Considerable quote

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
~ P.J. O'Rourke

An off century

Larry Elder reviews 50 years of Liberal policies -- from taxes to welfare, education, gun control, minimum wage, affirmative action, and Obamacare -- and concludes, "Any party can have a bad half-century."

Read the whole thing.

Incentives matter

Michael Barone on what the 2010 Census reveals:

The great engine of growth in America is not the Northeast Megalopolis, which was growing faster than average in the mid-20th century, or California, which grew lustily in the succeeding half-century. It is Texas.

Its population grew 21 percent in the past decade, from nearly 21 million to more than 25 million. That was more rapid growth than in any states except for four much smaller ones (Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Idaho).

Texas' diversified economy, business-friendly regulations and low taxes have attracted not only immigrants but substantial inflow from the other 49 states. As a result, the 2010 reapportionment gives Texas four additional House seats. In contrast, California gets no new House seats, for the first time since it was admitted to the Union in 1850.

There's a similar lesson in the fact that Florida gains two seats in the reapportionment and New York loses two.

This leads to a second point, which is that growth tends to be stronger where taxes are lower. Seven of the nine states that do not levy an income tax grew faster than the national average. The other two, South Dakota and New Hampshire, had the fastest growth in their regions, the Midwest and New England.

Altogether, 35 percent of the nation's total population growth occurred in these nine non-taxing states, which accounted for just 19 percent of total population at the beginning of the decade.

Say it with me: Incentives, incentives, incentives. By far the most important concept I've learned over the past few years of trying to become economically literate is that

Incentives, Not Intentions, Are What Matter.

I really can't stress enough how important this is. Whether it's economics, parenting, crime, or anything else, if you flat out ignore the intentions of a policy, action, or behavior and simply ask What incentives are being created?, you'll begin to understand things in ways you never imagined.

If you reward something, you get more of it; if you penalize something, you get less of it. This is the physics of people. It's like gravity, and it always wins.

They never learn

TaxProf:

Oregon raised its income tax on the richest 2% of its residents last year to fix its budget hole, but now the state treasury admits it collected nearly one-third less revenue than the bean counters projected. ...

In 2009 the state legislature raised the tax rate to 10.8% on joint-filer income of between $250,000 and $500,000, and to 11% on income above $500,000. Only New York City's rate is higher. Oregon's liberal voters ratified the tax increase on individuals and another on businesses in January of this year, no doubt feeling good about their "shared sacrifice."

Congratulations. Instead of $180 million collected last year from the new tax, the state received $130 million. ...

One reason revenues are so low is that about one-quarter of the rich tax filers seem to have gone missing. The state expected 38,000 Oregonians to pay the higher tax, but only 28,000 did. Funny how that always happens. These numbers are in line with a Cascade Policy Institute study, based on interstate migration patterns, predicting that the tax surcharge would lead to 80,000 fewer wealthy tax filers in Oregon over the next decade. ...

All of this is an instant replay of what happened in Maryland in 2008 when the legislature in Annapolis instituted a millionaire tax. There roughly one-third of the state's millionaire households vanished from the tax rolls after rates went up.

Newsflash: When you penalize something, you get less of it.

This was entirely foreseeable, which is why the Cascade Policy Institute was able to predict it, and why this is not only a replay of what happened in Maryland, but in New York, California, New Jersey, and other states as well.

Government falls into a basic trap, time and again. They see taxpayers primarily as a revenue source and fail to recognize that they are people, who respond to incentives. If you tax them, do they not bleed? Of course they do. Then they move out of the state or figure out other ways to keep you from taking their money.

Those who continue to act like they can just pass laws and magically achieve only the intended results need to wake up and meet the Law of Unintended Consequences: Incentives, not intentions, matter.

Incentives are like gravity; they win every time.

Quote of the day

Thomas Sowell:

One of the biggest obstacles to economic recovery is that politicians and the media are both focused on how government can make the economy recover, rather than on how it can let the economy recover. One of the biggest deterrents to investments — and the jobs they could create — is uncertainty over what new bright ideas will come out of Washington to change the rules in midstream.

