Is This the Change You Were Hoping For?

The Return of the Inflation Tax

In order to raise enough money to make their plan look like it won't add to the deficit, House Democrats have deliberately not indexed two main tax features of their plan: the $500,000 threshold for the 5.4-percentage-point income tax surcharge; and the payroll level at which small businesses must pay a new 8% tax penalty for not offering health insurance.

This is a sneaky way for politicians to pry more money out of workers every year without having to legislate tax increases. The negative effects of failing to index compound over time, yielding a revenue windfall for government as the years go on. The House tax surcharge is estimated to raise $460.5 billion over 10 years, but only $30.9 billion in 2011, rising to $68.4 billion in 2019, according to the Joint Tax Committee.

Americans of a certain age have seen this movie before...

I also recall some yak-yak from Our Puffery in Chief about only raising taxes on the rich. Being of a certain age, I remember the much less radical Bill Clinton making that same promise, and my subsequent annoyance at discovering that despite having a middle-class income at best we were somehow among "the rich."

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does play encores for the short-of-memory.

Election Night 2009

I'm kicking back with a bowl of popcorn to watch the results come in, for much the same reason a hardcore baseball fan will go watch a Little League game rather than hang out in a bar.

The pundits and partisans have spent weeks or months telling us what all the results will mean, and they're pretty much all full of crap. Without having turned on the newsfeed yet, I can tell you that Virginia is getting a GOP guv, Maine will probably turn back the anti-gay-marriage forces, NJ will have voter fraud and perhaps be contested, and that the NY 23rd is a unique situation that mostly just shows us the more strident divisions in the GOP and the right wing.

Jay Cost says it better than I do.

Wow. The pundit class is in full swing, interpreting the meaning of NY-23. "What's it say about Obama's administration?" "What's it say about the state of the Republican Party?" "What's it say for the upcoming health care debate?" So many questions. I'll do my best to answer them, each in turn.

Nothing, nothing, and nothing!

If you're watching the elections tonight rather than, say, re-runs of CSI, then you're a politics junkie like me. But you need to admit to yourself that there is little actual meaning of any national import in tonight's results. All politics is local, and we get to see a few isolated examples of the local struggle playing out without the big contextual backdrop of nation-wide contests. Enjoy it. But don't read too much into it, because there really isn't all that much there.

Capital Flight In Action

Tax refugees staging escape from New York

More than 1.5 million state residents left for other parts of the United States from 2000 to 2008, according to the report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy. It was the biggest out-of-state migration in the country. The vast majority of the migrants, 1.1 million, were former residents of New York City -- meaning one out of seven city taxpayers moved out.

What's worse is that the families fleeing New York are being replaced by lower-income newcomers, who consequently pay less in taxes.

Naturally. Not only do they pay less in taxes, but some of them are paying a lot less in taxes than they use up in government largess, which makes the tax revenue effect larger than the raw numbers would suggest. Why, you'd almost think they had monetary motivations...

Hey, I told you so.

Re-Branding...

Pelosi: Health care 'public option' needs new name

A government-sponsored "public option" for health care lives, though it may be more attractive to skeptics if it goes by a different moniker, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday.

In an appearance at a Florida senior center, the Democratic leader referred to the so-called public option as "the consumer option." Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., appeared by Pelosi's side and used the term "competitive option."

Toe-MAY-toe. Toe-MAH-toe. Giant Wooden Rabbit. Giant Wooden Badger. What's in a name, right? Sing it all together, boys and girls!

Branded!
Marked with a coward's shame.
What do you do when you're branded,
Will you fight for your name?

Useful Idiots

Maddow/Olbermann Invited to White House Chat with Obama, But Fox Isn't a News Organization?

The White House has sent TVNewser the complete list of those who attended the off-the-record briefing Monday: Eugene Robinson, E.J. Dionne, Ron Brownstein, John Dickerson, Rachel Maddow, Frank Rich, Jerry Seib, Maureen Dowd, Keith Olbermann, Bob Herbert, Gloria Borger, and Gwen Ifill. Several members of the staff also attended.

Nice to have a list of the top-tier anointed puppets, though it's not as if the strings weren't already obvious. And I see others have made the non-welcome list...

UPDATE: LOL. Heh. And more HEH.

Also: Reliable puppet Joe Conason didn't make the invite list? That's gotta sting.

First Amendment? What's That?

Jonathan Turley notes the Obama admin's support for speech restrictions:

Perhaps in an effort to rehabilitate the United States’ image in the Muslim world, the Obama administration has joined a U.N. effort to restrict religious speech. This country should never sacrifice freedom of expression on the altar of religion.

Seems that "wall of separation" between church and state is highly selective in the admin's eyes. Given their attempts to muzzle health insurers and the press, no one should be surprised.

Missing in Action

Journalism: Not Dead Yet

Not as long as we still have some actual journalists, such as Jake Tapper.

Bizarre

It seems like there really should be a Giant Wooden Rabbit involved here somehow....

That, or a horror film jointly produced by Sam Raimi and Hugh Hefner.

WORD

Don't f*** with Patterico.

As an associate producer of the documentary about Roman Polanski, you do not cover yourself in glory by coming on my blog and spamming a dozen identical anonymous comments that baselessly insinuate that I have a) bribed a witness on this case; b) blogged this issue on County time; c) written these posts to improve Mr. Cooley’s re-election chances; or d) engaged in “corrupt” behavior.

Not a smart thing to do, folks. Especially when you're going after a seasoned tech-savvy blogger with a firm grasp of criminal law and investigational technique. Folks, remember this: Unless you are using a proxy server or anonymizer, your tracks on the internet are pretty easy to trace. Even using such a service, it's still not impossible.