuse programs.
As a society we appear in some cases to have the wrong people in jail (for instance, those guilty of what could be called “victimless crimes”), which means we don’t have room for people who do belong in jail and aren’t in jail. Answering the drunk driving problem in a fiscally responsible way seems to require dealing with that conundrum.
Rich Galen went to lunch (and we’re in favor of lunch here), and …
The part of the conversation I did get was this: The two parties no longer consider each other to be political opponents – each aiming for the same goal but choosing differing paths to get there.
Each of the two parties now considers the other to be not just a political enemy, but an enemy of everything the other believes in.
We have traded political ideology for political religiosity.
We no longer have to defend our position with statistics and logic. We now defend out position as being correct because we believe it to be correct. …
When I was on Bill Maher last year, we got into a discussion about global warming. The largely youngish crowd was poised to boo and hiss as I talked about the lack of scientific evidence or whatever.
What I said was: We’re having the wrong discussion. What we should be discussing isn’t whether global warming is real or man-made or whatever; what we should be discussing is: Is it better to put more garbage into the atmosphere or less garbage into the atmosphere?
This type of discussion takes global warming out of the realm of sacred doctrine and makes each of us look at the real world as it really is.
Same goes for the economy.
We are stuck in a medieval crusade between those who believe we should spend more to generate jobs and those who believe we should cut more to reduce the deficit.
This, too, is the wrong discussion because most of us never took more than the minimum three-hour course: Econ 113 and we only know how to spell Keynes because we think it’s cool to know how to spell Keynes and the only other person we ever knew named “Maynard” was Maynard G. Krebs from the Dobie Gillis show. …
The fight-to-the-death should not a choice between spending and austerity – that hasn’t worked in Greece or Spain and it won’t work here.
The discussion should be this: Can we find a way to spend the money we are already spending in more productive ways? And how what can we do to raise the largest possible number of Americans who are at or below the poverty line into the middle class?
We have to stop blindly defending our position and start looking for solutions – some of which may lie in the other guy’s beliefs.
Idealistic, to say the least. The zero-sum-game nature of politics today, the fact that too many politicians make politics their career, and the fact that government does too much and taxes too much makes Galen’s wish a dream. Add to the fact that the parties have a particular brand of economics imbedded into them since the 1980s — smaller government (at least that’s what they claim) Republicans and big-government Democrats — and never the twain shall meet.
Today in 1964, a Rolling Stones concert in Ireland was stopped due to a riot, 12 minutes after the concert began.
Today in 1966, Alabamans burned Beatles products in protest of John Lennon’s remark that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus.” The irony was that several years earlier, Lennon met Paul McCartney at a church dinner.
Rev. James V. Schaal, a priest of the same order as Pope Francis:
An amusing citation from Margaret Thatcher reads: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” The socialists, however, were not the only ones who would run out of other people’s money. Democracies are quite capable of duplicating this feat. The question is this: What entitles us to acquire other people’s money in the first place? Do other people have any money that is not ours if we “need” it? Taxation, with or without representation, is about this issue. Who decides what we need? Who gets what is taken from us? On what grounds do they deserve it?
C. S. Lewis said that no one has a right to happiness. Our Declaration only says that we have a right to pursue it. Whether we attain it is not something that falls under the perplexing language of “rights.” If someone else guarantees my right to be happy, what am I? Surely not a human being, whose happiness, as Aristotle said, includes his own activity, not someone else’s.
In a world of rights, no one can give anything to anybody else. Everything is owed to me if I do not already have it. If I am not happy, I am a victim of someone else’s negligence. A “rights society” is litigious. If I am unhappy, it has nothing to do with me; my unhappiness is caused by someone else who has violated my rights. Unhappy people witness the violation of their rights by someone else; their unhappiness does not involve them. Their mode is not, “What can I do for others?” but, “What must they do for me to make me happy?” In his Ethics, Aristotle remarked that, if happiness were a gift of the gods, surely they would give it to us. No Christian can read such a line without pause. Is not the whole essence of our faith that we have no “right” either to existence itself or to a happy existence? Some things must first be given to us, no doubt—including our very selves, which we do not cause.
Indeed, the whole essence of revelation is that we do not have a right to the eternal life that God has promised to us. We cannot achieve it by ourselves, because it is not a product of our own making or thinking. God does not violate our “rights” by not giving us either existence or happiness; creation is not an act of justice. The doctrine of grace opposes the notion that we have a right to happiness. It is not even something that we deserve or can work for. …
Much of the world is filled with what I call “gapism.” The so-called gap between the rich and poor, the haves and the have-nots, is a sign, not of the natural order in which some know more and work more, but of a dire conspiracy to deprive me of what is my right. So the purpose of “rights” is to correct the world’s “wrongs.” A divine mission flashes in the eyes of those who would presume to make us happy by giving us our “rights.” People lacking the “right” justify the takers.
