Scott Spiegel

Conservatives have been pounding their fists and screaming for decades that tax cuts stimulate the economy.  With lower taxes, investors and business owners can provide more capital for new ventures and engage in more hiring, because they know less of their profits will be confiscated to pay for things like solar panels at the White House.

Tax cuts don’t revive the economy the second they’re passed—no one, not even Rick Santelli, ever said they did.  They don’t do so a few weeks later; they don’t always do so in time for the next election.  But eventually they do.

Tax cuts trim government revenue temporarily, but soon increased growth from lower tax rates results in net revenue increases.

In contrast, tax increases—which is what the impending reversal of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts would amount to—shrink the economy by decreasing hiring and investment.  Regarding the Bush tax cuts, that’d be a combined tax increase to the tune of half a trillion dollars over the next decade.  (Pop quiz: If Rhode Island and Massachusetts’ tax structures were switched, would John Kerry still take the trouble to dock his yacht in another state, even though it would cost him half a million dollars a year in taxes?)

It’s really not that complicated.

Imagine that you run a lemonade stand and make $100 profit a day, and the Obama administration taxes you at 50%, for a government revenue total of $50.

Now imagine that the incoming Christie administration slashes that rate to 20%.  Instead of worrying about paying your bills and staying afloat, and resenting the government’s punishing your entrepreneurship, you hire more workers and eventually expand to five franchises.  At $20 in taxes per stand, you are now sending twice as much revenue to the government as before.

Leftists refuse to see the economy as dynamic and capable of expansion; they view it as a fixed pot that must be redistributed from oppressors to oppressed.

The 1990s were prosperous, not because Bill Clinton was a laissez-faire capitalist extraordinaire—though he was forced into the role of pseudo-free-marketer by Republican Congressional majorities after 1994—but because of the cumulative effect of Reagan’s policies throughout the 1980s.  Reagan campaigned on the idea of permanent tax cuts across the board and enacted them while in office; they remain largely in effect to this day.  The degree of certainty, stability, and flexibility that this consistent posture afforded investors and business owners over the next two decades should not be underestimated.

Reagan steadfastly resisted the call of Congressional Democrats and some Republicans to ramp up government spending during the early 80s recession.  Under his administration, deficit as a percentage of GDP never rose above 6.0%.  By 1987 it was down to 3.2%.

In contrast, the Office of Management and Budget expects the deficit-GDP ratio to be 10.0% in 2010 under Obama, and to barely decline in 2011.

During his presidential campaign, Obama was not shy about promising to let Bush’s tax cuts expire in 2011 if elected.  When Charles Gibson asked Obama why he would support an increase in capital gains taxes, even though raising them in the 1980s decreased revenue and lowering them in the 1990s and 2000s increased revenue, Obama insisted he would do it “for purposes of fairness.”  In other words, Obama feels obligated to make rich people suffer for the sin of being productive, even if that means poor people will suffer more in the long run.

In the spring of 2009, Obama and Congressional Democrats passed their poorly designed, massively irresponsible stimulus spending bill.  Before passage, Obama warned that without the $787 (now $862) billion bill, the unemployment rate might rise to 8.0%.

When unemployment hit 10.0% in 2010, Obama’s new tagline became, “Yes, but it’s not 12 or 13, or 15.”

Democrats’ halting efforts to offer targeted tax cuts to special interest groups as part of the stimulus bill were not convincing.  Giving a tax break to a “green” company that wouldn’t survive on its own does not create the wealth that a tax break for an independent, self-sufficient, productive company would.

Now that it’s become obvious to everyone except Paul Krugman that runaway government spending does not mysteriously create wealth, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been caught admitting to the House Financial Services Committee last Thursday, 18 months after the stimulus bill has had a chance to work but failed, that extending the Bush tax cuts will strengthen the economy.

Bernanke was quick to walk back his statement and claim that extending the tax cuts is just one way to stimulate the economy.  (One way that works, he did not say in so many words, but give him credit for letting the genie out of the bottle.)

Since the end of last Thursday, the Dow Jones has rallied some 200 points to 10,500, after have troughed earlier in the week at just above 10,000.

