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Freedom Works.org has the top ten reasons to scrap the tax code. Here’s number nine.
9. The Code Drives Political Donations
The Congressman on the House Ways and Means Committee Received </$55,157,458 in the 2008 Election Cycle.
The Ways and Means Committee deals with taxes. It’s responsible for “raising the revenue required to finance the Federal Government. This includes individual and corporate income taxes, excise taxes, estate taxes, gift taxes, and other miscellaneous taxes.” It’s the busiest committee and it’s membership during the 2008 election cycle received $55,157,458 in campaign contributions.
If we scrapped the code, the committee members would lose their power to manipulate the code in order to pay off their campaign contributors. Our tax system leads to corruption and corporate capture of legislation .
Couple of good Corner posts on the pirates.
Last week, for the first time in two hundred years, pirates attempted to capture a vessel sailing under the flag of the United States of America, the Alabama. As we all know, their attempt was foiled.
Amazingly, the U.S. destroyer dispatched to the area to confront the pirates bears the name of Commodore Bainbridge, who was instrumental in shaping U.S. policy towards pirates in the late 1700s and early 1800s. At the time, North African pirates were waging war on commerce in the Mediterranean Sea. By declaring independence, the United States had just lost the protection of the British Empire, and with it the world’s most powerful navy. U.S. merchant ships, therefore, increasingly became victims of piracy in what was then a waterway of high importance.
Thomas Jefferson, then an American diplomat, reached out to France, Spain, and several other countries in an attempt to form a coalition of navies that would patrol the area, but the Europeans preferred paying ransom to the pirates rather than confronting them militarily. So the United States, too, resorted to bribery. The pirates’ demands, however, grew ever larger, and acts of piracy increased, as piracy became more lucrative. By 1786, the pirates had become so bold, and their respect for U.S. power had so diminished, that the leader of one pirateering nation told Thomas Jefferson and John Adams that the United States had to pay him $1 million per year if it wanted the pirates to stop attacking U.S. vessels. Bainbridge found these degradations appalling and advocated a more muscular approach. …
It is ironic that Hernando de Soto is lecturing us about doing the economic paperwork.
… With information about derivatives not standardized and thousands of idiosyncratic bonds sold, resold and scattered helter-skelter all over the market, it will be difficult for any individual vulture to calculate their worth until someone locates and categorizes them. In fact, some derivative paper is so sloppily structured that banks have been unable to figure out the contents of their own portfolios, and U.S. courts continue to reject many foreclosures that are based on this kind of paper. So before we could really hand over the solution to the vultures, someone still would have to do the math.
And even while the vultures are, minimally, at work, the contamination will continue as this huge shadow economy of derivative paper infects everything it touches. Consider that a mere 7% default on subprime paper — equivalent to maybe $1 trillion or $2 trillion — quickly contaminated other paper, creating a $50-trillion hole in the U.S. economy from losses in stocks, home values and revenues in less than one year. By not counting and identifying derivatives one by one and drawing a legal boundary around each by means of the rules of property law (things such as registration, traceability and standardized identification), we are unable to protect every asset and every particular interest on that asset from contamination. The longer we wait to do the math, the worse it will get. And the more likely the anarchy of this shadow economy will spread.
In the world where I come from, it is the typical state of affairs. In fact, apart from the elite Westernized minority, most people’s assets are covered by paper that is endemically toxic: not recorded, not standardized, difficult to identify, hard to locate, its real value so opaque that ordinary people cannot build trust in each other or be trusted in global markets. In short, for shadow economies outside the U.S. and Europe, “credit crunch” and “meltdown” are chronic conditions. …
Karl Rove and Michael Gerson write on BO’s extremism. Rove;
The Pew Research Center reported last week that President Barack Obama “has the most polarized early job approval of any president” since surveys began tracking this 40 years ago. The gap between Mr. Obama’s approval rating among Democrats (88%) and Republicans (27%) is 61 points. This “approval gap” is 10 points bigger than George W. Bush’s at this point in his presidency, despite Mr. Bush winning a bitterly contested election.
Part of Mr. Obama’s polarized standing can be attributed to a long-term trend. University of Missouri political scientist John Petrocik points out that since 1980, each successive first term president has had more polarized support than his predecessor with the exception of 1989, when George H.W. Bush enjoyed a modest improvement over Ronald Reagan’s 1981 standing.
But rather than end or ameliorate that trend, Mr. Obama’s actions and rhetoric have accelerated it. His campaign promised post-partisanship, but since taking office Mr. Obama has frozen Republicans out of the deliberative process, and his response to their suggestions has been a brusque dismissal that “I won.”
Compare this with Mr. Bush’s actions in the aftermath of his election. Among his first appointments were Democratic judicial nominees who had been blocked by Republicans under President Bill Clinton. The Bush White House joined with Democratic and Republican leaders to draft education reform legislation. And Mr. Bush worked with Republican Chuck Grassley to cut a deal with Democrat Max Baucus to win bipartisan passage of a big tax cut in a Senate split 50-50 after the 2000 election. …
Peter Robinson is in Forbes with a contrarian’s view of the housing crisis.
Jennifer Rubin has more on ethanol in One of the Worst Ideas Ever.
Global warming history lesson from Pajamas Media.
Ah, spring, when the earth slowly wakes from its winter slumber, a warming welcomed by nearly every living thing.
Hard to believe some silly people are deathly afraid of warming weather — worried sick because the earth has warmed a degree or two over the last 150 years.
Make no mistake — the earth has warmed. Unfortunately for the climate-change catastrophists, warming periods have occurred throughout recorded history, long before the Industrial Revolution and SUVs began spitting man-made carbon into the atmosphere. And as might be expected, these warm periods have invariably proven a blessing for humanity. Consider:
Around the 3rd century B.C., the planet emerged from a long cold spell. The warm period which followed lasted about 700 years, and since it coincided with the rise of Pax Romana, it is known as the Roman Warming.
In the 5th century A.D., the earth’s climate became cooler. Cold and drought pushed the tribes of northern Europe south against the Roman frontier. Rome was sacked, and the Dark Ages commenced. And it was a dark age, both metaphorically and literally — the sun’s light dimmed and gave little warmth; harvest seasons grew shorter and yielded less. Life expectancy and literacy plummeted. The plague appeared and decimated whole populations. …
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