It’s Wednesday, April 18th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the top of the order for the mid-week edition, it’s the “Shoot The Messenger” segment, courtesy of Bill Meisen and David Axelnut:

Axelrod: Gallup poll has ‘methodological problems’

 

Speaking of patent prevarication, here’s two items on Senate Dimocrats failed attempt to pass the Buffett Rule, the first from the WSJ‘s Stephen Moore….

Buffett Tax Baloney

The millionaire tax failed to get the 60 Senate votes necessary and went down 51 to 45. But Democrats vow to keep trying.

 

So the Buffett tax ruse is finally dead. The millionaire tax—named for financier Warren Buffett and designed to ensure that high earners pay at least 30% in federal income tax—failed to get the 60 Senate votes necessary and went down 51 to 45.

The Senate’s class warfare champion, Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, even acknowledged that this is not about growth or deficit reduction or rasing tax revenues. Rather, it’s about “tax fairness.” Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney noted that the plan “would pay for government for less than 11 hours. This isn’t a grand idea.” But President Obama thinks it is. Mr. Obama wasted no time blasting Republicans for “spending money” on tax cuts for the “wealthy that they don’t need.”

Only one Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, supported the tax. Mark Pryor, a Democrat from Arkansas voted no. Democrats thought that this issue was solid political gold, and polling seemed to show that two of three Americans supported the tax hike on “millionaires and billionaires.” But what this exercise has accomplished for the Democrats is an open question. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York promised after the vote to bring the issue up again and again. The party now appears to be more obsessed with socking it to the rich than with creating jobs, growing the economy, or solving the middle-class squeeze.

….the second by James Pethokoukis writing in the Enterprise Blog:

The total intellectual collapse of Obama’s Buffett Rule

 

Warren Buffett, President Obama’s favorite billionaire, once said that “you only find out who’s swimming naked when the tide goes out.”

Well, it looks like the tide has gone out for Obama when it comes to pushing his Buffett Rule “millionaire’s” tax. There was never much of an economic rationale for the idea.(It was always purely a means to divide and conquer through class warfare.) It would only raise about $5 billion a year over the next decade, a span when the U.S. is on track to compile average annual budget deficits of $1 trillion or more.

Wait, actually it would add nearly $800 billion to cumulative deficits because it would replace the Alternative Minimum Tax, according to government bean counters. No, wait some more! The numbers would probably be even worse. Other taxes targeted at the rich, such as President Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax hikes and recent tax increases in the UK, either raised less than forecasted or lost money.

As Bloomberg recently pointed out, affected taxpayers–fewer than 0.5% of Americans with annual incomes exceeding $1 million and tax rates of less than 30 percent–could avoid the tax via tax-free investments such as municipal bonds. They also could time asset sales for maximum tax benefits, engage in transactions that don’t result in taxable income, and make charitable contributions that yield deductions. “Largely, the Buffett rule is going to be manageable,” said David Miller, a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP in New York. “That is, with tax planning, people will be able to avoid it.” (You know….what people with money….like The Obamaos….always do!)

Obama’s strongest argument, really, was his moral one: that having the rich pay a lower tax rate than middle-class voters was just plain unfair from an income inequality perspective. But now he seems to have abandoned that one, as well:

That is not an argument about redistribution. That is an argument about growth,” Obama said in response to a reporter’s question at a news conference in Colombia. “In the history of the United States, we grow best when our growth is broad based. This is not an argument about taking from A to give to B. This is not a redistributionist argument that we’re making. We’re making an argument about how do we grow the economy in a 21st century environment,” Obama said.

Really? If there is an Obama Rule, it is the one he articulated back in 2008 to Joe the Plumber, that we need to raise taxes to “spread the wealth around.”

But I guess “spread the wealth” isn’t polling as strongly as Team Obama would like in 2012.

OK, so now Obama is focusing on the economic growth argument, his weakest one. Economic growth is produced by innovation and the acceptance of the creative destruction it brings. Obama would argue that by raising taxes, he could avoid cutting supposedly critical government investment to spur innovation. But is the federal government so lean and mean that the only way to reduce spending is by axing the NIH or the National Nanotechnology Initiative? Or is Obama talking about more Solyndra-style industrial policy? If that, better to keep that $5 billion in the private sector. And time for Obama to float some new economic ideas.

