"Fair Share" Bunkum

Over the past few years I've come to loath the term “fair share”, particularly when it comes to income taxes. Both Democrats and Republicans have used this term, though it means different things to each party. Partisan kind of guy I am, I'm going to focus more the Democrat's definition of the term.

We've been hearing more and more Democratic rhetoric claiming they're going to make sure “the rich” pay their fair share of income taxes. That's all well and good. But what exactly does “fair share” mean? For that fact, what does “the rich” mean? First, let's take a look at what the rich are paying in income taxes.

...the top 1% of taxpayers, those who earn above $388,806, paid 40% of all income taxes in 2006, the highest share in at least 40 years. The top 10% in income, those earning more than $108,904, paid 71%. Barack Obama says he's going to cut taxes for those at the bottom, but that's also going to be a challenge because Americans with an income below the median paid a record low 2.9% of all income taxes, while the top 50% paid 97.1%. Perhaps he thinks half the country should pay all the taxes to support the other half.

So the top 10% earners pay 71% of all income taxes collected and those making less than the median income level only pay 2.9%. The only way taxes on “the rich” could be increased without having an adverse effect on the economy is to redefine “the rich” as anyone with a job. Or maybe the plan is to create a confiscatory tax plan to soak even more capital out of the economy. That will work, right?

It's been tried in other countries before and all it managed to do was cause a flight of capital and a major downturn in their economies. Just ask the British what their economy was like in the late 70's into the late 80's. Top tax rates were 98% and everyone with money found ways to move it out of the UK in order to prevent the government from confiscating their wealth. The economy collapsed, the jobless rate rose to levels not seen since the Great Depression, factories closed, and countless people were forced onto welfare.

One of the biggest problems I've found most Democrats wishing higher tax rates tend to have is that they believe the myth that wealth is a zero sum condition, that wealth is finite. If someone got richer it must be because someone else became poorer, as if the rich stole it from the poor. That may have been true when wealth was based upon the possession of precious metals and other limited specie. However, those days are long gone. That still doesn't stop them from wanting to “take it back” and return it to the people from whom the rich supposedly stole it.

Wealth is something that can expand to include more and more people, lifting everyone out of poverty. Or it is something that can be taken away by the state, reducing everyone to a state of poverty. (At times I wonder if that's exactly what the Democrats want. If nothing else it gives the government total control over everyone's lives. Their philosophy seems to be that government is the answer to all problems, even the ones that government cause. It's a shame that government is so clueless and stupid, incapable of running anyone's life better than people can run their own. We've seen enough examples of that throughout history.)

In any case, the claim that the rich aren't paying their fair share is correct. I won't disagree with that statement because it's true. That's because the rich are paying more than their fair share. Even the IRS says so. They shouldn't be penalized by being forced to pay even more based upon the ignorance of those in Congress and those seeking even higher office.

Note: I actually wrote this Monday night, saved it, but never posted it. I guess I could blame a mind half-asleep.

Thoughts On A Sunday

It's been an interesting few days around here, with thunderstorms and even a few funnel clouds making appearances during the afternoons. It has made any idea of time out on the lake a non-starter. The idea of being out in the middle of the lake during a thunderstorm is not one that fills me with the warm and fuzzies. I've ridden out more than one storm in a boat and it was never a pleasant experience.

Maybe free time and better weather will allow us some time out on Lake Winnipesaukee on Monday.

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I saw this linked on a number of other blogs and I finally got around to reading it. All I can say is it's a good thing their story aired on radio and not TV. If it had, there's no way the two women in the story would receive one bit of sympathy for their plight.

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The fact that more people are shopping online to save money and gas doesn't surprise me in the least. I know the WP household has been doing more online shopping and less time going to brick-and-mortar stores.

Even more about online shopping here.

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At least one celebrity environmentalist talks the talk and walks the walk, unlike Al Gore and the rest of the Gulfstream environmentalists.

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Michael Gerson wonders whether the environment will survive the environmentalists? The question also brings to mind this characterization of Al Gore. All I can say is that it caused chills to run up and down my spine.

