Taxing Thoughts

From Atrios:

Lying like a rug on the tax cuts

David Rosenbaum of The Newspaper of Record (when they axe Lelyveld, that is) has a great headline:

Bush May Have Exaggerated, but Did He Lie?

My goodness gracious, are such things possible?!

What is more important is that the tax relief most people will receive is quite meager, hardly the impression the president sought to leave when he campaigned around the country for the plan.

Mr. Bush kept emphasizing the tax benefits for people with modest incomes, not the more extensive tax relief he wanted for the well heeled. He often had onstage with him a couple with two children and an income of $40,000 or $50,000 whose taxes would be cut by more than $1,000, mostly because of the increase in the child tax credit.

From CalPundit:

TAXES….Taxes, taxes, taxes, how much is enough?

This post isn’t about persuading anybody about anything. I just want to present a few numbers to put the whole tax/budget debate into perspective.

The chart on the right shows total federal tax receipts. As you can see, they have been relatively steady for the past 50 years, averaging about 18% of GDP (yellow line). There’s also a pretty obvious dynamic at work: whenever taxes start to rise to around 20% of GDP, they get reduced. This happened most recently in 2001, and during the 2000 election there was a bipartisan consensus that taxes ought to be lowered. (Bush and Gore differed on the size and nature of the cuts, but both agreed that taxes should come down.)

Thought this was interesting, shows the short sighted nature of government decison making!

From www.dailynews.com

Burbank airport almost cleared for $107 million in improvements
BY JASON KANDEL, Staff Writer

BURBANK - A Bob Hope Airport finance committee gave the preliminary OK on Monday for a proposed $107.2 million budget - 36 percent more than last year - that includes nearly $70 million for facility upgrades and runway improvements.

…

Last year, the figure hit an all-time high of 5.5 million, surpassing the 4.9 million in 1995 and 2004. The increase is fueled by new arrivals from Delta Airlines and JetBlue flights.

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/

Six operators of eight car park sites near Bristol International Airport have lost appeals over using their land as unofficial car parks.

In 2003, North Somerset Council refused retrospective permission for the land to be used for parking.

…

Bridget Campbell, of the government inspectorate, said in two cases up to 350 cars parking on land was causing “a serious loss of openness”.

She said the numbers of cars at Freeman’s Farm and The Oakes made the countryside area feel urban.

…

The owners… were given until 20 January 2005 to cease the parking practice.

Councillor Peter Burden said: “The council is committed to protecting the green belt from further damage by mass off-airport parking.”

From Talking Points Memo:

Let’s watch really closely how the walk-back unfolds. And taking what was undoubtedly a hotly-debated stab at walking back the administration’s WMD claims this afternoon was Secretary of State Colin Powell.

A little more than an hour ago NPR ran an interview with the Secretary on All Things Considered. Here’s one of the key passages in which the interviewer asks Powell about why no toxins were found on the alleged chemical/biological weapons trailers found in northern Iraq

MS. BLOCK: There were no toxins found in those trailers.

SECRETARY POWELL: Which could mean one of several things: one, they hadn’t been used yet to develop toxins; or, secondly, they had been sterilized so thoroughly that there is no residual left. It may well be that they hadn’t been used yet.

It’s no wonder that Democrats get labelled with the dreaded ‘L’ word.

“When I’m president, we’ll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day,” said Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri. (while referring to the then upcoming Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in university admissions)

The Supreme Court is the highest court of the land. I don’t always agree with their decisions, but their decisions are supposed to be respected. If you don’t like their decisions, then change the law or the Constitution, but I don’t see anywhere in the Constitution where the President can unilaterally overrule the Supreme Court!

And in true dumbass fashion-

Ever wonder how much of a cut the musicians get when people download their songs for $1 a piece?

- 40 % goes to the website
- 30% goes to the label
- 8% goes to the publisher
- 10% goes to middlemen
- 12% goes to the artist
Source: Business 2.0

From TBOGG:

The tangled web starts to unravel

Jake Tapper writes about the lies that took us into war over at Salon (it’s Salon Premium). Here is an interesting taste:

Korb also suggests that this affair could seriously affect the ability of the U.S. government to function efficiently. “What this administration has done to military and intelligence professionals in government is disgraceful,” he says, citing Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was publicly rebuffed by Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after predicting — correctly, it now seems — that it would take “several hundred thousand troops to keep the peace in postwar Iraq.” Korb also cites the formation earlier this year of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of a few dozen former intelligence officials from Army Intelligence, CIA, FBI, Defense and State Departments, to protest what they saw as a misuse of intelligence for the purposes of building a case for war. “This will also have long-term ramifications,” Korb says.

With the way that the economy is going and all of the different things that the government is doing to royally screw all middle and lower class Americans (like the recent ‘dividend tax cut’ and the passing of the estate tax repeal in the HOR), I was going to post a major bitch post, but then I came across this post by Jeff Cooper and decided that he said everything that I wanted to say and more, but more eloquently (and it’s nearly a month old)!

What’s Going On?

On Tuesday, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) made some very scary comments about how illegal file traders could be fought.

During a discussion on methods to frustrate computer users who illegally exchange music and movie files over the Internet, Hatch asked technology executives about ways to damage computers involved in such file trading. Legal experts have said any such attack would violate federal anti-hacking laws.

“No one is interested in destroying anyone’s computer,” replied Randy Saaf of MediaDefender Inc., a secretive Los Angeles company that builds technology to disrupt music downloads. One technique deliberately downloads pirated material very slowly so other users can’t.

“I’m interested,” Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone’s computer “may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights.”