Monthly Archives: November 2017

The Tax Proposals on Offer

Posted on by
Reply

The House has one, and the Senate has one.  The Wall Street Journal, oddly, is making out like the differences between the two are enormous.  Yet, here’s the WSJ‘s own chart illustrating these humongous differences.

The big differences the WSJ singles out are these:

The big ways the Senate version breaks with the House plan: the level of top individual tax rates, the number of individual tax brackets, the timing of a corporate tax-rate cut and the particulars of estate tax changes[.]

How big are these differences, really?  The top level doesn’t even differ by a per centage point, and the number of brackets only differ in how finely income should be subdivided.  The timing of the corporate tax-rate is a matter of a year, again a small difference: put it in place in 6 months, rather than immediately; cut the rate to 27% this year and 20% next; and on and on—even trading this year vs next for something else.  Estate tax changes differ only in repeal or not—in 6 years, a lifetime in politics, a complete Senate election cycle.

Even the differences the paper elides, keeping or eliminating deductions for SALT, medical expenses, and student loan interest, is tiny.  Most folks don’t itemize, which is the only place these deductions even exist, and with the standard deduction doubled all around (personally, rather than a single/married standard deduction, I’d rather see the standard deduction keyed to the then-current year Federal Poverty Guideline, but that’s a trivial difference at present, too) and lowered personal income tax rates, the value of those deductions shrinks even further, especially for those who still would itemize.

No, the two versions blatantly, firmly, agree on the principles and the degree to which those principles should be satisfied in the tax reform effort underway.  They differ on numbers and timing—all small things that are easily resolved, except to the extent the Republican Snowflake Three in the Senate get in the way and to the extent the My Way of the Highway collection of House members let their egos get in the way.

Frightening the Snowflakes

Posted on by
Reply

It seems a Cambridge University professor had the effrontery to warn new students of a class of his—Physical Sciences—that life is hard and that it’s harder when you’re stupid.  For instance, this in an email that he sent to his incoming students:

Remember that you are NOT at any other uni, where students do drink a lot and do have what they regard as a ‘good time’—and you are NOT on a course, as some Cambridge courses sadly are, where such a behaviour pattern is possible or acceptable.

Oh, the wailing and bodice rending that resulted.

Student Minds Cambridge, a “mental health” activist group:

We are very concerned that this could be extremely damaging to the mental well-being of the students concerned, and potentially others as well.

And a Vice-Chancellor of nearby Buckingham University, Anthony Seldon (late of Cambridge):

Frightening impressionable undergraduates into believing that work alone is all-important is irresponsible, unkind and wrong-headed[.]

Wow.

On the contrary, what’s damaging to incoming university students, what stunts their mental development, what’s frightening regarding “impressionable undergraduates” is coddling them, rewarding them for their precious snowflake-ness, and thereby trapping them in a sense of victimhood, instead of confronting them with the difficulties of serious learning, the sterner difficulties of life in the real world, and teaching them how to cope—and especially that they can actually cope.

Veteran’s Day

Posted on by
Reply

I first posted this in 2011; I’ve added to it in 2014.

Thank you for all who have, and are, serving.  And because I couldn’t have said it better, I’ll let Mike Royko, late of the Chicago Tribune, via BlackFive, say it from his 1993 column.

I just phoned six friends and asked them what they will be doing on Monday.

They all said the same thing: working.

Me, too.

There is something else we share. We are all military veterans.

And there is a third thing we have in common. We are not employees of the federal government, state government, county government, municipal government, the Postal Service, the courts, banks, or S & Ls, and we don’t teach school.

If we did, we would be among the many millions of people who will spend Monday goofing off.

Which is why it is about time Congress revised the ridiculous terms of Veterans Day as a national holiday.

The purpose of Veterans Day is to honor all veterans.

So how does this country honor them?…

…By letting the veterans, the majority of whom work in the private sector, spend the day at their jobs so they can pay taxes that permit millions of non-veterans to get paid for doing nothing.

As my friend Harry put it:

“First I went through basic training. Then infantry school. Then I got on a crowded, stinking troop ship that took 23 days to get from San Francisco to Japan. We went through a storm that had 90 percent of the guys on the ship throwing up for a week.

“Then I rode a beat-up transport plane from Japan to Korea, and it almost went down in the drink. I think the pilot was drunk.

“When I got to Korea, I was lucky. The war ended seven months after I got there, and I didn’t kill anybody and nobody killed me.

“But it was still a miserable experience. Then when my tour was over, I got on another troop ship and it took 21 stinking days to cross the Pacific.

“When I got home on leave, one of the older guys at the neighborhood bar — he was a World War II vet — told me I was a —-head because we didn’t win, we only got a tie.

