TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1270: Why The IRS Matters This Election.
Archive for 2016
October 30, 2016
MEGAN MCARDLE: A ‘Tweak’ to Fix Obamacare? That’s a Red Flag.
Here’s a little diversion to pass the time as you endure Washington’s policy debates. Listen for phrases like “All we have to do” or “We need just a small tweak” or “There’s a really simple fix.” Then watch to see what happens. Whatever that person is proposing will prove to be really, really costly — politically or fiscally or both. . . .
So beware when liberals today start saying that maybe Obamacare has a few problems, but all we need to do is …
They’re saying it a lot. . . .
These things are not easy, simple fixes. Do you know how we know this? They weren’t done when the law was passed.
Why? Because Democrats couldn’t assemble a political coalition to do this. Mind you, at the time they had 60 votes in the Senate, and control of the House, and the presidency — a level of historical dominance they hadn’t managed in decades. Either these simple fixes would have pushed the price tag of the bill too high, making it difficult to find even more taxes or program cuts to pay for it, or they would have damaged the popularity of a bill that was already really unpopular.
And, as we can see, with good reason.
SOCIAL SECURITY’S COMPLEX TRADE-OFFS: From CNBC — a short report on Social Security’s funding problems — its serious funding problems. The article mentions a couple of ways the “long term shortfall” might be solved. It also addresses how the annual cost of living adjustment is determined.
IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Did ‘Everytown’ Anti-Gun Group Pen ‘Hawaii Five-O’ Mass Shooting Episode?
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FLASHBACK: Washington Post editorial blasts Republicans for attacking FBI Director Comey. “A few months ago, criticizing Comey was risking damage to the rule of law. Now that it might be Hillary’s ox getting gored, bashing Comey is just fair game.”
NEW POLL: Trump Leads In Florida. “Donald J. Trump has slowly but surely improved his standing in state and national polls since the final presidential debate. A New York Times Upshot/Siena poll released Sunday is consistent with that trend: It gives Mr. Trump a four-point lead in Florida, 46 percent to 42 percent, in a four-way race. In our first poll of Florida a month ago, Mr. Trump trailed Hillary Clinton by a percentage point.”
And this is interesting: “Mrs. Clinton has had nearly unanimous support among black voters in Upshot/Siena surveys, but not in this one: She had a lead of 81 percent to 11 percent. It might not seem like a big deal, but the difference between that support and the 90-1 we saw from black voters in Pennsylvania covers about half of Mr. Trump’s lead. . . . Mrs. Clinton leads among Hispanic voters by a wide margin of 59 percent to 30 percent in our survey — a tally that’s pretty comparable to most recent Florida polls. But it is better for Mr. Trump than our September survey, when Mrs. Clinton led by a margin of 61 percent to 21 percent.”
Small samples though. And there’s this: “The poll was taken before the F.B.I. director, James Comey, informed Congress that the bureau had obtained additional information of potential relevance to an investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails.”
THE HILL: Ex-FBI official: Clintons are a ‘crime family.’ “It’s like organized crime. I mean the Clinton Foundation is a cesspool.”
“THE MOTIVE FOR THE ATTACK REMAINED UNCLEAR:” Frankfurt attack: Four people injured in stabbing at rail station.
LAST WEEK, EVEN MAKING SUCH A CLAIM WAS MONSTROUS AND ANTI-DEMOCRATIC. BUT NOW . . . Dems adopt Trump’s ‘rigged’ line after FBI bombshell.
The FBI’s decision on Friday to revisit its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified material sent Democrats and Clinton campaign staffers into a frenzy, leading some to accuse the agency of election tampering and sounding much like Donald Trump as they did so.
“[FBI Director James] Comey needs to provide full info immediately. Otherwise he has clearly made a partisan intervention,” liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman tweeted soon after the bombshell announcement.
Krugman then added, “If we don’t hear more from Comey, we just have to conclude that he was trying to swing election. And that should be the story.”
Like Krugman, the chairman of Clinton’s campaign, John Podesta, demanded that Comey “provide the American public more information than is contained in the letter he sent to eight Republican committee chairmen.”
Yes, all that have-you-no-decency stuff only goes one way.
SPENGLER: Small-Ball Conservatism Or National Greatness? “If we play small ball, we will lose.”
