It’s Tuesday, December 11th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of the WSJ, Bill McGurn, details yet story of The Dear Misleader’s blatant hypocrisy the MSM refuses to report:

Obama’s Middle-Class Tax Flip

After a decade of bashing by Democrats, the Bush tax cuts get strange new respect.

 

Barack Obama admits that he got the Bush tax cuts all wrong.

That’s not how he would put it, of course—and it’s plainly not what’s being reported. Even so, President Obama’s recent statements about the expiration of these tax cuts on Dec. 31 have put paid to the most widely accepted political slander of the past decade: that the Bush tax cuts rewarded the wealthy at the expense of the middle class.

That proposition simply cannot be reconciled with President Obama’s latest position, which is that America’s middle class will find itself hammered if Congress doesn’t extend President Bush’s middle-class tax cuts.

Here’s how President Obama put it during a recent White House event with a group of middle-class Americans: Unless Congress acts, he said, “starting Jan. 1, every family in America will see their taxes automatically go up.”

He went on: “A typical middle-class family of four would see its income taxes go up by $2,200. That’s $2,200 out of people’s pockets. That means less money for buying groceries, less money for filling prescriptions, less money for buying diapers. It means a tougher choice between paying the rent and paying tuition. And middle-class families just can’t afford that now.”

To emphasize that these cuts are a big deal, he asked people to “tell members of Congress what a $2,000 tax hike would mean to you.” He is now taking his message on the road, telling a group of Michigan auto workers on Monday that the end of the Bush cut would be “a hit you cannot afford to take.”

In any honest universe, this would be news. President Obama says the middle class benefits mightily from the Bush tax cuts and cannot afford to see them expire. Which provokes a question: Where has our press corps been these past 10 years?

For most of that time, Democrats have been hollering that the only people to benefit from the Bush tax cuts were Bill Gates, Wall Street bankers, and the guy with the top hat and monocle who appears on our Monopoly sets. Now the same press that accepted, approved and amplified the “Bush tax cuts for the wealthy” trope leaves unchallenged a president who today tells us, oh, by the way, those Bush tax cuts are vital for America’s middle class—and claims that the opposition to middle-class tax cuts proposed and put into law mainly by Republicans comes from . . . Republicans.

Perhaps the American people will accept this new Obama story line. If so, it will be because after years of assailing the GOP as the party of the plutocracy, this is the first time the American people have heard Mr. Obama or any Democrat in the party leadership concede that the Bush tax cuts benefited anyone save the über-wealthy. For the original complaint that Mr. Bush’s tax cuts favored the rich over the middle class has morphed into the orthodoxy we know today: Tax cuts for the rich came at the expense of the middle class.

Certainly this has been Nancy Pelosi’s accusation. At various times the California Democrat has spoken of “Bush tax cuts for the super-rich,” of Republicans “taking food out of the mouths of children to give tax cuts to America’s wealthiest,” of how Republicans were using “tax dollars paid by middle-class Americans” to pay for tax breaks for “millionaires.”

Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, Ms. Pelosi’s counterpart in the Senate leadership, voiced a similar complaint. Republicans, he said, “drew up their program to benefit the very, very, very few and eliminate the majority from any”—yes, any—”benefit of these tax cuts.” In November 2008, he described the Bush economy as “built on a foundation for eight years that basically just value[s] tax cuts for the very wealthiest.”

Candidate Obama banged that same drum in his bid for the White House. Early in 2008, he declared that “we owe it to” the middle class “to end the Bush-McCain tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% and put a tax cut into the pockets of the families who need it.” Though Mr. Obama has always said he wants to keep the Bush tax cuts for the middle class, he has always been careful not to suggest that these amounted to anything more than peanuts.

Today we are told a different story. Today Mrs. Pelosi tells us the “clock is ticking” on the fate of the Bush tax cuts for the middle class. Today Sen. Reid tells us “it’s really important that this holiday season the middle class is not going to be burdened with the thought that they may get a $2,200 a year tax increase.” And today President Obama tells us that the Bush tax cuts put some serious money in the pockets of our middle class—a benefit they will lose if Congress lets the Bush tax cuts expire.

