"I dress for church." Englishman. So do I, most of the time.
Don't these bozos realize that trees are grown on tree farms?
The opening chord of "Hard Day's Night." It's sort of a "clang," isn't it?
Dems seek to kill DC school choice
The genetics of male superiority in chess and science.
A closer look at the Bombay slums. They are neighborhoods, really. As I recall, "urban renewal" didn't work too well in the US.
How the socialized medicine scheme will work. I don't think folks will go for it.
Welcome to anarchy. Hitchen's Battle of Beirut
OK, some links re the proposed Obama socialist, eat-the-rich budget:
I actually agree about eliminating the mortgage interest deduction. There is nothing fair or rational about it, and all it does is to drive up the price of housing. However, their just mentioning this will add to the slump in home prices. They will just tighten the deduction phase-out at the high end.
I do not particularly like the idea of eliminating charitable deductions, despite the arguments for it.
Marginal Rev had this:
Today President Obama proposed about $634 billion in new spending and taxes. But since we here at MR cover only the quantitatively significant policy initiatives, I have nothing to say about it.
Q&O:
The era of big deficit financed government isn’t just back, it’s back on steroids sitting in a rocket sled pointed at economic hell.
Insty:
BOB KRUMM: “Barack Obama’s plans to hyper-inflate the government bubble while he taxes the rich at confiscatory levels, is so certain to collapse the economy that I can only conclude that he is a brilliant Rovian plant whose purpose is to finally drive a stake into the heart of the era of big government.”
Henninger: This is a radical budget:
Barack Obama is proposing that the U.S. alter the relationship between the national government and private sector that was put in place by Ronald Reagan and largely continued by the presidencies of Bill Clinton and the Bushes. Then, the private sector led the economy. Now Washington will chart its course.
A Vermont Lib goes through the lies in Obama's speech. h/t, SDA
Cap and trade is a tax on everybody. Volokh:
The most dangerous proposal in the new budget is the institution of a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. Indeed, the single largest source of new tax revenue in the budget going forward are these payments to be made by businesses for the right to emit excess carbon.
The goal is an 83% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 compared to 2005 levels.
That would bring US per capita emissions of CO2 down to a level below what we had in the 1700s.
The Audacity of Trope at Villainous. She quotes the NYT:
“To the extent that Mr. Obama has talked about raising taxes, he has focused on households that make at least $250,000 a year. . .But the problem can’t be solved just by taxing the rich. That top 1 percent pays only about one-quarter of federal taxes. Once the recession ends, taxes on the not-so-rich will need to rise, too.”
From a piece on the budget at Politico:
For those who might feel assured that this sneaky tax increase – pretending for deductibility purposes that your tax rate is lower than it actually is -- is only hitting the multi-millionaires of Obama’s derision, think again: the vast majority of the resulting new tax revenue will be paid by the entrepreneurs, professionals and successful small businesses (the ones with actual employees) whose paychecks are only a tiny fraction of those dastardly bankers and CEOs. For a Subchapter S small business, where personal income tax rates apply, it takes only a handful of employees to generate the $150,000 or so in taxable income (for a single owner or a married owner filing separately) to get hit with this tax increase. Moreover, this is not simply money that would otherwise be pocketed by the owner; these retained earnings are usually the only source of equity capital for sustaining their payroll and growing their businesses. And with banks so reluctant to lend, this is the worst possible time to reduce their working capital.
And to sum it all up, Dick Morris:
Why does Obama preach gloom and doom? Because he is so anxious to cram through every last spending bill, tax increase on the so-called rich, new government regulation, and expansion of healthcare entitlement that he must preserve the atmosphere of crisis as a political necessity. Only by keeping us in a state of panic can he induce us to vote for trillion-dollar deficits and spending packages that send our national debt soaring.
And then there is the matter of blame. The deeper the mess goes — and the further down his rhetoric drives it — the more imperative it becomes to lay off the blame on Bush. He must perpetually “discover” — to his shock — how deep the crisis that he inherited runs, stoking global fears in the process.
So, having inherited a recession, his words are creating a depression. He entered office amid a disaster and he is transforming it into a catastrophe, all to pass every last bit of government spending and move us a bit further to the left before his political capital dwindles.
But the jig will be up soon. The crash of the stock market in the days since he took power (indeed, from the moment he won the election) can increasingly be attributed to his own failure to lead us in the right direction, his failed policies in addressing the recession and his own spreading of panic and fear. The market collapse makes it evident that it is Obama who is the problem, where he should, instead, be the solution.
