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 [...]

12 Comments »

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 [...]

6 Comments »

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 [...]

18 Comments »

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 [...]

69 Comments »

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 [...]

31 Comments »

This seemed timely, very timely:

4 Comments »

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, [...]

10 Comments »

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 usual [...]

25 Comments »

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 [...]

10 Comments »

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 legislators [...]

2 Comments »

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 [...]

6 Comments »

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 [...]

2 Comments »

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 that’s [...]

7 Comments »

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 that [...]

5 Comments »

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 a [...]

2 Comments »

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 in [...]

11 Comments »

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).

7 Comments »

The Marin IJ reports that almost $3,000,000 in stimulus money Americans will help the public school district in Ross, California: Ross School has won the federal stimulus fund lottery. School officials learned Friday they would receive a $2.85 million school construction bond tax credit as part of the federal stimulus bill – a credit Superintendent [...]

10 Comments »

With his typical clarity, Karl Rove explains that it is impossible for President Obama to stick to his “no new taxes” promises if he continues on this ruinous path of government spending: The campaign team is intent upon protecting a pledge driven by its 2008 campaign polls: Mr. Obama promised never to raise taxes on [...]

No Comments »

If you are a young lawyer, struggling to learn what a non-responsive answer really looks like, you can’t do better than this question-and-answer session between Jake Tapper and Presidential press secretary Robert Gibbs.  If Gibbs were any slicker, he’d just ooze right out of the room: TAPPER:  Robert, in terms of what Geithner and Summers [...]

6 Comments »

In just three paragraphs, Charles Krauthammar explains all of the problems with the health care reform the President so desperately wants passed by August: President Obama premised the need for reform on the claim that medical costs are destroying the economy. True. But now we learn — surprise! — that universal coverage increases costs. The [...]

2 Comments »

Do you remember the words in my post title?  I sure do, and I wasn’t even very politically aware then.  That was George Bush, Sr., making a promise to the American people:  “Read my lips:  No new taxes.”  He broke that promise. It looks as if Barack Obama is readying himself to break that promise [...]

9 Comments »

The cat’s out of the bag now, and it’s clear that the Democrats and Obama are planning on destroying small businesses in America.  This is no surprise, of course, given that small business — entrepreneurship, independence and individualism — is the antithesis of a government run marketplace: In the middle of a recession and with [...]

9 Comments »

In his most recent article at the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove explains in great detail how Barack Obama told quite obvious lies about the stimulus numbers, only to pretend now that he didn’t really mean what he said.  (That’s the lying pattern I’ve told you about.)  The American people were good and fooled.  The [...]

6 Comments »

Rep. Michele Bachmann has set up an online petition in which you can add your name to the list of people who want Congress to stop funneling money to ACORN.

No Comments »