FASTER, PLEASE: Blue Origin”s Jeff Bezos revives the idea of free flying O’Neill space colonies.
While Elon Musk wants to found a city of a million people on Mars, his main rival in the commercial #Space game, Jeff Bezos, would like to revive a space colony concept first popularized by Dr. Gerard O’Neill in the 1970s, according to Alan Boyle. An O’Neill space colony consists of a giant rotating cylinder in space with people living on the inside, getting power from 24/7 sunlight. O’Neill envisioned the first such colony being established at the L5 point, one of the five Lagrange points where the gravity of the Earth and the moon cancel out. L5 has easy access to both the Earth and the moon and could serve as a way station to deep space destinations such as Mars. The concept was actually studied by NASA at one time.
The O’Neill space colony was popularized in the movie “Interstellar” and the TV series “Babylon 5.” The idea is that humanity would not just become a multi-planet species, but would be free from planets entirely. Bezos envisions all heavy industry being moved off of the Earth, with the home planet being turned into a garden of sorts for residential and light industry.
Works for me. I was an L5 Society member, back in the day.
PEGGY NOONAN: The Great Disappointment Of 2016:
What I’m thinking about this week is a focus group led by Peter Hart, the veteran Democratic pollster, Tuesday night, in Charlotte, N.C., still a toss-up state. Present were a dozen late-decider voters, three Democrats, six Republicans and three independents.
What struck me about the group wasn’t its new insights, which were few. What was powerful was its averageness, its confirmation of what you’ve already observed. The members weren’t sad, precisely, but they were unillusioned. They were seeing things with clean eyes and they were disappointed. They wanted a candidate they could trust and believe in.
Which when you think about it shouldn’t be too much to ask.
Raise your hand, said Mr. Hart, if you like both candidates. No one did. Raise your hand if you like one candidate. No one did. Raise if you don’t like either. All 12 did. . . .
Mr. Hart asked: Will the next generation be better off? No one raised a hand. This is not news; it’s been a cliché since the crash of 2008. You get used to the data: Americans no longer assume their children will have it better than they did. But it was striking to see these dozen thoughtful people keep their hands down.
Asked what has been lost in America, one respondent said security for kids: “They can’t just go out and play.” “Innocence for kids,” said another. Parents no longer feel the world, even the immediate one, is a safe place.
What is missing in America? “A freshness,” said a middle aged man. He went on to speak of the 1950s, “Ozzie and Harriet,” when things seemed newer somehow and assumptive of progress.
Is America off track? They all nodded.
We’ve been fundamentally transformed.
DAVID MASTIO: The Clinton/Weiner Email Conspiracy.
THIS IS A VERY BAD SIGN: The State Dept has decided that the threat of terror attack on US citizens is so high that it must withdraw the families of staff working at the consulate in Istanbul. Istanbul is a tourist destination. Or it was.
I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: “When linguistic analysis goes horribly wrong: no, Donald Trump doesn’t ‘talk like a woman.'”
MSM WORKING HARD TO TAMP DOWN HILLARY’S FBI WOES. This juxtaposition of two back to back stories at the increasingly politicized IMDB sums it up:
As Jim Treacher once said, “Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn’t know because they might reflect badly on Democrats” and leftwing IMDB readers must be cocooned at all costs.
I WANT A “PERSONAL GRAVITY PACK,” but I’m not sure this fills the bill.
ANDREW McCARTHY ON THE FBI’S PUBLIC COMMENTARY ON THE CLINTON INVESTIGATION:
And now we see the fallout of bending the rules: you end up having to keep bending them. Because Comey went public when he did not have to, he created an expectation – perhaps even an obligation, which is certainly how he sees it – that if circumstances changed, he would have to amend or supplement the record.
As a result, everyone is up in arms: the people (like moi) who believe there was more than enough evidence to indict are upset by the lack of charges and breaks given to the politically connected that no one else would get; and now the Clinton supporters who breathed an undeserved sigh of relief in July when the case was “closed” (something they had no right to know) are upset that the case is not closed – with all the innuendo its “reopening” entails.
Read the whole thing.
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AN INSTAPUNDIT READER POLL: Remember, the question isn’t who you want to win, it’s who you think will win.