TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1149.
Archive for 2016
July 1, 2016
TROLL LEVEL: GRAND KUNTZMAN. “Major League Baseball must permanently retire ‘God Bless America,’ a song that offends everyone.”
KILL THE WHITE PEOPLE: Whittle, Ott, and Green on al Qaeda’s new politically correct terrorism.
Full disclosure: I’m Green.
GOVERNMENT OF, BY, AND FOR THE ONE PERCENT: Clinton’s Student Loan Plan: Subsidies for Stanford Graduates.
Hillary Clinton, multimillionaire politician, Davos-guest extraordinaire, and giver-of-speeches to Goldman Sachs, is reportedly worried that she is not in tune with the populist mood of the electorate—and understandably so. But her latest student loan initiative—essentially, a targeted subsidy for the most successful college graduates—doesn’t seem particularly likely to help repair her image of among voters who feel that the system is rigged in favor of connected elites. . . .
The real losers from America’s dysfunctional student loan system are not young CEOs, but marginal and disadvantaged students who are often pushed by federal subsidies into programs they can’t complete or can’t afford. The overwhelming majority of the students in default on their federal loans went to third-tier or for-profit institutions or failed to graduate altogether. Graduates with the skills and social resources needed to incorporate a successful company are not in need of an expensive bailout.
Moreover, as Preston Cooper argues at Economics21, Clinton’s promise to give special treatment to the loans of graduates who work at vaguely-defined “socially impactful” companies is practically an invitation to cronyism. “In all likelihood, this provision would be used subjectively by Washington bureaucrats to reward the owners of favored businesses, while implicitly punishing those who fall outside the privileged category,” he writes.
Any serious policy for reducing Americans’ student loan burden should focus on bringing down the cost of college. That means shaking up the accreditation system to encourage more competition and forcing colleges to have skin in the game if their students can’t pay back their loans. It also probably means that the federal government should rein in its free-flowing loans and make more room for private lenders. Further expanding subsidies while creating exemptions and carveouts for favored interests is a regressive approach that will just make higher education more expensive and more unfair.
But the higher-ed industry is one of the Democrats’ most important constituencies, a tremendous source of money, foot soldiers, and propaganda. Why would they want to streamline it? If students suffer, well, omelets, eggs, etc.
THE DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION asks if the Bill Clinton-Loretta Lynch Phoenix Airplane Chat (a truly opaque PAC) was a plea-bargaining session –with Slick Willie begging on behalf of himself, not Hillary and her national security crimes.
Here’s the vastly probable scenario and don’t let mainstream media propagandists scorn it as a right wing plot: The FBI (which works for Attorney General Lynch) discovers evidence of Clinton Foundation corruption, say, the selling of political appointments to donors. At the minimum, rule of law supporting Feebs will solicit Ole Slick’s testimony –if not demand it with a subpoena. He’s the Clinton Foundation’s biggest fish. Fair bet former US Attorney Joseph DiGenova had this scenario in mind or one like when he told the Daily Caller that he believes Slick Willie
“is at least a witness in two criminal investigations, probably a subject in two criminal investigations. He is a person of interest officially to the Department of Justice.”
So Bill’s the slick person of interest. SPOI. The oily Mr. Clinton’s new acronym just begs for an L, doesn’t it? An apt L lurks in his past. In 1999 a federal judge fined him $90 grand for LYING.
MORE MAGICAL THINKING: Hollywood cowards blame Republicans, can’t mention Islam.
JONAH GOLDBERG: No-Gun List? How About a No-Abort List? “If an official at, say, the NIH or FBI think that a woman should be a mother for some reason or other, he or she can block an abortion. Maybe the woman has great genes or a high IQ or the sorts of financial resources we need in parents. Let’s leave that decision where it belongs: in the hands of the government.”
But the right to an abortion is secured by the courts. The right to own a gun is merely secured by the Constitution.
21ST CENTURY POLITICKING: Donald Trump’s Reddit Fan Club Faces Crackdown, Infighting.
The subreddit, managed by a handful of mostly anonymous fans, is a breakout success. But it’s also plagued by constant infighting among its leaders, infiltration by white supremacists and clashes with the site’s administrators over complaints that its users game the system to make their content more visible.
Reddit’s content is promoted on a competitive basis: The more users “upvote” an individual post, the higher it appears on r/all, a homepage that encompasses the whole site, with certain exceptions. The popularity of r/the_donald meant ordinary users who visited Reddit in recent months faced a regular bombardment of Trump posts, including some that critics found grotesque, racist or just plain obnoxious.
These complaints reached a crescendo in June when Reddit’s founder and CEO Steve Huffman announced that he was changing the algorithm for r/all to ensure more “diverse” posts and prevent users from colluding to force their content to the front page.
