Credit: Steve Rhodes / Foter.com / CC BY NDIn January, as part of a deal to avert the
fiscal cliff, Congress increased marginal tax rates on
higher-income earners to Clinton-era levels while preserving
existing Bush-era rates for most taxpayers. By boosting rates for
the rich, Congress is banking on the notion that tax increases will
deliver much-needed revenue for the government without unduly
damaging the economy. The bet is that high earners will keep
working despite Uncle Sam’s taking a bigger bite out of their
income. In the short run, writes Veronique de Rugy, this might well
be true. But the longer run is much more complicated.View this article. … Read More
Veronique de Rugy on Why Soaking the Rich Won’t Solve Our Problems
Obama Electric Car Fiasco Is A Case of “Unchecked Righteousness”
That’s the conclusion of Washington Post
columnist Charles Lane in his terrific op-ed, “The
Electric Car Mistake,” in today’s edition. Lane shows just how
hollow President Barack Obama’s promise to put one million electric
cars on America’s highways by 2015 is turning out to be. As Lane
reports:
President Obama
repeatedly
declared that, with enough federal aid, we can
put a million electric vehicles on the
road by 2015. His administration has invested about $5 billion
in grants, guaranteed loans … and tax incentives to buyers.
Yet Americans bought just
71,000 plug-in hybrids or all-electric vehicles in the past two
years, according to GreenCarReports.com. That’s about a third as
many as the Energy Department forecast in a 2011 report that
attempted to explain why Obama’s goal was not preposterous.
Federal billions cannot overcome the fact that electric vehicles
and plug-in electric hybrids meet few, if any, of real consumers’
needs. Compared with gas-powered cars, they deliver inferior
performance at much higher cost. As an American Physical Society
symposium on battery research concluded last June: “Despite
their many potential advantages, all-electric vehicles will not
replace the standard American family car in the foreseeable
future.”
Lane pulls no punches when he explains why the Obama
administration’s electric car plan is a fiasco:
I accept the president’s good intentions. He didn’t set out to
rip off the public. Nor was the electric-car dream a Democrats-only
delusion. Several Republican pols shared it, too.
Rather, the debacle is a case study in unchecked righteousness.
The administration assumed the worthiness and urgency of its goals.
Americans should want electric cars, and therefore they would,
apparently.
For background see my 2010 article, “Revving
Up Electric Cars with Government Cash,” where I reported on my
visit to the federally subsidized and now defunct car battery
manufactuer, Ener1 – which is
now bankrupt. Go
here for to read New York Times reporter John Broder’s
account of his less-than-successful test-drive last week of the new
all-eletctric Tesla S model from Washington to Boston. Naturally
Tesla
disagrees. … Read More
Nick Gillespie: Will Obama Tell Young People How Much He’s Screwing Them?
If youth is wasted on the young, then the youth
vote is being wasted on President Barack Obama, who has easily
carried 18-to-29-year-old voters in both of his elections. That’s a
shame, writes Nick Gillespie, because
From virtually every possible angle, Obama is helping to
diminish the prospects for today’s younger generation. First and
foremost, his response to the Great Recession – stimulus and the
massive piling up of debt – is slowing the recovery. Massive
regulatory schemes such as Dodd-Frank and the creation of huge new
soul-and-bucks-sucking programs such as Obamacare weigh heavily on
the economy now and in the future too.
View this article. … Read More
State of the Union Addresses: Going Downhill for 100 Years
Thomas Jefferson considered it
“kingly” to deliver his State of the Union report as a speech, so
he sent the Senate and the House some written comments instead.