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Are Barack Obama's campaign rhetoric so lacking in facts as to make his promises meaningless? Thomas Sowell things so.

As the hypnotic mantra of "change" is repeated endlessly, few people even raise the question of whether what few specifics we hear represent any real change, much less a change for the better.

Raising taxes, increasing government spending and demonizing business? That is straight out of the New Deal of the 1930s.

It also sounds like a repeat of the Democrat mantra of the days of LBJ's Great Society. Do we really want to go there?

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Just who the heck does Barack Obama think he is?

Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself. There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

He sure as heck isn't JFK or Ronald Reagan, that's for sure.

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It appears Hollywood is incapable of making a good Iraq War movie. Could it be because the message Hollywood is sending is one of defeat and psychosis?

As one commenter reminded us:

There is a quote attributed to Sam Goldwyn,the classic (successful) producer of Hollywood’s own Golden Age:

“If you want to send them a message, call Western Union.”

Still true today.

(H/T Instapundit)

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Is the EPA making a bid to take over the country? With their latest Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, they announced they will make CO₂ a regulated pollutant. How the hell will they do that? Will they need to eliminate all sources of CO₂, including people? Hasn't anyone told them CO₂ is a necessary part of our atmosphere? Obviously not.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the rain doesn't want to go away, the EPA wants to regulate your respiration, and where we're still hoping to get out on the lake...sometime soon.

A Nation Of Whiners Indeed

Former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas may have been impolitic when he called Americans a “nation of whiners”, but he was actually pretty close to the mark. For a nation that has the kind of wealth across the board never before seen in history, too many of us bitch and moan about it not being enough.

When it comes to the meltdowns in the financial industry, those meltdowns caused by imprudent choices by investors and blindness to greed rather than fact by the financial institutions, the call for bailouts is heard first and foremost. As I've stated more than once, when the investment bankers gambled on the housing bubble and lost, it's their tough luck. There's no way the taxpayers should make good on their failures, their mistakes, their lack of foresight.

As Jen Rubin said during Saturday's Meet the New Press, channeling Larry Kudlow, “No one wants to believe that failure is an option anymore.” It's one of the reasons we keep hearing about bailouts of Wall Street, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and coming soon, GM. It's a dangerous precedent being set, particularly one that removes risk from risky investments. There's no way they should be able to expect the taxpayers to “insure” their gambles. It sets us up for greater failures.

If one never knows the sting of failure, then how can one measure success? Some of the most successful people failed many times before. Their failures didn't lessen them. On the contrary, it made them more driven to succeed. But todays “whiners” seem to think failure makes them less than human, something to be avoided at all cost.

Whatever happened to the philosophy of Friedrich Hayek, the great free-market economist and Nobel Prize winner, who said the great thing about capitalism is the freedom to succeed beyond your wildest dreams, but that there is also the freedom to fail? I believe Hayek once argued that if he had to choose between success and failure, failure is more important in terms of preserving the free-market system.

“Endless” success is an illusion. It is unsustainable, even with taxpayer funded bailouts. Eventually the taxpayers will no longer be able to afford it and the whole thing collapses, creating an ever greater crisis, both financial and psychological. It's something we can't afford. The madness must stop.

So I guess I was relieved to come across a passage from President Bush’s press conference last Tuesday. A reporter asked him about bailing out banks and mortgage markets, and wondered about other entities in the economy that might be crucial, like General Motors. And President Bush said, “If your question is, ‘Should the government bailout private enterprise?’ the answer is no, it shouldn’t.” POTUS went on to say, in terms of private enterprise, that no, he doesn’t think the government ought to be involved with bailing out companies.

We'll see if the President sticks to his guns, or whether the need to prevent failure of any kind will be stronger, spurred on by the “nation of whiners.”

Another Climate Scientist Changes His Mind

While some folks have maintained I am a global warming denier (or rather, a global climate change denier), they would be wrong. I am, proud to say, an Anthropogenic Global Warming skeptic, and with good reason. My skepticism comes from too much conflicting information, where some data suggests AGW may be valid, and other data suggests natural processes. There's been far too many statements made that “the debate is over.” I beg to differ. The debate is just beginning. In fact, many skeptical climate scientists were once proponents of the AGW theory. But as more data became available, their support for AGW waned and they started looking for other causes.

