-
John Kerry was unwittingly honest on the Senate floor:
I've supported many tax cuts over the years, and there are tax cuts in this proposal. But a tax cut is non-targeted.
And Mary Katherine Ham noticed just how well that little snippet captures the essence of 21st-century American liberalism.If you put a tax cut into the hands of a business or family, there's no guarantee that they're going to invest that or invest it in America.
They're free to go invest anywhere that they want if they choose to invest.
Indeed, people with their own hard-earned money in their own pockets are free to spend, save, invest, or not wherever they please. Kerry betrays the fear that haunts every good liberal-- that the American people won't spend their money on exactly what good liberals would spend it on. Good liberals must, therefore, advocate for forcibly relieving the American people of the better part of a trillion dollars of their own money to fund things like STD education, welfare programs, and water parks.
Plus which, you get to pat yourself on the back for saving the American people from the only sin liberals believe in anymore: variously called "selfishness", "greed", or sometimes "minding your own business." -
Libertarian-tilting people looking for an answer to "Well, what would
you do?" will want to check out Harvard's Jeff Miron's article
(from an unlikely host: CNN). He proposes "a stimulus package
libertarians can endorse." The major points:
- Repeal the Corporate Income Tax
- Increase Carbon Taxes While Lowering Marginal Tax Rates
- Moderate the Growth of Entitlements
- Eliminate Wasteful Spending
- Withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan
- Limit Union Power
- Renew the U.S. Commitment to Free Trade
- Expand Legal Immigration
- Stop Bailing out Businesses that Took on Too Much Risk
Details at the link. Being an impure libertarian, I have problems with the "withdraw" recommendation, and, whatever its merits, the immigration item is unlikely to get much support, at least in our immediate high-unemployment future. You can read more on from Miron on killing the corporate income tax at Reason.
But everything both (a) deserves to be at least seriously considered, and (b) won't be, in the current political climate. (CNN link via Greg Mankiw.)
-
Skip at GraniteGrok is your go-to guy for
displeasure at Judd Gregg's nomination for Commerce Secretary. One
immediate result is that Gregg has chosen to recuse himself from voting
and discussion on the "stimulus" package, depriving the people who
elected him of representation with his (usual) voice of fiscal sanity.
-
Via Power Line, an amusing correction
from the New York Times:
A chart last Sunday with an article about a generational shift in the new Senate misidentified the home state of Senator Jeanne Shaheen and former Senator John E. Sununu. They are from New Hampshire, not Nebraska.
A mistake we have yet to make at Pun Salad, but then we are not Professional Journalists. -
A couple of Southern Illinois University links:
-
Margaret Soltan, the University Diarist, points
out and quotes extensively from an article that describes
the connections between political contributions to everyone's
favorite ex-Governor, Rod Blaogojevich, and appointment
to the SIU Board of Trustees.
-
And SIU (the Carbondale campus) has been given the dishonor
of being selected as owning the Foundation of Individual
Rights in Education's Speech Code of the Month.
-
Margaret Soltan, the University Diarist, points
out and quotes extensively from an article that describes
the connections between political contributions to everyone's
favorite ex-Governor, Rod Blaogojevich, and appointment
to the SIU Board of Trustees.
URLs du Jour
2009-02-08
Robert Frost on the Stimulus
So then you get the argument, well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill. What do you think a stimulus is? (Laughter and applause.) That's the whole point. No, seriously. (Laughter.) That's the point. (Applause.)
Robert Frost:
Pod of the Milkweed
Calling all
butterflies of every race
From source unknown but from no special
place
They ever will return to all their lives,
Because unlike the
bees they have no hives,
The milkweed brings up to my very
door
The theme of wanton waste in peace and war
As it has never
been to me before.
And so it seems a flower's coming out
That
should if not be talked then sung about.
The countless wings that
from the infinite
Make such a noiseless tumult over it
Do no doubt
with their color compensate
For what the drab weed lacks of the
ornate.
For drab it is its fondest must admit.
And yes, although
it is a flower that flows
With milk and honey, it is bitter
milk,
As anyone who ever broke its stem
And dared to taste the
wound little knows.
It tastes as if it might be opiate.
But
whatsoever else it may secrete,
Its flowers' distilled honey is so
sweet.
It makes the butterflied intemperate.
There is no slumber
in its juice for them
One knocks another off from where he
clings.
They knock the dyestuff off each other's wings—
With
thirst in hunger to the point of lust.
They raise in their
intemperance a cloud
Of mingled butterfly and flower dust
That
hangs perceptibly above the scene.
In being so sweet to these
ephemerals
The sober weed has managed to contrive
In our three
hundred days and sixty five
One day too sweet for beings to
survive.
Many shall come away as struggle worn
And spent and
dusted off their regalia
To which at daybreak they were freshly
born
As after one-of-them's proverbial failure
From having beaten
all day long in vain
Against the wrong side of a window
pane.
But waste was of the essence of the scheme.
And all the
good they did for man or god
To all those flowers they passionately
trod
Was leave as their posterity one pod
With an inheritance of
restless dream.
He hangs on upside down with talon feet
In an
inquisitive position odd
As any Guatemalan parakeet.
Something
eludes him. Is it food to eat?
Or some dim secret of the good of
waste?
He almost has it in his talon clutch.
Where have those
flowers and butterflies all gone
That science may have staked the
future on?
He seems to say the reason why so much
Should come to
nothing must be fairly
faced.*
* And shall be in due course.
Emphasis added, probably unnecessarily.