Last month Obama economic advisor Christina Romer and her husband published a paper in The American Economic Review demonstrating that tax hikes hurt economic growth.  Their article included the following takeaway: “Our estimates suggest that a tax increase of 1 percent of GDP reduces output over the next three years by nearly 3 percent.  The effect is highly significant.”

Over the weekend, Republican senators revived the idea of extending the Bush tax cuts.  Now even some Democratic senators are talking up the idea, including Evan Bayh, Kent Conrad, and Ben Nelson.

So I guess tax cuts stimulate the economy after all, according to our liberal president’s Federal Reserve chairman, his economic advisor, and multiple Democratic senators.  It used to be newsworthy when we discovered that Obama’s associates and cabinet nominees were terrorists, communists, and Maoists.  Lately the scoop seems to be that a few of his cronies, if allowed to speak freely, occasionally have some sane ideas about how to run the country.



 Print This Post

Related articles by Zemanta

• If the Bush Tax Cuts Expire (online.wsj.com)
• Bernanke Says Tax-Cut Extension Maintains Stimulus (bloomberg.com)
• Liberal Tax Revolt Game-Changer? (realclearpolitics.com)
• The Facts About the Bush Tax Cuts (redstate.com)
• Tax-Hike Hypocrites (realclearpolitics.com)

Ben Jealous, President of the NAACP, declared at last week’s annual convention that the impetus for the Tea Party is hatred of nonwhite people and resentment of a black president.  Of the rise of the movement, Jealous announced, “Here comes the genetic descendent of the White Citizens Council, burst from its coffin.”

I don’t know if Tea Partiers are genetically descendent from the White Citizens Council or not.  (Hey—isn’t an obsession with “genetic descendents” usually associated with racism?)

What I do know is that they’re not politically descendent.

The overwhelming majority of voters and congressmen who identify as Tea Party supporters are Republicans.

In contrast, the early leaders of the White Citizens Council were Louisiana politicians William Rainach and Joseph Waggonner, Jr., justice Leander Perez, and publisher Ned Touchstone, all Democrats.  The group was formed in reaction to political activities carried out by the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, led by black Republican T. R. M. Howard.

As part of its recent campaign against the Tea Party, the NAACP posted on its website a slideshow of Tea Party rally signs bearing such patently, explicitly anti-black sentiments as “Now Look!  Nice People Forced To Protest!  This Must Be Serious,” “Obama & His Gang of Thieves = America’s Toxic Assets,” “Freeloading Illegals Are Raping U.S. Taxpayers,” “Obama Was Not Bowing.  He Was Sucking Saudi Jewels!” “It’s 1939 Germany All Over Again,” “The American Taxpayers Are the Jews for Obama’s Ovens,” and “Hang ‘Em High!  Traitors in Congress—Pelosi, Reid, Waters, Schumer, Frank, Dodd, Conyers, Kerry, Clinton, Kennedy.”

The NAACP was once, many moons ago, a pioneer in spearheading crucial and controversial civil rights work, which culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Since then, the NAACP has distinguished itself as a water carrier for every racist fringe element in society but the KKK.

The writings of former local NAACP chapter president Robert F. Williams, for example, influenced the violent tactics adopted by the Black Panthers, the far-left, quasi-Marxist/Maoist revolutionary group formed in the 1960s that sprouted the Black Power movement and instigated numerous fatal confrontations with police over the next decade.

A revived version of the group, the New Black Panther Party, started in 1989, and was soon vilified by the Anti-Defamation League as “the largest organized anti-Semitic and racist black militant group in America” and labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Law Poverty Center.

More recently, in 2000 the head of the NAACP in Dallas, Lee Alcorn, used his radio show to slam Al Gore for selecting a Jew as his running mate: “If we get a Jew person, then what I’m wondering is, what is this movement for?  [W]e need to be very suspicious of any kind of partnerships between the Jews at that kind of level, because we know that their interest primarily has to do with money and these kind of things.”