As with most Liberals, The Obamao provides Republicans the rope with which to hang him.  Note the references in his Socialist soliloquy to “chance at success” and “spread the wealth”, two very different concepts which are by definition mutually exclusive.

What The Obamao, as well as any other Socialist throughout history, really wants isn’t “chance”, but rather “certainty”; certainty of outcome, not opportunity….want, not wealth….misery, not means.

Though with some, of course….

….just a little more equal….

….than others!

It’s a point Romney and the GOP need to drive home between now and November as if it were the final nail in The Obamao’s coffin; it might well be.

Oh….did someone mention those more equal than others?  It must have been Conn Carroll, quoting this item from the WaPo in his Morning Examiner:

Panetta said he regretted cost to taxpayers for trips home to California

 

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said Monday that he regrets that his frequent flights home to California on a military jet have cost taxpayers more than $800,000 since July. He gave no indication, however, that he would end the weekend commutes.

So Leon, for pissing away over $800,000 of our nation’s defense budget in less than 9 short months while at the same time proposing to (a) close additional military bases, (b) cut the number of active-duty troops, and (c) raise health insurance premiums for military retirees, congratulations:

In a related item, the WSJ‘s Holman Jenkins offers his observations on what has become, for the Left,….

The Inequality Obsession

Why is it in America’s interest to persuade the rich to report less income?

 

If it were learned that the car driven by the average American is 10 times more likely to burst into flames than the car driven by the richest 1%, what should the policy response be? Should it be to mandate that cars driven by the rich burst into flames more often?

Income inequality is a strange obsession, at least to the extent the obsessives focus their policy responses on trying to adjust the condition of the top 1% rather than improving the opportunities of everyone else.

Ahhh!  But some are more equal than others….and a helluva lot less poor!

Income inequality could be a sign of real pathology in authoritarian societies where entrenched groups use government-granted privileges to protect themselves from competition. By and large, that’s not the case in the U.S., where most see the market actually increasing the competitive advantages of the educated, skilled, hardworking and talented.

Though it’s always good to be on guard against political favoritism, the U.S. exhibits mostly a giddy process of wealth creation by people from middle-class backgrounds who start companies or become Wall Street traders or CEOs or celebrity performers in entertainment and sports.

Generalizing about the distribution of incomes is an academic specialty seemingly incapable of freeing itself from tendentiousness. Take a popular study by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two French-born researchers, claiming U.S. income inequality is higher than anytime since the 1920s.

Their result comes from choosing to look at income that leaves out transfers. Unlike the 1920s, Americans today have the opportunity partly to live off Social Security and Medicare. They can decide to do without reportable income. Also left out of the calculation is the large share of compensation accounted for by untaxed health insurance.

Too, the tax code has changed. Income is realized under today’s code that wouldn’t have been realized under previous tax codes. Owners of capital buy and sell much more easily, and the tax system creates much less incentive for them to sit on their holdings and report less income.

For the record, so sensitive are the inequality generalizations to how you define income, and whether household size is taken into account, that the claimed shift toward greater inequality can be made easily to disappear, especially when consumption rather than income is measured.

And, as always, the solution to income inequality amounts to persuading the rich to report less income. As CNBC’s John Carney has shown, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg could avoid ever reporting any income simply by borrowing against his assets to meet his living expenses. “Perhaps most bizarrely, Zuckerberg might be eligible for an Earned Income Tax Credit if he keeps his personal income under $13,000,” writes Mr. Carney.

This would make America a better place how? Yet, at bottom, such cosmetic fixes are the main outcome from using higher tax rates to “correct” income inequality.

Obsessing about income disparities might be productive if it led to policies that improved opportunity for all. It’s hard to exaggerate the movement on school reform over the past 20 years, to the point that the New Yorker, that bastion of Upper West Side propriety, contributed one of the most damning polemics against excessive teachers-union power.

