dajafi wrote: I can never decide if proponents of the flat tax are willfully ignorant of its ramifications--vastly smaller government, and an unprecedented shift of the tax burden from the rich to the poor--or just don't care. But these things have been modeled extensively; there isn't much mystery what would happen if we implemented them.

The truth is that taxes are going up. Probably way up. So long as we're committed to the unfathomable and politically well-defended military budget and the politically untouchable entitlement programs of the New Deal and Great Society, with our current demographic situation and evident insistence upon acting as a "soft empire," we're going to hit a wall. I just wonder if our Chinese creditors will choose to pull the plug in a way that kills the Democrats or the Republicans.

We've probably covered this ground before, perhaps on the other board. Folks who think like I do absolutely want a vastly smaller government. Not in military nor infrastructure, but almost everything else. The feds have no business, for instance, in higher education. They have done nothing except make it expensive while interfering with how colleges structure the curriculum. And surely our entitlement programs are already way too big. All the things we want have to paid for, and it's not realistic to think that government can compete on price or quality for any but the largest (military nor infrastructure) tasks.

The growth of government, and the growth of entitlements, has established a mindset by which too many Americans expect the government to take care of them. I'd rather see an America in which the citizens take advantage of opportunities to secure their own prosperity. It's not that I want to pay lower taxes, it's that I want to see people break the cycle of poverty and dependence.

No doubt that tax rates are headed higher, but that is not due to any burning need for more revenues -- it stems solely from the fact that we are seeing a power shift to the Democrats, who both enjoy punishing the successful and also hold the false belief that higher rates lead to more tax revenue.

I'm no fan of Robert Novak, but did you catch him on Uncle Cholly Rose last nite? He scored one great point after another, and Charlie (who is usually quite neutral, but here could not hide his liberalism) was astonished that Novak could maintain that Bush's tax cuts have resulted in greater tax revenues and that Novak gave Newt credit for the Clinton balanced budget -- it was the spending control of the GOP congress, not Clinton's tax hike, that permitted the balanced budget.

dajafi wrote:I hear you smitty. I don't generally have much use for David Brooks, but I've always thought his "BoBo" concept--"bourgeois bohemians"--described me and mine pretty well. We're secular and socially tolerant, but also thoroughly committed to family, community, and trying to make a world that's consistent with our own values.

I venerate both Hamilton and Jefferson. What's wonderful about America in many ways is that we've never entirely forced ourselves to choose between their visions. What worrie me now is that some of the best outgrowths of the Jeffersonian approach seem in serious danger--and that Hamilton's principle in the Federalist, that "ambition counters ambition" (I'm paraphrasing), which is the key to checks and balances working, has been severely undermined by the Rove/Carville approach to politics--that party loyalty matters more than anything else, including the Constitution.

Well, even back in Jefferson and Hamilton's time, there was a lot of party over Constitution stuff going on. Remember the Alien and Sedition Acts. Basically a law that gave Adams the ability to jail his political opponents.

The thing that seems to keep America from plunging too far over the cliff either way is that the extremes of both parties move us one way or the other for a while. But Nixon's silent majority, a group that is pretty much moderate when it comes right down to it, keeps pulling us back from the abyss. I think that will happen again here shortly.

TomatoPie wrote:

dajafi wrote: I can never decide if proponents of the flat tax are willfully ignorant of its ramifications--vastly smaller government, and an unprecedented shift of the tax burden from the rich to the poor--or just don't care. But these things have been modeled extensively; there isn't much mystery what would happen if we implemented them.

The truth is that taxes are going up. Probably way up. So long as we're committed to the unfathomable and politically well-defended military budget and the politically untouchable entitlement programs of the New Deal and Great Society, with our current demographic situation and evident insistence upon acting as a "soft empire," we're going to hit a wall. I just wonder if our Chinese creditors will choose to pull the plug in a way that kills the Democrats or the Republicans.

We've probably covered this ground before, perhaps on the other board. Folks who think like I do absolutely want a vastly smaller government. Not in military nor infrastructure, but almost everything else. The feds have no business, for instance, in higher education. They have done nothing except make it expensive while interfering with how colleges structure the curriculum. And surely our entitlement programs are already way too big. All the things we want have to paid for, and it's not realistic to think that government can compete on price or quality for any but the largest (military nor infrastructure) tasks.

The growth of government, and the growth of entitlements, has established a mindset by which too many Americans expect the government to take care of them. I'd rather see an America in which the citizens take advantage of opportunities to secure their own prosperity. It's not that I want to pay lower taxes, it's that I want to see people break the cycle of poverty and dependence.

No doubt that tax rates are headed higher, but that is not due to any burning need for more revenues -- it stems solely from the fact that we are seeing a power shift to the Democrats, who both enjoy punishing the successful and also hold the false belief that higher rates lead to more tax revenue.