After ABC News exposed the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s incendiary racist sermons in the spring of 2008, the NAACP invited him to give a keynote address to an audience of 10,000 members at a fundraiser in Detroit, where Wright unrepentantly reaffirmed his views to a welcoming audience and accused candidate Obama of disavowing his sermons for political reasons.  (As Bill Clinton might say, Obama had a “fleeting association” with black liberation theology.)  Wright added some charming eugenics-inspired comments about how blacks and whites’ brains are different and reflect separate but equal learning styles—remarks that also met with approval from the NAACP audience.

In November 2008, members of the New Black Panther Party brandished police batons and made menacing comments toward voters outside a Philadelphia voting center.  The Bush administration filed a lawsuit against the NBPP, which resulted in a slap-on-the-wrist injunction against one of the defendants.  In June 2009, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder dismissed the suit against the remaining defendants in the case with no explanation.  Liberal commentators have dismissed the voter intimidation incident as “street theater”—you know, like break dancing or singing James Brown tunes, only with nightsticks and paramilitary gear.

Bill O’Reilly observed, “[A] number of New Black Panthers have been shown on TV saying incredibly bigoted things.  NBPP member King Samir Shabazz even suggested that black Americans kill white babies…  One of the weaknesses of the NAACP is that it has rarely acknowledged black racism.  The organization is silent on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan.  Yet, it is outraged about the Tea Party.”

In a recent column titled “Is NAACP blind to Farrakhan & Co.?  The Nation of Islam is built on racism and lies,” Stanley Crouch highlighted the NAACP’s ongoing support for the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam and suggested that “were Jealous and the rest disturbed and vocal about [Louis] Farrakhan’s presence [in the NAACP], it would suggest some actual integrity of the sort we are not accustomed to hearing from ‘black leaders’ and ‘public intellectuals.’”

This week Andrew Breitbart unearthed video showing U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod admitting she had engaged in racist behavior toward a white farmer years earlier.  The remarks were made at an award ceremony held by the NAACP, whose audience members clapped and cheered and peppered her remarks with sounds of approval, all before they realized that she was citing her bad behavior as a mistake made on her way to embracing racial equality.

The NAACP responded to the Sherrod case by presenting video of Tea Party speakers telling audiences that tax cuts should be targeted toward whites and not blacks, and attendees shouting agreement with these sentiments.  Oh wait—no, they didn’t.

Tunku Varadarajan summed up the contrast between the two groups well: “Here we have the Tea Party, one of the nation’s most organic, Athenian, democratic movements, being attacked by a political organization—the NAACP—that is among the most sclerotic, dinosaurian, and cadaverous of America’s political groupings.”

In true “post-racial” fashion, expect Obama to hold the equivalent of a beer summit between leaders of the NAACP and representatives of the Tea Party movement, in which both sides are treated as equally morally culpable, calls are made to put aside differences, and reputations and character are obfuscated rather than clarified.



 Print This Post

Related articles by Zemanta

• Why the silence from The Post on Black Panther Party story? (washingtonpost.com)
• Bozell Column: The NAACP Cries Racism (newsbusters.org)
• Sherrod Blames NAACP for Firing (politico.com)
• N.A.A.C.P. Backtracks on Official Accused of Bias (nytimes.com)
• Why Martin Luther King Was Republican (humanevents.com)

What kind of benevolent dictator would declare his love for Britain’s stingy, depressing, complicated, cold and arbitrary National Health Service by describing it as “generous, hopeful, confident, joyous and just”?

That would be Harvard-based pediatrician Donald Berwick, who recently received a recess appointment as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services by the benevolent dictator who describes his pessimistic and stale vision for America as “hope and change.”

Recess appointments are an executive procedure used, for better or for worse, when the Senate gives a presidential appointee a difficult time during confirmation hearings—for example, when they filibuster a nominee.  Obama’s appointment of Berwick bears the distinction of having been given without a confirmation hearing having even been scheduled.

