Has The Tax Platform Seen Its Day?

Is the tax plank on the Republican platform still a viable issue to run on? In Ari’s article I posted on yesterday, I think he makes a good point when he makes a distinction between the Republican and Democratic tax ideology and platform.

“If Republicans, including their presidential candidates, wonder why their calls for tax relief don’t resonate like they used to, it’s because there aren’t that many income taxpayers left. They’ve been taken off the rolls.

“As for the Democrats, they historically have raised taxes and redistributed income as a core philosophy. It doesn’t matter to them how much money some people pay — the argument is that the wealthy can always pay more. According to this point of view, it’s immaterial that the tax code is highly progressive; it can always be made more progressive. While raising taxes on the few to benefit the many might be a political winner, it’s an increasingly risky policy to pursue.”

The tax platform is genius both as a campaign issue - cutting taxes puts more money in the pockets of workers - and a means to economic growth - cutting taxes encourages those that can to invest in new and growing businesses, creating more jobs.

But 60 percent of voters cannot relate to what Republican candidates say when they advocate for fewer taxes. Sixty percent of voters are not affected by taxes and do not understand what they can gain from fewer taxes.

One value is money out of pocket. If 60 percent of voters never have money taken from their paychecks (of course, they pay sales taxes, registration fees, etc.), they never see an increase in their bottom line when taxes are reduced and so have no incentive to favor fewer taxes.

Another value is increased economic opportunity. Raising taxes reduces available jobs because investors have less to invest in new businesses, but workers have a difficult time realizing how this affects them. Workers can’t see jobs they never had. They can see the increased government aid they receive from the tax increase, but they can’t see the great job they could have had that the tax killed.

So forty percent of voters pay all the taxes. This is a minority. When Republicans pull out the tax card, only 40 of 100 people listening understand. No party can win an election with 40 percent of voters. The tax platform may have seen its day.

Will the inequality right itself? No. Ari writes: “If, as now happens, 60% of the people in our democracy can force 40% to pay the bills, what’s to stop 65% from making 35% pay it all? Since no one wants to pay taxes, what’s to stop 90% of people in a democracy from making 10% pay it all? Or why not let 99% of the country off the hook, as long as the remaining 1% picks up the tab?”

While the tax platform should not be dropped (lowering taxes is a foundational element of a healthy economy) it may be time to start finding another mainstay.

Today’s Interesting Stuff

Beginning with a quote from the gibbon, I mean a quote from Gibbon:

In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again. – Edward Gibbon

How salient to our current situation in America is that statement. I definitely want to read Gibbon now, though I’ve heard his tomes (Rise And Fall Of The Roman Empire is his most famous) are quite, ummmm, thick.

Iterations of Complexity: The Continuing Argument for Intelligent Design

You’ve heard of single layer dependencies between various creatures in the kingdoms of nature. One beastie hitching a necessary ride on some unsuspecting host beastie. These dependencies befuddle evolutionary biologists who cannot explain methods by which these organisms evolved separately or the chances necessary for them to have evolved together.

Now see this:

As the sun rises over a grassy pasture, and the morning light glints from the countless clinging drops of dew, a single snail resolutely inches toward a mound of steaming nourishment. But unbeknownst to the armored gastropod, this seemingly ordinary heap of cow dung conceals a legion of tiny Dicrocoelium dendriticum eggs, each of which contains the embryo of a sinister mind-controlling parasite. As the snail gorges itself on the fibrous feast, it unwittingly sets the collection of unborn lancet flukes on a miniature adventure which will lead them through slime, zombies, and bile to ultimately find their own unique kind of utopia

These Flukes will live consecutively in the Snail, in an ant (which they will control to suicide through its nervous system), and finally in a cow. Catch that, at least four separate organisms in a dependency cycle, each step a necessary part of the growth process and life cycle of this Fluke.

My bet is the chance is impossibly slim that this cycle evolved.

A Majority Imposes Taxes On The Minority

If you paid any taxes this year, you’re a minority. Forty percent of the country’s households — more than 44 million adults do not pay taxes.

In The Taxpaying Minority, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer wrote, if “you find 100 people standing on the sidewalk [dropping off their taxes, forty] of them will be excused from paying income taxes thanks to Congress. Twenty of them, the middle class, will pay barely a thing. The 40 people who remain, the upper middle class and the wealthy, will pay nearly all of the income taxes.”

Remember, the “middle class” is not you anymore. The middle class now consists of single people or single parents with one income. The traditional “middle class” from 50 years ago (Dad, mom, two kids, a dog, car, and a home.) is now the upper class because the traditional middle class family now has two incomes. (See “Changing Demographics of the ‘Middle Class’: Married Couples with Children No Longer in Statistical ‘Middle Class.’ )

Ari continues: “Look at that crowd again and find the richest person there. That individual will pay 37% of all the income taxes owed by those 100 people. The 10 richest people in the crowd will pay 71% of the income-tax bill. The 40 most successful people will pay 99% of everyone’s income taxes.”