TP, whyzit that your robotic aversion to concentration of government power has no evident parallel with regard to concentration of economic power?

Someone with as much mental wattage as you surely grasps that the crux of the biscuit is concentration of power, by whatever means generated - that neither has "natural" virtues (setting aside your concern for the "punishment" of the "successful", with its implication that they are somehow crucibles of "natural" virtue)?

dajafi wrote:I'm CARLTON willing to listen to arguments about taxation. I don't think we need to go back to the 1950s rates. But the stuff you present is strictly ideology, without any empirical grounding.

And the consequences of this unhinged ideology are Katrina--both the failure of the levies and the disastrously inept "heckuva job" response of Bush's cronies--and the collpase of the I-35 bridge. That your political heroes really couldn't care less, because they've enriched themselves out of having to live like the rest of us, is the disgrace of our age.

I've noted that we are taxed just plenty, and that the problem is the misallocation of tax revenues, not the fact that the successful are permitted to keep what they earn.

Accountability. Federal funds for planning and administration grew dramatically during the decade, rising from $257 million in 1990 to $893 million in 1999. But it is hard to tell whether this investment in planning led to better outcomes. States are not required to establish any methods to measure progress toward transportation goals. This makes it difficult for policy makers or citizens to determine the effectiveness of transportation spending.

http://www.transact.org/report.asp?id=165

Federal funds, from your tax dollars, are also WAY up:

The hair-trigger political impulse, from states and Capitol Hill alike, is that [the Minnesota bridge collapse] means the feds need to spend more money. But it's hardly the case that taxpayers have been stingy. In 1991 [for highways] $151 billion. By 1998 it was up to $217 billion, and in 2005 a Republican Congress agreed to spend $286 billion.

{WSJOJ}

A big problem, and one not confined to either party, is earmarks in these highway spending bills, such as the ones for the Bridge to Nowhere. In the 1981 highway bill, there were 10 earmarks. By 2005 the earmarks numbered 6,371.

No sir, the problem is NOT that we are taxed too little, or that rich people can buy an extra box of Monte Cristos with their tax cut savings. Beating up the wealthy is not gonna solve any problem beyond envy.

The problem is that there is too little spending discipline, and that priorities are way out of whack.

drsmooth wrote:
TP, whyzit that your FREGOSI aversion to concentration of government power has no evident parallel with regard to concentration of economic power?

By this I suppose you refer to the perception of the rich getting richer, CEOs with obscene salaries and stock options, and so forth?

True dat the gap of rich and poor is growing. But this is due to accelerated growth rates of the very rich, not to any decline in the circumstances of the poor. Folks classified as "poor" today enjoy comforts that were reserved only for the richest elite a generation ago. There is also great mobility up and out of the bottom quintile.

While I do bemoan the circumstances that allow someone like George Soros to accumulate so much money and use it for evil, the same free markets also enable folks like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who are actively engaged in planning on how to give it all away, and for good purposes.

If CEOs are indeed overpaid, the market will correct that. It's no more of a problem than salaries in the NBA. Supply and demand.

TomatoPie wrote:By this I suppose you refer to the perception of the rich getting richer, CEOs with obscene salaries and stock options, and so forth?

True dat the gap of rich and poor is growing. But this is due to accelerated growth rates of the very rich, not to any decline in the circumstances of the poor. Folks classified as "poor" today enjoy comforts that were reserved only for the richest elite a generation ago. There is also great mobility up and out of the bottom quintile.

While I do bemoan the circumstances that allow someone like George Soros to accumulate so much money and use it for evil, the same free markets also enable folks like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who are actively engaged in planning on how to give it all away, and for good purposes.

If CEOs are indeed overpaid, the market will correct that. It's no more of a problem than salaries in the NBA. Supply and demand.

well, you didn't really address my question, but thanks anyway for prattling on in your usual fashion. Allow me a digression that may help you see what I'm on about.

Warren Buffett, who seems remarkably genuine for a fellow who bestrides sooooo much moolah, has what he has in large part due to his deft manipulation of a largely-implicit social contract, an artifact of the times he lives in - not to some sort of miraculous "economicosity" in his dna. Drop him into ancient egypt and maybe endures a mercifully brief existence cleaning stables.

Likewise with Gates, privileged son of west-coast bankers whose preposterous wealth hinges on his exploitation of this 'product': a set of standards for making a gadget perform calculating tricks. The economic value of this product can be said to have depended almost entirely on statutory and regulatory principles devised by men whose main aim was securing the value of real estate, livestock, and words impressed on mulched leaves and bark.

And these are 2 who can be fairly placed among capitalism's good guys.

