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Charles Krauthammer proposes tax reform with a twist.
… tax reform with a twist.
The problem begins with definitions. By tax reform, Obama means eliminating deductions, exclusions, credits of various kinds with all the money going to the Treasury.
That’s radically new. The historic 1986 Reagan-O’Neill tax reform closed loopholes with no extra money going to the Treasury. The new revenue went directly back to the citizenry in the form of lower tax rates.
This is called revenue-neutrality. The idea is that tax reform is a way not to fatten the Treasury but to clean the tax code. It means eliminating special-interest favors and behavior-altering deductions that create waste and inefficiency by inducing tax-preferred rather than market-oriented economic activity. And it introduces fairness by removing breaks and payoffs for which only the rich can afford to lobby.
As a final bonus, tax reform’s lower rates spur economic growth. A unique win-win-win: efficiency, fairness, growth.
Obama’s own Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission offered a variant. First, it identified an astonishing $1.1 trillion per year of these “tax expenditures.” That’s more than $11 trillion in a decade. In one scenario, it knocked them all out and lowered marginal tax rates to just three brackets of 8 percent, 14 percent and 23 percent.
But here’s the twist. Using the full $1.1 trillion annually of newly redeemed “loophole” revenue, Simpson-Bowles could have dropped the rates a bit below 23 percent. But instead it left some of that money in the Treasury, an average of almost $100 billion a year, or about $1 trillion over a decade. It was a reasonable compromise, so reasonable that even the Senate’s most fierce spending hawk, commission member Tom Coburn, signed on.
Now, Simpson-Bowles is not on the table but it could be a model. Obama’s “tax reform” would send 100 percent of the revenue to the Treasury. Reagan-O’Neill sent 0 percent. Simpson-Bowles fell somewhere in between. So should any grand compromise. …
Andrew Malcolm posts on Biden’s hotel bills.
Good thing, given sequestration’s cuts in spending increases, that the Obama administration has curtailed spending like canceling this spring’s White House public tours.
Otherwise, the administration might be in big financial trouble, like the country they’re allegedly leading, given the Vice President’s recent European hotel tabs.
The cost of the night’s London lodging in early February for Joe Biden and his unusually large entourage was $459,388.65. That’s right, nearly a half-million dollars, which would be a BFD for anyone who wasn’t self-appointed political royalty.
But that’s not the worst of it. In Paris, the Amtrak-lover from Delaware ran up another one-night hotel tab of more than a half-million dollars, $585,000.50. They must have hit that mini-bar pretty hard!
The Weekly Standard, which broke the stories of these extremely expensive expense extravaganzas, also discovered the five-star hotel stays at the Hotel Intercontinental Paris Le Grande and London’s Hyatt Regency were made through no-bid government contracts. That eliminates any messy money-saving competition and security concerns.
That was Joe’s first foreign trip of the second term (only 1,397 days left). He’s since made another, to Rome last week for Pope Francis’ first mass. …
Interesting WSJ OpEd on the intelligence of animals.
Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at KyotoUniversity who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touch screen, Ayumu could recall a random series of nine numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares.
I tried the task myself and could not keep track of more than five numbers—and I was given much more time than the brainy ape. In the study, Ayumu outperformed a group of university students by a wide margin. The next year, he took on the British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged the “chimpion.”
How do you give a chimp—or an elephant or an octopus or a horse—an IQ test? It may sound like the setup to a joke, but it is actually one of the thorniest questions facing science today. Over the past decade, researchers on animal cognition have come up with some ingenious solutions to the testing problem. Their findings have started to upend a view of humankind’s unique place in the universe that dates back at least to ancient Greece.
Aristotle’s idea of the scala naturae, the ladder of nature, put all life-forms in rank order, from low to high, with humans closest to the angels. During the Enlightenment, the French philosopher René Descartes, a founder of modern science, declared that animals were soulless automatons. In the 20th century, the American psychologist B.F. Skinner and his followers took up the same theme, painting animals as little more than stimulus-response machines. Animals might be capable of learning, they argued, but surely not of thinking and feeling. The term”animal cognition” remained an oxymoron.
A growing body of evidence shows, however, that we have grossly underestimated both the scope and the scale of animal intelligence. Can an octopus use tools? Do chimpanzees have a sense of fairness? Can birds guess what others know? Do rats feel empathy for their friends? Just a few decades ago we would have answered “no” to all such questions. Now we’re not so sure. …
CBS Sports says FloridaGulfCoastUniversity’s men’s basketball team is the biggest thing in sports. You’ll have to wait until Friday for their next game.
The funny thing is that they’re just as loose off the court as they are on it, full of great stories and quotes, happy to talk to anybody and everybody. And, yes, they’re just as blown away by all of this as you are. They admit it and display it.
“Wow,” said Florida Gulf Coast‘s Eric McKnight when I told him his ridiculous and vicious alley-oop was trending on Twitter. Then I told him he and his teammates are the biggest story in sports. Not just college basketball. Sports. All of sports. Including everything.
“Really?” McKnight asked. “Wow. Wow. Wow. This is all very hard to believe.”
Perhaps because it’s unprecedented.
Florida Gulf Coast made history here Sunday at the Wells Fargo Center with an 81-71 victory against San Diego State that made the Eagles the first 15 seed in NCAA tournament history to advance to the Sweet 16. So now the greatest (and newest) show in college basketball — Florida Dunk Coast — is headed to Jerry Jones’ Dallas Cowboys Stadium. To play the University of Florida. For a trip to the Elite Eight. And how perfect is this story?
This Atlantic Sun member that didn’t hold its first class until 1997 is now an international deal, and not only because it’s in the Sweet 16. No, it’s more than that. It’s the way the Eagles did this, how they got here. With lobs on lobs on lobs on lobs and dunks on dunks on dunks on dunks. Understand, this remarkable run — which started Friday against Georgetown and continued with this destruction of SDSU — didn’t feel fluky. For 80 consecutive minutes, Florida Gulf Coast was the aggressor, the attacker, way more than merely a so-called low-major getting fortunate by hitting lots of 3-pointers.
That said, they weren’t that sharp in the opening 20 minutes Sunday.
McKnight was asked what coach Andy Enfield’s halftime speech entailed.
“He [told us we] played like s— in the first half,” McKnight said, matter-of-factly. “Then he brought us all together and told us to turn up. So that’s what we did.” …