VIRGINIA POSTREL: Did George Lucas Read Vogue?
Archive for 2012
December 27, 2012
A HEARTWARMING PHOTO GALLERY: Women Pose With The Assault Rifles They Got For Christmas.
JIM TREACHER: Apparently, Laws Don’t Apply To David Gregory. “You may have thought they did, but that’s because you’re stupid wingnuts who are also idiots. Just because Mr. Gregory called for more gun laws by breaking existing gun laws, that doesn’t mean he should suffer the same consequences that anybody else would. Because shut up.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges cash in on food-truck craze with mobile dining halls.
SCANDAL-PLAGUED EPA ADMINISTRATOR LISA JACKSON QUITS: “A victory for transparency.” “After years of whispers that EPA officials frequently used private email addresses, fake names and coded messages to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, Jackson admitted recently to using ‘Richard Windsor’ as her chosen nom de plume on a government email account. . . . Here’s why this is so significant if you believe the public’s business ought to be conducted in public: Nobody in government has ever gone to jail for violating the FOIA. Jackson isn’t going to jail, either, but at least now she won’t be running the EPA under an alias.”
THE BOY WHO PLAYED WITH FUSION: “A rational society would know what to do with a kid like Taylor Wilson, especially now that America’s technical leadership is slipping and scientific talent increasingly has to be imported. But by the time Taylor was 12, both he and his brother, Joey, who is three years younger and gifted in mathematics, had moved far beyond their school’s (and parents’) ability to meaningfully teach them. Both boys were spending most of their school days on autopilot, their minds wandering away from course work they’d long outgrown.”
Do tell. But read the whole thing.
WHY DO THE RICH AND FAMOUS always sunbathe topless?
WHY DO PEOPLE BLINK SO FREQUENTLY? “In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of scientists from Japan offers up a surprising new answer—that briefly closing our eyes might actually help us to gather our thoughts and focus attention on the world around us.”
READER BOOK PLUG: Reader Martin Archer asks me to plug his new book. If the book is as memorable as the title, it’ll be a hit. But that’s a stiff challenge. . . .
PLENTY OF ROOM AT THE INN: D.C. Hotels Not Exactly Overflowing For Obama’s Second Inaugural.
CHANGE: Polyamory On The March.
SHOCKING SCIENCE: Kids eat more healthy foods at family meals.
HOPEY-CHANGEY: Consumer Confidence Plunges, Unadjusted New Homes Sales Slide To Lowest Since February. Forward!
GREG GUTFELD RIPS INTERACTIVE MAP OF GUN OWNERS: Makes non-gun owners ‘the easiest marks.’ That’s right, of course. When criminals don’t know who has guns, gun ownership generates positive externalities. A searchable map undercuts those.
JUDGING WOMEN BY THEIR WAIST SIZE IS WRONG, BUT JUDGING MEN BY THEIR WALLETS IS FINE: A Bad Credit Score Is A Good Reason To Dump A Guy.
WELL, I GUESS WE’RE SCREWED THEN: Faster Growth Will Come, If Governments Raise Their Game. I really don’t think that the problem is too much “fiscal tightening,” though.
IN THE MAIL: From Robert Sapp, Lunar Dance.
TALKLEFT: Are Gun Owners Now Going To Be Stigmatized Like Sex Offenders? “I think it’s an attempt at intimidation. I wonder if any of those whose addresses were published are immediate family members of federal officials or employees, and covered by 18 USC Section 119, which prohibits publishing home addresses for intimidation. Or if the internet publication of home addresses of gun owners can be considered cyber stalking, cyber-bullying, harassment or invasion of privacy under state laws? Just because the information is available under a FOIA request, does that mean it can be publicly disseminated? I’m sure they checked with their lawyers and felt like they were on safe ground, but I hope somebody sues them.”
Of course, my first thought on seeing the map was “That’s more gun owners than I would have expected for such a deep-blue area where guns are demonized.” Instead of marginalizing people, the effect may be more like How bad can it be if so many respectable people are doing it?
ANN ALTHOUSE: Why Was That Prop So Important To David Gregory?
MEGAN MCARDLE ON THE FUTURE OF TAX RATES:
First, for all the talk about “going back to the Clinton-era tax rates”, that is not exactly what we’re doing. Since Clinton, other tax hikes have been passed, most notably to pay for Obamacare, which raise the marginal tax rates on the wealthy well above their Clinton-era levels.
Second, we’re getting to a marginal income tax level on top incomes that I’m personally uncomfortable with. As libertarians go, I’m not particularly fussed about taxes–I am, for example, on the record as in favor of letting the Bush tax cuts expire.
But I am uncomfortable when the government makes more money off your labors than you do. Yes, some people don’t work very hard to earn their money, or earn it in ways that seem illegitimate. But the solution is to change the law so that it’s harder to earn money in illegitimate ways, not to take the majority of their money in taxes–and the majority of the money of other people who work quite hard indeed.
And third, we’re pushing surprisingly close to the limits of the “raise tax rates on the rich” strategy. Oh, they can maybe go up another 10%, which would raise some real money–about $150 billion a year. But it’s not nearly as much money as we need. And my back-of-the envelope calculation assumes, fairly unrealistically, that raising the top marginal tax rate to 60% produces no income-shifting, doesn’t decrease capital formation, and doesn’t encourage anyone to lessen their work effort. While the literature on the income elasticity of taxation is varied, no one thinks the effect is zero–and one thing that people often don’t understand is that the higher the tax rate already is, the harder it is to raise it further.
Obama, et al., aren’t likely to be especially constrained by revenue limitations, though, as their real motivation is to hurt people they don’t like. It’s all about the punishment.
NAKED DC: A Year Of Crazy Hippies.