Don’t expect the admission that the Bush cuts are vital to the middle class to provoke any challenges at the president’s next press conference. Like the assertion that Republicans hate women, the GOP preference for tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the middle class has become accepted scientific fact. Even when President Obama himself shows just how wrong that is.

As we noted yesterday, absent the MSM’s total and absolute complicity, no one on earth could get away with the glaringly patent prevarications this charlatan peddles.

That anyone in America buys them bespeaks both the ignorance and obliviousness of the population at large.

Speaking of blissful ignorance, Alan Viard, writing at Bloomberg.com and courtesy of the AEI, provides the details on….

A new tax on savings you didn’t know about

 

In the debate over the looming fiscal cliff, U.S. President Barack Obama often plays down any adverse economic impact from letting the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts expire for high-income Americans, claiming that the top tax rates would merely return to where they were during the Clinton years. Unfortunately, the president’s claim is incorrect because he ignores the impending arrival of the unearned income Medicare contribution tax, which will further raise tax rates on income from saving.

Scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, the tax, which was adopted as part of the 2010 health-care law, is a 3.8 percent levy on interest, dividends, capital gains and passive business income received by taxpayers with incomes exceeding $200,000 (or $250,000 for couples).

Because the new tax was added to the health-care law late in the process without congressional hearings, it received little attention at the time. With only a few weeks left before it takes effect, it remains largely unknown. Its obscurity has allowed bizarre myths to circulate on the Internet — despite what you may have read online, the tax is not a 3.8 percent levy on home sales.

One problem with the unearned income Medicare contribution tax is the name Congress chose for it, which is a triple misnomer. The income that will be subject to the tax isn’t unearned — it is earned by savers who receive market rewards for delaying consumption and providing funds to finance business investment.

Also, because the proceeds will be paid into the general treasury, the tax will have no financial link to Medicare. And, of course, the tax will be a compulsory payment, not a voluntary contribution.

Intricate Regulations

Another concern is the complexity of the tax, as demonstrated by the intricate proposed regulations the Internal Revenue Service has had to develop to carry it out. The regulations, which still leave a few implementation issues unresolved, and the accompanying explanation filled 42 pages of the Dec. 5 Federal Register.

The biggest issue, however, is the additional penalty the tax will impose on the savings that finance investment and fuel long-run economic growth. It’s true that relatively few Americans have high enough incomes to be subject to the tax. But they account for a large portion of what the nation saves, magnifying the economic impact.

IRS data for 2010 reveal that the 3 percent of taxpayers with incomes of more than $200,000 received 45 percent of the interest income, 58 percent of the dividends and 88 percent of the capital gains (net of losses). More taxpayers and more saving will gradually become subject to the unearned income Medicare contribution tax in coming decades because its income thresholds won’t be adjusted for inflation.

Even if the high-income portions of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are fully extended, the unearned income Medicare contribution tax’s arrival next year will raise the top rates on interest, dividends and capital gains 3.8 percentage points above this year’s levels. Or, if the high-income provisions are allowed to expire, it will push the top rates on interest, dividends and capital gains 3.8 percentage points above Clinton- era levels. Even if we can’t repeal this tax, we should at least keep in mind its burden on saving as we decide the fate of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

Finally, if we keep the unearned income Medicare contribution tax, we should give it a more accurate name. The IRS is now calling it the “net investment income tax.” I prefer to call it a “tax on income earned by savers.”

Or, as we prefer to call it, yet another purposeful policy intended to further the destruction of free-market capitalism in America….aka, the furtherance of free-loading.

Next up, courtesy of The Guardian, coming soon to a hospital near you….

 

Welcome to the future of American healthcare.  We’d frankly feel more sympathy for Ms. Clwyd had her criticism of the institutionally-inept BHS begun prior to her husband’s fatal encounter.