Ditto the return of tax reform to the agenda. Tax reform promises to improve the opportunities of all while sponsoring less tax evasion, less distortion of investment priorities and less politically corrupting pursuit of loopholes, all of which are the certain and inevitable corollary of high tax rates enacted to salve inequality neuralgia.

One can only wonder how much faster progress on tax reform or school choice would have been if the political capital devoted to income inequality had been devoted to fighting entrenched institutional resistance to useful reforms.

One factor is a certain human soul-sickness that’s impossible to put a constructive gloss on. Why is the New York Times disproportionately given over to cataloging the consumption of the rich in a tone even more cringing for its pretending to be snarky? Why do some of our dreariest journalists spend all their time writing about Goldman Sachs, except to associate themselves with the status object they attack in order to raise their own status?

That goes doubly for the inequality obsessives. How society stimulates the creation and distribution of income is an important topic—so important that one could wish it were less infected with the pathology Freud diagnosed as “group spirit” and which he said was ultimately founded on envy.

As Freud put it, “Everyone must be the same and have the same. Social justice means we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well.”

Meanwhile, as economist Richard Rahn details in the Washington Times, The Obamao continues to display the Progressive’s prototypical hypocrisy:

Do you think it is more important to have a tax policy that raises the most revenue at the least cost in order to maximize job growth and economic opportunity or to have a tax policy like the Buffett rule, which falsely claims it would make all millionaires pay a higher tax rate than their secretaries?

President Obama released his tax return last week, showing he had an effective rate of a little more than 20 percent of his income, even though he is rich by his own definition. One of the major ways the Obamas were able to reduce their tax rate was by giving away 22 percent of their income to charity, which I applaud. But their actions raise several interesting points. The president’s actions illustrate how people have the ability largely to determine their own tax rate both by the amount of money they choose to give away and the types of investments they choose to make.

When we donate money to a charity, church or some other worthy cause, we are allowed a tax deduction, which means the government gets less of our money. The president and many in his party keep telling us that the government needs more money, but if they believe this, why are they taking charitable deductions? I expect the reason is that most of us implicitly believe (for good empirical reasons) that private charities and other tax-exempt groups spend our money more wisely and carefully than the government.

Which brings us to where the country currently finds itself, courtesy of Steve “The” Boss (except when Evelyn’s in the room!) and today’s Money Quote:

Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc’-ra-cy) – a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing; and, where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

And since we’re on the subject of ineptocrats, they’re part and parcel to today’s Environmental Moment:

Some Himalayan glaciers actually growing, scientists find

 

A new study reveals that some Himalayan glaciers in the Karakoram mountain range may actually be getting bigger, according to a study published in the April issue of the journal Nature Geoscience — a surprising quirk in the planet’s response to a changing climate.

The Karakoram range runs along the India-China-Pakistan border and is home to about half the volume of the Himalayan glaciers, including K2 — the world’s second highest peak. Using computer models to compare the ice volume in satellite photos from 1999 and 2008, the study showed that some glaciers are holding steady and even gaining ice mass. The new finding appears to align with another startling report published Feb. 9 in the science journal Nature, which found that the Himalayas have barely melted at all in the past 10 years.

Yet the surprising growth of some glaciers isn’t commonplace, said study researcher Julie Gardelle, of CNRS-Université Grenoble, France. She told LiveScience that the larger trend was clear: all the other glaciers are melting. “The rest of the glaciers in the Himalayas are mostly melting, (“mostly”….what happened to “all”?!?) in that they have negative mass balance; here we found that glaciers aren’t,” Gardelle told LiveScience. “This is an anomalous behavior.”

The earlier study disagreed. The Nature report offered the first comprehensive study of the world’s glaciers and ice caps, using GRACE — a pair of orbiting satellites racing around the planet at an altitude of 300 miles. That study concluded that the Himalayas have barely melted at all in the past 10 years. “The GRACE results in this region really were a surprise,” said University of Colorado at Boulder physics Prof. John Wahr, who led the study.

Glaciologist Jonathan Bamber (who was not part of the research team) cautioned that the Nature study doesn’t alter his view that the climate is changing. “This new study doesn’t change our view of the risks and threats from climate change,” he said in an online chat at the Guardian. “What it does do is improve our knowledge of the recent behavior of one part of the climate system.”