One of those scientists is Dr. David Evans, a former consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office. For six years he worked collecting and analyzing data and generating computer climate models for the Australian government. The more data he reviewed, the more convinced he was that CO₂ was not the driving force behind climate change. As he put it, “As Lord Keynes famously said, 'When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?'”

There were four basic facts that convinced Dr. Evans the theory of AGW was wrong.

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

3. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980). Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the "urban heat island" effect: urban areas encroaching on thermometer stations warm the micro-climate around the thermometer, due to vegetation changes, concrete, cars, houses. Satellite data is the only temperature data we can trust, but it only goes back to 1979. NASA reports only land-based data, and reports a modest warming trend and recent cooling. The other three global temperature records use a mix of satellite and land measurements, or satellite only, and they all show no warming since 2001 and a recent cooling.

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

So data being quoted by some to support the idea of AGW either have no connection with CO₂ or are slanted in such a way to as to make it appear so.

Data that challenges AGW is being ignored or explained away as an anomaly, even though there's plenty of anomalous data being used to support the AGW theory. One of those 'anomalous' data sets shows global temperatures have been dropping since 1998, but the AGW faithful ignore it, trying to explain it away as merely a pause in the inexorable rise in temperatures. Yet solar astronomers point to a lengthy delay in the start of Sunspot Cycle 24, a signal the Sun's output has declined and may be entering a period of relative quiet after over a century of increasing sunspot activity. Earth's climate has a tendency to track sunspot activity, with long quiet periods of sunspot activity, called minimums, heralding equally long period of colder temperatures. Are we entering one of those minimums as some solar astronomers suspect?

Regardless, it would be prudent to examine all of the data available, making sure to take into account all factors that can affect the accuracy of the collected data, as mentioned by Dr. Evans. Otherwise the theory of AGW can never be adequately debated or tested.

Is Britain Doomed?

Any of you that have read this blog for any amount of time know that over the years I've spent quite a bit of time in the UK. I've almost always enjoyed my time there, whether I was visiting for business or to spend time with friends or loved ones. Like many others, I've noticed the changes taking place there. Unfortunately too many of those changes haven't been for the better.

Another person noticing the less than welcome changes is Rachel Lucas, who enlightens us with a story of the laws of decency and of criminal jurisprudence turned upside down.

When a law abiding citizen is brought before a court for her efforts to stop a bunch of young hooligans from vandalizing a World War II memorial to Britain's fallen, you know the society is in deep trouble. Instead of the miscreants being punished for their crimes, they appear to enjoy protection by the courts. As one of them said to her during one confrontation earlier in the year when she tried to prevent them from continuing their vandalizing of public property:

“You can’t touch us, we’re 15, we can do what the f*** we like.”

That's someone who needs some serious time behind the woodshed, getting acquainted with a hickory switch. I know if I had ever mouthed off to an adult like that when I was 15, I'd catch hell from every adult within earshot, and then catch even more once I got home. Those boys need some discipline. It's obvious they aren't getting any at home.

This poor woman's situation reminded me of an experience I had with the older son of my ex-fiancée about 10 years ago when we were riding the Underground (that's “subway” in American English) between her home and central London. The poor kid was being picked on and roughed up by some of the young toughs riding the same train he took daily. This day was no different except that this time I was there.

They started their taunting almost from the time they boarded the train. Then they made the mistake of trying to intimidate me. (I have to confess to a somewhat dark period in my life. Nothing all that shocking, but it taught me a lot about handing idiots like this. You see, I used to work in Boston's notorious Combat Zone when I was in my late teens, a part of town lined with strip joints and other places of ill repute. I dealt with scumbags far worse than the jerks on the train.)

I won't go into details about my less than proper public actions and not exactly polite words to the young bullies. Let's just say that they decided it would be best if they get off at the next stop and took another train. They also decided to leave my ex-fiancée's son alone from that point on. All it took was some proper discipline applied with just the right amount verbal reinforcement and the problem was solved.

