My commentary on Fred’s tax plan will be quite short indeed. I mostly like what he’s proposing if compared to our current tax code, and I would pull that lever in a second if these were the only two choices available to me. However, I also feel that there is a better alternative available than what he’s proposing.
The basics, from the Fred ‘08 website:
Tax Reform
The U.S. tax code is broken and a burden on U.S. taxpayers and businesses, large and small. Today?s tax code is particularly hostile to savings and investment, and it shows. To make matters worse, its complexity is a drag on our productivity and economic growth. Moreover, taxpayers spend billions of dollars and untold hours each year filling out complicated tax returns, just so they can send more money to Washington, much of it for wasteful programs and the pet projects of special interests. We need lower taxes, and we need to let taxpayers keep more of their hard-earned dollars?they know best where and how to spend them. And we need to make the system simpler and fairer for all. To ensure America?s long term prosperity and economic security, I am committed to:
* Fundamental tax reform built on the principles of simplicity, fairness, and growth.
* A new tax code that gets the government out of our citizens? pocketbooks, while enhancing U.S. competitiveness abroad.
* Dissolution of the IRS as we know it.
To be a little more specific:
Key aspects of Thompson’s tax proposal:
–The choice of filing under the current system or a flat tax rate of 10 percent for joint filers with an income of up to $100,000 — $50,000 for single taxpayers; and 25 percent on income above these amounts.
The standard deduction would be more than doubled to $25,000 for joint filers and $12,500 for singles. The personal exemption would be increased to $3,500. A family of four would be exempt from income tax on the first $39,000. The simplified code would contain no other tax credits or deductions, and retain the 15 percent tax rate on capital gains and dividends.
–Preserving the $1000 child tax credit, which was doubled from $500 per child.
–Protecting marriage penalty relief.
–Retaining education tax incentives, including Coverdell Education Savings Accounts, 529 college savings plans, and deductions for higher education expenses.
–Permanently repealing the estate tax.
–Eventually repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax, a separate system created 30 years ago to ensure that a few high income Americans could not use deductions and credits to eliminate their tax liability.
Thompson also would index the exemptions annually so that millions of middle-class families would not be subject to the tax.
House Democrats earlier this month pushed through an $80 billion bill to block the spread of the tax. The White House and Republicans, protesting tax increases in the bill affecting mainly investment fund managers, maintained that it would never become law. Bush supports relief from the tax, but promised to veto any bill that raises taxes as a condition of fixing the AMT.
–Reduce the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to no more than 27 percent.
–Permanently extend small business expensing of equipment and other small business items.
–Update and simplify depreciation schedules.
It seems like he’s coming from the right place at least – a desire to streamline and clean up the ponderous tax code. If he’s the man to work with a possible continued democrat majority in the legislature to make these reforms a reality, then it’s a step in the right direction. At the same time, however, I do not feel this is the best possible reform package. Partly because it retains some of the arbitrary progressiveness of the current tax code – he’s merely reducing the number of tax increments. And partly because it’s just not the fair tax (consumption tax) which candidate Mike Huckabee, for example, has voiced support for. I’ll let Alexander Hamilton explain one of the advantages of the fair tax:
It is a signal advantage of taxes on articles of consumption that they contain in their own nature a security against excess. They prescribe their own limit, which cannot be exceeded without defeating the end proposed—that is, an extension of the revenue. When applied to this object, the saying is as just as it is witty that, “in political arithmetic, two and two do not always make four.” If duties are too high, they lessen the consumption; the collection is eluded; and the product to the treasury is not so great as when they are confined within proper and moderate bounds. This forms a complete barrier against any material oppression of the citizens by taxes of this class, and is itself a natural limitation of the power of imposing them. -Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Paper No. 21.
Also refer to the fair tax.
The government will never be out of our pocketbooks as long as we need to prove up our income and expenditures to the IRS every year.
Finally, if I were Fred, I would make one addition. A third choice of tax system, where rich liberals can volunteer to pay anywhere from 50% to 95% of their incomes to the federal government. Give the people what they want. There is no shortage of snobbish liberal gazillonaires demanding the opportunity to pay their “fair share”. Any reformed tax code failing to accommodate their wishes would be woefully deficient.
