Bookworm Room

Tweet Today’s big story the new tax bill that Obama jetted off to Hawaii before signing, but that will soon (and inevitably) become the law of the land.  I don’t see any surprises.  I knew that we’d get hit hard and so we have. I gather that sequestration has now been averted, so that Obama [...]

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Tweet What do you think? I am coming to the conclusion that it’s really hard to sell such an important message in just 25 seconds.

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Tweet The movie said “if you build it, they will come it.”  More and more California businesses say, “if you tax it, we will go“: Comcast announced Tuesday that it would shutter three Northern California call centers and consolidate them into other western U.S. centers in a few months, a move that will affect as [...]

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Tweet Well, Romney nicely pulled the rug out from under the Progressives/Democrats when he released all of his tax information.  This is a relief to me, because I was getting sick and tired of seeing my liberal Facebook friends repeat ad nauseum nasty statements about those missing (per Harry Reid, “unpaid”) taxes.  Turns out that, [...]

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Tweet I was driving along in the car and, suddenly, the phrase “Roe v. Wade” popped into my head.  In 1973, the Supreme Court waded into what should have been a state-by-state legislative matter, and created the most vicious 39 year fight in America since the Civil War.  One side found the decision completely invalid, [...]

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Tweet The Supreme Court opinion on ObamaCare runs to 193 pages.  It is the size of a book, only more boring than any book anyone would ever want to read — and that is true despite the fact that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the worst writer on the court, didn’t write it.  I’ve been making a [...]

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Tweet DQ raise very important points about the power of language. The examples of “austerity” and “stimulus” certainly need to be addressed. But, let me address another problematic term: “government spending”. Far too many people seem to equate government spending (syn. taxes, benefits, welfare, rebates, investments, stimuli, grants, outlays, funding, etc.) with “free” money. All [...]

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Tweet Students, not normally a personally wealthy group, are all for redistributing other people’s money.  Apparently, though, they draw the line at redistributing the fruits of their own labors: The next step is to get the students to listen to Jon Lovitz’s F-Bomb laden rant and understand that, whether we’re talking grades or money, it [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet This seemed timely, very timely:

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet If you’re on the ball, this week you have the opportunity to bid on a great sounding book, get an iPad, and help Soldier’s Angels. Everyone’s wondering why multiple New Yorkers just walked by as a good Samaritan bled to death on the sidewalk in front of them.  The intelligentsia has jumped on the [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet A friend emailed me with a question about an initiative poised for California’s November ballot, called the “Simple Majority” initiative.  I’ll let the Wall Street Journal explain: Two groups are pushing ballot initiatives they say would purge that chaos from Sacramento’s budget process. A bipartisan group, California Forward, is pushing a reform to let [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet I don’t know if it’s a local, state or federal tax, but when I go into a restaurant that provides both eat-in and take-out services, I always order take-out, regardless of whether I plan to sit at one of their tables or hit the road.  Why?  Because the government imposes a tax on food [...]

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Tweet The Chronicle was always first in line for the Obama slobber fest, but the bloom is apparently wearing off of that well-drooled upon rose too.  Today, the Chron has a front page story vigorously attack the myriad accounting errors on the administration’s boastful website about its economic chops: Nine months after President Obama promised [...]

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Tweet Yes, it is old news now that Tim Geithner and a whole lot of other Obama officials forgot to pay their taxes.  Nevertheless, when I heard this monologue that Steve Martin did on Saturday Night Live back in 1977, I just had to include it here.  It’s perfect: You . . . can be [...]

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Tweet The UC regents voted for a steep increase in tuition.   Some have pointed to the unedifying spectacle of whining middle class students taking to the streets to protest the tuition increase, since they prefer to have California’s working class, most of whom will not attend the school, bear the financial burden.  Although I agree [...]

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Tweet The Daily Mail has the data to prove what we all knew:  a political party that shifts the tax burden to less than 50% of the population, while leaving more than half the population dependent on government largesse, wins in perpetuity (or until the country implodes, whichever comes first).

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