But I thought poverty causes crime?

CSM:

As new FBI crime figures point out, property crimes, murder, rape, and arson all plunged in the first six months of 2010 – some would say counterintuitively – even as unemployment and hard times hit communities from coast to coast....

"Recessions actually tend to be associated with decreases in crime," adds Peter Scharf, a criminologist at Tulane University in New Orleans. "People's aspiration levels go down, they get less greedy, they stay home. Not only don't you go to Saks and Macy's, you don't go to Best Buy and Walmart. So even in your risk populations you can get a recession effect: People are not out in the large economy involved in conflict and alcohol and property crimes" to the same extent as during a booming economy.

A lost decade in education

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:

History is usually made by a small group of passionate people. On Dec. 7, history was made by a small group of parents in Compton, Calif.

Their children attend McKinley Elementary School - a school that has been defined as failing for the past 10 years. Using a new power known as the "parent trigger," which I fought for and state legislators approved last year, these Compton parents banded together to demand change. The legislation allows parents of students at troubled schools to demand such significant reforms as closing a school, replacing a school's management or most of its staff, or reorganizing a school into a charter, if 51 percent of parents sign a petition.

McKinley Elementary is being reorganized and will soon be transformed into a charter school run by Celerity Educational Group, which is successfully operating three other schools in California.

Schwarzenegger may think he's trumpeting a success story, and perhaps he is, but that story remains to be written. What I hear, instead, is an indictment -- no, a confession, an admission of guilt that for at least 10 years California has knowingly allowed this school to fail without taking corrective action. How many kids have been robbed of their futures in that time?

Consider the remedies only now being made available to the victims of McKinley Elementary: replacement of the school's management and staff, reorganization into a charter school. Now consider what things would look like if, instead of being herded through a government-run monopoly, parents were given real choices in an educational marketplace.

To begin with, the failures at McKinley would have been addressed a decade ago. A failing school remains a tragedy only as long as we force our kids to attend it. Had we allowed parents to choose where they send their kids -- the way we allow them to choose where they shop for groceries or fill their gas tanks -- McKinley would have been vacant as soon as parents learned there was a better product down the road. The failing school would be forced to reform or shut down (very likely with a new school, under new management, moving in to fill the vacuum). In any event, in the face of competition failure is not an option for very long, and a lost decade could have been averted.

The lesson, as always, is that, if given choices, people do a much better job of looking out for their own interests than any government can ever do. Until we break free from the government monopoly on education, we will continue to condemn millions of children to bleak, stunted futures. No amount of money or reform is enough to improve a system that doesn't need to succeed to survive.

The unAmerican dream

I haven't paid attention to the details of the DREAM Act because I'm against rewarding illegal behavior, and no matter what kind of package it comes in, that's what Harry Reid is selling. (If it didn't reward illegal behavior, illegals would have no interest in it and there would be no point.) So when it comes to the DREAM Act -- well, sing it, Groucho:

I don’t know what they have to say,
It makes no difference anyway --
Whatever it is, I’m against it!
No matter what it is or who commenced it,
I’m against it.

Your proposition may be good
But let’s have one thing understood --
Whatever it is, I’m against it!
And even when you’ve changed it or condensed it,
I’m against it.

Still, it was interesting to read Bob Dane's "How To Guide for Becoming a DREAM Act Beneficiary," which takes the aspiring young illegal by the hand to make sure all his dreams come true should the act become a reality. I'll leave the reading to the, er, reader, and simply note that there are far fewer hurdles and far more ways around the requirements than I imagined. There are some nice perks thrown in as well. For example, illegals would actually become eligible for federal benefits like health care sooner than if they had come here legally.

DREAM Act indeed.

Hug a rich person

Bernie Goldberg says we need to stop vilifying rich people and instead build a huge monument "to pay tribute to those this nation of ours owes a great debt; to those who give and give and give and in return get anything but our gratitude." He offers some numbers to make his case:

Did you know that the top one percent of American wage earners (adjusted gross income) pay about 38 percent of all our federal personal taxes (according to the National Taxpayer Union)? The top one percent, by the way, account for 23.5 percent of all income — a substantial amount, yes, but considerably less than 38 percent.

Or that the top five percent pay just under 60 percent?

Or that the top ten percent pay about 70 percent of all the personal income taxes collected in this great land of ours?

These “fat-cats” are the ones who do the heavy lifting in this country. They’re the ones whose federal tax dollars pick up a big chunk of the tab for all sorts of noble things, such as: food for folks who don’t have enough to eat … medicine and doctors for people with little money … financial aid to help other people’s kids go to college … milk and diapers for poor babies whose 15 year-old mothers and deadbeat fathers are too irresponsible to take care of their own kids … a safety net for old folks who are retired on fixed incomes … and on and on. . . .

No, I’m not saying the wealthiest Americans are all a bunch of selfless philanthropists. But try to imagine an America without those rich people.

By the way, the bottom 50 percent of tax filers pay a paltry 2.7 percent of our federal income taxes. How many poor people do you think their tax dollars are taking care of? If you ask me, they’re the ones not paying their fair share. Every time they pass a “rich” person on the street, they ought to say, “Thank you for everything you do for me and for this country.”

Goldberg is right. The rich aren't necessarily heroes, but Americans have the highest standard of living in the world in large part because we receive the benefits of a small group of rich people acting in their own self interests. In addition to all the services they pay for and the jobs they provide, they are responsible for all the wonderful things that make our lives so much better.

Even poor people in America are known to have cars and stereos and color TVs with cable service and VCRs and computers with Internet connections and cell phones and microwaves and washers and driers, not to mention plumbing and electricity and heat and air conditioning and contact lenses and medicines and on and on.

Rich people created all that stuff! Then they figured out ways to make it cheap so we could afford it. Poor people in America have luxuries that even the super rich couldn't buy not so long ago.

Hell, I love rich people.

I know. You say, then why don't you marry them? Well, I just might should one of them ask.

No, maybe we don't need to build a monument to rich people, or give them a national holiday, or even start naming streets and babies after them. But maybe we could at least cut them a little slack? Stop calling them bad names? Say thanks for all the cool stuff?

Besides, if rich people are all that bad, why is everybody trying so hard to be one?

Pigs at the trough

Jamie Dupree put together a handy collection of links that allows you to take a look at the earmarks your senator has included in the new budget bill.

One of my senators is requesting 13 earmarks (* Turns out this in not true. Dems played dirty. See both updates below!); the other is requesting 32. As far as I can tell there's not a single item on the list that the Constitution says they are allowed to spend money on, and they want to spend millions.

Dupree writes:

The projects include the usual smattering of things that make some lawmakers go nuts, like $300,000 for the Polynesian Voyaging Society.

"I'm not making it up," said Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who again took to the floor on Tuesday to denounce the thousand of earmarks in this bill from both parties.

"The American people said just 42 days ago, 'Enough!'" said McCain. "Are we tone deaf? Are we stricken with amnesia?"

Apparently.

h/t: JammieWearingFool

* Update: Despite his request for 13 earmarks, Judd Gregg has announced that he will vote against the omnibus bill. Apparently, he got the message voters sent on November 2. As Milton Friedman said, it's nice to elect the right people, but the way you get things done is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.

Unfortunately, I can't imagine my other senator, Jeanne Shaheen, will do the right thing under any circumstances.

Update: Kimberley Strassel reports that "omnibus author and Hawaii Democrat Daniel Inouye dug up earmark requests that Senate Republicans had made in the past year (prior to their self-imposed ban) and, unasked, included them in the bill."

Apparently, Inouye was trying to play a dirty trick, inserting the outdated earmark requests into the bill in hopes of luring Republicans into voting for it, and also setting them up to take the blame if it passed. Pretty slimy stuff -- and it might have worked if not for the leadership of Mitch McConnell.

A tale of two states

I've been reading more and more accounts like this one from Victor Davis Hanson, and missing my beloved California less and less.