The Trump subreddit is the most obvious example, but even blog comments have seen infestations by trolls, bots, and sockpuppets on behalf of various candidates. The signal-to-noise ratio of this election cycle is often indecipherably low.
ROBIN HANSON: AGAINST PRESTIGE. “I am against prestige. I don’t yet know how, but I will seek ways help people doubt and distrust the prestigious, so they can be more open to focusing on outcomes. Not to doubt that the prestigious are more impressive, but that letting them run the show produces good outcomes.”
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BREAKING: Under fire after secret meeting, Lynch to step back from Clinton probe.
“Determinations as to whether to charge any individual, as well as the findings of the investigation, will be made by career prosecutors and investigators who have been handling this matter since its inception,” a Justice Department official told Fox News.
The source said Lynch will accept the determinations and findings of non-political appointees as well as FBI investigators and FBI Director James Comey. It is up to the FBI to recommend to proecutors whether to bring charges, but no timetable has been announced. Despite the approach of the Democratic National Convention, Comey has said the priority is to be thorough and fair.
Either that or we’ve just witnessed theater so well orchestrated that it makes Kabuki look like The Groundlings.
GREAT MOMENTS IN MAGICAL THINKING: Sweden’s police chief unveiled the force’s latest weapon in the fight against sexual assault: wristbands reading “Don’t touch me.”
A SERIES OF REFLECTIONS ON BREXIT FROM SETH BARRETT TILLMAN over at The New Reform Club.
AT LEAST UNTIL ELECTION DAY IN NOVEMBER: Desperately holding on to the debunked idea of gender wage gap.
Even though economist after economist has debunked the gender wage gap over and over again (it’s more accurately referred to as an “earnings gap”), some in the media just can’t let it go.
Enter Danielle Paquette of the Washington Post, who wrote an article on the website’s “Wonkblog” section titled “Men say they work more than women. Here’s the truth.”
Paquette attempts to explain away the fact that the Department of Labor repeatedly finds men who work both full-time and part-time are working more hours than women in the same categories. Her assertion is that the statistics only show reported hours.
“Let’s start with a few massive caveats in the Labor Department’s report. First, the researchers asked each respondent to log their own time. Nobody submitted manager-approved work hours, and research tells us one of the sexes generally tends to overestimate,” Paquette wrote. “Secondly, the survey didn’t measure productivity or efficiency. Workaholism isn’t necessarily a sign of value.”
She’s right that working longer hours isn’t necessarily a sign of value, but that’s beside the point unless she has a study to bring out demonstrating that men are systematically less productive.
Her other point about respondents logging their own time is a new angle and, as with every study, it’s an important caveat. Paquette loses some credibility on this point, however, when she later links to studies showing women spend more time doing chores at home but neglects to add the same caveat that these are also self-reported times.
Another caveat with many studies regarding household chores is that they don’t mention many chores that men typically do, like lawn maintenance and household repair.
It’s like the whole thing is just a bogus, politicized sham.
DENNIS PRAGER ON WHY THE LEFT HATES THE #BREXIT REFERENDUM: “The left loves power, not people. Repeat: The left loves power, not people. If that is not understood, the left is not understood.”
HOW DO YOU SAY “DO OVER” IN AUSTRIAN? Austrian court overturns presidential election result.
The results of run-off were contested by the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe), whose candidate, Norbert Hofer, lost by a margin of just over 30,000 votes to former Green Party chief Alexander Van der Bellen.
“We are not poor losers. Rather, it is about the pillars of democracy, which must be secured,” FPOe chief Hanz-Christian Strache told reporters when the challenge was launched last month. He said he felt “obliged to challenge the results.”
Hofer was leading after polls closed on May 22 but the fate of the election was decided when more than 700,000 postal ballots were counted on May 24.
FPOe claimed the ballots were handled illegally in 94 out of 117 electoral districts, with more than 570,000 ballots affected. Irregularities cited include ballots being counted by unauthorized personnel or without observers present. FPOe also alleged that under-16s and foreigners were allowed to vote.
It all appears perfectly Democratic to me.
SO DOES THIS MEAN PAUL RYAN CAVED? House Plans Vote on Guns Next Week. If they slip national carry in, no. If they don’t, then probably yes.
YEAH, I WAS SITTING HERE, EATING MY MUFFIN AND DRINKING MY COFFEE AND REPLAYING THE INCIDENT IN MY HEAD, WHEN I HAD WHAT ALCOHOLICS REFER TO AS A MOMENT OF CLARITY: USA Today’s Paul Singer calls himself a ‘Democratic stooge’ for covering gun control sit-in, in an editorial titled “That day I became a Democratic stooge.”
(Classical reference in headline.)