This phenomenon is a natural result of a democratic form of government ruling a people who have a diminishing sense of personal responsibility. From a purely pragmatic perspective, why did bike helmet laws pass on the ballot box in California years ago? Because the law applied only to those under 18. The law didn’t affect voters, therefore, they could pass the law without feeling any personal consequences. California voters have passed two tax increases by initiative over the past few years. Why? The first passed because it applied only to the “rich” (those making more than $500,000.). Lo and behold, it only applied to a little over 200 people. Funny how millions of voters can impose a tax on 200.

The next tax increase lowered the bar. It defined “rich” as those making more than $150,000. Those could be my friends, my neighbors, my boss. They aren’t wealthy people and, in California, $150,000 isn’t too much to live on.

It is a sad day when voters make decisions simply because they will feel no personal consequences.

OpenCongress

Want to know what’s going on in Congress? We put the people there, we need to keep abreast of what they’re up to.

The Culture Cries, Common Sense Dies

A Professor of Financial Accounting at Emmanuel College in Boston was fired after acting out a brief skit in which he pretended to be the murderous young man at Virginia Tech, and then had one of his students pretend to have a firearm of their own, shooting him and ending his rampage.

(Professor Nicholas) Winset said he gave students a disclaimer before he started his Virginia Tech re-enactment, which involved him pointing a Magic Marker at students and saying, “Pow.” He then had another student shoot him with an imaginary gun to make the point that Cho could have been stopped by another student with a firearm.

Professor Winset was notified in a single page letter delivered by courier:

“You are hereby directed not to enter the College campus or any College owned property at any time for any reason,” the letter states. “Also enclosed . . .is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts form, How to File for Unemployment Insurance Benefits.”

He has since spoken out on YouTube regarding his dismissal.

Quotes above are from the article “Professor axed for VT stunt: Re-enacted tragedy to tout pro-gun perspective” published in the Boston Herald.

Also in the Rational Review.

Today’s Interesting Stuff

An article “13 Things That Do Not Make Sense” on NewScientist.com had an intriguing bit of information which plays right into the ‘old earth’ hypothesis related to creation.

The horizon problem

OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you’ll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.

This “horizon problem” is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. “Inflation”, for example.

You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 10⁵⁰ in 10^-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? “Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred,” says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen, but see Inside inflation: after the big bang.

So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face of the question “why?” In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.

This is beautiful. According to the ‘old earth’ view of creation, God created the earth as though it were already ‘old’. Instead of every natural cycle having to begin for the first time when God created all things, all the cycles were already full functioning with all parts of each natural cycle in a state of happening. Even though the entire universe had just come to be moments before in our finite time, it’s various members were fully functional. So the temperatures of microwave radiation across the entire universe were already uniform as though the universe were billions upon untold billions of years old.

Isn’t our God amazing? And isn’t it sad that so much effort and brilliance is wasted on hypotheses which are full of dead ends because their root assumptions are so false?

Peaks, Valleys, and Rails…

An article in Christianity Today really spoke some profound truth to me. I must say I’ve been a proponent of the ‘mountain-tops and valleys’ view of life in general, and in the context of this article, relationships.

Joy and difficulty are an odd combination, but much of life is lived seeking one and avoiding the other. I used to think they came one at a time, like alternating currents. Now I realize they’re both present, all the time.

I’m developing eyes to see both simultaneously.

A peaceful coexistence On our honeymoon, Susan and I chose the wrong day to spend at Busch Gardens in Tampa Bay, Florida. Shortly after we paid our admission and entered the park, a tropical storm moved in and dumped more than four inches of rain on us.

Within minutes we were soaked. Normally, the idea of spending several hours in sopping wet pants, shirts plastered to our skin, and shoes squishing water with each step, is not my idea of a good time. It could have been a miserable day.

But I was with the woman I loved, and she was with me! We took photos of each other splashing through puddles with our stringy hair arranged in crazy ‘dos. That was the first time in our marriage that I realized joy and difficulty could coexist. But it wasn’t the last.

The idea that life is like the rails a train rides on, constant contact with both joy and adversity being important to growth and a normal mode of life should have a profound impact on how we live our lives.

And a final bit of absurdity…

Apparently I’ve been misinformed: there are worse things than dying a sinner.

A Dutch escort agency is launching a special virgin service for computer geeks.

Sociology student Zoe Vialet, who set up Society Service last year, says she has had a lot of demand from virgins.

She says most of them work in the IT sector and added: “They are very sweet but are afraid of seeking contact with other people. They mean it very well but are very scared.

“Every booking lasts three hours minimum. Longer is possible, shorter not. We take the time to take a bath together, do a massage and explore each others body.

“When the date is over, you will have had a fantastic experience, and you will be able to pleasure a woman.”

Zoe and her colleague Marieke have specially trained five girls to look after the needs of virgins, reports De Telegraaf.

She added: “You better practise before having a girlfriend. Woman expect men older than 30 having had some experience.

“Some men need a little bit of help. But it makes them happy and they are glowing .There is nothing more terrible than dying as a virgin.”

Article printed in the Independent Online April 21st, 2007.

