Article up at MercatorNet: Attack of the Google Phone
I have an article up over at MercatorNet called My big brother, my cell phone on the latest on Google Phone in particular, but the use of cell phone advertising in specific. Go take a look!
Related Posts:
Mercator Column Up: Google, YouTube, and Web 2.0 MercatorNet article up: Unsuitable for Children Some more Weekend Reading Book Review: Google: The Missing Manual by Milstein, Biersdorfer, and MacDonald Google worth more than GM and Disney Combined
Greenspan is Right about the Republicans and the Economy
Many on the right are lamenting the "conversion" of former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and will likely start to discredit him for committing the unforgivable heresy of praising Clinton and criticizing Bush. Specifically, he praised Clinton for his fiscal-minded policies and focus on the spending deficit. Conversely, he criticized Bush and the Republican Congress for its out-of-control spending and divorce with fiscal discipline. He has it exactly right — the Democrats did not win in 2006, the Republicans lost.
In the information age, or more appropriately the disinformation age, pundits on both sides will spin Greenspan's remarks and globalize them into what they aren't. Greenspan remains, legitimately so, a libertarian Republican. This is not an endorsement of Hillary-care which will likely be re-introduced if she gets elected. However, the fact remains that at least "tax and spend" liberalism is mathematically coherent compared to "tax-cut and spend" Republicanism. Call it what you want, but it's not a conservative policy and that is why the conservatives have not bailed out the Republicans in 2006 and aren't contributing at high levels in 2008. The Republicans had a golden opportunity to cut the massive waste and pork from the federal government's budget and showed themselves all too ready to increase it at far greater levels than any Democratic administration.
Greenspan's book, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, spells out some of his criticism and praise of US economic policies of his time at the helm of the Fed. The timing of the book could produce real intelligent discussion on economic policies, but sadly it will not. We don't debate ideas, we duel with soundbites.
The fact remains, deficits do matter. The technical term for a family that routinely deficit spends is "bankrupt". The sub-prime mortgage fallout is just another case of what happens when families do this in bulk. Our deficit spending has driven the dollar to record lows against the Euro. Other nations and central banks are concerned about our spending habits and are acting accordingly.
When a few Chinese ministers threatened to sell their US dollars because of policies toward the Yuan, the threat was real. To be fair, this was probably two ministers trying to make inroads into the Communist Party of China, but we should all stand up and take note that our policies have introduced a significant risk of foreign manipulation to our economy. Someone has to make up the difference between our spending and our tax revenue. In this case it was foreign countries like China who may not have our best interests in mind when they make their financial decisions.
President Bush rarely used his veto pen until the Democrats took over Congress. The result was an out-of-control appropriations process where almost every significant bill was laden with pork spending such as the "bridge to nowhere". Pundits can point to Rep. Jefferson (D-LA) who took a $100,000 payoff all they want, but conservatives expect better from their people and don't want politicians who are just as corrupt as Democrats. Illinois Republicans learned that lesson with George Ryan and the result was that the Illinois Republican party is defunct and no longer capable of winning statewide office. The national Republican Party should look at how rampant corruption and waste worked out for the Illinois Republican party… that's their future unless they get it together.
That said, Greenspan is, as are most conservatives, for "tax-cut and spending-cut" and corruption-free policies. Judging from the field of 2008 Republican nominees, it is doubtful that any of them are up to the task of pruning the budget to end the deficit or cleaning up the corruption in Congress. This is why Newt Gingrich is also right that there is an 80-20 chance that there will be a Democratic (probably Hillary Clinton) president in 2008.
Get An Online Education
Learn more with an online social science degree! It’s easier than ever to get your online degree and put it to use in a field you love. So get learning today and don’t forget there are many grants for education avalable. Don’t let money matters stop your education!
The Environmentalists’ War on the Poor
Denver has recently announced a policy that plans to remove 500,000 cars from the road in an aggressive attempt to curb the effects of global warming. This follows on the heels of other plans nationwide to reduce emissions as well as commentary from elites who encourage the further increase in gas prices so fewer people will be able to drive, or at least, will moderate their driving habits.
There is on thing that immediately comes to mind about the Denver plan. To identify which 500,000 cars will be taken off the road, line up every resident with a car and have them organized from poorest to richest. Then count off the first 500,000 starting from the poor end. Those are the people who won't have cars anymore. It's just that simple.
These attempts to curb global warming by "modifying behavior" are all designed to simply increase the cost of normal human activity. The result is that the people who are priced out of the game are the poor. An example is in order.
Take Al "the Goracle" Gore. With his mantourage and jetsetter lifestyle he uses carbon emissions comparable to many thousands of people. He has mcmansions here and there and despite being a prophet of global doom, he hasn't personally curbed his lifestyle one iota. The sacrifice to save the planet is never meant to restrict the elite's lifestyle; it’s the poor and middle class that need to sacrifice for the "greater good".
