Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Fiscal Cliff Creates Problems That Don't Faze Obama
Is Barack Obama bluffing when he threatens to go over the fiscal cliff if Republicans refuse to agree to higher tax rates on high earners? Some analysts think so. Keith Hennessey, a former top staffer for the Bush White House and Senate Republicans and a veteran of budget negotiations, argues that Obama's whole second term would be blighted if he allows the fiscal cliff tax increases and sequestration budget cuts to take place next month. His argument is based on three assumptions. One is that going over the fiscal cliff would trigger a sharp recession and a weak economy thereafter. Many economists agree. Some disagree. I leave that argument to them. Hennessey's second assumption is that Obama has other second term policy goals -- immigration reform, cap-and-trade legislation, tax reform -- that would be difficult to achieve if he breaks sharply with Republicans.
Let the Real Fat Cats Pay Their Fair Share
Who exactly were the rich who, as the president said, were not "paying their fair share"? The rapper Jay-Z (net worth: nearly $500 million)? The actor Johnny Depp (2011 income: $50 million)? Neither seems to have heard the president's earlier warning that, "at a certain point you've made enough money." Could both zillionaires simply have quit making money at $10 million -- and thereby given their poorer audiences a break on ticket prices? With all the talk of raising taxes on the supposedly conservative wannabes who make $250,000 per year, why not additionally levy a $3 surcharge on discretionary tickets for movies, concerts and sporting events to "spread the wealth" from multimillionaires? That way, LeBron James (approximate annual earnings: $53 million) or Oliver Stone (net worth: approximately $50 million) might at last begin to "level the playing field."
No Cliff Calamity: That's What Stocks Are Correctly Predicting
Despite all the media hullabaloo about the fiscal cliff and a potential recession if none of the Bush tax cuts are extended, stock markets have behaved calmly throughout this whole period. I'm going to guess that stocks, in their wisdom, are correctly sniffing that there will be no calamitous falling off the cliff. By that I mean there will be no $500 billion tax hike, which would be an economy killer. Instead, after speaking with prominent Republican House and Senate members, I have come to believe the following: The GOP knows that Obama has the upper hand in this post-election battle. Therefore, they are preparing a strategic retreat.
Save the Middle Class ... and Everyone Else
Washington -- William McGurn, the esteemed Wall Street Journal columnist and soon-to-be editor of the editorial page of the New York Post, has made an interesting observation about the fabulous Bush tax cuts that are about to lapse. They amount to a substantial sum of money for a middle-class family. For the middle class it will be a big deal if they disappear. President Barack Obama has portrayed the Bush tax cuts as a rich person's tax cut, but now he is portraying them as a huge tax break for the middle class. Of a sudden he says do not let them lapse! Instead raise taxes on the wealthy!
No Entitlements
SINGAPORE -- While the U.S. unemployment rate "dropped" to 7.7 percent last month -- a figure even The Washington Post acknowledged was due "...in large part because the labor force fell by 350,000..." -- here in this modern and prosperous city-state of slightly more than 5 million people, unemployment is practically nonexistent. A taxi driver tells me, "Everyone here works." With unemployment at an astonishingly low 1.9 percent, he is nearly right. In part, this is due to a work ethic that seems to be in the genes here. But there is something else at work that should astound Washington politicians struggling with expensive "entitlement" programs and with those who receive them.
Why We're Near the Cliff
WASHINGTON -- If you have worked hard for five decades, made pots of money and now want to squander it all in Las Vegas on wine, women and baccarat, go ahead. If, however, you harbor the anti-social desire -- stigmatized as such by America's judgmental tax code -- to bequeath your wealth to your children, this would be an excellent month to die. Absent a congressional fix before Jan. 1, the death tax, which is 35 percent on estates above $5 million, reverts to 55 percent on those above $1 million. This is one of many tax changes that could be triggered. The Hoover Institution's Tammy M. Frisby, writing in Policy Review, says that -- not counting temporary disaster relief tax breaks -- 31, 56 and 37 provisions of the tax code expired in 2010, 2011 and 2012, respectively. "The country," she says, "is trying to create sustained economic growth using temporary tax laws." It is not working.