If the UK doesn't get on the ball and start enforcing their proper laws, instilling discipline, trying the criminals and leaving the law abiding citizens alone, the UK will cease to exist as a civilized nation. And that would be a shame.

Return Of The Double Nickel - Part 2

Last week I wrote about Senator John Warner (R-VA) and his idea to re-impose the National Maximum Speed Limit and why it was such a bad idea. I have no idea how far his efforts to do so will go. But even if he tries and fails, there may be another way we will see the hated 55MPH speed limit make its return, and neither Congress or state governments will have anything to do with it. Instead it may make its reappearance as a regulation created by the Environmental Protection Agency.

What kind of nonsense is this? How is it they can be allowed to set speed limits on the nation's highways when they have no part in traffic regulations and laws? By using a back door.

That back door has to do with CO₂ emissions from cars and trucks. If they slow vehicles down the amount of CO₂ emissions will decrease. Never mind the fact there may be additional costs associated with the lower speed limits they have ignored, one of them being time. After all time is money and the longer it takes people or cargo to get from Point A to Point B, the more it can take its toll on the economy.

Never mind the extra cost might be minimal, there's still the idea that this course of action was decided upon by a friggin' bureaucrat rather than our duly elected representative to Congress or our state legislature. The EPA is sticking its nose in where it doesn't belong and where it has no jurisdiction. Nowhere in its charter is it stated they have control over the highways and byways or the laws and regulations governing them.

If the Agency's aim is to lower CO₂ emissions, would the lower speed limits apply to electric cars? Why should they be forced to drive at a lower speed if they have no emissions? (Yes, I know that ultimately they do have emissions due the the smokestack gases from fossil-fired power plants. But what if you live in an area that uses little, if any fossil fuel for power plants? Much of New Hampshire's electric power comes from nuclear and hydro, with a few coal and natural gas plants, as well as 5 biomass plants. Does that mean we'd get a pass for electric cars? Of course not.)

This proposal by the EPA is merely an end run around the legislative process, usurping the powers of Congress and the state legislatures. We should let them know in no uncertain terms to back off. Another approach is to take them to court. Yet another is to string a few of 'em up, to let them know of our displeasure. (No, we wouldn't hang them until they are dead. Just until they're mostly dead. Of course, with a bureaucrat that might be hard to do because so many of them are already mostly dead...from the neck up.)

Thoughts On A Sunday

It's been over a week since we've managed to make it out on to the lake. Between jobs, meetings, and weather, we haven't been able to pull it off. Even today is iffy due to the high winds that started late yesterday. We do have plans to make it out on the lake tomorrow, the one day that Deb, BeezleBub and I all have a day off. (Yeah, I'm on my summer work schedule, with every Monday off between now and September.)

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Fellow New Hampshire blogger Bruce of No Looking Backwards is already preparing for the upcoming heating season, having procured a woodstove insert for his home. Yours truly commented, giving him a little advice about what needs to be done before he starts using it to heat his home.

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Speaking of woodstoves, we start prepping the Official Weekend Pundit Woodstove next month, with a visit by the chimney sweep and the replacement of the gasket on the stove door.

We begin hauling firewood from the WP In-Laws in September...all seven cords of it. We'll make two trips in the fall, not wishing to repeat the experience we had last March.

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Watching this morning's edition of Good Morning America I was surprised to see a report about how the so-called recession is more in the minds of people rather than a fact. Another surprise: they placed a lot of the blame on the media for making a weakened economy even worse by stoking consumers' fears about a recession, making many people dial back their spending. Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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At least US exports have reached record levels.

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Will the trend towards four day school weeks/work weeks continue as energy prices continue their climb? I dare say it will. There's a lot of money to be saved by reducing the number of days kids must be bussed to and from school or workers must commute to and from their jobs. With schools, it also reduces the number of days the thermostats must be turned up during the heating season.

As I've mentioned before, my employer is considering doing something along these lines, at least as far as reducing the number of commuting days. Unfortunately sales and technical support require 5 days per week coverage, though there may be ways of working around that with call forwarding and remote access to the corporate network.

