Clfford Thies points out an unlovely but very important truth about paying for everything by levying higher taxes on the wealthy: Lifting the caps on Social Security “contributions”, ending deductions for charitable and homeowners’ interest expense, raising the top federal personal income tax rate and the corporate tax rate, ending the capital gains tax preference … get the idea? If you have a high income, they’re coming after you. But, the idea that you can heavily tax the rich is bogus. As the author of the referenced article indicates, “If you look at the background of the top 1%, you realize that they meet my criteria of knowledgeable, worldly, disconnected to location for wealth, and willing and able to pay for proper legal advice.” In response to excessive taxes, these people will simply shift themselves and their wealth overseas. Instead of getting more out of them, the government will actually get less. During the next 4-8 years there will always be tax attorneys, tax shelters...

I want to be sure I don't take this quotation out of context (and I am not happy that I cannot find a single net reference that does not have an elipsis). This is Senator Obama campaigning in Oregon as reported by GoogleNews : "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama said. I am hoping that this quotation is just a verbally maladroit attempt to say that the US cannot exist in a vacuum, as if the ecological consequences of its actions will be automatically tolerated by the rest of the world. I hope that's so, because what it sounds like is that Senator Obama is advocating some pretty serious government intervention into the lives of American citizens. Especially that part, "we can't . . . eat as much as we want. . . ." What's up there? Enforced vegetarianism because wheat has a smaller carbon footprint than beef? I w...

....the problems with the economy do not stem from consumption related issues, they stem from 1.) the lack of domestic production, and 2.) super liquidity. Overall there are too many dollars floating around in the economic system to try to "provide full employment and low interest rates," to use Bernanke's words, while not creating opportunity through the productive mechanisms of the economic structure. So basically, what he means is that after Wall Street has been slathered with enough green to cover a St. Paddy's day festival in Ireland , and the value of the dollar collapses, we will need an alternate way to fuel the economic structure. This can be done in three ways, 1.) by opening the economy up for the average person to competing currencies and the use of commodities as trade items, or a return to the use of "silver and gold" as legal tender or 2.) through a political and populist redistribution of wealth and 3.) through continued aggressive warfare t...

. . . that we've apparently been in a recession since 1975. According to Mid-Atlantic States Labor, The American quality of life has been going downhill since 1975 . Arguing that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is not "is not an appropriate gauge of our national well-being" is not a particularly new proposition, although you should feel a slight tinge of warning at that "national well-being" term being thrown into the mix. Let's take a look at how the analysis goes: GDP measures the total market value of all goods and services produced in a country in a given period. But it includes only those goods and services traded for money. It also adds everything together, without discerning desirable, well-being-enhancing economic activity from undesirable, well-being-reducing activity. An oil spill, for example, increases GDP because someone has to clean it up, but it obviously detracts from well-being. More crime, more sickness, more war, more pollution, more fires, s...

Here are my naked, raw economic debates as filled with vulgarity as they are with optimistic pan Americanism for the future: http://www.delawareliberal.net/2008/02/29/big-hit-to-economy-from-credit-crunch-study-says/#comments They are debates both with liberals and conservatives and many of the arguments come from my teachers like Steve Forbes, and other economists and financiers. Most importantly it shows an intellectual aggression that is unusual for me, but which was provoked by the current economic crisis, so many people's misunderstanding of its complexity and my understanding of its drivers. I almost regret studying John Nash, Buffett and with Forbes. Who are all in agreement that the Greenspan, Bernake crowd cannot create lasting prosperity for our nation or a pan-American group of nations. Ron Paul's idealism features in the discussion, but the important thing to take away is that Pan-Americanism does not have to be a violent event, it is a natural progression and we ...

I grow increasingly tired of people holding up Europe as the bright shining example of effective social programs. Sure, we've got lots of problems here, but Europe--and the term depends on which nations you arbitrarily decide to include in the term Europe --is still struggling with immense and widespread problems of poverty and unequal income distribution that five decades or more of the welfare state, and nearly two decades since the fall of the Soviet Union have not been able to eradicate. Polska , a Polish business site , takes its analysis of Gross Domestic Product per Capita one step further than those recent sensationalist reports about Great Britain's GDP (primarily on the strength of the fluctuation of the Pound) having slipped ahead of the US: In 2005, the Gross National Income per capita (GNI, Polish: PNB) in Poland, according to the data of the World Bank, amounted to around 7 thousand USD. According to this criterion, Poland is much poorer than Germany or France, wh...

America is generally short of news outlets that take a genuine world perspective, which is why--as I noted in my post on the budding relationship between France and China --we miss so much of what's really going on in the world. For that--even though the graphics are pathetic and the stand is conservative enough to embarrass Thurston Howell III--I read The Economist . Among other advantages, the magazine is actually written by people who know something about economics rather than the glib but essentially puppet-like market analysts we constantly see on TV. Recently The Economist took on the issue of soaring food prices worldwide , attributing them to: ...long-running changes in diet that accompany the growing wealth of emerging economies—the Chinese consumer who ate 20kg (44lb) of meat in 1985 will scoff over 50kg of the stuff this year. That in turn pushes up demand for grain: it takes 8kg of grain to produce one of beef. But the rise in prices is also the self-inflicted result...

Despite what you may hear from Kyoto or Bali, there are a large number of people in the developing world that see global warming as a semi-conspiracy on the part of the industrialized nations to deprive them of a higher standard of living. Here's a current example, as reported by Canadian TV , as well as one of my favorite blogs, The Ecolibertarian . India's Tata Motors is unveiling the new Nano, a four-door compact that retails for between $2,500-3,000, potentially allowing tens of millions of Indians to upgrade from motorcycles and carts to automobiles. Tata says the vehicle will meet European emission standards and achieve fuel efficiency of about 45 miles per gallon. A triumph for capitalism and innovation? If you thought that, you're wrong. According to UN Chief Climatologist, Dr, Rajendra Pachauri (co-winner of last year's Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore), he's "having nightmares" about the possibilities of the Indian subcontinent teeming with cars ...

I started thinking about this when I was debating health care: is there actually a right to health insurance? That's not so much the slam-dunk question as you might think. Now before those of you who are not libertarians start pounding on the keyboards to call me a heartless materialist, let's think about this for a moment. What's a right? The Declaration of Independence : We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most...

As we go into an election year spin-cycle, with the statists on both wings of the Demopublican Party competing to hand out bread and circuses with our tax dollars, THIS is just too much. As the Snooze J reports, "Coupons offered to convert old TVs to digital" . Seems like the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (who knew we had one of those?) has been taking heat from Congress regarding its failure to properly prepare Americans with older TVs for the 2009 switchover to all HD broadcasting. So now it has set aside $1.5 Billion--let's see, thats $1,500,000,000 of OUR money--to send out $40 vouchers to defray the costs of converting an old TV into one that can receive Hi-Def. Converters sold on the free market will retail for $50-70, and the NTIA expects to pass out between 10-26 million of the vouchers (two per household, please). What this amounts to is the US government essentially taking $5 from all 300 million American citizens and redistributin...