Bookworm Room

Victor Davis Hanson hits it out of the park with his post explaining why higher taxes are not the answer.  Some of his twelve reasons are better than others, but all are worthy of your consideration.  This is my favorite of the twelve, but I think you’ll like them all: 2) Inequality? Liberals reply that [...]

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Sadie got this in an email and posted it as a comment.  It’s too good, though, not to get wider play.  The beer theory of taxes explains just about everything that’s wrong with a system that drives away the wealth: THE TAX SYSTEM EXPLAINED IN BEER Suppose that every day, ten men go out for [...]

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Last night was back-to-school night at my daughter’s new high school.  I was deeply impressed.  The facility is beautiful; the classrooms are clean, bright and well-maintained; the teachers are engaging; the test scores are over-the-top; and the expensive extras (fancy computers, lab equipment, etc.) are all in place.  My daughter loves her new school.  All [...]

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Zombie begins to take seriously those who call for radical changes to our taxation system:  Why not let those who demand ever higher taxes, especially for themselves (Buffet, Trump, etc.), have the opportunity to do precisely that?  You should read Zombie’s entire post but, in the meantime, you can enjoy the revised Form 1040 that [...]

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One of life’s truisms is that, on the whole, renters don’t take care of property as well as owners do.   Why should they?  They have no investment in the structure.  If they don’t mind the aesthetics of a scuffed baseboard, stained carpet or dirty walls, it doesn’t matter.  When they leave the property, they leave [...]

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The administration’s newest scheme to slow the recovery and, just coincidentally I’m sure, to put monitoring ankle bracelets on all citizens:  Make all possible roads toll roads, and mandate that drivers have toll reading devices on their cars (which are, after all, tracking devices): The White House last week began circulating its legislative proposal for [...]

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Is our democracy germinating the seeds of its own destruction? Alexis de Toqueville warned, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” That day has come. It is not yet gone. Democracy  in ancient Athens lasted about 250 years. We in the United [...]

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San Francisco is definitely up in the top five when it comes to “most Progressively governed cities in America.”  No surprise, then, that the city’s finances are in a shambles.  What is a surprise is the fact that, faced with a looming budget collapse, the City has suddenly discovered capitalist incentives:  it’s offering the big [...]

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On the “real me” facebook, a “joke” is making the rounds: ‎”A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, ‘Watch out [...]

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The U.S. is already bankrupt

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Are the wheels coming off the bus, or are we witnessing the most brilliant, and dangerous, political theater in our life times? Here’s what it looked like a few days ago:  the President caved on maintaining the current tax rate, leaving Republicans triumphant.  In exchange, it seemed as if the Republicans were extending unemployment benefits, [...]

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Two interesting things rolled across my desk today, interesting because they address the same topic — dependence on Big Government — but reach diametrically opposite conclusions.  The first is a Dennis Prager column that examines why American conservatives are happier than American liberals.  This isn’t just Dennis’ opinion, by the way.  Instead, several recent polls [...]

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I blogged earlier this week about the fact that San Francisco, which is broke, was trying to find $137 million so that the feds would provide it with almost $1 billion dollars in funds to build a 1.7 mile subway tunnel.  Federal money, of course, is your money.  This is not money belonging to beleaguered [...]

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Many of us view the IRS with a certain amount of suspicion.  Being fair-minded people, we know that all societies need some mechanism to collect revenue to pay for basic government services (with the fault lying with Congress if those revenue demands are excessive).  We also know that our family and friends may work for [...]

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This seemed timely, very timely:

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In my life, if I’m running at a deficit, I cannot demand more money from my boss.  The only thing I can do is cut my spending.  In the world of government, which is running at a deficit, the fed demands more money from its boss (that would be, collectively, the taxpayers who are constrained [...]

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The British government has proposed stealth communism:  all paychecks go to the government first, which then doles out to the wage earner whatever amount the government feels is the wage earner’s due.  Think about it.  As Pat Sajak wrote yesterday, withholding is bad enough, because it deprives the worker of a sense of ownership over [...]

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Americans, if you still think elections don’t count, and that all that’s needed in the White House is a metrosexual beloved by the New York media, think again.  We are all going to be very deeply affected by the changes coming down the pike this January.  Higher taxes, hidden taxes, coercive taxes — you name [...]

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One of the things that I try to understand is the Great Divide between today’s Liberals and conservatives that has left us talking past one another on policy issues. Frankly, I have concluded that discussion with Liberals is often futile because we attribute different meanings to words and concepts. One of those concepts, I suspect, [...]

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I was complaining to Don Quixote today about the huge amount Mr. Bookworm and I pay in taxes, an amount that will only increase come January, when the Bush tax cuts expire.  I have, of course, a principled opposition to these high taxes. I firmly believe that government does better when it skims a small [...]

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This is the cozy mansion New York Times‘ columnist Tom Friedman calls home: Judging by its size, it probably has a carbon footprint roughly equal to a small nation’s: As the July edition of the Washingtonian Magazine notes, Friedman lives in “a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel just [...]

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Obama may have been making a fool of himself with baseball, whether throwing a ball badly, misspeaking the name of an American institution, or refusing to admit that no, he didn’t know the team line-up, but Jonah Goldberg , distinguishing himself from Obama, hit a home run today.  Admittedly, the home run didn’t actually have [...]

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Yesterday I wrote a long post about the fact that the abortion debate, at least on the pro-choice side, ignores social and medical advances that should make it a very different debate from the one that led to Roe v. Wade.  I think this is an important conversation, because of the fact that ObamaCare would [...]

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Just in case he actually runs for office, the Leftist media is already planning one line of attack against Glenn Beck.  They’re thinking that they can nail him on taxes, just as he went after so many Democrats who were found, wittingly or not, to have underpaid their taxes: No one has been less forgiving [...]

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