Over the Cliff We Go....Whee!
The only consolation to being in my 70s is that I got to spend most of my life in a pre-Obama America, and probably won't have to spend too many years in the post-Obama one. I hate to be a gloomy Gus, but prior to the election, I wrote that the nation could probably survive another four years of this schmuck, but what it couldn't survive is an electorate that would give him another four years in which to do his dirty work. By now, even Obama must be embarrassed to keep blaming Bush. But being the sort of egotist who can never acknowledge his own miserable failings, I fully expect he will now start blaming Biden. Speaking of Biden, it's often said of vice-presidents that they provide the president with more protection than the Secret Service. But for my part, I would actually prefer to see Biden in the Oval Office. At least, thanks to his gift for malaprops, he could be counted on to keep us laughing.
Freedom From Union Compulsion
Republican legislators voted Tuesday to make Michigan the 24th state in the nation to protect an essential civil liberty: the right to work for a living without being required to join or pay money to a labor union. Governor Rick Snyder signed the new laws -- one dealing with private-sector employees, one covering government employment -- a few hours later, hailing them as "pro-worker and pro-Michigan."
Those Pesky Mayans
I've got nothing for today. DO NOT READ THIS. If you've been awake for anything more than 13 minutes, some toothy, giggly anchor dressed in a sleeveless dress on your local news channel has already told you that today is 12-12-12 and he then added that the next time there can be three numbers the same in a date will be January 1, 2101. Of course, there won't BE an 01-01-01 because why? Because the end of days is 12-21-12 which is almost a palindrome. More to the point, it is also my 66th birthday.
Union Violence and Mob Mayhem in Michigan
Conservative victory over an unprecedented Big Labor power-grab.
Obama's America Will Become Detroit
President Barack Obama travelled to Michigan this week and made his case for class war in defense of the welfare state. We need to take more money from the rich, he said, or schools will not be able to afford books, students will not be able to afford college, and disabled children will not get health care. "Our economic success has never come from the top down," said Obama. "It comes from the middle out.It comes from the bottom up." Obama spoke these words a few miles from Detroit -- the reductio ad absurdum of his argument.
Welcome to the Thugocracy
"I'm in the top two percent," said Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, this week on CNBC. "Right now, I'm paying 45 percent of my total income in income taxes ... You tell me, what's fair about that when medieval serfs pay 25 percent, I'm paying half? I don't care what the majority voted to do, they don't have a right to steal my money just because they vote for it." But according to most Americans, they do. And that's the problem. As America racks up more debt than God has ever seen on this earth, Barack Obama prepares to right all wrongs by taxing the top 2 percent of income earners in America. What right does he have to their money? Well, says Obama, it's only fair and just -- they make the most money, so they should foot a disproportionate burden of the tax load.
Not Enough Liberal Bias in Loony Land
How could a liberal actually be upset with the liberal media for their coverage of the 2012 presidential election? Well, Daniel Froomkin of The Huffington Post (formerly of the Washington Post) is furious. His complaint carried the headline "How the Mainstream Press Bungled the Single Biggest Story of the 2012 Campaign". What would that story be? Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth. Head Scratch Time. Who in the media (set ital) didn't (end ital) identify the Grand Old Party as burdened, infected and/or poisoned by their conservatives?
'There Will Be Blood': Union Violence in the Age of Obama
Not so many moons ago, President Obama urged us all to "make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds." He Who Heals advocated "a more civil and honest public discourse" in the wake of the January 2011 Tucson massacre. As usual, though, the White House has granted Big Labor bullies a permanent waiver from the lofty edicts it issues to everyone else. This week, menacing union goons unleashed threats, profanity and punches in Michigan, which is now poised to become a "right-to-work" state. Obama met the initial outbreak of violence with the same response he's given to every other union outbreak of violence under his reign: dead silence.
Our Government-Created Financial Crisis
Suppose you saw a building on fire. Would you seek counsel from the arsonist who set it ablaze for advice on how to put it out? You say, "Williams, you'd have to be a lunatic to do that!" But that's precisely what we've done: turned to the people who created our fiscal crisis to fix it. I have never read a better account of our doing just that than in John A. Allison's new book, "The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure." Allison is the former CEO of Branch Banking and Trust, the nation's 10th largest bank. He assembles evidence that shows that our financial crisis, followed by the Great Recession, was caused by Congress, the Federal Reserve, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and was helped along by the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama White Houses.
Taxing the Poor
With all the talk about taxing the rich, we hear very little talk about taxing the poor. Yet the marginal tax rate on someone living in poverty can sometimes be higher than the marginal tax rate on millionaires. While it is true that nearly half the households in the country pay no income tax at all, the apparently simple word "tax" has many complications that can be a challenge for even professional economists to untangle. If you define a tax as only those things that the government chooses to call a tax, you get a radically different picture from what you get when you say, "If it looks like a tax, acts like a tax and takes away your resources like a tax, then it's a tax."
Smoking Pot and Tying the Knot
Last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed for the first time to take on the issue of gay marriage. No matter how it rules in the two cases it will hear next spring, polling data suggest it is only a matter of time before legal recognition of same-sex unions is the norm throughout the country. Something similar is happening with marijuana, which became legal in Washington last week and in Colorado on Monday. With both pot and gay marriage, familiarity is breeding tolerance. The cases before the Supreme Court deal with popular reactions against gay marriage: the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a 1996 law that barred the federal government from recognizing state-licensed gay marriages, and Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot initiative that amended California's Constitution to eliminate same-sex couples' right to marry, which the California Supreme Court had recognized that year. But something interesting happened after those measures passed: Surveys now indicate that most Americans support gay marriage.
The GOP -- Not a Club for Christians
In the scramble to make the GOP more diverse, a lot of people are looking at Asian Americans, whom many believe are a natural constituency for the party. I would love it if Asian Americans converted en masse to the Republican Party, but the challenge for Republicans is harder than many appreciate. President Obama did spectacularly well with Asian Americans, garnering nearly three-quarters of their vote. This runs counter to a lot of conventional wisdom on both the left and the right. On average, Asian American family income is higher and poverty is lower than it is for non-Latino whites. Entrepreneurship, family cohesion and traditional values all run strong among Asian Americans, and reliance on government runs weak.
Government Gone Bad
Politicians claim they make our lives better by passing laws. But laws rarely improve life. They go wrong. Unintended consequences are inevitable. Most voters don't pay enough attention to notice. They read headlines. They watch the Rose Garden signing ceremonies and hear the pundits declare that progress was made. Bipartisanship! Something got *done.* We assume a problem was solved. Intuition tells us that government is in the problem-solving business, and so the more laws passed, the better off we are. The possibility that *fewer* laws could leave us better off is hard to grasp. Kids visiting Washington don't ask their congressmen, "What laws did you repeal?" It's always, "What did you pass?" And so they pass and pass -- a thousand pages of proposed new rules each week -- and for every rule, there's an unintended consequence, or several.
Using Facts to Fight
The AGW Agenda is on a major offensive now. The election, Hurricane Sandy, the warm start to winter in the U.S. (that will switch around) and the latest World Climate Conference, has lead to a barrage of disinformation. Their strategy is to come out with strongly worded ideas on impending doom, use the current weather if it's warm (or there was a major storm) and tell the public this is proof. Through it all, the facts remain that the science, economics and the social high ground is on the side of those that don't believe in human induced global warming, for the economies of the world would prosper most with all forms of energy being used, as billions of people are being sentenced to a life of little hope with no change to their fate in sight.