Monthly Archives: September 2013

Responsibility

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President Barack Obama says that now that Russia has agreed to the removal and destruction of Syria’s chemical weapon arsenal, it’s on the Russians to follow through.

Which raises a question: if the Russians use the “agreement” to stall and delay, or even openly refuse to carry through the removal and destruction, what are you going to do about it, Ace?  Shake your finger very firmly at the Russians?  Like you’ve done all along vis-à-vis Syria, Iran, and northern Korea?  Or will you respond like you did over missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, instead?

A Thought on the Syrian Opposition

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Israeli Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren (for a few more days), has one, which he offered in an interview with the Jerusalem Post:

The initial message about the Syrian issue was that we always wanted [President] Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran. … We understand that they are pretty bad guys.  Still, the greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut.  And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc.  That is a position we had well before the outbreak of hostilities in Syria.  With the outbreak of hostilities we continued to want Assad to go.

Would that our own national leadership, including a President who’s a better policy guy than his policy guys, had such clarity of thought.

Because Stuff Happens

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Another seemingly mendacious defense of Obamacare.  Congressman Jackie Speier (D, CA) decries objections to unqualified or even unvetted Obamacare “Navigators” having access to individual Americans’ health and financial data.  Speier dismisses the concerns as just a

systematic effort by some Republican state officials to obstruct implementation of the Affordable Care Act[.]

She’s joined by HHS spokesman Brian Cook, who insists,

The navigator program is similar to Medicare counselors, which have existed for years and never faced this kind of criticism from Congress.  The shameful and unprecedented attempt by some in Congress to bully and intimidate these private organizations is clearly an ideologically driven attempt to prevent uninsured Americans from gaining health coverage.

Never mind that personal medical and financial data weren’t so easily hacked into when Medicare was being gutsed up.  Hey, stuff happens, and we should just live with it.

Wrong.  These people know stuff happens, and they should be getting in the way of it, not excusing it.

Obama’s Government Shutdown

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Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew had this to say in a Tuesday speech to the Economic Club. The President

will not accept measures that would tie a debt-limit increase to defunding or delaying the Affordable Care Act.  There are not and will not be negotiations about the debt limit.

There it is in so many words.  President Barack Obama insists on blowing up our economy and trashing what’s left of our national credit rating because his ego will not let him negotiate—anything—on the debt ceiling.

Obama’s shutdown.  Obama’s trash.  He’s even setting up for his shutdown.

Now That’s Just Dumb

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House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp of Michigan and others are quietly floating the idea of accepting a slightly higher tax on capital income in order to win support from Democrats on tax reform.

“Capital income” includes both capital gain and dividend income.  But if you raise the taxes on investment, you’ll get less of it.  Any high school student of economics knows this.

[C]ommittee insiders in the House tell us that Republicans have been weighing the trade-off between higher taxes on capital in exchange for lower rates on wages and salaries and small businesses.

To what end?  This tax policy just distorts the market and our economy, even more than the existing tax-code-as-social-engineering-tool already does.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana, a Democrat, wants to equalize the rates for capital gains and taxes on wages and salaries.  For Democrats, he has said, this is a matter “of basic fairness.”

Fair or not, I agree with the idea of equalizing “the rates for capital gains and taxes on wages and salaries.”  A flat tax of 10% on all income, regardless of source, does the trick.  And a low, flat tax won’t distort our economy.  Although, it will take away a vote buying tool that members of both parties use for personal political gain: promising “lower taxes” by Republicans and selling tax credits and subsidies by Democrats.  That’s not dumb.