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It looks like Paul Campos has got it all figured out: The Elitists will fix everything.

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The shockwaves from the Supreme Court's Heller decision still reverberate among the anti-gun MSM and politicians. Some still haven't quite clued in that legally owned guns aren't the problem and never have been. Others aren't willing to believe the Framers of the Constitution meant exactly what they wrote or that the Bill of Rights didn't grant rights to the people, but enumerated them as a natural rights that cannot be infringed. John Stossel tries to set them right.

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Here's yet another example of politically correct idiocy.

At a recent meeting of city officials in Dallas County, Texas, a small racial brouhaha broke out. County commissioners were hashing out difficulties with way the central collections office handles traffic tickets. Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield found himself guilty of talking while white. He observed that the bureaucracy "has become a black hole" for lost paperwork.

Fellow Commissioner John Wiley Price took great offense, shouting, "Excuse me!" That office, the black commissioner explained, has become a "white hole."

Seizing on the outrage, Judge Thomas Jones demanded that Mayfield apologize for the "racially insensitive analogy," in the words of the Dallas Morning News' City Hall Blog.

You have got to be kidding me! Making reference to an astronomic phenomenon is a “racially insensitive analogy”? Somebody needs to be taken out behind the woodshed to have this politically correct BS beaten out of them. This is the most asinine thing I've ever heard.

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Coyote has some interesting links, thoughts, and comments about taxes and their effect on the economy. One commenter proves he didn't pay attention during his Econ 101 classes, assuming he even took an economy course.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where summer vacation is in full swing, gas prices are still going up, and where I don't have to get up Monday morning!

Bush Was Right To Ignore Kyoto

As much as it may pain many of the more faithful believers in Anthropogenic Global Warming, it turns out George W. Bush's approach to the reduction of greenhouse gases was the right one.

Bush has been criticized for not embracing the Kyoto Protocols, a treaty that was rejected unanimously by the US Senate during the Clinton administration. It obligated the US to onerous measures in order to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Many of those measures would have crippled the US economy while those countries exempt from the limits imposed by Kyoto would have been able to continue increasing their emissions and expand their economies with no consequence. President Bush certainly wasn't going to sign on something that would do nothing but impoverish the US.

As time has shown, Bush made the right decision. Many nations that were signatories to Kyoto haven't even come close to meeting their greenhouse gas emission goals, with most of them seeing their emissions rise. On the other hand, the US has decreased its greenhouse gas emissions 3% since 2002 and they're still falling. With the large increase in energy prices over the past year, I would expect they'll fall off at an even greater rate.

The US has been doing what the Kyoto signatories have failed to do, and we didn't have to destroy our economy to do it. We did it our way, not by following draconian measures laid out by parties that do not have our best interests at heart.

Gun Control

Larry Elder ponders the question '”Why do we keep and bear arms?”, ruminating about the use of firearms by law abiding citizens and the relationship between the ability to keep and carry firearms and crime rates. However, while Elder brings up valid points, it is the comment from one of his readers that got me chuckling, if for no other reason than he's dead on about the topic of gun control.

At ease, maggots.

Sergeant Slaughter's here.

Gun control? GUN CONTROL?!

What kind of maggot thinks we don't need gun control?

Of course we need gun control!!

Without proper gun control, how the #$%@#% hell are ya gonna hit anything?

After properly training myself, I have the gun control I need to get a nice tight three shot grouping right smack dab in the middle of the &*^%&$ target!

Of course, I know you %#(@%& lefties are thinking gun control means law abiding citizens shouldn't have guns. Well, you maggots need to pull you heads out of your collective *ss!

What are ya gonna do to defend yourself? Take careful aim and throw your liberal bleeding heart at a violent intruder in your home? Yeah, pukes, why don't you see if that works?

After the intruder eats you alive for breakfast, maybe eventually the puke will decide to break into the home of yours truly, and then I can show him the meaning of proper gun control.

"Nuff said!

Fall out!

Indeed.

Greens Are Not Friends Of The Environment

At least someone out there understands the Greens are not friends of the environmental movement, but rather have their own agenda which has little to do with protecting the environment.