With the supposed concern from the Left about the gap between the rich and the poor, it is ironic at best that they support policies that have no other effect than to push the middle class into the poor and to push the poor down further. In its most radical forms, environmentalists believe the Earth is over populated and that the population should be reduced to about 2 billion. You can bet real money that it won't be them that numbers in the 4 billion or so that are unworthy of life. China's forced-abortion policy solicits nary a peep from "human rights activists". The Serra Club supports abortion for a reason.
Carbon offset programs have been exposed as a fraud and it has just been discovered that hybrid vehicles cause much more environmental damage to produce than a hummer. In the rush to "do something", or at least appear to be doing something, no one every actually examined to see if they were doing something that would have an effect. This mindlessness pervades the entire gamut of environmental thought.
These elites, despite not usually having any real contact with the middle class or the poor, deign to know what is best for us and are more than willing to use government to enforce their values on us from on high. These Henryites demonstrate this arrogant paternalism in their support for bans on smoking (not just in public, but even in private homes), trans-fat bans and their incessant parade of lifestyle legislation designed solely to indicate that the right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness applies only to those who have won life's lottery. Call it the secular humanism version of the Prosperity Gospel.
With all the Hollywood and political elites that support environmentalism, you'd think they'd restrict their lifestyle that uses many more resources then dozens if not hundreds of middle-class or poor families. When they close down their large estates and live solely in one 3,000 square foot home (generous for almost any family I know), then they might have some basis with which to tell the rest of us what we need to cut out of our lives.
Until the time comes that they will share in the sacrifices which they demand everyone else to make, no serious consideration can be given to their interpretation of what the common good is.
Part-Time Pundit Featured at Carnival of the Capitalists This Week
My post on the upcoming Illinois energy crisis is featured in this week’s Carnival of the Capitalists. Check it out and the other fine posts.
Lights Out: How Freezing Electricity Rates Will Cripple Illinois’ Electrical System
Illinois has enjoyed a ten year rate freeze on electricity rates that have kept consumer’s electrical bills low. That bill expires at the end of this year leaving Illinois residents looking at upwards of a 55% rate hike. As expected, legislators are looking to stop the rate hike because short-sighted pandering is what politicians do best. This is the absolute worst thing to do for Illinois and will lead to a dark future for our children.
The New York Times recently ran an article discussing a report from the commission set up to investigate the causes of the massive Ohio power outage in 2003. The report says bleakly that the United States is not building enough power plants to keep up with demand, that consumers waste a great deal of energy and have no incentive to reduce their demand on the grid, and that the grid’s general infrastructure is so old and aging that it’s susceptible to massive outages.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. By artificially capping prices, costs have to be cut somewhere to make up for it. For the power grid, this means less money for research and development. Less new construction, less new technology to increase efficiency, less redundancy, and so on.
There is one idea that needs to be put to a violent death right now; that energy company executives should cut their pay to pay for new power stations. Everyone who thinks this, consider this. That national deficit is about a few trillion dollars and it should be paid off. Will you take a 10% pay cut to help pay this debt off? Didn’t think so.
Another feature of letting market prices take effect in Illinois is that it will give consumers the full incentive needed to curtail and conserve their energy usage. The power companies have said that they will give near-time energy pricing data so that they can adjust their power usage by time. This is one of the biggest suggestions in the study cited above.
By artificially keeping prices low, consumers have lost the incentive to conserve. By artificially keeping prices low, energy companies do not have the resources to invest properly to maintain and improve the energy grid. The status quo will lead to more and more failures like we saw in 2003.
Rate freezes are good politics, if pandering is your thing. However, in reality they never work quite as advertised. It’s time to let the rate caps expire before it is too late… and too dark.
Fair Tax Blogburst: The Progressive Sales Tax
Reprinted with permission from Running in Circles
by Connor CarneyThe Progressive Democrats’ Sales Tax
I consider myself to be fairly liberal on most issues. So some of you might be surprised that I am about to take a position that’s usually the providence of hardcore conservatives. I support HR25—the Fair Tax Act of 2005.
Yeah. The one that would replace virtually the entire tax system with a 23% sales tax.
I read about it most recently in an unnecessarily hostile editorial by Matthew Holmes. Truth be told, his article did nothing to convince me that the tax is a good thing. But it convinced me to wade through the full text of the legislation, and I’ve decided that not only is the Fair Tax Act justifiable, it is the ideal legislation for progressive Democrats. I’ll explain why.
Defining “Progressive”
I used the word “progressive” up there in my introduction. Exactly what that term means can be a little shaky sometimes, but when we’re talking about tax code, it has a pretty clear meaning: people with more money shoulder more of the tax burden. Using this definition, sales taxes are usually something progressives would avoid, since they often hit the poor the hardest. Most sales taxes make life considerably harder for the impoverished, because they increase the cost of basic necessities, making it harder for people to get by.
