Radioactive Communist Zombies

Return of the Death Tax

Under current law, the Inheritance Tax was supposed to fade out to nothing in 2011 (and then come back full force in 2012).  Now, apparently, even that's not going to happen.  According the the Wall Street Journal, the Obama Administration has snuck in a provision in their budget to keep the Death Tax alive.

Of course, the Death Tax is a ridiculous class-warfare eat-the-rich stupid tax.  You work hard all your life, pay taxes on what you earn and invest, and then when you die, your wealth is taxed again at up to 50% by the federal government (and there's state death taxes, too). 

What the Obama Administration has done is put a line in their budget bill:

The announcement  . . . is buried in footnote 1 on page 127 of the President's budget. That note reads: "The estate tax is maintained at its 2009 parameters." This means the death tax won't fall to zero next year as scheduled under current law, but estates will be taxed instead at up to 45%, with an exemption level of $3.5 million (or $7 million for a couple). Better not plan on dying next year after all.

Or any year.

The Death Tax accounts for a minuscule amount of the whole Federal budget.  Yet what it does is force small family-owned businesses to either take preventive actions before hand (large insurance policies) or be sold or broken up after a death.  

And, according the the WSJ, the Death Tax costs jobs (something in short supply right now):

[T]he higher the estate tax, the lower the incentive to reinvest in family businesses. Former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin recently used the Summers study as a springboard to compare the economic cost of a 45% estate tax versus a zero rate. He finds that the long-term impact of eliminating the death tax would be to increase small business capital investment by $1.6 trillion. This additional investment would create 1.5 million new jobs.

Or about what the trillion dollar stimulus is supposed to create at much less cost.

The Death Tax is simply class warfare and, as usual, those hurt are collateral damage, not the intended target.  The Death Tax needs to be buried.

Democrats in Charge

Remember when Republicans were in charge?  You know, they spent too much and some were corrupt.  So you threw the bums out in 2006.  Do you regret that, yet?

As bad and the Republicans were, they can't hold a candle to the Democrats Spendocrats who are giving us trillions of dollars of deficits for as far as the eye can see.   And on top of that, they are doing their best to turn this country into the kind of socialist "paradise" the Europeans have enjoyed for so many years of double digit unemployment.

A good example is this new energy bill Henry Waxman and Edward Markey (both Spendocrats) have come up with.  It's 648 pages long.  Reading the summary of the bill is hair-raising enough.  For example:

The draft [of the bill] establishes a new low-carbon transportation fuel standard to promote advanced biofuels and other clean transportation fuels. It authorizes financial support in the form of grants or loan guarantees to cities, states, or private companies for large-scale demonstrations of electric vehicles. A related provision authorizes financial support to car companies to retool their plants to build electric vehicles.

Electric vehicles that no one will want to buy.  Also:

The draft directs the President to work with the relevant agencies and California to harmonize, to the maximum extent possible, the federal fuel economy standards, any emission standards promulgated by EPA, and the California standards for light-duty vehicles. The goal of this provision is to preserve the environmental benefits that could be achieved by the three standards, but do so in a way that simplifies compliance by the auto companies. The draft also directs EPA to set emissions standards for other mobile sources of pollution such as locomotives, marine vessels, and nonroad sources. The draft requires states to establish goals for reducing global warming pollution from the transportation sector and requires large metropolitan planning organizations to submit transportation plans to meet those goals. The draft authorizes EPA to carry out the SmartWay Transportation Efficiency Program to increase the efficiency of highway trucking.

And that's just vehicles.  The bill also has a cap-and-trade feature (although it's not called that) that requires green house gas emissions to be cut by 83% of 2005 levels by 2050.  Good luck with that without nuclear power.  The bill addresses everything from mobile homes to appliances to light bulbs to coal-fired power plants.

In other words: it is a top-down directive on how to live your life to meet some environmentalist lobby group's ideals (you think Waxman and Markey actually wrote this thing?).  It'll ensure higher prices for energy which will assure higher prices for everything else.  It'll stop and prosperity in its tracks.

Makes you long for the good old days of Jack Abramoff.

Death of the U.S. Auto Industry

This is historical: we are witnessing the death of the U.S. auto industry right before our eyes.

The government has forced out the CEO of GM and decided Chrysler is too small to survive so giving it 30 days to merge with Fiat.  As AP reports:

"I am absolutely committed to working with Congress and the auto companies to meet one goal: The United States of America will lead the world in building the next generation of clean cars," Obama said in his first extended remarks on the industry since taking office nearly 10 weeks ago. And yet, he added, "our auto industry is not moving in the right direction fast enough to succeed."

But that will not make the U.S. auto industry profitable.  Rather the opposite.  For one thing, it'll cost $1.5 trillion to meet the new mileage standards according to an article in the Detroit News:

The Transportation Department unveiled its 2011 model year fuel efficiency requirements today, saying the 27.3 mpg fleet-wide average would cost automakers nearly $1.5 billion to meet.

The problem is, without some change in the market, no one will want to buy these cars.  Electric and hybrids are expensive and don't pay for the extra cost in gas savings even at $4 per gallon gas.  What's going to have to happen is the government somehow increasing the market for these vehicles by either increasing the price of gasoline or taxing regular cars out of existence.  Or some other draconian measures to force you into the Gutless Supremes of tomorrow.

Which means we are going to see the American equivalent of British Leyland: a government run car company making cars no one wants.

Oh, and the U.S. government is going to back Chrysler and GM's car warranties.  So getting your car fixed will become as fun as paying your taxes.  

Carbonism

I'm still catching up on my reading after being gone for four days.

Came across an unsigned editorial in Investors Business Daily.  Imagine if you will, a carbon dictatorship that makes communism look mild in its control of the economy.  This "carbonism" as it were looks to dictate every economic decision based on its supposed effect on the climate.  This is what is being discussed in United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The framework would:

[R]eorder the world economy in a de facto repeal of the Industrial Revolution. Under the supervision of the U.N., free trade would die, industries that survived could be relocated across borders, and we would have mandatory carbon offsets and cap-and-trade imposed on a global scale.

For example, it would require:

[A] new kind of tariff known as a "border carbon adjustment" that the note describes as "a levy on imported goods equal to that which would have been imposed had they been produced domestically." In other words, if the exporting country does not impose a carbon tax, the importing country will.

This has already been proposed in the U.S. and will make protectionism look like good economic policy.

Other parts of the framework include:

The document speaks of a "climate change levy" on maritime shipping and aviation that is certain to devastate foreign trade and tourism. The American aviation industry had revenues of $208 billion in 2008. Unless we can come up with a hybrid 747 real quick, there's trouble ahead.

There is talk of signatories implementing cap-and-trade policies that the note admits "would involve negative consequences for the implementing country."

What would those negative consequences be?  That isn't mentioned.  And remember how places like the Pacific Northwest were supposed to replace extractive industries like timber with tourism?  Now they won't be able to do that, either.

So what does this look like to those that have lived under communism?

Writing in the Financial Times recently, Czech President Vaclav Klaus said: "As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not communism."

So who knew, green is the new red.  We fought the Nazis; we fought the Communists.  And now we are surrendering to the Carbonists.

Obama's False Choice

Mark Steyn, the writer I'd most like to be like, has a typically brilliant piece on NRO.

This year federal government spending will rise to 28.5 per cent of GDP, the highest level ever, with the exception of the peak of the Second World War. The 44th president is proposing to add more to the national debt than the first 43 presidents combined, doubling it in the next six years, and tripling it within the decade. But to talk about it in percentages of this and trillions of that misses the point. It’s not about bookkeeping, it’s about government annexation of the economy, and thus of life: government supervision, government regulation, government control.

Read the whole thing.

Ban Black Cars?

(Hat tip Planet Gore)

What will the mafia do?  California's Air Resources Board (CARB) is looking at banning black cars.  Why?

The CARB believes the air conditioning systems in black cars work harder and waste more energy than the ones in lighter colored cars.

And they want car makers to come up with more energy efficient paints.  But black is eluding the efforts:

The best the carmakers can do, so far, looks like "mud-puddle brown."

Doesn't really matter, California is about to ban all cars soon, anyway.

Labor is Mad at Washington State Demos

Remember when the Washington State Democratic leadership (including the Governor) pulled a labor-backed bill because of possible improprieties in an email?  If you don't, see here.

The email in question I thought was pretty innocuous and apparently the State Patrol and the Public Disclosure Commission agreed.  The email basically said that labor would stop giving campaign contributions to legislators who didn't back their so-called "Worker Privacy" bill.  So what else is new?  I'm sure other lobby groups have made similar threats in the past.  The question is, why did the Democrats react in this case to kill the bill?

Now labor is firing back because they want the bill to be revived (despite a veto threat from the Governor).  Late yesterday the Washington State Labor Council (the union lobby) put out a statement that reads in part:

The Washington State Labor Council (WSLC) and labor leaders from affiliated unions met Wednesday with Governor Chris Gregoire, Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown and House Speaker Frank Chopp to discuss the Worker Privacy Act legislation . . .