Where's your sense of the absurd, man? Almost every human has some vestige of one. Your jeremiads peopled with nefarious lefties plotting to divest the "worthy" of their "rightful" swag, to somehow overturn the 'natural' economic 'laws' you apparently swear obeisance to, by turns pious and fatuous, present you as a solemn stooge of your economic "betters" - a patsy, a dupe, a sucker.

I cannot imagine any real phillies phan is such a person.

Imagine it this way: Frankenstein - the literary classic, not the guy with neck-bolts - is about industrial-age social mechanisms gone awry, turning on their makers, as much as about 'science' getting the better of mad scientists. A clanking man-made 'rational' social apparatus gone 'gigantic' - a 'monster' quite without intent - frightens, maims, & otherwise consumes its (direct & indirect) makers, whether virtuous or villanous, mostly indiscriminately. A monster, we gentle readers come to understand, is a monster quite independently of its intent, its philosophy, its collection of rationales.

A classic for our age indeed!

And on reflection, is there any modern social artifice any of us individuals can safely turn our backs upon, any incapable of squashing us like roaches (or even butterflies) under its indifferent heels?

Whether the gizmo benefits or burns you is a probability function - a crapshoot - a roll of dice loaded by - somebody(s) who may no longer even benefit from the load. Can the gizmo be gamed? sure - why not? It's not like "it" (which may be a loose confederation of "its") is governed mainly by laws of physics, or some other set of natural forces you or I or anyone is obliged to bow before.

But if you happen to be a 'gamer', that doesn't convey some kind of entitlement to you, or your fellow gamers, or your heirs. Because maybe your 'urge to game' merely means you're more sensitive to itches that you can scratch, or not.

Doc,

I greatly enjoyed your post, but I still really don't know what you're trying to say. Really, truly, almost no idea at all. It seems like you are railing against capitalism and the fact that the "laws" therein allow a would-be stable boy to accumulate obscene wealth, but I'm not sure that's your main point.

But here's mine: capitalism and free markets do enable good guys Gates and Buffett as well as bad guys. But the bottom line is that capitalism is the system producing the greatest good for the the greatest number. Rising tides lift all boats, etc, etc.

Bill Gates is not rich at your expense; you are richer on account of Bill Gates.

TomatoPie wrote:Doc,

I greatly enjoyed your post, but I still really don't know what you're trying to say. Really, truly, almost no idea at all. It seems like you are railing against capitalism and the fact that the "laws" therein allow a would-be stable boy to accumulate obscene wealth, but I'm not sure that's your main point.

But here's mine: capitalism and free markets do enable good guys Gates and Buffett as well as bad guys. But the bottom line is that capitalism is the system producing the greatest good for the the greatest number. Rising tides lift all boats, etc, etc.

Bill Gates is not rich at your expense; you are richer on account of Bill Gates.

But your insinuation that that ism, or any other, has some kind of virtue for all that -
doesn't it practically stick in your throat?

The bottom line is that capitalism is the system producing the greatest good for the greatest number

gahhhh - I can practically hear your curly little tail wagging.

it's not your reasoning I don't get, it's the smarmy suck-up way you express it.

Sorry about your comprehension deficits, by the way.

drsmooth wrote:But your insinuation that that ism, or any other, has some kind of virtue for all that -
doesn't it practically stick in your throat?

The bottom line is that capitalism is the system producing the greatest good for the greatest number

gahhhh - I can practically hear your curly little tail wagging.

Now I know you are full of sheep, since I wear a tail silencer. Top of the line, too, I can afford the best.

If capitalism has any kind of virtue, it is by happy accident. But it's awful neat, doncha think, that by each of us pursuing our own interests (within certain constraints), the welfare of all maximized?

I can't recommend that you read Adam Smith, it's dry and dense, but I can recommend that you read P J O'Rourke's cliff notes on Smith.

TomatoPie wrote:
If capitalism has any kind of virtue, it is by happy accident. But it's awful neat, doncha think, that by each of us pursuing our own interests (within certain constraints), the welfare of all maximized?

Only by the crudest sort of math, in the simplest of simpleminded abstractions.

Your own hedge ("certain" constraints - constraints devised by the certain, certain mainly to them, usually devised in their own best interests) puts the lie to the wonderfulness of your "neat" welfare maximization fantasies.



(Incidentally, you may be confusing maximization for optimization, as the results of maximized formulae frequently look a lot like matters taken to their absurd extremes).

More awful than neat, you see. Or, in your case, not.

TomatoPie wrote:I can't recommend that you read Adam Smith, it's dry and dense, but I can recommend that you read P J O'Rourke's cliff notes on Smith.

Funny you mention this--my brother-in-law was talking about this yesterday. I'm hoping he buys it...

dajafi wrote:

TomatoPie wrote:I can't recommend that you read Adam Smith, it's dry and dense, but I can recommend that you read P J O'Rourke's cliff notes on Smith.