A National Luxury Tax
This proposal isn’t like that. The secret lies in Title II, Sections 301-303, a provision called the “family consumption allowance.” These provisions allow families to purchase necessities without paying taxes on them. (“Family” means “1 or more family members sharing a common residence”).
This exemption does something interesting: it means that the government would only get taxes from the sales of nonessentials—things that the impoverished, by definition, don’t buy. By allowing essential products to be purchased without the tax, it turns the “national sales tax” into something more like a “national luxury tax”.
In other words, people who spend most of their money on things like food, clothing, and medicine end up paying almost none of the tax burden, while people who spend a greater percentage of their income on luxuries pay a greater percentage of the tax burden. People who don’t have very much money almost uniformly fall into the former group, while people with lots of money almost uniformly fall into the latter group. People with more money shoulder more of the tax burden—it’s as progressive as is gets.
Helping the Needy
The family consumption allowance is a rebate, mailed monthly by the Social Security Administration to families of 1 or more(?!?). According to II§301, the amount of the rebate check is equal to the product of the tax rate and the poverty level.
Using this definition, families making (and thus spending) less than the poverty level could conceivably receive more money in their rebate check than the actual sales tax rate.
This is a similar concept to the Earned Income Tax Credit currently administered by the IRS, with a few exceptions. Unlike the EITC, it the consumption allowance can be claimed by the unemployed. The consumption allowance would also require a lot less paperwork than the EITC—just names, address, proof of citizenship, etc. That’s a good thing for families who are especially time-constrained or people who are poorly educated. And statistics show that such families are exactly the ones who would need such a credit the most.
Tax Evasion
Of course, the Fair Tax Act would also virtually eliminate tax evasion. Right now, companies can move their assets offshore and avoid paying U.S. taxes on them. Some people, particularly business executives and accountants, consider it to be good business.
I, along with most Democrats, consider this to be tax evasion. The Fair Tax Act would put an end to it. The Act would mandate that anything sold in the United States would incur U.S. taxes. There’s really no way to outsource that. Businesses couldn’t get around it by moving production to China, or by moving their income to Bermuda. If they want to sell their product in America (and they all do), it will be taxed.
There are no less than a thousand articles out there that deal with the tax evasion issue, so I won’t say much more about it, but corporate tax evasion is contrary to the spirit of a progressive tax system. It’s currently legal in many forms, thanks to loopholes in our indecipherably complex tax code. That’s bad, and this would put an end to it.
Illegal Immigration
The Act would also provide a serious new tool in the attempt to end illegal immigration. It wouldn’t involve any weapons or border guards or checkpoints or fences—and it wouldn’t cost the government a single extra cent. Again, it has to do with the consumption allowance that I talked about a few paragraphs back.
See, only citizens are eligible for the credit. That effectively increases the cost of living for illegal aliens (okay, okay, “undocumented immigrants”) by 23% (assuming, of course, that they live under the ceiling for such a credit, which I’m just guessing that most do.
Since the primary motivations for the border jumpers are economic, this throws a wrench in the whole concept of entering the country illegally. It gets at the reasons that illegal immigrants are trying to come into America—which is exactly what a lot of Democrats have been saying we should do all along.
Where Does All The Money Go?
The budget of the IRS is currently over ten billion dollars per year, plus the equivalent of a hundred thousand federal employees. Let’s think about that for a moment: ten billion dollars and a hundred thousand people… what could we do with that?
Some of it, of course, would go to the collection agencies established in III§302, but not nearly the scale of the IRS. For one thing, there’s a lot of administrative overhead that gets out of the way because the new Federal Sales Tax Bureau would, for states that already implement sales tax, be working with an infrastructure that is mostly already in place.
So let’s look at what we could do with the money, and with those employees. Let’s assume that a high school can accommodate 2400 students for 3 million doallars a year. That’s an average—in some places it costs more, in some places less, but it’s a fairly realistic estimate. $10 billion would cover the entire cost of operating over three thousand high schools—that’s the total cost of educating 7,200,000 students.
And that doesn’t include the agency’s hundred thousand employees. Let’s say we divided them evenly among the states and put them to work in DMV offices. Anybody who has ever applied for a driver’s license can appreciate the notion of having 2000 extra people in the DMV office. We could do that, in addition to the school thing, for no more than we are already paying just to operate the IRS.
No Tax Cuts for the Rich
The income tax and payroll tax systems that HR25 would replace have not been working out too well for progressives in the past four years. Why? Because the systems we have in place are too obscure. How many people even know what it means to “tighten the tax brackets?” How many people even realize that their income is not all taxed at the same rate?