The tax rates are too damn high

Katria Trinko writes:

President Obama asked Congress this morning to pass the tax cut compromise “as swiftly as possible,” stressing its importance to generating economic growth and helping the middle class.

Obama is on record, both as a candidate and as president, supporting the idea that lower taxes (at least on the middle class; he's flip-flopped on the issue when it comes to high income earners) are essential to economic growth. The vast majority of both Democrats and Republicans agree (again, at least as regards the middle class).

So why aren't any of them calling for actual tax cuts? The so-called "tax cut compromise" doesn't cut tax rates; it simply keeps tax rates where they've been for the last decade.

If all these politicians really believe that lower tax rates are good for the economy, then let's get busy, you know, lowering the tax rates.

Update: Well, there's one. I just heard Michele Bachmann tell Sean Hannity that we should be cutting tax rates instead of simply maintaining the status quo. Music to my ears! I know there's no chance it will actually happen, but it cheers me to hear someone taking an honest to goodness conservative position for a change. Good on her.

If the news doesn't fit, you must omit

NewsBusters catches the Washington Post hiding the ball, as they fail to report the results of their own poll: [emphasis in original]

A new ABC-Washington Post poll found ObamaCare sunk to its lowest popularity yet: 52 percent opposed, and only 43 percent in favor. ABC mentioned the poll without fanfare at the end of a Jake Tapper report on Monday’s World News, and Tapper added this was the health law's "lowest level of popularity ever." But Tuesday’s Washington Post reported not one sentence on the poll in the paper – even as they reported in the paper that the same survey found Obama’s tax-and-unemployment-compensation deal has “broad bipartisan support.”

This is the same Post that highlighted the news on Page One on October 20, 2009, when they found a “clear majority” in favor of a socialist “public option” -- amid charges they oversampled Democrats.

The numbers weren't excluded because they arrived late. The Post poll numbers went up on the website yesterday at about 1 pm, under the headline “Health care opponents divided on repeal.”

So, they reported the results of the tax deal question, which has Americans agreeing with Obama, but they hid the results of the Obamacare question, which has record numbers of Americans disagreeing with Obama, even though the questions came from the same survey. The Post has a reputation for a pro-liberal slant and this seems to confirm that bias.

I've long said that most media bias comes not in the actual reporting but in what is reported or ignored. This seems to confirm that theory as well.

Rising gas prices not Obama's fault

Ron Futrell of Big Journalism wonders why the media isn't blaming Obama for rising gas prices the way they did Bush.

Oh, the activists in the old media commit sins of omission and sins of commission, sometimes both in the same story.

Take those pesky little ol gas prices that have now skyrocketed to more than $3.00 a gallon. For months the media had just omitted the story altogether like they hadn’t even noticed, while during the Bush administration they couldn’t stop doing stories on “Pain At The Pump” and they worked overtime to point the nozzle directly at the White House.

Here are a couple of examples, there are many others.

This story from 2006 on MSNBC blasts Bush for doing little to stop the rising gas prices.

This story from 2008 talks about how Bush and Evil Big Oil were conspiring against us all to raise prices and how Dear Leader Obama was going to come in and save us all from high gas prices and our dependence on foreign oil.

Whoops. . . .

When Obama entered the White House gas prices averaged $1.81 per gallon. Evil Bush/Oil must’ve done something to make those prices fall – but there’s no time in the 10 hours a day that local TV stations do in their newscasts to mention this little fact. They’re out of space in the New York Times to provide context for this story.

A formula for success

Economists Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution:

Our research shows that if you want to avoid poverty and join the middle class in the United States, you need to complete high school (at a minimum), work full time and marry before you have children. If you do all three, your chances of being poor fall from 12 percent to 2 percent."

That's a pretty simple formula. Unfortunately, unwed child births are at historic highs, high school graduation rates are dismal, and it's tough to find and keep a job while you are on drugs or in prison, which is the fate of all too many of our youth.

