Bracket CreepEver hear of bracket creep? With inflation on the rise, you soon will. Especially if Obama’s tax plans as they’re currently outlined become enacted. Bracket creep is the process where people’s taxes are raised because their salaries rise due to inflation and they are thus pushed into a higher tax bracket. So say your salary doubles due to inflation. You’re not any richer, and you’re certainly not rich, but suddenly you’re in a tax bracket for rich people because your nominal salary doubled in terms of dollars, even though it stayed the same in terms of wealth. That’s bracket creep. One of the great triumphs of the Reagan legacy was that they got rid of bracket creep by indexing the tax brackets for inflation. Now obviously this gives the government every incentive to underestimate the effects of inflation, but it’s better than nothing. Now, apparently, there was no such provision written into the Bush tax cuts when they expire, meaning that the brackets revert back to the way they were in 2000 or so, before Bush took office, before all this inflation took place. Scared yet? Andrew Biggs comments:
Obama had best address this issue if he wants to let the Bush tax cuts expire, because otherwise he is suggesting an enormous tax increase on the American people. Furthermore, he should also suggest indexing capital gains taxes for inflation in exchange for raising the rate as he wants to. That would at least be a fair trade-off. Read Andrew Biggs. |
||
Chinese FoodA friend of mine just came back from China, and while his pics were amazing, all I cared about was the food. Well the WSJ has a great expose on food in Beijing for the upcoming Olympic games. It has great photo spreads of some of the restaurants too. Seeing my friend’s pics and reading this article in succession really made me want to go to China. My friend may give me some pics to post later. In the meantime, check out the WSJ Beijing food expose. |
||
Rules Matter 2This time it’s Dick Morris stating the obvious:
Yeah. The thing is, the rules committee is filled with her cronies, so it’s not quite as cuckoo bananas as it sounds. But it’s still nuts. Read Dick Morris. |
||
What Do Alcoholics, White Women, and Nude Photos Have In Common?They’re all discussed in the latest Ask Amber column. |
||
What WhatJust because… |
||
FrEaKoUt!!!Don’t look:
More here, but it’s just a news site. No flashing images. For that I’ll refer you to my banner ads. |
||
Rules MatterObserve:
On the money. Read George Will. |
||
Hillary’s PlotSo Hillary has leaked to Drudge via Stephanopoulos that she’d be willing to accept the VP slot if offered. Given Hillary’s utter duplicitousness, one may rightly ask “What the heck is she up to?” Well, I’ll tell you. Hillary’s new game is to join Obama’s team, get elected as Vice President and then, kill Obama. She would be sworn in as President immediately, before all the facts could be sorted out, at which point she would immediately pardon herself for the murder of Barack Obama. Mark my words, friend. |
||
IndiaSo I’m listening to the BBC News on the way into work today, and they were describing last night’s election results, and the woman says, “Barack Obama came out ahead in last night’s elections in North Carolina and India…” Hilarious. I also love how they roll their R’s when saying “Barrack”. |
||
I’m BackI’ve been way too busy to blog. And I have so much to say too, which really sucks. In the meantime, you should be subscribing to my Google Reader feed, which you can find in my sidebar. And if you aren’t subscribed, here’s what I’ve been reading for the last week:
I’ll see if I have some time to blog tonight. I really do have some interesting stuff to say. Honest!!! |
||
Inflation Yet AgainWhen the Wall Street Journal is telling you that your policies are designed to rob Main Street to give the money to Wall Street, you know it’s gotten bad:
And we wonder why people refuse to save. Be sure to read the whole thing. |
||
Riehl on SnipesSo Wesley Snipes is going to jail for 3 years for not filing tax returns. Dan Riehl understands the implications:
It’s all about the money, which is all about controlling your life. Read Dan Riehl. |
||
Good Grandparenting(via kung foo) |
||
EducationSo apparently it’s not good enough to tank the mortgage market and then have the US taxpayers finance a bailout. Now we have to have a repeat performance with the education market:
Of course, as George Will points out, out free education sector is a mess (which is probably why so many people need to pay to go to college; to learn what they should have learned in high school):
Great. Oh, and let’s not forget, our schools are super easy compared to intellectual strongholds like Bangladesh… |
||
InflationPlease, Lord, when will it end??? Caught this interesting link over at Instapundit. Basically, fuel and food prices correlate 90% to the decline in the dollar. Go figure:
Be sure to read the whole thing. Also, Robert Samuelson today talks about the effects that changing demographics have on the economy:
Now put those both together. Inflation while the economy is showing down due to an aging population. Remember the Jimmy Carter years, when senior citizens ate dog food because inflation has turned their SS check into nothing? I do… The future looks bleak indeed. |
||
PennsylvaniaI don’t have much to say about it. It was relatively close. Hillary picked up a few delegates, which will be negated by the upcoming Indiana and North Carolina primaries. Obama will still be the nominee. The only question is what Hillary does with herself once that happens. |
||
First Casualty From The WSJIts editor resigns:
He says that the new ownership deserves the opportunity to choose their own editor. Sure that’s why he’s leaving. Read more here. |
||
Earth DaySo here a few bits from Earth Day. First the founder of Greenpeace explains why he left:
John Cox celebrates Earth Day; with a finger up the nose. David exhorts us not to buy the hype. And on a different note, check out the Solatube. |
||
George Will On The FedGeorge Will is on fire over the recent Fed moves. Welcome to the party:
Read George Will. |
||
What’s The Matter With The Wall Street Journal?Sorry, that was completely unwarranted but I couldn’t resist. The Journal has hired Thomas Frank, author of “What’s The Matter With Kansas?” to do a weekly column and in effect be the Journal’s left-of-center token columnist. Tom was a graduate student at the University of Chicago while I was a college student there, and we came to know each other in the fight to save the college radio station, WHPK. I haven’t spoken to him since then, and he probably doesn’t remember me in the slightest, but he was a good guy, and so I thought I give his new column a plug here. Today Tom is writing about Obama’s so-called “bittergate”. Read Thomas Frank. |
||
Water TownI’ve lived in and around the Boston area for most of my life. Both my parents and their extended families hail form Watertown. So imagine my surprise when I got a postcard for Cosco Landscape which advertised itself as being located in Water Town, MA. Who the heck writes it as two words??? What’s also weird is they feel the need to let me know they’re incorporated as an LLC, and finally it says “email at www.coscolandscape.com” which of course is not an email address. Weird. |
||
Regulate Bandwidth By PriceSo Net Neutrality continues to be a big issue. The FCC is apparently getting involved, and their ideas don’t seem terribly bad:
I think that’s basically right. What’s needed is truth in advertising, a sense of what you’re really getting for the money you pay. The simplest way for the networks to manage their bandwidth is to charge for peak vs off peak times, rather than a one price all you can eat approach. By manipulating pricing, they can get consumers to manage their behavior. But when they mess with Internet Protocol itself, they destroy the Internet, which is predicated on everyone playing by the same rules. Too bad I don’t think the FCC has jurisdiction over Internet matters. If only congress would do it’s job… Read more here. |
||
Where Is The Fault Line Now?So I’ve written about the shifting fault line in American politics before. My basic thesis is that with socialism out of the way, party politics will re-align with civil-libertarians and economic-libertarians aligning under one party roof, with the other party roof basically looking something like the Christian Democrat parties of Europe except more fundy. The operative question is: which party will become which? Will black Christians eventually migrate over to the Republicans with their fellow white Baptists, or will civil-libertarian democrats wind up migrating over to the Republicans? According to Daniel Henninger, the Democrats are making a play for white Christians to head their way:
It remains to be seen where people actually head. But I do think that things are shifting. Economic-libertarians have no obvious home, religiously informed voters will eventually unite around one party, a party that preaches some form of mild socialism along side with social critiques, and the capitalists will unify with the ACLU and the gays and others to form the other party. I personally figured that the Republicans would wind up as the Religious party, since switching on the abortion stand seems to be impossible for either party to do. But I could be wrong. Read my original essay on the Fault Line in American Politics. |
||
Disrespecting Your CustomersEveryone on the planet has already referenced this MS sales video. In case you haven’t seen it, here it is: Most everyone who has commented on it has either made some snarky remark, or made fun of corporate booster videos generally. But what strikes me about this is the extent to which Microsoft disrespects its customers. If this video is to be believed, the typical corporate buyer is a stereotypical caricature of the fat businessman in a suit, easily angered and kinda dumb. The problem is, not everyone out there has Steve Ballmer for a boss. In fact, most of us don’t. And if you are the boss, the guy who makes that buying decision, is that how you want to see yourself portrayed? I’m serious… So yesterday at lunch, a friend was showing me his implementation of SUSE Linux on his HP laptop. It was truly slick, and fast as hell. I’d really like to try one out. But one detail he pointed out to me really struck me. The HP laptop he had had this neat kind of volume control. It was a touchpad slider kind of mechanism; slide your finder to the left to turn the volume down, to the right to turn it up. My friend told me that when he had XP on it, it never worked properly. When he installed SUSE, it recognized the gizmo and now it works perfectly, as intended. If my friend were the tech guy in my company and I were the boss, that demonstration alone would have made my decision for me. Videos of Bruce Springsteen imitators singing about how SP1 will finally convince the fat dumb suit that it’s ok to use Vista now actually push me in the same direction. Nice work. |
||
Last Night’s DebateNo, I didn’t watch. These debates are pretty much unwatchable, and you can get a better sense of the candidates positions by watching interviews with them or reading their positions on their websites. Nevertheless, a few articles about last night’s debate caught my eye. Apparently, the debate lived up to my craptastic expectations. Let’s start with booster David Brooks [emphasis mine]:
Frankly, I don’t think he could have been more wrong about what the journalist’s job is. The journalists job is not to get the candidate in a “gotcha” moment or to try and embarass the candidate about some personal matter or some lack of knowledge about some trivial matter. That’s the Tim Russert/Sam Donaldson/Andy Hiller school of journalism, and it sucks. The job of the journalist, if I may be so bold, is to ask questions so as to illuminate us as to what this candidate is likely to do once in office, particularly on issues that may be controversial, where the candidates may differ on their approaches. It would appear as if none of that occurred at last night’s debate. I’m glad I didn’t waste my time watching. Oh, and on a side note, which brainiac decided it would be a good idea having George Stephanopoulos ask questions when one of the participants in the debate was a Clinton? I mean, I don’t know if Stephanopoulos loves or hates Hillary, but given his previous close working relationship with that family, shouldn’t ABC have found someone else to ask questions during the debate? Now on to Tom Shales, who gives what sounds to me like an accurate description of last night’s “debate”:
Wow. I actually thought ABC did an OK job with their first Republican debate, and CNN had sucked wind there. Regardless, I think it’s time for the candidates to just debate each other in slow motion on YouTube, taking their time to answer questions from each other and perhaps from noteworthy bloggers. If they did that, say taking one question a day for a month, the people would learn far more about the candidates than they ever do now with these “televised” debates. Gingrich was right, this is no way to choose a President. |
||
Honda Fuel CellSo it appears Honda is selling, leasing actually, their first fuel cell vehicle. It’s available in southern California only, for $600/mo. That includes maintenance. The car runs on hydrogen. They say they’re going to make it more available as they get more hydrogen stations up and running, and they’re even planning a “home station” to generate your own hydrogen. ![]() Check out the Honda FCX Clarity. |
||
Samuelson on TradeRobert Samuelson delivers his usual goodness:
No wonder no one trusts us. First we clamor that we want to unilaterally re-negotiate treaties that were negotiated in good faith, and then we suspend our rules that encourage other countries to negotiate with us in good faith. So much for the Democrats repairing out international image abroad. Whatever. Bust just negotiates treaties with Iraq and then doesn’t submit them to the Senate as he’s constitutionally requires. It’d be nice if someone in out government lived up to their commitments. IN any event, read Robert Samuelson. |
||
Boston is #2Apparently, Boston is the #2 place to buy real estate in the country right now:
#1 is Atlanta. |
||