The simple fact is, George Bush’s “tax cuts for the rich” that were so offensive to the idea of a progressive tax system were only possible because the tax system is so unbelievably complex. Under the system that HR25 proposes, targeting tax cuts at the top 1% of income earners would be not only politically impossible, but literally impossible. Why? Because the system inherently gets a greater percentage from those with more disposable income. (See the section above, “A National Luxury Tax”).
Unlike the current system, the national sales tax would do this without any disparity in the established rates. In other words, the only way that politicians could shift the tax burden away from the rich would be to explicitly give them a lower rate. That, my friends, sits in the dictionary as the cardinal example of “political suicide.”
But Shouldn’t Businesses Pay Their Fair Share?
One of the more obvious questions that comes up when we talk about replacing our entire tax system with a sales tax is whether it shifts too much of the burden away from business. A few people go so far as to say it shifts the entire burden away from business. And quite honestly, I cannot see how that is the case.
The argument that a sales tax shifts the burden away from businesses is fallacious because it assumes that consumers have unlimited disposable income. I will concede that if you are rich enough to believe that, you should absolutely oppose HR25. Most people I know do not have an unlimited supply of money.
If consumers had unlimited spending money, then the businesses could go on as usual. They’d hang on to their existing margins, pass the entire cost of the tax on to consumers, and the price of everything would go up by 23%. Again, that’s assuming that every customer has unlimited money.
In the real world, if the price of almost anything were to actually go up by 23%, they would price almost all of their existing customers out of the market. We’re talking a serious hit to their sales. So, we can expect most of them to change things to keep their numbers up—to decrease margins in exchange for increased sales. They don’t have to, but those who don’t will find that most of their customers can’t afford their products. No customers=No income=No business.
There is actually an exception to this. Businesses that cater almost exclusively to the indescribably wealthy could conceivably pass the entire cost of the tax to customers, but keep in mind that that is a relatively small market (and will remain that way), simply because so few consumers fall into the “indescribably wealthy” category.
Conclusion
It’s kind of hard to believe that I’m finishing up an 1900-word analysis of the tax code. I mean, who am I to evaluate the complex intricacies of tax law?
Ordinarily I’d defer to the accountants on an issue like this. After all, they’ve studied economics and spent years of their life working with and around the tax code. They know taxes like some people know their way home from work. I, by comparison, am a rank amateur.
But this is an issue where deferring to accountants is profoundly dumb. The accountants, as people who make their living off of a tax code so complex that only trained professionals can understand it, are inherently biased against a tax code so simple that garbage men can understand it.
And so I don’t, in this case, trust the people who I would usually look to for analysis. Instead I’ve done my own analysis, and I’m liking the prospect of a tax code that even I am able to analyze. Pretty cool.
Like most progressive Democrats, I’ve learned to be pretty averse to sales taxes. But in this case, we have a proposition that actually bolsters everything that progressives fight for in a tax code. I don’t believe that any progressive worthy of the cause can oppose HR25, and those who give any thought to it should wholeheartedly support it.
The FairTax Blogburst is jointly produced by Terry of The Right Track Blog and Jonathan of Publius Rendezvous. If you would like to host the weekly postings on your blog, please e-mail Terry. You will be added to our mailing list and blogroll.
Wictory Wednesday Presents Steve Laffey for US Senate
This week Wictory Wednesday presents Steve Laffey for the US Senate for Rhode Island. Steve is running against well-known *insert appropriate adjective here* Republican incumbent Senator Lincoln Chafee. The reasons to vote against Chafee are many, but as a rule, we should casts votes for something.
A vote cast for Laffey is a vote cast for fiscal restraint. Laffey understands that the federal government spends other people’s money and that pork projects are an egregarious example of government waste and corruption. He also is against raiding the Social Security Trust fund (yeah, I know, it’s a joke) and corporate welfare. It is a national disgrace that our tax system cannot be understood by even the enforcers of that system, the IRS, and that such a system is an oppression and shackle against the American family. He supports simplifying the system so that the average person doesn’t need to hire a team of professionals to figure out what their “fair share” of taxes is.
Laffey is a strong economic growth candidate supporting policies that will keep the economy moving forward. He supports making the Bush tax cuts permanent and will work to introduce additional tax cuts. He understands that tax cuts also need to come with spending cuts. Laffey is an experienced politician who, as mayor, lead his town from having a near junk-bond rating to financial solvency and has overseen some of the greatest economic renewal Cranston has seen in decades. The Club for Growth has endorsed his campaign recognizing that he will move the nation forward and avoid the recession-prone policies of the Democrats.
Please consider contributing or volunteering for Steve Laffey’s campaign for the Senate.
This has been a production of the Wictory Wednesday blogburst. If you would like to join Wictory Wednesday, please see this post or contact John Bambenek at jcb (dot) blog [at] gmail {dot} com. The following sites are members of the Wictory Wednesday team:
