Expect to have hope rekindled.
Expect your prayers to be answered in wondrous ways.
The dry seasons in life do not last.
The spring rains will come again.
Sarah Ban Breathnach
Obama is April's Fool: America #1--in Business Taxes
America Business Tax: 39.2% Average Developed 25.4%
Corporate Tax, Income, Wealth, Statistics and Liars
I mentioned in this blog some time ago that the Japanese government, at the time the only developed economy with a tax rate exceeding out own (35% plus any state tax, which adds on average just over another 4 points) was planning a cut. (The top 2011 Japan corporate tax was 30%, but local taxes add about 10 points. Japanese federal taxes over the weekend went down 4.5 points, but there is a temporary 10% surtax which leaves the average corporate rate at just over 38%. (Before going further, yes, a number of companies for a variety of tax reasons pay a lower effective rate. But, for instance, domestic energy companies--yes, the same companies Obama routinely bashes and the progressives hypocritically target for punitive tax treatment--pay near the top. That's when you know it's more about ideology than revenue.))
I don't like to write about the Politics of Envy. I am so nauseated by Obama's repeated use of bait-and-switch tactics; Heritage Foundation has a good post on Obama's economically-challenged (is that the politically correct term?) "sugar-coated tax hike reform" and Joe Biden's equally cognitively-deficient (I want to use stronger language but am trying to be tactful) "global minimum tax". Here's the basic idea: multinational companies get taxed for their earnings in each country they do business. In Ireland, for instance, depending on the business, a corporation can get taxed as little as 12.5%. Obama and Biden are having a temper tantrum: they feel that they are entitled to the full 39.2% as if that income was based in the US. To rephrase ABBA: "all the spending I could do if I could only collect more taxes, it's a rich man's world". They want to "reward" companies that pay higher taxes than the rest of the world, and they want to punish multinationals that do profitable business in a foreign country with lower tax rates.
It's one of the problems I have with Barack Obama: he never learns anything. He keeps banging his head against the wall. He gave 3 dozen speeches on ObamaCare, and he thinks that he just hasn't found the right magic spell to use on the American people--it's NOT that maybe his policy is wrong. Every other country has lower corporate tax rates, and his takeaway is NOT that maybe we're charging corporations too much, but the rest of the world is charging them too little.
This is sheer, utter madness. As the Heritage Foundation points out, even if Obama succeeded, foreign companies would be licking their chops to buy out an American-based multinational corporation because they would make a killing in the acquisition: the US could only charge them taxes on US income for the new subsidiary.
I used a childhood incident to make a similar point in a post a few weeks back. I was playing first base, and none of my infielder teammates were throwing a ball anywhere near me on first. I could stay on the bag and have every ball sail past me--or I could play the ball wherever it was thrown. In other words, it's a no-brainer: Obama should have (3 years ago) proposed a more globally competitive tax rate. He just doesn't get it: the stick approach doesn't work; he needs to give foreign-based operations reasons to invest or domestic-based companies to expand in the US. And, among other things (including long-overdue regulatory reforms), that means globally competitive tax rates.
Finally there's another Heritage post which looks at income inequality again, this time involving an economist named Emmanuel Saez whom suggests that top income earners got 93% of income gains in 2010. (My first reaction was of slight amusement: how is Barack Obama going to explain how his economic policies have led to even more inequality?) But in fact top income earners are biased upwards because the heavier tax burden and lower-income earnings are biased downwards because of transfer payments or tax credit refunds. Heritage notes that Saez' research on wealth (versus income) is ignored: the differences in wealth distribution were more pronounced at the beginning of the twentieth century and because the wealthy are generally more vested in the economy, they are significantly affected by economic shocks like the Great Depression; even though the Reagan tax policies were more accommodating to wealth accumulation than policies of preceding decades, wealth distribution differences did not revisit prior levels.
Sheldon Richmond, "Why the Health Insurance Mandate Is Immoral and Unnecessary":
Thumbs UP!
ObamaCare proponents argue:
- Uninsured people will avoid routine and preventive medical care and go to hospital emergency rooms when they can’t delay care any longer, raising costs to others.
["Emergency-room care is a bare 3 percent of total medical spending, less than the retail sector’s loss from shoplifting."
My supporting/related comments: first of all, the individual does not lose his economic rights just because we are discussing health care goods and services. If he wants to see his preferred physician without the expense or approval of an insurance middleman, without being compelled by government policies to pay an unfair share of the expenses of poor health risks or to pay for expensive benefits he doesn't want or need, he should have that option. Moreover, government policies discriminate (from a tax benefits perspective) against those whom choose their health benefits outside an employer's choice. Individuals on their own do seek non-emergency health services.
In fact, most of the cases involving medical bankruptcy started out with individuals whom, at least at the start of treatment, had insurance. Routine or preventive care (which by their nature are ordinary, not insurable risks) can be neglected by those with or without insurance. Guaranteed services at a hospital, without insurance, is mandated by public policy. And just like many lawyers do pro bono work, a number of doctors, free clinics or charity hospitals provide need-based services at nominal or no cost to individuals or families.]
- some people will apply for insurance only after they are seriously ill.
["Government raises the cost of medicine: restrictive licensing, anti-competitive state insurance cartels, benefit mandates, and much more. All such interventions price people out of the medical market by making products and services more costly than they would be in a free and competitive marketplace. Government also raises prices to the uninsured by maintaining policies that insulate people with insurance from the true costs of their decisions."
My supporting/related comments: The government's case is, at its heart, circular reasoning, and in sophistic, audacious terms, points out the fruit of the poisonous tree it has grown to justify its intervention! Economics 101: the law of supply and demand: at a higher price, you have less demand for anything, includinghealth insurancebundled health services. It adds expensive special-interest nonessential mandates, it promotes moral hazard by guaranteeing below-cost premium coverage, it is a perversion of basic insurance concepts by confounding ordinary expenses with more relevant low-probability high-costing illness, accidents or conditions and because the government subsidizes the cost through tax-free treatment of compensation, it artificially lowers the effective price of covered goods and services, thus exacerbating aggregate costs.
The way the government can really lower costs is not by some megalomaniac delusion of "controlling costs" (e.g., by cutting/capping prices below fair market value) but by letting insurance be insurance (stripping ordinary expenses, establishing deductibles and otherwise vesting the consumer in cost decisions, eliminating unnecessary benefit mandates and implicit tax subsidies for work-procured health insurance, and repealing dysfunctional policies (e.g., guaranteeing low-cost premiums, regardless of health condition.))]
The Trail of Tears: Injustice of the Highest Order
This is another in my series of setting the record straight on some commonly praised Presidents like Andrew Jackson. My only issue with Amy Sturgis' account here is one of style: she mixes her sense of moral outrage with the objective recounting of the facts. I think my title says how I feel about the Trail of Tears and historic injustices against Indian tribes where the US government constantly reneged on its treaties with them. I'm more used to a different, Thomistic approach: Thomas Aquinas would scrupulously and in good faith describe each side of an argument and then come to a decision. Amy has this habit of dismissing arguments on the fly. But the bottom line is that she is right, and she honors the memory of those whom otherwise would be forgotten.
The oldest of my sisters, an RN, loved this song when we were kids. The lead singer Mark Lindsay had Cherokee ancestors; it was the remake of a 1959 song penned by John Loudermilk. I used to listen to Casey Kasem's Top 40 countdown religiously at the time, and I remember the fabricated story Kasem unknowingly repeated: "A well-known story is that when Loudermilk was asked by American Top 40 radio show about the story behind the Raider's hit Indian Reservation, he concocted a tale that he wrote the song after crashing his car in a blizzard and being kidnapped by Cherokee Indians. He claimed that they tortured him for days and only let him go after he promised to write a song about their plight."
Entertainment Potpourri
Wrestlemania Follow-Up. I wrote an extensive commentary on professional wrestling in Saturday's post. This will not be a regular feature. I just want to make a few relevant comments on some matches. Celebrities are usually invited, probably to gain mainstream entertainment publicity (e.g., Donald Trump, Snooki, Mike Tyson, etc.) and invariably win their matches, like Maria Menounos. I always feel bad for the wrestlers jobbed out. In this case, Menounos pinned women's champ Beth Phoenix in a tag team contest. (Beth Phoenix is an attractive Amazon with biceps probably twice the size of Menounos' significant other's.) If you didn't know wrestling had arranged finishes, this was a classic example.
I was surprised to see they booked the Rock into a clean pin of the WWE top babyface John Cena; it does make sense in that Miami is Dwayne "Rock" Johnson's home base (he used to play college football there). But he may also fit the celebrity gimmick.
But the biggest surprise to me was they booked champ Daniel Bryan into a squash match with rising star Sheamus. It took Sheamus all of 18 seconds to do away with Bryan with a kick. I was on a wrestling website at the time, and it was clear a lot of people besides myself were unhappy. (In fact, fans in Miami were chanting for Daniel Bryan during follow-up matches, no doubt annoying WWE officials.) Nobody mentioned it (maybe they're too young to know), but I remember a similarly oversized Diesel (Kevin Nash) beat Bob Backlund in 8 seconds for the WWE title in the mid 1990's. I'm not surprised in the sense Sheamus had been given a massive push, but I thought it was a bad move. Bryan is one of the most talented wrestlers around, and I thought a clean win over Sheamus would cement his reputation.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Doobie Brothers, "Rockin' Down the Highway"