“So now on Veterans Day I get up in the morning and go down to the office and work.

“You know what my nephew does? He sleeps in. That’s because he works for the state.

“And do you know what he did during the Vietnam War? He ducked the draft by getting a job teaching at an inner-city school.

“Now, is that a raw deal or what?”

Of course that’s a raw deal. So I propose that the members of Congress revise Veterans Day to provide the following:

– All veterans — and only veterans — should have the day off from work. It doesn’t matter if they were combat heroes or stateside clerk-typists.

Anybody who went through basic training and was awakened before dawn by a red-neck drill sergeant who bellowed: “Drop your whatsis and grab your socks and fall out on the road,” is entitled.

– Those veterans who wish to march in parades, make speeches or listen to speeches can do so. But for those who don’t, all local gambling laws should be suspended for the day to permit vets to gather in taverns, pull a couple of tables together and spend the day playing poker, blackjack, craps, drinking and telling lewd lies about lewd experiences with lewd women. All bar prices should be rolled back to enlisted men’s club prices, Officers can pay the going rate, the stiffs.

– All anti-smoking laws will be suspended for Veterans Day. The same hold for all misdemeanor laws pertaining to disorderly conduct, non-felonious brawling, leering, gawking and any other gross and disgusting public behavior that does not harm another individual.

– It will be a treasonable offense for any spouse or live-in girlfriend (or boyfriend, if it applies) to utter the dreaded words: “What time will you be home tonight?”

– Anyone caught posing as a veteran will be required to eat a triple portion of chipped beef on toast, with Spam on the side, and spend the day watching a chaplain present a color-slide presentation on the horrors of VD.

– Regardless of how high his office, no politician who had the opportunity to serve in the military, but didn’t, will be allowed to make a patriotic speech, appear on TV, or poke his nose out of his office for the entire day.

Any politician who defies this ban will be required to spend 12 hours wearing headphones and listening to tapes of President Clinton explaining his deferments.

Now, deal the cards and pass the tequila.

– Mike Royko

Next, because this is a day of remembrance and of honoring our surviving veterans, take another moment to visit here and take in Mark Toomey’s piece.

And follow his advice at the end.

Free Speech, Left-Style. Again

Posted on by
Reply

The UC Berkeley student newspaper, The Daily Californian, accused Alan Dershowitz, in black and white, of having “blood on his hands” and of being “culpable for…Israeli atrocities”—of blood libel.  The Harvard law professor emeritus wanted to respond, but

The Daily Californian “absolutely, categorically” refused to print his reply to the op-ed.

As Dershowitz put it in a Fox & Friends segment,

The Daily Cal, as many college newspapers today, are totally one-sided.  You can say whatever you want about people like me if I’m pro-Israel. I don’t get to respond.

Free speech, indeed.

Two Views of the Saudi Purge in Progress

Posted on by
Reply

One is that

the “purge” is not about removing political rivals who threatened MBS’s [Mohammed bin Salman, the newly anointed Crown Prince] position as heir apparent but rather about sending a message to political and economic elites that their entitlement to extreme wealth and privilege, and their impunity, is coming to an end.

Indeed,

With the exception of Minister of the National Guard Prince Mutaib bin Abdallah, the detainee list is made up entirely of individuals who had no capacity to challenge the succession.

The other view is that

Despite his youth and inexperience, he [MBS] has risen rapidly through the ranks, amassing previously unimaginable powers for a single royal. This, and his refusal to govern through consensus—as is customary—has caused deep resentment, jealousy and anger. His most prominent critics and rivals were therefore carted off on corruption charges.

So, maybe a purge after all—but of whom?  Apparently not threats to his political power:

[T]he wider significance of this can only be fully understood in conjunction with events in Israel. The Jewish state is hardly a natural ally for Saudi Arabia, but they have long shared a common enemy: Iran.
…
So the two have been working together: close diplomatic cooperation, intelligence sharing and perhaps more.

And the possibility of an actual alliance may be growing.  The purge, thus, could be a clearing of the decks in anticipation of an Iranian-backed anti-Saudi Arabia program (expanding its Yemen program—recall the Houthi launch of an Iranian-supplied IRBM against Riyadh—supporting another client’s efforts against Saudi Arabia, …) if not an overtly fought military action.

Nor are the two views mutually exclusive, and they could be entirely independent of each other.  Overt dispute with Iran or not, the Saudi economy in the post oil-only economy can prosper only with corruption in government and other high places eliminated or at least greatly reduced.  On the other hand, Iran seems intent on taking over the Middle East, and that has negative implications for both Israel and Saudi Arabia.  With Iran’s view of how to run things, too, the implications would seem to be no less catastrophic for the Saudis, regardless of the degree of corruption.