Payroll Tax Cut

Star Parker explains the secret plan behind the payroll tax cut.

A cut in income taxes, even if not accompanied with an equivalent cut in government spending, puts the pressure for such cuts in place and carries with it the prospect of reduction of government interference in our lives.

But there is no such possibility with the payroll tax. When the tax was reduced “temporarily” last year from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent, were working Americans asked to agree to an equivalent cut in their Social Security benefits that the payroll tax pays for?

Of course not. What politician in his or her right mind would suggest to working Americans that they intend to cut Social Security benefits?

She only forgets the all important public narrative that goes along.

Republicans are mean.
As a newly converted Republican, let me try to change that.

Republicans are adults who expect that what you say is what you mean!

A First Reaction

OMG!!! One set of people has something less than another set of people!!! Something must be done!!

There are people out there who do not have highspeed (in particular cable) internet service!
Many live in rural areas of even ghettos!

What is the answer, what is the answer?
Well as a first reaction from those at the NYTimes, apparently it’s “force these companies to share their cables to that more “competition” is created and prices will come down.

The answer to this puzzle is regulatory policy. Over the last 10 years, we have deregulated high-speed Internet access in the hope that competition among providers would protect consumers. The result? We now have neither a functioning competitive market for high-speed wired Internet access nor government oversight.

By contrast, governments that have intervened in high-speed Internet markets have seen higher numbers of people adopting the technology, doing so earlier and at lower subscription charges. Many of these countries have required telecommunications providers to sell access to parts of their networks to competitors at regulated rates, so that competition can lower prices.

Was this directly copied from Atlas Shrugged? Maybe in a speech given by Dagny’s brother?

Today, the problem is about affording unregulated high-speed Internet service — provided, in the case of cable, by a few for-profit companies with very little local competition and almost no check on their prices. They have to bear all the cost of infrastructure and so have no incentive to expand into rural areas, where potential customers are relatively few and far between. (The Federal Communications Commission recently announced a plan to convert subsidies that once supported basic rural telephone services into subsidies for basic Internet access.)

The bigger problem is the lack of competition in cable markets. Though there are several large cable companies nationwide, each dominates its own fragmented kingdom of local markets: Comcast is the only game in Philadelphia, while Time Warner dominates Cleveland. That is partly because it is so expensive to lay down the physical cables, and companies, having paid for those networks, guard them jealously, clustering their operations and spending tens of millions of dollars to lobby against laws that might oblige them to share their infrastructure.

It’s not fair, it’s not fair. These companies came up with the plan, placed the infrastructure and now they won’t share!

China

Jonah Goldberg has a good column on China envy from that article in the WSJ yesterday.

I enjoyed his book Liberal Fascism.

Stern joins a long list of liberals who’ve seen China embrace authoritarian capitalism and conclude that the secret to that success had to be the authoritarianism. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, my usual whipping boy in this department, has written thousands of words rhapsodizing about his “envy” of China. President Obama himself has said he’s envious of China’s president and has touted China’s infrastructure spending as something to emulate.
If you want to copy China because its authoritarian capitalism is better than our democratic capitalism, it seems pretty obvious that what you envy is the authoritarianism. H.G. Wells had a phrase for that.

It’s done

I am……wait for it…….a Republican.

Now onto the election. The more I read of Newt, the more I like the man, but the less I want him for President.

Jon Huntsman inexplicably chose to debut as the Republican for people who rather dislike Republicans, but his program is the most conservative. He endorses Paul Ryan’s budget and entitlement reforms. (Gingrich denounced Ryan’s Medicare reform as “right-wing social engineering.”) Huntsman would privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Gingrich’s benefactor). Huntsman would end double taxation on investment by eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends. (Romney would eliminate them only for people earning less than $200,000, who currently pay just 9.3 percent of them.) Huntsman’s thorough opposition to corporate welfare includes farm subsidies. (Romney has justified them as national security measures — food security, somehow threatened. Gingrich says opponents of ethanol subsidies are “big-city” people hostile to farmers.) Huntsman considers No Child Left Behind, the semi-nationalization of primary and secondary education, “an unmitigated disaster.” (Romney and Gingrich support it. Gingrich has endorsed a national curriculum.) Between Ron Paul’s isolationism and the faintly variant bellicosities of the other six candidates stands Huntsman’s conservative foreign policy, skeptically nuanced about America’s need or ability to control many distant developments.

Romney might not be a Dewey. Gingrich might stop being (as Churchill said of John Foster Dulles) a bull who carries his own china shop around with him. But both are too risky to anoint today.

The Friday Funny isn’t very funny

Liberal Democrat Progressive, all around good leftie President Obama has approved of horse slaughtering in this country again.

The whole subject is rife with opinions. I recognize that we are in the midst of a national changing view of horses and that there is going to be controversy.

Are horses pets or livestock?
How are they different from cows?
If they aren’t then how are dogs different?
Should it matter that people choose to abandon their horses vs euthanize them when making these decisions?
Should it matter that people choose to ship their horses to Mexico vs euthanize them when making these decisions?
Should we make decisions based on the basist of human ways?

I’m not sure, but I do believe that if you own a horse now, then you are “rich” enough to set aside $300 to humanely euthanize him/her when the time comes vs selling them down the road to neck knife stabs in a Mexican slaughterhouse.

Similarly if you have a kid in this country, you are “rich” enough to plan to feed them a sandwich.
[ht Maggie’s Farm}

But I’m a bitch.

Iran

We’re at war.….

Jawa has some photographic evidence. (though that means very little in the age of photoshop)

China

I swear I hear of the greatness of China all the time around here.

Yesterday John Kranz linked to a column in the WSJ by Andy Stern (previous SEIU boss) about the greatness of China.
As John says, this isn’t April Fools and

it is really a full-on Walter Duranty cheering session for central planning.

Gag. I read the whole thing. Two things stand out.
1) So they have a 5 year plan. ? That would be the central planning part of central planning. The real test is whether it works well.

As this was happening [our diplomat dissing China's currency adjustments], I was part of a U.S.-China dialogue—a trip organized by the China-United States Exchange Foundation and the Center for American Progress—with high-ranking Chinese government officials, both past and present. For me, the tension resulting from the chorus of American criticism paled in significance compared to reading the emerging outline of China’s 12th five-year plan. The aims: a 7% annual economic growth rate; a $640 billion investment in renewable energy; construction of six million homes; and expanding next-generation IT, clean-energy vehicles, biotechnology, high-end manufacturing and environmental protection—all while promoting social equity and rural development.

……
2) and 3) I could bring this delegation to South Dakota to look at all the work being done, the jobs being had and the industry moving forward. BUT 700,000 units of public housing isn’t something to be proud of. And any numbers given by a totalitarian government are suspect.

While we debate, Team China rolls on. Our delegation witnessed China’s people-oriented development in Chongqing, a city of 32 million in Western China, which is led by an aggressive and popular Communist Party leader—Bo Xilai. A skyline of cranes are building roughly 1.5 million square feet of usable floor space daily—including, our delegation was told, 700,000 units of public housing annually.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government can boast that it has established in Western China an economic zone for cloud computing and automotive and aerospace production resulting in 12.5% annual growth and 49% growth in annual tax revenue, with wages rising more than 10% a year.

Coyote Blog has some thoughts too. Including:

Exactly how much economic progress had China made before its leaders brought in the very free market ideas Stern says are dead? None, of course. To read China as a triumph of statism and as the death nell of capitalism, when in fact it is one of the greatest examples in history of the power of capitalist ideas and how fast they can turn around a starving and poverty-stricken country, is just willful blindness.