NEWS YOU CAN USE: 10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Beer.
Archive for 2014
August 27, 2014
ANDREW KLAVAN ON MY TAKE ON MILITARIZED POLICE. “The problem then is that the militarization of the police is only a symptom of the larger disease: public servants re-conceiving themselves as public masters who do not need to follow the laws they pass and aren’t accountable to the people who elect them. I guess we can expect to see Nancy Pelosi in a SWAT suit right soon!”
JACK DUNPHY: The Ferguson Debacle. No American institution has performed well here. But then, what American institutions are performing well, lately?
IN THE MAIL: One Size Never Fits All: Business Development Strategies Tailored for Women (And Most Men).
Also, today only at Amazon: 50% Off Diesel Clothing & Shoes.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 475.
ANN ALTHOUSE: “I’d like to see more detail about this ‘fear of being thought as racist.’ It sounds like a confession of deliberate law enforcement paralysis, a choice to permit thousands of children to be raped for decades on end, because of befuddlement about how on earth to begin to do anything without looking bad or because of a sense that your community is already hopelessly overwhelmed by evil forces that will only become more aggressive and violent if opposed.”
Perhaps they need to consider the possibility that there are worse things than being thought racist. Of course, if that idea were to spread, a powerful tool of social control would vanish.
BURGER KING AND THE WHOPPER ON TAXES:
Let me explain. Or actually, in the case of Burger King’s planned acquisition of Tim Hortons, let my colleague Matt Levine explain, because he is smarter and funnier and a better writer than I am, and has already nicely summed things up:
The purpose of an inversion has never been, and never could be, and never will be, “ooh, Canada has a 15 percent tax rate, and the U.S. has a 35 percent tax rate, so we can save 20 points of taxes on all our income by moving.” Instead the main purpose is always: “If we’re incorporated in the U.S., we’ll pay 35 percent taxes on our income in the U.S. and Canada and Mexico and Ireland and Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, but if we’re incorporated in Canada, we’ll pay 35 percent on our income in the U.S. but 15 percent in Canada and 30 percent in Mexico and 12.5 percent in Ireland and zero percent in Bermuda and zero percent in the Cayman Islands.”
What is he talking about? The U.S., unlike most developed-world governments, insists on taxing the global income of its citizens and corporations that have U.S. headquarters. And because the U.S. has some of the highest tax rates in the world, especially on corporate income, this amounts to demanding that everyone who got their start here owes us taxes, forever, on anything they earn abroad.
This is a great deal for the U.S. government, which gets to collect income tax even though it’s not providing the companies sewers or roads or courts or no-knock raids on their abodes. On the other hand, it’s not a very good deal for said citizens and corporations, especially because our government has made increasingly obnoxious demands on foreign institutions to help them collect that tax. Both private citizens and corporations who have a lot of income abroad are deciding that they’d rather renounce their ties to the U.S. than deal with the expense and hassle of letting it tap into income that they have earned using some other country’s roads and sewers and police protection.
Taxing people on income earned elsewhere is a human rights violation. Someone should complain to the UN.
And no, I’m not exactly kidding. The United States has been able to get away with this kind of intrusiveness because we’re powerful. As Obama makes us less powerful, there’s increased incentive for other countries to band together against this practice. Though on the other hand, they may favor it as a way to get businesses to relocate outside the United States.
Here’s a crazy idea: Let’s have a business climate that would make people want to headquarter their businesses here.
UPDATE: From the comments: “The global community has spoken: don’t tax income earned overseas. That cowboy Obama is going it alone.”
ANDREW MALCOLM: How Obama Plays PR With National Security.
AT AMAZON, it’s not quite too late to soak up Summer Deals. But it will be soon!
Plus, save 50-70% off on fashion at the Amazon Labor Day Sale.
I HOPE THAT COURTS GROW MORE SKEPTICAL OF QUALIFIED IMMUNITY CLAIMS: Court to Police: No Immunity Just Because You’re Cops.
MICHAEL BARONE ON THE NEW REPUBLIC’S NOAM SCHEIBER: Letting the cat out of the bag on the role of public employee unions.
Noam Scheiber makes a good case for the importance of the Wisconsin governor’s race at the New Republic. But the most interesting thing comes in what Scheiber, perhaps inadvertently, admits. Referring to the limitations on public employee union bargaining imposed by Governor Scott Walker and the Republican legislature, Scheiber writes, “He’s effectively defunded a key Democratic constituency.”
Let’s unpack that. Where do public employee unions get their money? Directly from dues paid by public employees, who in turn get that money from taxpayers. Where does that money go? Politically, almost entirely to the Democratic Party, as Scheiber admits. Public employee unions, whatever else they do, are (in almost all cases) a mechanism for mandatory taxpayer financing of one political party. Scheiber’s complaint is that Wisconsin Republicans have cut the amount of such public financing.
