Happy Birthday to Cindy Williams, 65. C'mon: is there anyone who was in American Graffiti who you don't like? Okay, I guess I don't especially have any fondness for Richard Dreyfuss. Hey, I didn't know that Candy Clark played Buffy's mom in the Buffy movie. I suppose I should sit through all of it at some point.
Back on topic; the good stuff:
1. Marc Tracy on Adeslon-bashing and anti-Semitism. Reading this one is Good for the Jews.
2. Jared Bernstein on big vs. small government.
3. WaPo/Kaiser polling on independents. I'm sticking with my rule of thumb, which isn't perfectly accurate but is good enough for most purposes: Americans are evenly split between Democrats, Republicans, and independents, but those independents are almost evenly split between Democrats, Republicans, and true independents.
4. The Romney tax "plan" gets sillier and sillier; as Suzy Khimm reports, he's rallying to the defense of the mortgage interest tax deduction, which of course is a pretty large chunk of the kinds of things he would be closing if he really was putting together a revenue-neutral tax reform. Seriously; by November, isn't it likely that he'll make the whole TPC analysis moot by explicitly excluding so many tax expenditures that it's no longer possible to get to revenue-neutral no matter what?
5. And I'm not entirely certain, but I do believe that this is Brad DeLong apologizing.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
You don't need to close tax expenditures to achieve revenue neutrality. You just cut taxes on job creators and watch revenues soar as the economy grows 6% a year and unemployment drops to 3%....
ReplyDeleteAh, life is good.
DeleteOh yeah, Mitt Romney's 0% tax rate is way too high. The federal government should be paying him money for the privilege of having him extract money from the US economy and sending to various island tax shelters. It seems that there is no state of affairs too upside-down for tea party morons like Ron E. to want to make it worse.
Deletepurusha, I do believe our friend Ron E. was being sarcastic.
DeleteI was thinking along the same lines recently. Long-term capital gains/dividends are usually taxed at 15%, much below the ordinary rate, because they are not paid by "ordinary" people, more often corporate-type entities. That's logical to the extent that capital can easily flow elsewhere if you tax it too much (much more easily than ordinary idiots like myself can relocate to Monte Carlo). Also cause corporations aren't people.
I mean, its not like a corporation can get disability insurance! Ok, maybe if its a Detroit automaker. Or social security! Ok, maybe if they screw up their pension and dump it on the PBGC. Well, at least a corporation can't benefit from the common defense! Unless its something like United Fruit, which used the US military to overthrow a banana republic that was hindering its own sale of bananas.
So maybe corporations are people. But people are not corporations! Then I thought about what Reid's Deep Throat alleged about how Romney got to an effective tax rate of 0%, and it occurred to me that, no, no, Lord Mittens is probably a corporation unto himself.
CSH - I think you're forgetting that we have one of the highest tax rates on Corporate income in the world.
DeleteHighest official rates, but the corporate income tax has a whole lot of deductions and credits in it, so the effective corporate tax rate is fairly low.
DeleteUserGoogol - Fair point, although that's not true for all businesses.
Deletewell yeah, I never really warmed to Mackenzie Phillips.
ReplyDeleteI do wish Paul Le Mat had worked to his potential over the years.
Agree about Paul Le Mat, but he did have a good, albeit short, run.
DeleteAnd...really? Mackenzie Phillips? How could you not root for her? Oh well.
Oh I mean just as an actress, a personality. I was a pre-teen who loved One Day at a Time, but I was kind of afraid of her. And that and AG are pretty much it for notable performances. Later, when I realized who she was, I did feel sympathy for her.
DeleteNo, I sort of meant on the show; I guess I had the opposite reaction - I always thought that having America's Sweetheart as her younger sister made her the one to root for.
Deleteahh I see. yeah, I was intimidated. not that I was all that into Valerie though. I was more the Farah and Cheryl Tiegs poster kinda kid.
DeleteT.....M......I......
DeleteRomney would balance the budget by selling Hawaii and the Democrat-voting Pacific coast to Japan, keeping the Republican-voting inland. His reelection would be certain...
ReplyDelete