Why the Karakoram range isn’t melting is still a mystery. “For now we don’t have any explanation,” Gardelle said. “There’s been a study reporting an increase in winter precipitation; this could maybe be a reason for the equilibrium, but that’s just a guess.”

The United Nations’ climate arm warned incorrectly in 2007 that the Himalayan glaciers would melt completely in 25 years, vanishing by the year 2035 due to the effects of climate change. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and director general of the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Dehli, India, ultimately issued a statement offering regret for what turned out to be a poorly vetted statement.

Why let facts impact your feelings; abandon tried and tested scientific method and just “guess” instead!  You know….

….listen to your feelings; use the Force!

On the Lighter Side….

Next up, we turn to Tales From the Darkside, and this item just in from River City:

University of Memphis regrets black students hitting pinata depicting white woman

 

A Tennessee university is expressing regret after a photo surfaced showing a group of black boys hitting a piñata shaped like a white woman.  “The photograph taken out of context may be disconcerting, but we want to assure our community that no racial or gender animosity was intended,” a University of Memphis spokesman said in a statement provided to Fox News.

The photograph was taken during a luau sponsored by the University of Memphis Dept. of Residence Life and Dining Services. It showed a grade school student about to hit a Hula dancer piñata. “This was one of numerous activities which occurred during the RHC Luau,” a popular event that has been held for more than 10 years,” the statement read – noting that the hula dancer was one of three piñatas used in the event.

The Memphis spokesman went on to say “nothing should be read into the fact the other two pinatas looked like George Zimmerman and Mitt Romney, nor should any level of racial animosity be inferred by the children yelling ‘Take DAT, you honky HO!’ and ‘Dat’s fo Trayvon, you white beeatch!” as they energetically swung the colorfully decorated stick.”

We could not care less that a bunch of kids, Black, White, Red, Yellow or Brown, pummeled a pinata; but wouldn’t prudence, if not good judgment dictate the substitution of a pineapple, a mango or even a pig?  The issue on our mind isn’t the University of Memphis’ need to apologe for a lack of common sense, but rather what the reaction would have been had the color of the pinata and children been….reversed?

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the McKenzie Brothers Memorial “Take off, hoser….but hand me another lager before you leave the flight deck, eh?!?” segment, and this bit of News From the Great White North:

Report: Pilot mistook Venus for aircraft, plunged plane toward Atlantic

 

Air Canada: Any flight you can walk away from, that’s our motto, eh?!?

An Air Canada pilot mistook the planet Venus for another aircraft and plunged his plane towards the Atlantic Ocean to avoid a collision. A report released Monday by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada found 16 people were injured after the Boeing 767 dropped 400 feet to avoid an imaginary crash with an oncoming US C-17 military cargo plane.

The report blamed pilot fatigue and breached rules over mid-flight napping for the January 2011 incident on a Toronto to Zurich flight. An investigation by the safety board — based in Gatineau, Quebec — revealed the first officer had just woken from a “controlled rest” when the captain informed him a US cargo plane was flying towards them. He “initially mistook the planet Venus for an aircraft,” then thought an oncoming plane was descending from above and risked an “imminent collision.” The cargo plane was actually 1,000 feet below the Air Canada flight.

The report said, “Under the effects of significant sleep inertia (when awareness and performance are degraded after sleep), the first officer perceived the oncoming aircraft as being on a collision course and began a descent to avoid it.”

Fourteen passengers and two crew members were injured during the incident. The passengers were all in economy class, and none were wearing seatbelts. (Occupy Ottawa was happy to hear no members of Canada’s “1%” were injured!)

Hey, you’ve had one too many lagers, it’s a long flight from Toronto to Zurich and you kick back for a quick forty winks, eh?  Next thing you know you’re beak to beak with a C-17, and you’ve got the yoke jammed up against the instrument panel.  Could happen to anyone!

So in a spirit of international cooperation and friendship, The Daily Gouge offers this helpful primer for Canadian aircrews:

Venus

NOT Venus

Any questions?

Magoo