I’m Now A Chicagoan

I’m now a Chicagoan. I live in the western ‘burbs of the windy city. I’ve partaken in the rivalry between Cubbies and White Sox fans. Though I’m partial to the Cubs for sentimental reasons (Dusty Baker moved from the Giants to the Cubs the same year I moved out here the first time), I do enjoy rooting for winning teams (not that I really root for any teams, I’m no sports fanatic). The Sox are a more regularly winning team than the Cubs, and the Northside (Cubs) - Southside (White Sox) rivalry is no less vociferious than Giants/A’s for the Bay Area people or Dodgers/Angels for the LA crowd:

On a tour of Florida, the Pope took a couple of days off to visit the coast for some sightseeing. He was cruising along the beach in the Pope-mobile when there was a frantic commotion just off shore. A helpless man, wearing a Chicago Cubs jersey, was struggling frantically to free himself from the jaws of a 25-foot shark.

As the Pope watched, horrified, a speedboat came racing up with three men wearing Chicago White Sox jerseys aboard. One quickly fired a harpoon into the shark’s side. The other two reached out and pulled the bleeding, semi-conscious Cubs fan from the water. Then using autographed Jim Thome baseball bats, the three South-Side heroes beat the shark to death and hauled it into the boat.

Immediately the Pope shouted and summoned them to the beach. “I give you my blessing for your brave actions,” he told them. “I heard that there was some bitter hatred between White Sox and Cubs fans, but now I have seen with my own eyes that this is not the truth.”

As the Pope drove off, the harpooner asked his buddies “Who was that?” It was the Pope,” one replied. “He is in direct contact with God and has access to all of God’s wisdom.” “Well,” the harpooner said, “He may have access to God’s wisdom but he doesn’t know squat about shark fishing. How’s the bait holding up?”

This joke is ripped off with pride and edited for applicability by me. I found it’s original version here.

Remember The Name “Nancy Pelosi”

Remeber! Remember! the 11th of September,
The airplanes, towers, the plot.
I see no reason the 11th of September,
Ever should be forgot.

Remember the name “Nancy Pelosi.” It will stand someday beside the name “Neville Chamberlain” in the pantheon of deluded fools whose poll-following stupidity led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their own nation’s citizens, and the deaths of millions of others who would have lived if those deluded fools had done what was necessary to preserve their national honor.

Orson Scott Card scores again. The pity is how few, relatively speaking, will ever read or realize the chilling ramifications of the current policies of the dishonorable and craven American Elite and the leadership of the Democrat party.

Education “Experts” And The Appetite For Power

Orson Scott Card, my current favorite Science Fiction author and all around Renaissance Man, has written one more excellent commentary on the state of our education system. His issue? Schools that want to shorten summer so they can control more of our kids more of the time.

Convenient? Yes. Good for our kids? Are they doing well now, and can that good be actually attributed to things the school system is responsible for? I believe that the vast majority of the good kids coming out of public education are examples of ‘in spite of’ and not ‘because of’.

There are people who have snookered us into paying them a lot of money because they claim to be experts on education, but it’s all a game. They collect degrees by taking classes from people who don’t know how to teach and don’t recognize good teaching when they see it. Then they come to the school districts and get ridiculously high salaries for thinking up ways to keep teachers from doing their jobs.

And Card continues:

We have layers of these “experts” in every school district in the state. They are the highest paid district employees, so I suppose it’s appropriate that they do the most harm.

Do you know what I find, as a college teacher? That the best writers, the best thinkers, the most broadly educated among my students are the ones who were home-schooled.

First time I’ve ever read Orson say that, and I agree wholeheartedly. Of course I’m biased, I was home schooled. But I turned out OK. I graduated High School at the age of 15, and it’s not just a case of my parents saying “you know everything we can teach you, go find someone else”. No I took and passed the California State High School Proficiency Examination (CHSPE), effectively the state exit exam. My brothers and sisters are all intelligent, functional individuals with relatively few hangups. We’re normal, with friends both our ages and older and younger. We’re socialized (whatever made socialization the point of school?) and we don’t worry about threats from maladjusted peers who feel wronged or responsible for righting wrongs. We’re not fearful that our world will come crashing down the next time a frog belches. We’re not worried about our shape or weight or what others think about our shape or weight.

We’ve got our issues, just like anyone else, but we know we’re responsible for what we can change. We’re not necessarily self-starters, but we’re not co-dependent either. In short we’re normal people who didn’t have to put up with so much of the garbage thrown at us by experts who really know nothing at all, and get paid highly for it.

Government Dependence Up Nearly 200 Percent

How many of my neighbors are dependent on the government? A recent editorial in the Investors Business Daily (Also on NewsMax) said 52.6 percent. Amazing!

This number includes dependents of direct recipients, receive significant income from government programs. The editorial went on: “Seven years ago, that number was 49.4 percent. But it’s the data from 1950, when a mere 28.3 percent of Americans relied on Washington, that really shows how needy we’ve become.”

The 52.6 percent breaks down like this:

It takes the remaining 47.4 percent of the population one-third of their year (more than 120 days) to meet the demands of the majority.

I’ll post later on efficiency of our universal wealth-distribution system (Hint: CharityNavigator.org would fail it and Milton Friedman said that the government usually spends $3 to do a $1 job.).