Also unfortunate is that we tend to inherit both our genes and our environment from the same people, meaning that the behavior patterns of the fathers tend to be visited upon the sons.

Read Obama's lips

Chuck Norris:

[O]f the more than 500 promises Obama made during his candidacy, even according to the pro-Obama website PolitiFact's "Obameter," his scorecard reads: 123 promises kept, 39 compromised, 24 broken, 82 stalled, 232 in the works and three not yet rated. What that coddled language boils down to is this: Even according to those on the political left, Obama has fulfilled 123 promises and left 380 pledges dangling farther than participles.

Norris accepts Obama's recent challenge to "Look at what I promised during the campaign. There's not a single thing that I've said that I would do that I have not either done or tried to do."

After "setting aside" such things as "promises of transparency, C-SPAN coverage of health care debates and even Guantanamo Bay's closing," Norris goes on to list some of the major promises Obama has failed to deliver on:

--"We've got a philosophical difference, which we've debated repeatedly, and that is that Sen. (Hillary) Clinton believes the only way to achieve universal health care is to force everybody to purchase it." (Spoken during the Democratic presidential debate on Feb. 21, 2008.)

--"We need tougher border security and a renewed focus on busting up gangs and traffickers crossing our border. ... That begins at home, with comprehensive immigration reform. That means securing our border and passing tough employer enforcement laws." (Spoken in Miami on May 23, 2008.)

--"Based on the conversations we've had internally, as well as external reports, we believe that you can get one to two brigades out a month. At that pace, the forces would be out in approximately 16 months from the time that we began. That would be the time frame that I would be setting up." (Spoken to The New York Times on Oct. 31, 2007, about the withdrawal from Iraq.)

--"We will launch a sweeping effort to root out waste, inefficiency and unnecessary spending in our government, and every American will be able to see how and where we spend taxpayer dollars by going to a new website called Recovery.gov." (Spoken in a speech on Jan. 28, 2009.)

--"There is no doubt that we've been living beyond our means and we're going to have to make some adjustments. Now, what I've done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut." (Spoken during the presidential debate on Oct. 15, 2008.)

--"We are going to ban all earmarks." (Spoken at a news conference on Jan. 6, 2009.)

--"Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase -- not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes." (Spoken at a town hall meeting on Sept. 12, 2008.)

--And oh, yes, then there's that substantial promise repeated dozens of times in one way, shape or form on the campaign trail: "It's true that I want to roll back the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans." (Spoken in Chester, Pa., on Oct. 28, 2008.)

Liberals and Conservatives will disagree over which of these promises are laudable and which are not, but it's clear that Obama hasn't lived up to a number of large, important vows.

The voters punished Bush-41 for breaking his famous "read my lips" pledge. Will they hold Obama similarly accountable?

Swing and a miss

At The Notion, Laura Flanders takes New York's Republican Congressman Peter King to task for his evolving "definition of terrorist". King, Flanders complains, "can't remember what the word means anymore."

The problem is that two of the three examples Flanders uses to track King's allegedly inconsistent definition of terrorism have nothing to do with terrorism. After staking out King's position on a 1980's extradition case, Flander's writes:

Flash forward to 2005, when Karl Rove and Scooter Libby outed CIA agent Valerie Plame. King called for "crosshairs" to be set on news media for not being tough enough on Plame's husband Joe Wilson instead. He also suggested that the media "be shot" for pursuing the story.

First, let's get the facts straight: it was Richard Armitage, not Karl Rove or Scooter Libby, that "outed" Valerie Plame. And Armitage didn't actually "out" her, as she wasn't undercover to begin with (she was listed as a CIA agent in Who's Who, for crying out loud). This is why Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald didn't charge Armitage (or anyone else) with outing Plame; he concluded there was no evidence a crime was committed.

Setting all that aside, what does any of this have to do with terrorism? By Flanders own account, all King did was criticize the media for not doing its job.

Flanders continues:

Terrorism has a new definition now, though, and King is emphatic on who the bad guys are. "I am calling on the attorney general and supporting his efforts to fully prosecute WikiLeaks and its founder [Julian Assange] for violating the Espionage Act," he told a New York radio station.

