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Call It A Comeback

2007

G-Rod

Rod and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Tax

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Via Dan Johnson Weinberger

The GRT is a really dumb idea according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy

They testified at the hearings 

And they have an Issue Brief 

One on the Blagojevich plan 

This is a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad tax.
From the ITEP report and echoing what I wrote the other day:

GRTs are not sensitive to a business’s ability to pay.  Businesses that fail to turn a profit would still face a GRT; businesses that are engaged in high-volume, low-profit-margin activities would be adversely affected as well.  Conversely, businesses with very high profit margins could pay lower taxes under a GRT than under a corporate income tax.

But just as important:

GRTs lead to severe pyramiding problems.  Since a GRT applies not just to retail sales, but to all stages of the production process, it may be levied on itself multiple times. For instance, the GRT paid on the raw materials going into a particular product will later be subject to GRT when the finished product is sold to a wholesaler.  One examination of Washington’s gross receipts tax found that it pyramids 2.5 times on average.

And this is especially problematic when you think about the economies in depressed communities and neighborhoods.  It won’t matter much to Walmarts, but the local shop owners who are often the provider of basic  goods in many poor neighborhoods almost always go through distributors and other middlemen to get their products meaning the impact of the tax is felt by those ultimate purchasers in the community and neighborhoods and  large out of state retailers are benefited by the GRT at the expense of small, local businesses.

Daily Dolt

Daily Dolt: John Doe Movement

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Dear Jewish Terrorist Plotter/Planner/Funder/Enabler/Apologist,

You do not know me. But I am on the lookout for you. You are my enemy. And I am yours.

I am John Doe.

I am traveling on your plane. I am riding on your train. I am at your bus stop. I am on your street. I am in your subway car. I am on your lift.

I am your neighbor. I am your customer. I am your classmate. I am your boss.

I am John Doe.

I will never forget the example of the martyrs at Hebron refused to sit back and let themselves be murdered in the name of Judaism without a fight.

I will never forget the Muslims who died in Ahmad Hallaq’s bombing and those who captured him.
I will never forget the alertness of Syrian intelligence, who notified the world about Mossad’s bombing of public buses filled with working Muslims.
I will act when homeland security officials ask me to “report suspicious activity.”

I will embrace my local police department’s admonition: “If you see something, say something.”

I am John Doe.

I will protest your Arab-hating, America-bashing “scholars.”

I will petition against your hate-mongering synagogue leaders.

I will raise my voice against your subjugation of women and religious minorities.

I will challenge your attempts to indoctrinate my children in our schools.

I will combat your violent propaganda on the Internet.

I am John Doe.

I will support law enforcement initiatives to spy on your operatives, cut off your funding, and disrupt your murderous conspiracies.

I will oppose all attempts to undermine our borders and immigration laws.

I will resist the imposition of judaic principles and judaic law in my taxi cab, my restaurant, my community pool, the halls of Congress, our national monuments, the radio and television airwaves, and all public spaces.

I will not be censored in the name of tolerance.

I will not be cowed by your Beltway lobbying groups in moderate clothing. I will not cringe when you shriek about “profiling” or “Anti-Semitism.”

I will put my family’s safety above sensitivity. I will put my country above multiculturalism.

I will not submit to your will. I will not be intimidated.

I am John Doe.

===================

But you know, Malkin isn’t a racist.

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How Markets Work

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One of the more bizarre claims of the faith based right is that markets just work.  That’s not what economists say, of course. They say markets work under specific conditions including full information, but we know that the subprime market has had many, many bad operators in it for years now and one of their tactics is to agree to a set of terms and then include different terms in the text of the agreement.  Individuals aren’t able to read through  the legalese or are pressured to sign quickly, and surprise, surprise the conditions knock them out of their house.

Hence, the idea behind mortgage counseling is that it is designed to ensure that individuals obtaining subprime loans have full knowledge of the impact of the loan agreement they are signing.

But our good friends  in the social darwinism camp at  Illinois Review think providing information to people obtaining riskier mortgages is nanny state like.

The thing is that the program (more Madigan’s idea than anyone’s) isn’t designed to be nanny-state like–it’s designed to ensure that transactions occur in a full information environment where people are given assistance in understanding the terms of an agreement especially in cases where unscrupulous subprime lenders misrepresent the terms.

