Newsletter in the Strict Sense of the Term

 

Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ) in the Capitol just after midnight, January 7, 2021, helping to clean up the garbage left by the marauding Yahoos. Photo by Andrew Harnik/AP via NBC News.

Unbelievable torrents of news over the last few days, as if coming down on us from one of those "atmospheric rivers" they have in California now (of which I have a mental picture like a Dr. Seuss drawing, with foamy, roiling blue waves at the border of the stratosphere and lots of careless but energetic fish doing aerial maneuvers).

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In New Jersey, First Lady Tammy Murphy dropped out of the Democratic primary race to replace the abominable Senator Robert Menendez, now under indictment for (among other things) representing Egypt instead of New Jersey on the foreign affairs committee, though he still claims to be running as an independent. The presumptive nominee, Rep. Andy Kim of the suburban district 3 east of Philadelphia, filed immediately after Menendez's indictment, but Murphy seemed inevitable, with her husband's political might behind her and the special Jersey trick known as the County Line, where 19 of the state's 21 counties print their own primary ballots with a top line which the voter can pick to vote for all the candidates endorsed by their party machine at one blow, which generally always wins.

Trouble in Mind

Revised and Updated

Senator Hatch "has a rough time" with renewing the Children's Health Insurance Program.

.@SenOrrinHatch on CHIP: “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves – won’t lift a finger – and expect the federal government to do everything.”

Unbelievable. https://t.co/4VHROvIL8X

— Jenny Wilson for UT (@JennyWilsonUT) December 2, 2017

About $14 billion a year, and it's true small kids are shamefully slow on paying their medical bills like "I think Daddy takes care of it right?"

Everybody—starting with Joe Scarborough!—took this a little bit out of context, I'm sorry to say. What Hatch said, as reported in The Guardian, is this:

David Brooks thinks a new national narrative is his mother

David F. Brooks clinging to the conservative interpretation of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. Image via Simply Psychology.

Funny thing happened to David F. Brooks on the way to writing his column on the Republican tax bill, which is what the URL (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/opinion/elites-taxes-republicans-congress.html) suggests it was meant to be: he got lost in the woods of a completely new argument, beginning with the great British psychiatrist John Bowlby:

John Bowlby is the father of attachment theory, which explains how humans are formed by relationships early in life, and are given the tools to go out and lead their lives. The most famous Bowlby sentence is this one: “All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.”

Actually that's not the case, though it may not add up to a Radio Yerevan joke: first of all, the last word of the quote (from his 1988 collection A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development) has a parenthesis in it, "figure(s)" (along with definite articles with "cradle" and "grave"), and as we'll see that's not a trivial mistake.

Problem Solvers updates

Tongue in cheek, last October (I believe he was explaining that it was "not harmful" for Trump not to have paid any taxes for two decades; yes, I heard that he paid some in 2005, no, that doesn't answer all my question). Via Proud Democrat.

A couple of notes to tack on to Saturday's post on the failure of the Ryan tax cut health care initiative:

First, just that I can't help bragging about it when Dr. Krugman looks like he's channeling me two days later:

One important answer would be to spend a bit more money. Obamacare has turned out to be remarkably cheap; the Congressional Budget Office now projects its cost to be about a third lower than it originally expected, around 0.7 percent of G.D.P. In fact, it’s probably too cheap. A report from the nonpartisan Urban Institute argues that the A.C.A. is “essentially underfunded,” and would work much better — in particular, it could offer policies with much lower deductibles — if it provided somewhat more generous subsidies....

Who invented the single market?

The Custom House, New York, 1799, via Wikimedia Commons.

The first time a continent-wide bunch of independent countries decided to form a single-market customs union, more than three decades before the various German statelets and principalities started toying with the concept of the Zollverein in ca. 1819, was in North America in 1787.

Because as everybody knows the War of Independence was not fought on behalf of one nation but 13 nations, which as the Declaration says "are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States", note the careful deployment of the plural there. As the dust settled after the war they worked out their Articles of Confederation under that assumption, giving each full autonomy in matters of taxation, after the fashion of the Dutch United Provinces.

Because Dad was a bartender...

Imma focus my tax breaks on the biggest tippers!

Per Christian Post, which claims to have interviewed the guy, it's not actually for Jesus at all. He's an agnostic. Image via Komo News.

Senator Marco Rubio is fond of telling us how his experience of financial adversity makes him uniquely qualified to feel for the problems of ordinary Americans, though he doesn't mention that when he was having that iffy relationship with the Republican Party American Express card he was taking home a salary (apart from his not-generous pay as a part-time Florida legislator) of $300,000 from the Miami law and lobbying firm of Broad and Cassel.

Looking at his income tax proposals in the light of some data and analysis supplied by Jared Bernstein puts Rubio's claims to be helping out the poor in some pretty startling perspective, by focusing on the top 400 tax filers, that's with two zeros, or 0.0003% of US households, those with total earnings (according to the IRS) of $139,633,000 or more in 2012.

You should read Bernstein's piece (although he misses the fact that Rubio has apparently taken back his proposal to give the poorest a guaranteed income of $2000 for single filers or $4000 for joint returns and thus makes Rubio seem less stingy to the havenots than he actually is), but there's this one detail in the IRS data that really jumped out at me, the way the top 400's incomes divide up:

Hot little numbers

When they tell you the US has the highest corporate tax rate in the world at 35% and it just has to come down or all our industries are going to Luxembourg, just remember that, as the Times reminded us today, it isn't true.

According to a study of scores of Fortune 500 companies released this year by [Citizens for Tax Justice's Robert S.] McIntyre and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the average tax rate from 2008 to 2012 on utility, gas and electric companies was 2.8 percent. The rate for the industrial machinery sector was 4.3 percent, while the telecommunications industry averaged 9.8 percent. For the aerospace and military industry, it was 19.7 percent. Dozens of corporations including Verizon, Boeing and Corning paid the government absolutely nothing.

Thanks to the wilderness of loopholes, the effective tax rate varies wildly from industry to industry, but overall is not so different from that of other countries, and definitely on the modest side.


Chart by Center for American Progress. I can't find a proper credit but I think it was first used here.

The reason they keep saying that it's so high it's bankrupting them and that if you get rid of the loopholes it must be in a revenue-neutral manner is nothing but shameless extortionism: they want to noodge us into giving them another break.

And it usually works, which is how it got this way in the first place.

Grover forgive me, for I have sinned...

“No pledge-taker has voted for a tax increase,” Norquist explained to CNN’s Soledad O’Brien on Monday. “They’ve had some people discussing impure thoughts on national television.”

Raw Story (http://s.tt/1uQkH)

"When did you first start thinking about tax increases?"

"Oh, I must have been thirteen, fourteen... Physically capable of  legislating, you know, but not at all ready emotionally. Your body's been going through all these changes, and it's hard to concentrate, and these images kind of wander into your head unbidden."

"What kind of images?"

"You know how it it is... you'll be out in the garage with your buddies, and there's a stack of old Congressional Records, harmless stuff mostly, National Accordion Week and the like, and then every once in a while something a little titillating. Like, look at this one, Eddie, voting rights! From the sixties!  And sooner or later you see a revenue bill, and you don't say anything to anybody and shut the volume as quick as you can, but you can't squeeze that stuff back into the tube. You can't unsee it, if you will. You can't stop wondering what it feels like to vote for something like that."

"And how do you cope with it?"

"Well, you pray, naturally. And there's the Bible. 'Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.' Doesn't say anything about giving Caesar your own stuff, does it?"

Reading Playboy South Africa for the articles. From adland.tv.

A hand on the tiller, another in the till

That old Bain Capital (Wall Street Journal, via ThinkProgress) when Willard Mitt Romney was running it was such a sweet place to work, always thinking of the employees—especially the CEO. When they acquired a new company they'd issue special "high-risk" shares that you could dump in your IRA, where they would magically increase to as much as almost 600 times their original value, with any and all taxes deferred as the funds grew or as you reinvested them somewhere else:

Wall Street Journal, 28 March 2012

So Willard himself in this way amassed an IRA of $100 million, which is some basket of eggs. But doesn't every silver lining have a cloud? Now if he wants to withdraw that money it counts as income, not capital gains, and he'll have to pay a top marginal tax rate of 35%—just like ordinary people have to do with their money! Talk about adding insult to injury, this is doing it at compound rates!

Just sickening what a job creator has to go through these days, isn't it? No wonder he's so anxious to reform the system.