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Some of the places we frequent have noted tax day.
WSJ;
… In the beginning the return was indeed simple, resembling the postcard flat tax that Steve Forbes and Dick Armey have advocated in recent years. The original 1040 form in 1914 was so compact, the New York Times printed it on the front page. There were a grand total of four instruction forms. Now there are 4,000. …
… The original IRS enforcement office had 4,000 employees. Now the IRS has 100,000 tax agents, more employees than the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Food and Drug Administration combined. …
… Looking back 93 years, there’s a case to be made that the 16th amendment was an even greater failure than that other Progressive era experiment, prohibition. We should have listened to the advice rendered by the New York Times, which while editorializing against the income tax in 1909 warned: “When men get in the habit of helping themselves to the property of others, they cannot be easily cured of it.”
Washington Post;
Early American history was a conservative’s nirvana: It was one long tax revolt.
The British imposed taxes on everything from molasses to tea, and Americans smuggled the molasses, tossed the tea into a harbor and reached for their muskets. Thomas Jefferson’s incendiary Declaration of Independence listed King George III’s basest transgressions; prominent among them was that he had “sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” The descendants of those royal minions are now, of course, nestled in thousands of cubicles in Internal Revenue Service offices across the country.
Looking at that history, it’s astonishing how low the taxes were. Talk about men being men. One historian estimated the combined burden of the infamous “Navigation Acts,” for example, to be 1 percent of income. The other assorted taxes added up to about the same, making the total bite a measly 2 percent.
And that set off a war. …
And the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Mark’s Sun-Times column is on Imus.
I was at LaGuardia the other day. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just the usual four-hour delay brought on by yet another of these April snowstorms Al Gore has arranged as a savvy marketing gimmick for his global warming documentary. Anyway, as always when you’re at the gate for hours on end, there’s nothing to do but watch CNN. I gather air traffic delays now account for 87 percent of CNN’s audience. If it’s just a routine holdup of two or three hours because the gate agent hasn’t shown up, you know you’ll be out of there before Wolf Blitzer’s said goodnight. But, if it’s something serious, like a light breeze at O’Hare, you know you’ll be watching Larry King right through to the plug for tomorrow night’s full hour with Tina Louise.
So I had the pleasure of sampling a typical evening’s lineup of Don Imus coverage, from Wolf bringing us up to speed on the various networks that have fired him to Paula Zahn hosting a balanced panel of three African Americans and a guilt-ridden honky.
After the Madrid train bombings Spain bought off the islamofascists by retiring from the field of battle. How’d that work? VDH with some answers.
Couple of posts from The Spine and Melanie Phillips touching on the anti-Semitism of the BBC.
Open Market has some fun finding hypocrites in the green community. The post is titled the Don Imuses of Environmentalism.
Michael Barone posts on E. J. Dionne’s acceptance of media bias.
Human Events with a series of ‘dueling quotes’ from Hillary and Milton Freidman.
“The unfettered free market has been the most radically destructive force in American life in the last generation.”
– First Lady Hillary Clinton on C-Span in 1996 stating her troubles
with the free market“What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself.”
– Milton Friedman, Wall Street Journal, May 18, 1961
Samizdata spots surprising China fact.
George Will notes the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s first game in ‘the show’. Will spots interesting facts. Unfortunately he didn’t take the time to string them together in a coherent message. But, we know the story and it’s worth being reminded.