Hence the Wisconsin Deep State’s scorched-earth assault on Scott Walker.
GOVERNMENT SPYING IS FINE WITH THEM SO LONG AS IT’S AIMED AT REPUBLICANS AND TEA PARTY TYPES: Media curiously silent on “Truthy.”
GEORGE WILL ON THE IRS: “It Is Off The Rails And It Is Now Thoroughly Corrupted.”
DAVID ADESNIK: The Tea Party’s Surprisingly Hawkish Foreign Policy.
Two things: First, it’s not so much “hawkish” as Jacksonian, in Walter Russell Mead’s formulation. As Mead put it: “For the first Jacksonian rule of war is that wars must be fought with all available force. The use of limited force is deeply repugnant. Jacksonians see war as a switch that is either “on” or “off.” They do not like the idea of violence on a dimmer switch. Either the stakes are important enough to fight for—in which case you should fight with everything you have—or they are not, in which case you should mind your own business and stay home. . . . The second key concept in Jacksonian thought about war is that the strategic and tactical objective of American forces is to impose our will on the enemy with as few American casualties as possible. The Jacksonian code of military honor does not turn war into sport. It is a deadly and earnest business.”
Second, the Tea Party is about restricting the federal government to its constitutionally-defined roles. Defense of the nation is a constitutionally defined role.
NOEMIE EMERY: Nobody’s Fault: Liberals make excuses for Obama. “All of a sudden, people have noticed that we are in trouble, and many are saying it isn’t the president’s fault. All the bad news, from Iraq to Ukraine, from Libya and Syria to the Mexican border, just seems to have happened: Obama was standing there, golfing or shaking hands with donors, and, like a burst of bad weather, the winds blew, the skies opened, and things went to hell. Mysterious forces conspired against him, terrible setbacks occurred for no reason, and we were left with effects without a cause. His supporters commiserate with him and note his bad fortune at being in office at a time when events make his life difficult. Or they worry about the effect of all these misfortunes on his legacy.”
Why do bad things always happen to him?
PATRICK REDDY: 5 Reasons Why the 2014 Midterms Are Most Like … 1918.
ROGER KIMBALL: Obama Tries For Kyoto 2.0. Can we roll back the Presidential carbon footprint to 1992 levels?
Related: Climate Change To The Rescue? “Mostly, I’m sure he sees the ‘climate crisis’ as a distraction from the countless failures of his administration, not to mention the current global collapse, and yet another sop to his base that makes Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’ seem like the Caltech chess team.”
THE TEACHOUT CHALLENGE MAY OR MAY NOT SUCCEED, BUT IT’S CERTAINLY PUTTING A DENT IN CUOMO’S VIABILITY AS A NATIONAL CANDIDATE: New York Times snubs Andrew Cuomo with non-endorsement.
In 2010, the New York Times offered a ringing endorsement of Democrat Andrew Cuomo for governor, citing in particular his campaign promise to clean up corruption in the state’s capital and reform campaign finance rules.
“Mr. Cuomo acknowledges that his foremost task is restoring trust and transparency to Albany, and the sections on ethics reform are the most impressive in his briefing books,” the editorial board wrote.
But times have changed. In a major snub, the Times editorial board said Tuesday that it will not endorse Cuomo, now governor, for re-election in the state’s Democratic primary in two weeks, largely because he failed to act on the promises that enchanted the paper nearly four years ago. . . .
Looming over the Times’ non-endorsement is the controversy earlier this year over the Moreland Commission, an independent panel set up to investigate corruption that Cuomo’s administration blocked when it looked too closely into Cuomo’s allies. The New York Times published the seminal story on Cuomo’s interference with the commission.
Still, the Times declined to endorse Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham Law School professor challenging Cuomo in the primary, in spite of praise for many of Teachout’s proposals.
They’re afraid she might win.
UPDATE: From the comments: “Check out the comments by Times readers to the non-endorsement. I’ve yet to read a single one defending Cuomo. And they’re Cuomo’s natural constituency and the kind of people who vote in Democratic primaries. The Professor here might be on to something.” I occasionally am.
REP. STEVE COHEN GETS TO THE HEART OF THE MATTER: “A lot of people in America like guns.”
EXECUTIVE LAWMAKING: Obama Pressed To Take Executive Action On Immigration. “Immigration reform advocates, including many Democrats on Capitol Hill, argue that Obama has both the legal authority and a moral obligation to use his executive pen to halt deportations for millions of immigrants living in the country illegally.”