Woodrow Wilson, never reluctant to play king, brought back the
speechifying in 1913, and the modern custom of addressing a joint
session of Congress was born.The state of the actual union has improved in many ways in the
century since then, but for State of the Union addresses it’s
been all downhill. Calvin Coolidge reversed
many of Wilson’s kingly policies, but he kept the oral address to
Congress in place; indeed, he started broadcasting it on the radio,
expanding the crown’s audience even further. The show came to TV in
the Truman years, and under LBJ the other party started airing a
response right after the speech, an innovation that may sound
even-handed and democratic but in practice just amplified the
kingliness. As I
wrote a few years ago,No matter how lethargic, long-winded, dishonest, or
dimwitted the president’s speech may be, the reply will feel like a
pathetic rejoinder put together in someone’s rec room. A
politician—possibly a party leader but often a “rising star,” i.e.,
someone most viewers won’t have heard of—stares at a camera in an
apparently empty office, reciting a set of talking points. In the
State of the Union speech itself, an immensely powerful man sets an
agenda. In the response, no matter what the speaker says, the
takeaway message for anyone still bothering to watch is that he
isn’t setting the agenda. In Great Britain, the opposition
gets to confront the prime minister on television every week. In
the United States, the opposition gets to borrow the camera after
the president has left the room.And then, just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse,
Ronald Reagan added the practice of singling out people to praise
in the audience, thus seasoning the bland proceedings with the
flavor of a high school assembly. I’m trying hard to think of a way
the State of the Union tradition has improved in the last 100
years, and all I can come up with is the invention of cable TV: Now
at least there’s something else to watch.The ideal way to experience the SOTU is to skip the speech as
it’s broadcast and then read it in the paper or online the next
day, a practice that allows you to scan the text quickly for
nuggets of news while avoiding the pomp and boredom of the show. In
a better world, we never would have abandoned Jefferson’s approach
to the State of the Union report, but even in this one we can act
as though that saner system is still in place. … Read More
Ohio Attorney General Releases Animation of Police Shooting Involving 137 Shots Fired at Pursued Car
Ohio Attorney GeneralThe police chase of Timothy Russell, driver, and
Malissa Williams, passenger, began in East Cleveland when an
unidentified cop said he heard the sound of a gun shot from
Russell’s car. No shell casings or gun was ever
recovered. Twenty-five minutes later, in Cleveland, the chase
ended with 13 officers firing 137 shots (ranging from 2 shots fired
by one cop to 49 by another) in about 20 seconds, killing Russell
and Williams.The State Attorney General’s office came in to conduct an
investigation and Mike DeWine, the attorney general,
released a report on the incident last week, and a few days
later an
animation (below) depicting the shooting. In concluding the
investigation he handed it over to the county prosecutor, who is
expected to go to a grand jury. The Cleveland police chief, of
course, insists policies and procedures were in place, and if they
were violated “some will be held accountable.” DeWine’s
response, via
the Cleveland Plain Dealer:“This type of attitude, this head in the sand, refusal
to look at the facts, could mean we could have this problem again,
and next time we may have an innocent bystander who dies, or police
officers who are killed, which could very well have happened this
time,” DeWine said. “People in leadership need to take
responsibility. The police department system failed these officers
and they failed the general public. You can’t look at that report
and come up with any other conclusion.” It’s not one or two officers who made a mistake, DeWine said, but
dozens of officers, which “means you have a systemic
problem.” …DeWine did not make any determination of whether the officers’
actions were legal or justified.The Cleveland City Council
introduced a resolution yesterday supporting the police
chief.Animation of the shooting: … Read More
Gene Healy on Calvin Coolidge
In a new biography
of Calvin Coolidge, Amity Shlaes suggests that we have much to
learn from this parsimonious president, especially his record for
cutting government spending. Gene Healy assesses both the book and
the man it describes.View this article. … Read More
Matt Welch on Spending Denialism in the Age of Obama
Several weeks before the slow-motion
“fiscal cliff” negotiation ended in a giveaway-rich, tax-hiking,
154-page spending bill that senators had all of six minutes to
glance at before approving by an 89-8 vote in the wee hours of
January 1, President Barack Obama reportedly told House Speaker
John Boehner flat out: “We don’t have a spending problem.”Boehner, in relaying the quote to The Wall Street
Journal three days after the House of Representatives
grudgingly ratified the Senate plan, expressed astonishment at the
president’s words. But he shouldn’t have. As Matt Welch explains in
Reason’s March issue, spending denialism—of the literal
sort—has become a core progressive value in the age of Obama.View this article. … Read More