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Voter fraud is a serious problem all across the country, a problem made much worse in the 90’s thanks to Clinton’s “motor voter” debacle. Many states, responding to public pressure, have moved to close loopholes and ensure the integrity of the voting process. The Florida legislature has passed a sensible bill that made what can at best be described as moderate changes in hopes of providing better protection to legitimate voters from having their ballots diluted.
Feds question whether state’s new voting law is fair
A sweeping new elections law passed with great fanfare earlier this year is coming under the scrutiny of the U.S. Department of Justice, which wants to make sure parts of it won’t discriminate against minorities.
Buried in the lengthy 42-page law, which forced counties to switch to optical-can voting machines for the fall 2008 elections, are changes to identification requirements for voters as well as new requirements for groups that register voters.
An Oct. 29 letter from the Department of Justice says the agency needs more information to decide the impact the changes will have on minority voters.
”Our analysis also indicates that the information is insufficient to enable us to determine that the proposed changes . . . do not have the purpose and will not have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color or membership in a language minority group,” wrote John Tanner, chief of the voting section of the Civil Rights Division.
The Department of Justice, however, has decided to play on race fears by pretending that it needs more information to insure that minority voters aren’t “disenfranchised”. This is transparent nonsense, for the rule changes apply equally to all. There is no legitimate and factual basis for assuming that one sub-group or another is unduly targeted, unless of course that sub-group just happens to be engaging in greater fraud than others.
The usual rabble of race-related outcry has of course emerged.
‘Anything that burdens or shuts down voter registration drives will have a negative effect in those communities,” said Renee Paradis, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.
The only drives that will be “shut down” are those which are fraudulent. Meanwhile, a necessary burden is already inherent in the process for all to ensure the protection of all votes. That has nothing to do with race. It’s time to stop with the racial fear-mongering and fix our beleaguered voting mechanism.
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When President Bush “coaches” soldiers for a Q&A session, it leads.
When FEMA “fakes” a press conference, it leads.
When the communist front-runner a.k.a. Her Thighness plants questions for herself…well, I doubt we’ll hear much about this.
It’s said that politics is show business for ugly people. Everyone should realize that a certain amount of preparation always goes into making these events look and feel a certain way. Why else do these candidates go out and hire all these PR people? Nobody, especially those in the press who report these campaigns and know exactly what goes on before the lens cap comes off, should act all shocked when we periodically get a peek backstage. I’m not saying that political theater is a good thing. I only wish that whenever the “objective” press felt the urge to pull back the curtains a little bit, like Toto in the Emerald City, they would occasionally pick someone other than their ideological opponents to expose.
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Just so no one forgets who we are dealing with:
59 Schoolchildren Killed in Afghan Blast
Dozens of schoolchildren and five teachers were among those killed in a suicide attack in northern Afghanistan earlier this week ? the country’s deadliest since the fall of the Taliban ? the government said Friday.
The 59 schoolchildren had lined up to greet a group of lawmakers visiting a sugar factory in the northern province of Baghlan on Tuesday when a suicide bomber detonated explosives.
It takes an inhuman animal to strap on a pack of explosives, run into a group of children and explode oneself. This kind of animal cannot be reasoned with, placated nor appeased; it can only be slaughtered.
Hat tip: Michelle Malkin
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Rejoice! After much strenuous and vigorous research, a cure has been found! No, not for cancer, AIDS or any other serious malady responsible for millions of deaths each year. Oh no, we’ve found a cure for a much bigger problem: global warming.
Global warming ‘cure’ found by scientists
A “technical fix” that could stop global warming by taking billions of tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and save the coral reefs from being destroyed by acidification has been developed by scientists.
The process could be used on an industrial scale to remove excess carbon dioxide caused by the burning of fossil fuels from the atmosphere in “a matter of decades rather than millennia,” according to researchers from Harvard and Penn State universities.
The process relies on speeding up a process that happens naturally, whereby carbon dioxide dissolved in sea water breaks down volcanic rock and soils to make alkaline carbonic salts.
The water flows into the ocean and increases its alkalinity. Sea water containing more alkali can absorb more carbon, so more carbon from the atmosphere is “locked up” and becomes harmless bottom sediments, according to the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
Researchers estimate that it would take a cube of volcanic rock 10 kilometres across to return the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere to pre-industrial levels.