And since we’re on the subject of the Dimocratic view of America’s future, here’s two items on the inherent, incurable flaws of the welfare state.  First, Michael Barone comments on Leftist Nicholas Kristoff’s own assessment of government dependency’s….

Soul-crushing dependency 

 

“This is painful for a liberal to admit,” writes liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, “but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in soul-crushing dependency.”

Kristof is writing from Breathitt County, Ky., deep in the Appalachian mountains, about mothers whose Supplemental Security Income benefits will decrease if their children learn to read. Kristof notes that 55% of children qualifying for SSI benefits do so because of “fuzzier intellectual disabilities short of mental retardation,” far more than four decades ago when SSI was just a new program.

Evidently SSI administrators decided to be more generous to parents of such children. But, as Kristof notes, giving parents an incentive to keep children from learning to read works against the children’s long-term interest.

Kristof’s column makes a point similar to that in my De. 2 Examiner column on the vast rise in people receiving Social Security Disability Insurance payments. As with SSI, one imagines that those responsible for extending benefits to those not previously eligible did so out of a sense of generosity. But as I noted, “there is also a human cost. Consider the plight of someone who at some level knows he can work but decides to collect disability payments instead. That person is not likely to ever seek work again, especially if the sluggish recovery turns out to be the new normal. He may be gleeful that he was able to game the system or just grimly determined to get what he can in a tough situation. But he will not be able to get the satisfaction of earned success from honest work that contributes something to society and the economy.” Generosity that produces “soul-crushing dependency” is not really generosity.

Breathitt County, by the way, has long been a heavily Democratic county. Even in 1972 it voted 59% for Democrat George McGovern over Republican Richard Nixon. But it’s in coal country and it voted 53% for John McCain in 2008 and 66% for Mitt Romney in 2012. More proof that Romney’s 47% remark was not only hugely ill-advised but simply inaccurate.

Then, courtesy of the AEI, Charles Murray lists what he defines as….

The 3 Laws of Social Programs

 

Several people have tagged me and Losing Ground since Nicholas Kristoff’s column on Friday about the ways that social programs can backfire. It was a praiseworthy column—all of us on both sides of the political spectrum should be as ready as Kristoff to acknowledge problems with our beliefs. But it also offers an opportunity to recall the three laws of social programs in Losing Ground, because the backfires are not idiosyncratic. They occur everywhere and always for inherent reasons.

1. The Law of Imperfect Selection. Any objective rule that defines eligibility for a social transfer program will irrationally exclude some persons.

This law accounts for the reason that programs like Food Stamps and the Supplemental Security Income program constantly expand. Whenever the people who administer the programs run into a case of a genuinely needy person who has been excluded under a current rule, they tend to redefine the rule or otherwise alter the program’s administration to be more inclusive, which in turn brings more people who don’t need the social transfer under its umbrella.

2. The Law of Unintended Rewards. Any social transfer increases the net value of being in the condition that prompted the transfer.

Kristoff referenced the increased net value of being illiterate because of the “intellectual disability” payment of $698 per month that leads parents to withdraw their children from literacy classes. But the same thing is true of every payment of any kind that requires people to demonstrate that they have a problem before they qualify for the payment. It is not a defect in program design. It is inescapable whenever you give rewards for having a problem.

3. The Law of Net Harm. The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.

This is not as obvious as the first two laws, but just as inexorable. My favorite chapter of Losing Ground is a thought experiment about a government program that uses financial rewards to reduce smoking. If the rewards are small, nothing will change. If they are large enough to induce a significant number of people to quit smoking, the program will inevitably lead to more people who take up smoking in the first place and the net number of inveterate smokers.

Fewer and fewer people are old enough to remember, but once upon a time almost all children were born to married couples and almost all young men were physically able to work and knew how to show up on time and work hard. Then, in the mid-1960s, before globalization, before manufacturing jobs disappeared, while working-class wages were still going up, we decided that compassion should be bureaucratized. The three laws of social programs explain a lot of what has happened to the working class since then.