It’s as though Obama decided that the very requirement that his nominee appear before a Democratic-controlled Senate constituted an unreasonably difficult hurdle.  This isn’t a recess appointment—it’s a vacation to Bermuda appointment.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, “Circumventing Senate confirmation to appoint the new Medicare chief is part of the same political willfulness that inflicted ObamaCare on the country despite the objections of most voters.”  CBS News observed, “The debate over Berwick’s recess appointment makes clear what the White House knew all too well—Berwick may not have survived the Senate confirmation process, which would have turned into a proxy debate over health care reform.”

Berwick, who will be put in charge of the health care of 100 million Americans without so much as a public query about his plans in office, has been quoted saying, “I am romantic about the N.H.S.; I love it.”  He has called himself “an American fan” of the system, “distant and starry-eyed.”

In his London speech commemorating the N.H.S.’s 60^th birthday, Berwick delivered such pro-American pronouncements to his audience as “Do not trust market forces to give you the system you need…  I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care.  That is for leaders to do.”

When it comes to Berwick’s affection for health care systems centered around use of death panels, apparently absence makes the heart grow fonder.  After returning home and mooning over the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the operational arm of the N.H.S., Berwick realized that “All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at health care in my own country.”

That country would be the United States, which has the greatest health care system in the world, and would be a profound source of inspiration for anyone who truly loved medicine.  Berwick’s own place of employment is Harvard Medical School, where you would think there would have been a few medical advances in recent years to set his heart aflutter.

But no—Berwick’s passion is for euthanasia counseling and quality-adjusted life years.

Berwick of course has never had to live under the jurisdiction of the N.H.S.  You might call his affair with the British health care system a long-distance relationship.

Describing the supposed British backlash against American conservatives’ depiction of the N.H.S. during the health care reform debate last summer, the New York Times gushed, “A Twitter campaign, We Love The N.H.S., is still going strong, with supporters sending messages about their own good experiences.”

In fact, said campaign didn’t even last 30 days from its first Tweet to its last, and has attracted a piddly 520 followers internationally.  This is despite such helpful but unheeded administrative prompts as “What do you love about the nhs?” and “Please Retweet: 10,000 supporters visualised.”

Admittedly, the riotously popular N.H.S. does have a Facebook fan page with 3,500 members.  Then again, an ill-worded N.H.S. sign implying that contraception would be facilitated by anal rather than vaginal intercourse has a Facebook fan page with 124,475 members.  So perhaps fan counts are not such a flattering measure of the N.H.S.’s popularity.

Even the New York Times admitted that Brits “complain endlessly about the National Health Service…  They deplore the system’s waiting lists, its regional disparities in treatment, its infection-breeding hospitals and its top-heavy bureaucracy.”  I guess the grass is greener on the other side of the pond!

If Donald Berwick wants to swoon over endless waiting lists, fatally protracted wait times, diminished access to specialized care, craven efforts to shield patients from learning about or acquiring costly life-saving drugs, dismal heart attack and cancer survival rates, depersonalized patient treatment, and centralized bureaucratic decision-making about individual health care options, that’s his prerogative.  But forgive the rest of the U.S. if we aren’t quite as smitten as he is.



 Print This Post

Related articles by Zemanta

• Bowdlerizing Berwick (spectator.org)
• Health Care Rationing Obama Believes In (realclearpolitics.com)
• Obama bypasses Senate for new Medicare chief (news.yahoo.com)
• A Transatlantic Review of the NHS at 60 (wales.nhs.uk)
• Britons Fault Health Service, Until Others Do (nytimes.com)

It’s no coincidence that the Tea Party movement is springing up now, 235 years after the Boston Tea Party.  Barack Obama is the closest thing this country has had to royalty since King George III.

Yesterday Queen Elizabeth II visited New York City for the third time in her life and the first time in 34 years.  New Yorkers were aflutter over the prospect of royalty tramping around on gritty Manhattan soil.  QE2 addressed the United Nations and then, to cleanse herself of that demoralizing experience, did something pro-American and visited Ground Zero, where she dedicated a new park to 67 Britons who died on September 11.

Americans get keyed up over this kind of thing because it’s so alien to our way of life.  To us, a visit from the Queen is a novelty act, like Lindsay Lohan showing contrition for her actions.

