Nov 9, 2011 | Politics
Writes David S. Addington over at Heritage on Obama’s Christmas Tree Tax:
President Obama’s Agriculture Department today announced that it will impose a new 15-cent charge on all fresh Christmas trees—the Christmas Tree Tax—to support a new Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees.
In the Federal Register of November 8, 2011, Acting Administrator of Agricultural Marketing David R. Shipman announced that the Secretary of Agriculture will appoint a Christmas Tree Promotion Board. The purpose of the Board is to run a “program of promotion, research, evaluation, and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry’s position in the marketplace; maintain and expend existing markets for Christmas trees; and to carry out programs, plans, and projects designed to provide maximum benefits to the Christmas tree industry” (7 CFR 1214.46(n)). And the program of “information” is to include efforts to “enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States” (7 CFR 1214.10).
To pay for the new Federal Christmas tree image improvement and marketing program, the Department of Agriculture imposed a 15-cent fee on all sales of fresh Christmas trees by sellers of more than 500 trees per year (7 CFR 1214.52). And, of course, the Christmas tree sellers are free to pass along the 15-cent Federal fee to consumers who buy their Christmas trees.
[…] The economy is barely growing and nine percent of the American people have no jobs. Is a new tax on Christmas trees the best President Obama can do?
And, by the way, the American Christmas tree has a great image that doesn’t need any help from the government. [Obama Couldn’t Wait: His New Christmas Tree Tax]
Oct 1, 2011 | Politics
In recent debates GOP presidential rivals have been sparring on Social Security, with some (Rick Perry) insisting it’s a “Ponzi scheme” that should be decentralized (run by fifty states), and others (Mitt Romney) conceding that it’s shaky and needs “reform” but isn’t fraudulent because “millions of people depend on it.” (Mitt Romney). Another (Herman Cain) says privatize it, as Chile did. They’re all wrong, because they don’t name the real problem with the system – and they forego an easy fix that might boost their election chances.
That we’ve only seen GOP rivals “spar” on this key issue is an apt description, for there’s no real fight going on. It’s mere shadow-boxing. Worse, the GOP contenders are mostly on the same side of the issue (the wrong one) and aren’t sufficiently distinct from the rival party. Yet Democrats don’t even try to be candid about Social Security, or try to present a real fix; they’re content to run ads with GOP suits tossing granny off a cliff, which means they’re content to be infantile – which means they’re unfit to lead this great nation.
The facts about Social Security are these. Yes, it’s a Ponzi scheme, thus criminally fraudulent (as I’ll explain), but even worse, because it coerces us to be a part of it. Since the scheme began in 1935 the full force of the U.S. government has compelled a growing portion of citizens to suffer by it, such that we all do so by now. A scheme of such widespread, compulsory fraud is unprecedented in U.S. history, and one of the most shameful (and popular) of FDR’s schemes.
Rationality and justice require that this atrocity be terminated – now. Yet neither virtue can be found in Perry’s proposal to pawn it off to fifty states and thus to decentralize the fraud – or in Romney’s plan to “reform” and “save” the scheme and thus to perpetuate the fraud – or in Cain’s notion that it be operated by quasi-profit-seeking (loss-imposing) “firms” like Bernard Madoff Investment Securities LLC, and thus to privatize the fraud. A fraud remains a fraud regardless of its size, scope, or duration, and it is simply evil to evade this plain fact and deliberately enact policies to decentralize the fraud, perpetuate it, or profit by it.
Read the rest.
Aug 2, 2011 | Politics
Richard Salsman crunches the numbers at Forbes on the attempt to “cut” the size of the public debt:
[…] Even the most “radical” GOP plan, to “cut” $9 trillion, would boost federal outlays by 30% in the coming decade versus outlays in the past decade, while the most modest GOP plan, to cut a mere $2 trillion, would boost outlays by 55%. Yet Democrats lambaste GOP plans as “Draconian,” prone to trigger a “depression.”
By “baseline” federal spending over the coming decade, the CBO means the sum that’ll be spent even with no changes in current fiscal policy, whether in tax rates or spending schemes. As mentioned, the CBO says $45.8 trillion in outlays over the coming decade are effectively on “auto-pilot,” so any proposed “cut” is relative only to this huge number. As mentioned, Washington spent $28.3 trillion over the past decade, so embedded “baseline” spending of $45.8 trillion in the coming decade already entails an astounding increase of 62%. In the coming decade neither U.S. population nor real economic output would rise nearly so much.
[…] Why are today’s politicians, journalists and economists so complicit in deliberately misleading the public about the current and future state of U.S. finances? Why do they speak of “cuts” in future federal spending when the CBO routinely projects increases in the range of +30% to +65%? Check those numbers again, dear citizen: they’re positive, not negative. “Baseline budgeting,” which blithely presumes a perpetually-growing government, was first enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1974, in order to side-step White House efforts to “impound” (limit) federal spending; but that doesn’t condone the gimmick – or justify lying to the public. When people hear that Washington will “cut” spending by $2 trillion over the coming decade, they think that’s a lot of money and that outlays might be $2 trillion lower a decade hence – not higher by 50% or more. Even Boehner’s budget plan, like many others, backloads the “cuts” into later years; he’d “cut” outlays by only $23 billion in 2012, equivalent to less than three days of total federal spending at the current spending rate. [Richard Salsman, Forbes, Washington’s Budget “Cuts” Would Boost Spending 50%]