Which provides the perfect lead-in for the Money Quote, courtesy today of one far wiser than any Liberal who ever lived….

“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.“

….Benjamin Franklin.

Meanwhile, as this forward from Balls Cotton and the Air Force Times details, despite an increasingly dangerous world, and threats greater than any America’s Military has faced since the Cold War, what does the Air Farce’s senior officer deem a prudent use of his dwindling manpower’s time?

Air Force-wide inspections begin today

 

Commanders and supervisors in all corners of the Air Force will conduct a widespread sweep of all work spaces and public areas starting today, looking for pictures, calendars and other materials that objectify women. The order covers all active, reserve and Air National Guard units and must be completed by Dec. 17.

Pictures of scantily clad women in calendars, posters or in briefing slides have no place in a professional workplace, said Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh, who ordered the service-wide health and welfare inspection.

Welsh has emphasized the need to stop sexual assaults and harassment in the workplace since coming to office in August, and he told Air Force Times he had received multiple complaints about images, jokes and comments that made women and some men uncomfortable. The complaints indicated that many women felt they had to “go along to get along” with offensive images and comments if they wanted to steer clear of trouble.

“In my view, all this stuff is connected. If we’re going to get serious about things like sexual assault, we have to get serious about an environment that could lead to sexual harassment. In some ways this stuff can all be linked,” Welsh said Dec. 4. “I’m not saying every case is linked, but it could be linked, and why would we want to tolerate there even being a chance of that?”

Like so much in modern Liberalism’s alternate universe, we can only assume a “hostile” environment is purely dependent upon one’s politics.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this beauty from Balls Cotton….

….this classic rejoinder to anti-gun ignorance courtesy of Jeff Foutch….

….and this Bill Meisen forward showing the Seattle skyline the morning after Washington voters legalized smoking dope:

And in the Health Section, we learn why sometimes washing your hands isn’t always enough:

Surgeon’s Infected Hands Led to Staph Outbreak at Cedars

 

Five heart patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center contracted staph infections after a doctor operated on them with bacteria on his hands, the hospital said this week. The doctor, whom the hospital declined to name, had an inflammation on his hand when he implanted replacement heart valves into five patients last June.

He wore gloves, but they developed microscopic tears, the hospital said, causing the infection to pass to patients. All five became infected with the staphylococcus epidermidis bacteria, the hospital said. “We have apologized to the patients involved, worked diligently to answer any questions they have, and provided appropriate follow-up, support and monitoring,” a spokesman for the hospital said in a statement Sunday.

The physician involved remains on the hospital’s medical staff, but is no longer performing surgeries, the hospital said.

All inquiring minds want to know is how many zeroes followed each “apology”!

Next up, courtesy of Bill Meisen, another sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter which confirms the ignorance of Bob Costas and Jason Whitlock:

‘Bow and arrow-type’ attack leaves 3 dead in Casper, Wyo., including 2 in college classroom, officials say

 

Police released more details Saturday of a grisly murder-suicide at a community college, saying a man shot his father in the head with a bow and arrow in front of a computer science class not long after fatally stabbing his father’s live-in girlfriend at their home a couple of miles (kilometers) away.

….Police still were trying to figure out what motivated Christopher Krumm to attack his father and girlfriend, 42-year-old Heidi Arnold, a math instructor at the college. Arnold was found stabbed to death in front of the home she shared with James Krumm. After shooting his father with the arrow, Christopher Krumm stabbed himself, then fatally stabbed his father in the chest in a struggle in the classroom, Walsh said.

….Christopher Krumm had smuggled the compound bow — a type much more powerful and effective for hunting than a simple, wooden bow — onto campus beneath a blanket, Walsh said. He said Christopher Krumm also had two knives with him and the knife used was “very large.”

Compound bows: “much more powerful and effective for hunting”….particularly when you’re going after your father.  Oh….and one knife was “very large”!

Finally, in the Sports Section, inquiring minds also want to know….

NHL cancels more games

 

….did anyone realize the NHL wasn’t playing, let alone really miss it?!?

Magoo