Unlike other proposed “technical fixes” that “sequester” carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, this one makes the sea more alkaline and therefore counteracts the other side effect of more carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere – the acidification of the sea.
Well isn’t that wonderful. All we have to do to solve the non-problem of global warming is change the alkalinity of the entire ocean. There’s no possible way a plan this simple could go wrong and cause unintended consequences worse than those we’re trying to avoid. Nope, not at all.
Meanwhile, the very “scientific body” (the IPCC is really a governmental body) that has been pushing warming the hardest doesn’t even agree that the consequences are bad, as this survey demonstrates.
Leave a commentThe responses to the survey?s first four questions were predictable ─ between 83% to 90% of the respondents favored the view that manmade emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are driving or helping to drive global climate to unprecedentedly warmer temperatures and that limiting manmade CO2 emissions would reduce such climate change.
But despite the apparent ?consensus? on these four questions, the responses to the last two questions expose that consensus as potentially meaningless.
Less than 50% of the respondents said that an increase in global temperature of 1-degree Celsius is flatly undesirable. Half of the respondents said that such a temperature increase is desirable, desirable for some but undesirable for others or too difficult to assess.
Among survey respondents, then, there?s no consensus on desirability of 1-degree Celsius of global warming ─ twice the level of warming that occurred during the 20th century.When asked about the ideal climate, only 14% said that the ideal climate was cooler than the present climate. Sixty-one percent said that there is no such thing as an ideal climate.
But if there?s no agreement on what the target climate should be, what precisely is the point of taking action on global warming? What is the climatic goal at which we are aiming?
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Their patience has payed off, there’s finally news to report!
2007 is deadliest year for U.S. in Iraq
The U.S. military on Tuesday announced the deaths of five more soldiers and one sailor, making 2007 the deadliest year for U.S. troops despite a recent downturn, according to an Associated Press count.
At least 853 American military personnel have died in Iraq so far this year ? the highest annual toll since the war began in March 2003, according to AP figures.
The grim milestone passed despite a sharp drop in U.S. and Iraqi deaths here in recent months, after a 30,000-strong U.S. force buildup. There were 39 deaths in October, compared to 65 in September and 84 in August.
A common statistical ploy: when the recent numbers aren’t to your liking, expand the timeframe. The media has been fretting lately because of the surge’s success in recent months. How to get around that…how to get around that? Oh, I know! Let’s not just look at recent months. Of course, all this obsession with death counts obscures the real question: Are we making progress toward victory? And at this time, that answer seems to be “yes”.
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The hysteria on Global Warming is not just an amusing adventure into delusional-land. Such flagrant disregard for real science and the adoption of doom-and-gloom loaded pseudo-science has real consequences. One of those consequences is now being advanced in the Senate and threatens to wreck havoc on the American economy, and all for no gain whatsoever.
The bill (S. 2191, America’s Climate Security Act of 2007), which justifies its existence by referencing the fraudulent work of the IPCC, lays out desired emissions cuts over the next few decades and then spells out the consequences for non-compliance. Senator Inhofe has long been at the front line of this fight, duking it out with the socialists, eco-religious and all the rest pushing the pathological science of global warming hysteria.
Warning of the dangers of S. 2191, Senator Inhofe calls it “real economic pain, for no climate gain.”
“The Lieberman-Warner bill will burden American families with additional energy costs and significantly harm the United States economy,” Senator Inhofe said. “Senators are going to be asking the American people to pay more for home energy and pay higher prices at the gas pump for no climate benefit. This bill will simply result in real economic pain, for no climate gain. MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen correctly summed up these types of efforts in March when he said, ?Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat’s dream. If you control carbon, you control life.’
He strikes right to the heart of the matter. This isn’t about climate; this is about control. Control over the economy, control over your lives. They have a lot already but they want even more. This control will come at a steep cost. One of the bill’s sponsors, Joe Lieberman, admits that it would cost hundreds of billions.
The Lieberman-Warner global warming cap-and-trade bill (S2191) would cost “hundreds of billions of dollars” to the electrical and industrial sectors of the economy, Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) conceded today. Senator Lieberman made the remarks during today’s Environment & Public Works (EPW) subcommittee markup on the bill.
