Discover the Network

SEE HERE I have not investigated this much but a friend of mine sent it to me and I took a quick look. If you're researching who is connected to whom this might very well be your starting point.

A Step In the Right Direction

Ken Cuccinelli sent around breaking news: In a decision released this morning, Virginia survived the federal government's motion to dismiss. This is the first of many hurdles we will be facing - but this is a huge victory nonetheless. This is just a first step, but an essential one.

SEE HERE for the decision. It's 32 pages long.

Higher Taxes, Lower Revenue: Stupid In the Extreme

SEE HERE The economy has long since passed the critical point of the Laffer Curve where increasing taxes decrease revenue. (See world's largest Laffer Curve at left) There are lots of reasons for this. The fundamental problem is that the average person in the street things in short term linear terms about income that is simply money paid for work. This is a bad model for the economy as a whole. Work is more complex then a paycheck. Work is part of a complex economic reality of capital, rents, employment, organization, production, and consumption. Money works somewhat like oil in a machine. It makes it easier to exchange things. But it also conceals the underlying reality.

The wealthy are not wealthy primarily because they have high incomes. Indeed, often enough they don't have particularly high incomes. It is the big corporations which often had highly remunerated chief executives that give the impression that there are many high incomes. That's partly because they are hired managers and not owner creators for the most part.

The reality is that the majority of the wealthy are wealthy because they have created organizations that employ people. They are the risk takers and the entrepreneurs. They generate the vast majority of the new jobs. If you make their life more uncertain they take precautions which contract the economy. Higher taxes hit your pocketbook in two ways if they are levied uniformly. They reduce your income directly and because of economic shrinkage they cause other things to become more scarce and more expensive so that reduces the availability of jobs and tends to drive the prices of things up. Particularly high rates on the rich simply cause the rich to quit working when their income approaches the tax threshold. This ripples down once more in shrinking economic effects, loss of jobs, loss of productive work. The result is that instead of the treasury getting more income, their income actually shrinks.

The opposite effect happens when the tax rates are lowered. The economy expands, prices tend to fall and employment expands and government revenue actually increases. Check it out: THE LAFFER CURVE This is also a worthwhile reference: SEE HERE This document concluded:
The Reagan tax cuts, like similar measures enacted in the 1920s and 1960s, showed that reducing excessive tax rates stimulates growth, reduces tax avoidance, and can increase the amount and share of tax payments generated by the rich. High top tax rates can induce counterproductive behavior and suppress revenues, factors that are usually missed or understated in government static revenue analysis. Furthermore, the key assumption of static revenue analysis that economic growth is not affected by tax changes is disproved by the experience of previous tax reduction programs. There is little reason to expect static revenue analysis to evaluate the economic or distributional effects of current tax reform proposals much better than it evaluated the Reagan tax program 15 years ago.

Demagoguer In Chief (DIC) New Title for Shameless

SEE HERE Demagoguer In Chief may be up a notch from NIC (Narcissist In Chief) and it is after all the one thing the president does well, talk. He talks ingratiatingly and smoothly if he's been properly prepped. If he's planning to read his talk on a teleprompter he usually isn't all that well prepped and if the teleprompter breaks he can be pretty funny. But the idea that he's shameless ... I wonder ... does that imply that he has a concept of shame and he does it intentionally, or does it mean that he has no concept of shame because he's fundamentally immoral? There's a big difference. It might also mean that he's just a set of vocal cords attached to a short term memory. He says whatever sounds nice and will get you to do what he wants. He resembles Bill Clinton a lot in that way. It is time to return integrity to American government. It is no easy task. We've been without it for so long that most of us can hardly remember what it looks like.

Evil or Just Stupid? I'm Inclined to Go for Evil

SEE HERE The rule of law is what separates the civilized from savages. Today Bob Livingston makes the case that the current administration, by no means unique, is ignoring the requirements of the rule of law by selective enforcement, or I suppose more properly, non-enforcement. The conscious and intentional pursuit of this strategy is to embrace a form of evil. Capriciousness in law is no law at all. We've been watching and standing by as the Constitution is suborned for well nigh a hundred years. It is not as if we have not had plenty of notice. So when we finally discover that the velvet covered fist of government has forged chains to enslave us, it will be too late to say "But we didn't see it coming."

The View from NYC Hardly Middle America

A case study on "the narrative."  Note the spins involved.

Another Case of Corruption?

SEE HERE This whole earmark thing simply reeks of corruption. Here's SC congressman Clyburn who apparently has a long history of this kind of stuff, he's into the Federal knickers for $50 million for a transportation center based at his alma mater $25 million of which apparently has just evaporated. Now that takes at least a certain amount of slight of hand. Although the experts seem to be able to make billions evaporate insofar as the stimulus money keeps shrinking with no discernible stimulus. So where did the $25 million go.