So we do not have a right to be happy. The assumption that we do lies behind the utopian turmoil of our times. The attempt to guarantee our right to be happy invariably leads to economic bankruptcy and societal coercion. By misunderstanding happiness and its gift-response condition, we impose on the political order a mission it cannot fulfill. We undermine that limited temporal happiness we might achieve if we are virtuous, prudent, and sensible in this finite world.
Schaal should have added “flawed” and “sin-filled” to “finite world.” Of course, the concept of sin isn’t in these days.
I don’t eat much at McDonald’s. I prefer other fast food options (namely a Wisconsin-based company whose products are superior except for their French fries). And we do buy food from the local farmer’s market.
That having been said, I think Kyle Smith brings up valid points while being amusing:
What is “the cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history” Hint: It has 390 calories. It contains 23g, or half a daily serving, of protein, plus 7% of daily fiber, 20% of daily calcium and so on.
Also, you can get it in 14,000 locations in the US and it usually costs $1. Presenting one of the unsung wonders of modern life, the McDonald’s McDouble cheeseburger.
The argument above was made by a commenter on the Freakonomics blog run by economics writer Stephen Dubner and professor Steven Levitt, who co-wrote the million-selling books on the hidden side of everything.
Dubner mischievously built an episode of his highly amusing weekly podcast around the debate. Many huffy back-to-the-earth types wrote in to suggest the alternative meal of boiled lentils. Great idea. Now go open a restaurant called McBoiled Lentils and see how many customers line up.
But we all know fast food makes us fat, right? Not necessarily. People who eat out tend to eat less at home that day in partial compensation; the net gain, according to a 2008 study out of Berkeley and Northwestern, is only about 24 calories a day.
The outraged replies to the notion of McDouble supremacy — if it’s not the cheapest, most nutritious and most bountiful food in human history, it has to be pretty close — comes from the usual coalition of class snobs, locavore foodies and militant anti-corporate types. I say usual because these people are forever proclaiming their support for the poor and for higher minimum wages that would supposedly benefit McDonald’s workers. But they’re completely heartless when it comes to the other side of the equation: cost.
Driving up McDonald’s wage costs would drive up the price of burgers for millions of poor people. “So what?” say activists. Maybe that’ll drive people to farmers markets. …
Junk food costs as little as $1.76 per 1,000 calories, whereas fresh veggies and the like cost more than 10 times as much, found a 2007 University of Washington survey for the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. A 2,000-calorie day of meals would, if you stuck strictly to the good-for-you stuff, cost $36.32, said the study’s lead author, Adam Drewnowski.
“Not only are the empty calories cheaper,” he reported, “but the healthy foods are becoming more and more expensive. Vegetables and fruits are rapidly becoming luxury goods.” Where else but McDonald’s can poor people obtain so many calories per dollar?
And as for organic — the Abercrombie and Fitch jeans of food — if you have to check the price, you can’t afford it. (Not that it has any health benefits, as last year’s huge Stanford meta-study showed.)
Moreover, produce takes more time to prepare and spoils quickly, two more factors that effectively drive up the cost. Any time you’re spending peeling vegetables is time you aren’t spending on the job. …
Fuel prices, like food prices, disproportionately hit the poor, so do-gooders do everything they can to raise energy costs by blocking new fuel sources like the Keystone XL pipelines and fracking. And they are always up for higher gasoline taxes and regulating coal-burning energy plants to death.
If the macrobiotic Marxists had their way, of course, there’d be no McDonald’s, Walmart or Exxon, because they have visions of an ideal world in which everybody bikes to work with a handwoven backpack from Etsy that contains a lunch grown in the neighborhood collective.
That’s not going to work for the average person, but who cares if they go hungry because they can’t afford a burger anymore? Let them eat kale!
There is one problem with Smith’s thesis: The McDouble doesn’t include bacon. (Sold separately.)
The point here is not the McDonald’s Double is superior to all other food. The point is consumer choice, something that liberals seem to oppose when those choices disagree with theirs. (See Bloomberg, Michael, Soda Size Regulations.)
If this makes you hungry, I believe lunch doesn’t start at McDonald’s until 10:30 a.m.
Today in 1966, the Beatles’ “Yesterday and Today” album reached number one and stayed there for five weeks:
Today’s brief list of birthdays begin with Buddy Guy:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 