“It’s hard to imagine that [Lieberman-Warner] will not cost – over time — these two sectors (electric power and industrial), hundreds of billions of dollars to comply with the demands of this bill,” Senator Lieberman said during the business meeting today.
Alan Greenspan denounces the idea of a “cap-and-trade” system while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce calls the bill “fatally flawed.”
“Cap-and-trade systems or carbon taxes are likely to be popular only until real people lose real jobs as their consequence,” Greenspan said.
“There is no effective way to meaningfully reduce emissions without negatively impacting a large part of an economy.” “Jobs will be lost and real incomes of workers constrained,” Greenspan wrote in his new book, The Age of Turbulence.
…The Lieberman-Warner bill “does not adequately preserve American jobs and the domestic economy,” wrote Chamber Executive vice president for government affairs R. Bruce Josten in an October 31, 2007 letter to Senators Lieberman and Warner.
“The bill requires American companies to undertake dramatic emissions reductions-15 percent below 2005 levels in 2020, and 70 percent by 2050-regardless of whether its economic competitors do the same, at least prior to the year 2019. By then much of the United States’ energy-intensive industry could be gone, having either shut down or moved overseas,” the Chamber letter stated.
This bill represents an unprecedented desire to commit suicide in the face of a nonexistent enemy. It must be opposed at all costs.
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Americans have given much to fight tyranny around the world. But what about all the creeping tyranny right here in America? The following two stories illustrate in different ways just how overbearing the United States government has become since its inception as an institution once designed to protect, rather than infringe upon, basic rights.
First, we have the story of Mike Mette. He’s about to be kidnapped by the state of Iowa and held against his will for five years. Normally, government is only allowed to engage in such behavior when a member of society has demonstrated that they are incapable of coexisting with the rest. Mike Mette, however, is being kidnapped for no other reason than that he exercised his natural right to self defense.
Self-defense is, inexplicably, no defense
It went to hell for Mike Mette, too, in Dubuque on Oct. 8, 2005. What happened shouldn’t have happened, but it did. Mike and his buddies were drinking, a testament to what happens when young guys mix with alcohol. They heard about a house party, the party was a dud, they left without taking a drink, but the alleged victim and another man, a basketball player standing 6-foot-8, were highly offended.
The victim said his cell phone had disappeared. Angry words were exchanged. Mike and his friends left. The victim, a college student, and the basketball player chased them down the street, picking a fight. Mike wasn’t armed. He tried to avoid the confrontation until the other guy began pushing him, punching him in the chest with both hands.
So Mike did what anyone would do. He threw a punch. One punch. The victim went down. Unconscious. There was no testimony that he did anything other than throw that one punch. Prosecutors spinning their local paper talk about the victim being kicked, but even the victim’s friend wouldn’t testify to that. The victim was released from the hospital four days later. A month went by, and Mike was charged with assault causing serious injury, which carries a mandatory five-year term.
This next story, which Rush talked about a couple days ago, is absolutely ridiculous.
Deputies seize baby boy from parents so state can test blood
A nearly 7-week-old baby is home after sheriff’s deputies seized him from his parents so doctors could perform a mandatory blood test that the boy’s parents object to on religious grounds.
Mary and Josue Anaya of Omaha say their due process rights were violated and they’re considering legal action against the state and county, which decided to “grab the baby and ask questions later,” said their attorney, Jeff Downing of Lincoln.
Mary Anaya gave birth to their ninth child in Iowa, which offers a religious exemption to the blood tests.
…Mary Anaya told a health worker they would not have Joel tested, and health officials told the county attorney’s office, which got an order from a juvenile court judge, saying the child was in “imminent danger.” With the order came permission to place the baby in foster care while the test was performed.
And just what was this “imminent danger”? Well, the screening is for rare diseases, which should give a clue right there. With 43 confirmed positives out of 27,000 tests conducted last year, “imminent danger” has been stretched well beyond the breaking point. At this point it’s clear that no personal liberty can remain so long as do-gooder liberals are allowed to use government force to decide what is best for you and yours. Sometimes I can’t tell what country we’re in anymore.
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science, but please don't hold that against me.