None of this happened in a vacuum though–Alan Greenspan strongly encouraged people to adopt variable rate mortgages.  As we see the subprime market crumbling, we can only guess that it was because he saw the house of cards about to come down and wanted to keep the illusion going that everything was okay.

I will give some credit to Dan Green who has written about some of the very real practical problems with HB 4050, but I strongly disagree that counseling is not a good thing if we can provide it to people and HB 4050 identifies key warning signs of a borrower who will not be able to maintain their payments.

Uncategorized

Tom Roeser’s Aversion to Fact Checking

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Cross-posted at Illinois Reason 

Is demonstrated in a post that also exemplifies his aversion to editing.

An adversarial press vis-à-vis Republicans, forcing Giuliani’s third wife to admit she was herself married three times, something she admitted after interrogation last week. Only after steadily asking for as many biographical details as are available for other presidential candidates when reporters asked where Obama’s Kansas-born white mother was, we learned that she had died twelve years ago. Case closed. Some adulators implied her death was a private matter–nobody’s business; others defended the close-to-the-vest information policy, asserting, “we knew all the time she was dead.” The point was: Few knew or asked more than what the campaign office chose to release.

Let me offer a line from Obama’s DNC Convention speech:

They are both passed away now.

Only after asking for biographical details…

Uh huh.

Perhaps Tom should remember that at the same time they were discussing Mitt Romney’s great grandfather, the press also reported that Obama had a slave owning ancestor as well.

But more to the point, one cannot tell why the press should be concerned with the death of his mother.  A woman died of cancer.  That’s it.

We learned that while the senior Stanley Dunham is dead, his wife Madelyn is alive at 84 but that there is an embargo on her being interviewed. Although she was a bright and successful bank executive during Obama’s Punahou days, her receptivity is a closed book. We know that in the words of his half-sister “those were robust years full of energy and cacophony and she loved all of it.” Why is she kept away from the media? Well, we’re not privileged to know that-yet. Perhaps never. Is she incapacitated or unwilling to be interviewed? We don’t know that, either. Big media shush: It is not good form to ask.

You know some people get older and know they aren’t as sharp as they once were.  This might lead them to not drive anymore or say not comment in the press.  Sometimes the family has to take the keys away.  Perhaps given the repeated and egregious errors Roeser has made, it’s time for the family to take the keys to the blog and radio show away.

The Adults are Back In Charge

Make it Stop

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Kyle Sampson considered sacking Fitzgerald.  Why didn’t he?  Because of the Plame investigation is the insinuation.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/mZmJsLCzVIU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Of course, the demonstrates the problem the Administration has more than alleviating concerns.  Why in the hell would anyone think of firing Patrick Fitzgerald as US Attorney?  It’s not just that he was the special prosecutor for the Plame case, he has been a remarkably successful prosecutor on public corruption, corporate corruption, terrorism foreign and domestic, and the mob.

Durbin did a great job pinning him down on it too though the point is somewhat lost in discussion.  Why was Patrick Fitzgerald’s name thrown out there?  To see what kind of reaction it got.

Now, if you are going through some sort of systemic process to determine who is doing a good job and who is doing a bad job, wouldn’t the only names thrown out there be those that have some objective measure of performance problems?

If someone wants to claim Fitzgerald fit some objective performance criteria for firing–what are those criteria?

If they cannot answer the question, the entire process is a sham.  Sampson couldn’t and so far no one else has even gotten close to addressing that question.

The irony is if you go back to the 2000 election we were given glowing stories on Bush’s great role as a manager and he’d be the MBA in chief and run the government like a good business.

As some of us pointed out at the time, Bush failed at every business venture other than the one that depended upon public subsidy.   We got exactly what we should have expected.

Uncategorized

Why the GRT is a Dumb Idea

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Kristin McQueary writes a pretty good column on the Gross Receipts Tax today.

What has been surprising is the lack of outrage over the tax breaks, loopholes and stunts big businesses have employed for years to avoid paying corporate income taxes — not to mention the tax burden they avoid through the growing use of economic incentives extended by municipal governments (sales tax rebates and tax increment financing districts) as well as property tax reductions through a county and state appeals process navigated by their well-schooled attorneys.

It’s easy to be swayed by the television commercials and apocalyptic bravado about how a gross receipts tax will trickle down to you and me. Maybe it will. What tax doesn’t?

She also discusses that Blagojevich’s administration tried to cut down on loopholes, but it didn’t work.