The meeting revealed a deep division between Democratic leadership and the labor community in Washington state. Even after the meeting, the fate of the Worker Privacy legislation remains unclear.

"This entire incident has severely strained labor’s relationship with Democratic leaders," said WSLC President Rick Bender . "We still consider their actions to have been a dramatic over-reaction especially after the Washington State Patrol and the Public Disclosure Commission quickly determined no legal or ethical wrongdoing. Democratic leaders offered no explanation at Wednesday’s meeting to counter assertions that their actions were anything but a pretext for blocking the Worker Privacy Act at the insistence of The Boeing Company. 

"While the leadership still insists they support the causes of working families, they have a long way to go in order to rekindle the trust and rebuild the relationship with the labor community."

So this is a case of friendly fire, the unions are shooting at the Democrats.

The whole Workers Privacy Act is a ruse to gag employers from giving their side of the story in a union organizing drive.  A similar law in California was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.  I don't know why labor is so insistent on this law.

But a little in-fighting among the left can't be a bad thing.

 

Travelling

Just got back from a four-day business trip.  Which is why blogging has been slow.  Okay: nonexistent.  Had one flight yesterday (during my whirl-wind visit to the middle of the country) delayed by four and a half hours by a blizzard.  That's global warming for ya.  I was cleaning snow off the rental car (An SUV, thank heavens) and stepped off the curb of a sidewalk I couldn't see because snow was drifted over it and ended up in snow almost to my knee.  And I was wearing slacks and shoes.  When I got to the airport and was required to remove my shoes, chunks of snow followed them out of my pant legs.

So, tomorrow, back to blogging.  The other thing I hate about travel is you get behind the news cycle.  I have no idea what is happening in the world.  Probably too much to hope that Obama resigned admitting he was over his head.

You Voted for Change, and That's all You'll Have Left

Are you regretting your vote for Obama yet?

The Democrat-run Congressional Budget Office is projecting third-world levels of debt for the U.S. if Obama's budget passes.  Look at the chart to the left (click for a larger view).  I stole it from the Wall Street Journal.  It shows debt as a percentage of GDP.  And the CBO predicts by 2019 it will be over 80% (and that's assuming the economy turns around next year and grows at a fast pace in 2010 and beyond).  And as the WSJ reports: 

And by the way, all of this is without including the costs of Mr. Obama's plan to offer "free" health care for the middle class. The White House budget includes only a "down payment" on health care, with every serious person figuring it will cost at least $1.2 trillion, and probably more. Incredibly, Democrats on Capitol Hill are, with White House encouragement, talking about jamming health care through Congress with a special procedure that requires only 50 Senate votes.

So our children and grandchildren can expect to be owned lock stock and barrel by whoever holds U.S. debt (and that looks like the Chinese right now).

And why is the Obama administration doing this?

One unstated but clearly implicit goal of his budget is to put in place spending programs that make ever-more Americans dependent on government and that will require a permanently higher level of taxation to finance. All of this is being done in the name of addressing income inequality.

In other words, rob you (if you have a job) to pay non-productive types.  Expect that promise of tax cuts to be quietly forgotten.  If you work, your taxes are going up.  And all you'll be left with is pocket change.

Blog Neglect III

I have to apologize to my readers (both of them).  Like before, the bad news is just overwhelming.  I could either blog all day about it or curl up in a ball of whimpering dark-cloud depression.  I have apparently chosen the latter.

The AIG bonuses don't concern me nearly as much as Congress deciding to tax them at 90%.  This sets a dangerous precedent for confiscating wealth that isn't politically correct.  The Wall Street Journal reported that the vote was 328-93 which means some Republicans voted for the measure.  That's depressing.

The Congressional Budget Office has projected massive, horrific, huge deficits for the next two years at least.  As the Christian Science Monitor reported:

On Friday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said this year’s budget deficit is now nearly $1.7 trillion, more than $400 billion larger than it forecast two months ago. Next year’s deficit will be nearly $1.1 trillion, $430 billion more than its prior forecast. And that doesn’t count President Obama’s budget plans to cut taxes and increase spending.

And that's not counting the unfunded debt for paying for Social Security and Medicare for the baby boomers.  That's depressing.

Obama has proposed a $3.55 trillion budget, or about $11,600 per every human in the U.S.  And it sets a level of spending that you know will only be increased in "out years."  That's depressing.

And we haven't even talked about the up and coming regulations on . . . everything.

So, I apologize to both my readers.  I'll try to be more productive in the future.