A good paragraph in a Wall Street Journal editorial about the New York special congressional election results: "The biggest failing of House and Senate Republicans this year has been their emphasis on budget accounting more than growth economics. This is understandable given the tea party's 2010 electoral influence, the magnitude of the deficits, and Mr. Obama's fiscal abdication. But it has too often made the GOP come across as bookkeepers."
Also worth the time in the Journal is Stephen Moore's piece headlined "A 62% Top Tax Rate?"
Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new post up at the Hoover Institution Web site about free trade and adjustment assistance for those who lose jobs to overseas competition: "what would be the state of play in the United States if every time a new firm opened up in one state it was required to fund trade assistance for workers at other firms who lost their jobs as a result?...We have to take the same approach to international trade that we take to domestic trade. Those individuals who lose their jobs to foreign competitors are no better off than those who lose them to domestic competitors. These people should receive the same level of assistance, no more and no less."
Stanford economist Michael Boskin looks at the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, and France: "What about economic performance, as measured by real GDP per capita? The four countries rank exactly in inverse order of their government spending shares (according to both 2009 and pre-crisis 2007 data), with the US highest, followed by Canada, the UK, and France....The size of the welfare state – and the erosion of incentives to work, save, and invest, owing to high taxes and bloated transfer payments – is a major impediment to faster income growth."
trucking companies say an 18-wheeler tractor configured to burn natural gas can cost about $200,000, roughly twice as much as a diesel version. And the trucks need special natural-gas fueling stations. The bill at the center of the tussle would provide tax breaks of up to $64,000 per natural-gas truck to transport companies and up to $100,000 per fueling station for owners of the stations. The tax breaks would end after five years. As of Tuesday, 185 House lawmakers, including 104 Democrats and 81 Republicans, were sponsoring the bill.
There are actually a surprising number of issues in Washington that don't break down on party lines. Or, to put it another way, bipartisanship can come pretty easily when it's about dispensing money via the tax code to an interested group.
The environmentalist author Bill McKibben has posted a response in the comments section of the item from yesterday about tornadoes and climate change. It links to the Climate Progress blog of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which acknowledges that "the tornado-warming link is more tenuous" than other evidence on climate and extreme weather. The piece also acknowledges, "'Today' weatherman Al Roker appears to have gone beyond the data with his suggestion that 'climate change' is bringing tornadoes to urban areas, although, admittedly, it is a brief clip and it's not exactly clear what he is saying."
The Palm Beach Post reports that Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty was in Florida and "called for ending cost-of-living increases for wealthy retirees." So if Mr. Pawlenty is the Republican nominee, the choice will be between President Obama, who wants to raise income taxes on the rich, and Mr. Pawlenty, who wants to cut the value of their Social Security benefits. Some choice. Is it too much to ask for a candidate in the race who wants to treat all Americans the same regardless of how much money they make, or who tries to unite the country rather than finding one group to soak for the benefit of everyone else?
Earlier discussion of means-testing for programs like Social Security is here and here and here.
William McKibben, a distinguished scholar at Middlebury College, was president of the Crimson some years before me, and the few times I have met him he's been totally nice. I've bought and read and enjoyed some of his books. But his piece today in the Washington Post is disappointing. It sarcastically instructs readers not to ask about a link between the tornadoes and climate change, because, "you might have to ask other questions. Such as: Should President Obama really just have opened a huge swath of Wyoming to new coal mining? Should Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sign a permit this summer allowing a huge new pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta?" and "If you got upset about any of this, you might forget how important it is not to disrupt the record profits of our fossil fuel companies."
The Financial Times mentions a publicly traded company called Cubic Corporation, which has a 95-year-old CEO: "Shares in nonagenarian Mr Zable's Cubic have outperformed both the S&P 500 index (and Mr Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway) over the past 10 years."
The Washington Post says President Obama is incorrect when he claims that "the tax burden on the wealthy is at its lowest level in half a century," and the Post says that Rep. Paul Ryan is correct when he accuses Mr. Obama of wanting to raise the top federal tax rate to 44.8%.
The Wilpon family uses the New Yorker magazine to try to sell the minority stake in the Mets it has been peddling:
he didn't anticipate that owning the Mets would boost his seemingly unrelated business interests. "No one had heard of us before we bought the Mets, and afterward the change was dramatic," Wilpon told me. "I don't think someone has not returned one of my telephone calls in thirty years. It's a small club, owning a baseball team, and people want to be near it." As Katz told me, "You take the chairman of the board of a bank, with his grandson, on the field to meet David Wright, and make that grandfather a hero, and you do business the way we do business, it opens up everything."
More:
in 2002, they bought out Doubleday's half, in a transaction that put the value [of the entire team] at $391 million. Today, as Wilpon negotiates with possible investors, he says it's clear that the team is worth more than a billion dollars.
For those wondering what Glenn Beck would be up to after his Fox News show ended, the answer just got a little more interesting: Mr. Beck has launched a Groupon-style discount deals email and Web site at Markdown.com.
The New York Times has a news article exploring the proposition that "leftist parties" — by which it means not the Democrats, the Working Families Party, or the Green Party, but rather the Communist Party USA and two small socialist parties — have "been given a fresh, beguiling appeal by the failures of capitalist symbols like Lehman Brothers and by debacles like the billions of dollars in securities tied to subprime mortgages."
From the article: "Mr. Webb, who joined the Communists in the 1970s, likes to emphasize the party's rich history, including the fight against McCarthyism and the volunteers who helped the Spanish Republicans battle the Fascists, rather than more unpleasant episodes like the case of the American Communist Julius Rosenberg, who spied for the Soviet Union."
An "editorial observer" column in today's New York Times claims: "The budgetary policy of the United States has been the least generous in the industrial world for a very long time....our government spending on social programs is equally puny. In 2007 Britain spent 25 percent more, as a share of its economy. Germany spent almost 60 percent more."
This depends, I suppose, on one's definition of "generosity." The Times column doesn't get into this, but one reason America spends less on "social programs" for Americans is that we spend a lot more than Britain, Germany, or other industrialized countries do on our military. What's more "generous" — for America to spend hundreds of billions of dollars making places like Iraq, Afghanistan, or the former Yugoslavia more safe for the people who live there, and on protecting Japan and Taiwan from Communist China — or spending the money instead on helping Americans? The Times writer apparently thinks it's more generous to keep the money at home, but one could easily argue that that's not the generous approach, but the selfish one.
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