While New Yorkers dutifully read up on how they should behave if they met the Queen—don’t bow or curtsy, we are not her subjects; use the title Your Majesty, then switch to Ma’am—too many Americans still haven’t learned how to stop treating Obama like royalty.

His supporters don’t exactly bow in his presence; they get rowdier than that.  They whoop and holler and sing hosannas, when they’re not crying, fainting, and melting into a pile of mush.

Royalty is the perfect metaphor for the Obama administration: symbolic figureheads who shake hands, soak taxpayers who fund their lavish lifestyles, and don’t do much besides look elegant (except when Barack is swatting flies off his face or Michelle is wearing a Mark Rothko painting).  Whereas Brits are reassured that their royal family is just for show and that there’s an actual political administration getting the work done, in the U.S. we have no such consolation in the Age of The One.  Even when Obama is touring a natural disaster area like the Gulf oil spill zone he behaves like royalty, prancing through the dunes in his silk shirt, daintily noshing lobster salad, and privately contemplating his forehand.  When Obama stepped off the plane in Huntsville, Ontario for the G8 summit, the first thing he asked his hosts was whether there were a lot of golf courses in the area.

Royalty strut around on the taxpayer’s dime, bestowing awards upon the little people who volunteer to help littler people via charity boondoggles and fundraising spectacles.  Similarly, Barack jets around the country on Air Force One speaking at union events and elementary schools, trying to convince the country to get excited because some two-bit smelting plant in Ohio was given a million-dollar grant to go green and is managing to break even instead of going bankrupt.

Royalty play expensive, individualized sports requiring fancy equipment—polo for the royal family, golf for Obama.  (I doubt the Queen would do very well at bowling, but I doubt she would denigrate retarded children after getting a dismal score.)

Royalty are bestowed with honorary titles, awards, and ceremonies based on the mere fact of their existence.  Already Obama-friendly municipalities are naming roads, community centers, and paid holidays after him, to say nothing of his infinitely premature Nobel Peace Prize.

Royalty are famous for being famous.  How else can you characterize Obama’s overnight notoriety and meteoric rise to frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination after a mere speech he gave at a convention?  Obama became well-known for being well-known—liberals fell all over themselves to prove their commitment to the cool kid before everyone else found out it was cool to support him.

Royalty believe in bogus organizations like the UN and their power to bring about change through fantasizing.  They don’t appreciate the corruption inherent in such bloated Potemkin goodwill societies and the spite harbored by poisonous partners admitted due to an unrestricted membership policy.  Naivety about the organizational structure of the UN and its inefficiency in getting anything done may stem from the fact that royalty, like Obama in his guise as a former community organizer, don’t have actual responsibilities.

Royalty are given significant power and are thrust into the public eye at a young age despite negligible accomplishments.  They have the spotlight on them for so long that they forget what it’s like to live as everyday citizens.  Similarly, Obama was elected President of the Free World in his 40s after having served less than one full term as U.S. Senator, most of which was spent running for President, and before that serving as a state Senator in which capacity his most remarked upon accomplishment was voting “Present” 130 times.  As with Obama, royalty’s assumption of power is referenced using such adulatory terms as “ascension” and “coronation.”

Royalty are depicted in solemn portraits; their countenances are ubiquitous.  Similarly, you may have seen Obama’s face reverently displayed two or three trillion times since his presidential candidacy began.

For the British, the royalty are a harmless relic, colorful fodder for tabloid speculation.  For Americans, who have lived without royalty for centuries, the mere prospect of their reintroduction should be a dangerous reminder of what happens when our leaders are worshipped instead of held accountable as public servants.

 Print This Post

Related articles by Zemanta

• Queen places wreath at ground zero (msnbc.msn.com)
• LIVESHOT: The Queen Is Coming (liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com)
• N.J. Gov. Chris Christie will meet Queen Elizabeth in New York City (nj.com)
• Queen honors Sept. 11 dead, including 67 Britons (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• New Yorkers Prepare For Queen Elizabeth II Visit (huffingtonpost.com)