Reasonable enough, but the problem with the GRT is that it isn’t progressive as a tax and is not neutral as to the businesses hurt most and hurt least.   Hi margin low volume businesses get a pretty good deal under the tax because their profit is obtained by relatively low sales.  High volume low margin businesses do very poorly because they have to sell a lot to make much of a profit and this kind of across the board tax hits them hard.

To make matters worse, the stores poorer and lower middle class folks tend to shop at are high volume relatively low margin stores from grocery stores to drug stores to many big box stores.  In contrast, the high margin low volume types of sales tend to be items that are more in the luxury category.

I’m all for closing tax breaks that aren’t necessary and even an increase in taxes to put the state on reasonable financial footing, but this tax is exactly the wrong way to do it.  Already the flat tax on incomes hurts the poor in this state more than the rich, this will simply exacerbate that effect.

Focusing a tax upon profit would be a far more fair way to tax businesses and it has the benefit of treating businesses fairly because it isn’t based upon sales, but on the profit and ability to pay and still have a marginal impact upon the business’s bottom line other than on those that are above operating costs.

Uncategorized

ArchPundit Fantasy Baseball

ArchPundit 3 Comments

Oh, what the hell. I’ve set up a league to live draft on Saturday at 1:30 CDT (you can autopick if you prefer). It’s a 5X5 league with 10 teams. C, 1B, 2B, SS, 3B, 1B/3B, 2B/SS, 5 OF, 2 Util, 9 P, 4 Bench, 2 DL–so lots of slots.

It’ll be relatively casual, but I’d hope people plan on keeping up their teams daily or close to daily and a fair amount of trading will take place. Nothing intense though as this will be a secondary team for me.

Drop me an e-mail or reply in comments and I’ll send you an invitation. It’ll need 10 people to sign up so if that isn’t reached, I’ll let it die.  It’s through ESPN and is a free league and only bragging rights for winning.
Back to regular postings in a bit.

Uncategorized

How Uncomfortable

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Gonzalez and Fitzgerald at the same event

Given Fitzgerald’s status in Chicago, I’m betting the press turns Gonzalez into pinata at 11.

Or as the Trib says today:

A further mystery is that some of the prosecutors were given poor evaluations, but others had gotten high scores. One of those fired, Bud Cummins of Arkansas, was on the mark in complaining “there is no evidence of a credible performance-review process.” That was obvious from the fact that standout prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald of Illinois got a mediocre rating — which is like Albert Pujols being left off the All-Star roster.

Obama

Frank James on Pickler

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I think Frank James does a very good analysis on the Pickler piece that won Daily Dolt below:

Again, it strikes me that this is what politicians do, or allow to have done in their names, even first-class ones. Abraham Lincoln did a stint of rail splitting before becoming an affluent railroad lawyer but he probably could have been accused today of allowing supporters to exaggerate that part of his biography in calling him the “rail splitter.”

But the larger point is that after being charged with creating the Obama phenomenon, the Washington press corps is now doing stories that I guarantee the Obama campaign will be hoping most people ignore. These stories are inescapably negative.

Whether Obama is the MSM’s Frankenstein monster is arguable. Millions of people voted for him in Illinois. The man certainly has the larger-than-life charisma needed to occupy the White House successfully. The John F. Kennedy is definitely not-far fetched in this regaed.

Obama really seems comfortable with the media glare and adoring crowds, making him a kind of anti-Nixon. Part of his success, so far, I believe is that people tend to like other people who are comfortable in their presence.

Americans also like politicians who speak to the better angels of their nature, which Obama certainly does with all of that Lincolnesque, high-toned language of his that, yes, at times comes across as platitudes. Come to think of it, Lincoln’s better-angel line is really a platitude, isn’t it?

My take is even more cynical in that I don’t think it matters what Obama does in terms of receiving criticism like this because the press is going to do it anyway. The measure of the campaign is can they take the criticism and react to it creating a net positive.

What’s most interesting about the Tribune and the Swamp is that despite being a part of the DC corps and being an influential paper, since it’s not East Coast or West Coast, they are somewhat distinct from the herd (Sun Times has a similar nature with Lynn Sweet).  No news organization is perfect, but I often find the Trib and Sun-Times reporters to be far better than most of the beltway crowd.  An interesting test case will be to analyze Jeff Zeleny’s work for the Trib and how he’s doing one year from now at the NY Times.

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