Again, what does this have to do with terrorism? According to Wikipedia, the Espionage Act made it a crime "to convey information with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies."

This sounds like a pretty fair description of what Julian Assange did. In fact, the Wikipedia article on the Espionage Act includes a section specifically on the Assange case. But there's no mention of terrorism in the article, and there shouldn't be. Espionage and terrorism are different things, and King seems to understand that, even if Flanders doesn't.

I'm actually not a fan of Peter King, but Flanders is bending over backwards to play "gotcha" when there's no cha to be got.

I try to read The Notion regularly, so I can get opposing views and keep up with what the Left is thinking, but when this is the kind of stuff they push it's hard to keep going back.

Merry Christmas from the president

What does it say that it's "news" that the President of the United States actually uttered the words "Merry Christmas" (three times!) at the national tree lighting ceremony?

If you ask me, it's downright ridiculous that this is at all remarkable, but here we are. But since we are here, it's worth sending out some kudos to President Obama for opting for "Merry Christmas" (three times!) over the bland and politically correct "Happy Holidays."

Nicely done, Mr. President.

Bush gave the facts; journalists are hacks

Larry Elder says George W. Bush is owed an apology by those who claimed he lied when he uttered the now famous 16 words: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." This was never a lie to begin with, of course. The British, to this day, stand by that report. But it turns out there is hard evidence to corroborate the claim.

In 2008, our military shipped out of Iraq -- on 37 flights in 3,500 barrels -- what even The Associated Press called "the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program": 550 metric tons of the supposedly nonexistent yellowcake. The New York Sun editorialized: "The uranium issue is not a trivial one, because Iraq, sitting on vast oil reserves, has no peaceful need for nuclear power. ... To leave this nuclear material sitting around the Middle East in the hands of Saddam ... would have been too big a risk."

Now the mainscream media no longer deem yellowcake -- the WMD Bush supposedly lied about -- a WMD.

Funny how "Bush Lied" made headlines for years, but the evidence of the actual nuclear material in question didn't seem to get much attention. I certainly didn't read about it anywhere. Did you?

Dems protest too much

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama struggled Tuesday to prevent wholesale defections by fellow Democrats that could sink the tax deal he worked out with Republicans -- angry opposition that could subject millions of Americans to a big holiday-season tax increase.

Many GOP lawmakers seemed ready to embrace the Obama-GOP compromise and declare victory. The question was whether enough Democrats would join them in support, especially in the House, where liberal resentment of the president's concessions on tax breaks for the wealthiest runs strong.

My ever-growing inner cynic has me pretty well convinced that this is pure political theater. Obama has given ground, but it's not like this is a truly conservative end point.

A conservative plan would lower tax rates for everyone. Obama only agreed not to raise them, and even then only temporarily. A conservative plan would shorten the number of months people can receive unemployment payments, which has already been extended. The Obama compromise has Republicans agreeing to extend unemployment benefits an additional 13 months. A conservative plan would eliminate the estate tax. Under the compromise, the estate tax will be set at 35 percent.

So while it's true that Obama gave ground and Republicans got a lot of what they asked for, Obama got some things in return and we ended up with a plan far from what conservatives would like to see.

What I think we're seeing is a coordinated effort to make it look like Obama has pivoted to the center a lot further than he has. He gives in a little while his team complains quite loudly about how he's caved. Then Obama can campaign for 2012 on the claim that he bucked his own party to reach across the aisle, etc. etc. I predict we'll soon be hearing about what a great leader he has been, and how he's set a new tone in Washington of cooperation and bipartisanship, when he's done exactly the opposite for two years.

So methinks the Dems protest way too much. Especially when I see this a bit farther down in the article:

Democratic leaders in the House criticized the tax plan, sometimes harshly, but stopped short of saying they would try to block it.

Why all the whining and pissing and moaning if they're not going to actually do something about it? Because the whining and pissing and moaning, not the policy, was the point from the start.