Funny you mention this--my brother-in-law was talking about this yesterday. I'm hoping he buys it...

Um, everyone should read Adam Smith--he's brilliant. Liberty Fund has his entire corpus at a very low price.
http://www.libertyfund.org/details.asp?displayID=1765

Then, of course, one has to read his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Because, reading Smith's two major works combined makes it clear that economics is not a normative endeavor and one cannot use economics to make moral claims, and we make a terrible mistake when we confuse the two. We also commit a serious blunder when we fail to recognize that Smith was arguing against not socialism, but mercantilism.

Specialization, people!!!!!!!!1

Happy anniversary, Mr. President:

It hasn’t received much recognition in previous years, but today, Aug. 6, is a noteworthy anniversary as well — six years ago today, the president, on vacation in Crawford, was handed an intelligence briefing document. It was titled, “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.”

In 2004, Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and the State Department’s counterterrorism chief, explained that a Presidential Daily Briefing like that one should have sent Bush back to the Oval Office. Johnson, who’d written dozens of PDBs during Bush 41’s presidency, said the documents are usually brief and dispassionate. The one on Aug. 6, 2001, was a page and a half, with a title meant to capture the president’s attention. “That’s the intelligence-community equivalent of writing War and Peace,” Johnson said.

Johnson added that when he read the declassified document, “I said, ‘Holy smoke!’ This is such a dead-on ‘Mr. President, you’ve got to do something!’ ”

He didn’t.

[A]n unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”

Top intelligence officials — George Tenet, Richard Clarke, and others — were running around with their “hair on fire,” warning that al Qaeda was about to unleash a major attack. Bush, tragically, treated his intelligence briefings about Osama bin Laden as perfunctory chores that he had to endure. Based on the “covered your ass” comment, it was almost as if the president was humoring the CIA briefer.

The “covered your ass” comment should have been in every John Kerry campaign ad in 2004. A CIA briefer, someone who has devoted his life to the safety of this country, all but screams “DO SOMETHING, MR. PRESIDENT!” and Bush gives him the metaphorical finger and turns back to his brush-clearing and pre-season football.

And then he has the unbearable audacity to demagogue the tragedy into political gain, expended on a ruinous, tragic war and the most atrociously misguided and political domestic “agenda” maybe ever.

During the ‘04 campaign, Bush was famously asked if he thought he’d made any mistakes. I wonder if “Well, I should have done something about that PDB” even popped into what passes for his mind. I’m not sure if it’s more upsetting if it did, or didn’t.

STOP YOUR LIBERAL HATE MONGERING, STONED

Serious question, though: If it really was a serious "hey pay attention to this, dummy!" issue, wasn't it possible for them to, I don't know, like, call him, e-mail him, txt message him, post on his Myspace, etc... also?

Are these daily briefs really the only means of communication the intelligence community has with the Commander in Chief? If so, seems like a flawed system...

Woody wrote:STOP YOUR LIBERAL HATE MONGERING, STONED

Serious question, though: If it really was a serious "hey pay attention to this, dummy!" issue, wasn't it possible for them to, I don't know, like, call him, e-mail him, txt message him, post on his Myspace, etc... also?

Bush seems more ready to catch a football than read a email/txt message.

Woody wrote:Are these daily briefs really the only means of communication the intelligence community has with the Commander in Chief? If so, seems like a flawed system...

They come with their own future supreme court nominee to hand them to you and read them out loud if you want:

Is this what we have to look for on the Fox Busines Chanel? Opps, did I say Chanel?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAHV_plPsy8&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Enewshounds%2Eus%2F2007%2F08%2F08%2Fis%5Fthe%5Fstar%5Fof%5Fthe%5Fnew%5Ffox%5Fbusiness%5Fnetwork%5Fready%5Ffor%5Fprime%5Ftime%2Ephp[/youtube]

I am not sure what is worse, that they put on a women who are clueless or that some dirtball says that they are. At least that burnette is hot.

phdave wrote:

Woody wrote:STOP YOUR LIBERAL HATE MONGERING, STONED

Serious question, though: If it really was a serious "hey pay attention to this, dummy!" issue, wasn't it possible for them to, I don't know, like, call him, e-mail him, txt message him, post on his Myspace, etc... also?

Bush seems more ready to catch a football than read a email/txt message.

Woody wrote:Are these daily briefs really the only means of communication the intelligence community has with the Commander in Chief? If so, seems like a flawed system...

They come with their own future supreme court nominee to hand them to you and read them out loud if you want:

Wow, being President seems less stressful than my job. It's 2007, get a fucking laptop or something

http://www.philly.com/dailynews/columni ... _9_11.html

:roll: