Paul M. Jones

For those of you who know a little about federal personal income or corporate tax, or who just want to get a sense for the scope of the tax increase, I commend to you the more extensive write-up produced by Deloitte Tax. I've clipped some inflammatory excerpts for your morning indigestion, but it is worth scrolling through to get a sense for the breadth and nature of the proposal. The short version is that President Obama is pushing absolutely staggering increases through the corporate and business tax systems. Direct taxes on business are, in general, inefficient and economically disruptive, but they are also peerless in their complexity, which means that few voters and essentially no reporters will make the effort to understand what is being done to them.

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If Barack Obama is bashing somebody in his speeches, he is preparing the media battlespace for a substantive attack to come. It turns out that it matters very much what he says.

via TigerHawk (the audacity of taxes).

Obama's health care plans are very, very expensive, and they mean higher taxes for everyone, not just that elusive klatch of greedy fools who are not in the 95% of working families now allegedly slated for stable or lower taxes. Otherwise, how could Obama hope to pay for it?

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You may recognize these proposals; they are recycled from the Obama budget. Estimated cost savings listed: $215 billion over ten years. That leaves just $1.785 trillion for the "stakeholders" to find. And with a model of stakeholder cooperation like Chrysler before us, that shouldn't be hard.

via Obama's Magical Mystery Tour of Health Care Savings - Megan McArdle.

The White House on Monday projected 2009 and 2010 federal budget deficits far higher than it forecast just two and a half months ago, even as it continued to defy most experts and predict that the economy is headed for a strong comeback starting late this year.

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The new administration budget said that the fiscal 2009 deficit would reach $1.84 trillion, or $89 billion more than forecast in February, while the 2010 figure now is estimated at $1.26 trillion, or $87 billion above the previous number. The fiscal 2008 deficit was $459 billion.

The new figures dwarf the $17 billion in budget reductions and program terminations that President Barack Obama proposed with a flourish last week, reductions that Congress is unlikely to approve in full.

via Deficits soar even with rosy Obama budget assumptions | McClatchy.

President Obama's call last year for "shared sacrifice" doesn't extend to federal employees, at least based on the details of his administration's 2010 budget released this week.

via It's A Good Time To Work For Uncle Sam | Econwatch - CBS News.

The financial health of Social Security and Medicare, the government's two biggest benefit programs, worsened in the past year because of the severe recession.

Trustees of the two programs said Tuesday that Social Security will start paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes in 2016, one year sooner than projected last year, and the giant trust fund will be depleted by 2037, four years sooner.

The trustees said Medicare was in even worse shape. They said that the trust fund for hospital expenses will pay out more in benefits than it collects this year and will be insolvent by 2017, two years earlier than the date projected in last year's report.

via Social Security and Medicare finances worsen - More politics- msnbc.com.

To my mind, the real scandal is not that a large corporation doesn't pay people more. The scandal is that so many people have so little economic value. Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the work force without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid?

via Cafe Hayek: Wal-Mart reality check.

I'm seeing nascent signs of a new (but actually old) fallacy, namely that since health care costs can (will?) crush the budget, we don't have to worry so much about other expenditures. The mental story runs something like this: "if we don't cure health care cost inflation, it doesn't matter; if we do cure health care cost inflation, we can afford it." That's exactly the kind of false mental framing that behavioral economics identifies as irrational in other settings.

via Marginal Revolution.

Tyler, too, fears increased taxes -- but via something like a consumption tax (or value-added tax) *in addition to* the existing Federal taxes.

And people wonder why the Tea Party movement strikes such a chord.

If Obama were trying to wreck America as a superpower, what would he be doing differently?

via Instapundit » Blog Archive » A VILLAGE CAN’T RAISE A CHILD WITH NUCLEAR ARMS, OR SOMETHING: Obama Breaks With Gates, Cancels Nuk….

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has bounced an astounding 30% from its March 9 low of 6547. Is this the dawn of a new era? Are we off to the races again?

I'm not so sure. Only a fool predicts the stock market, so here I go. This sure smells to me like a sucker's rally. That's because there aren't sustainable, fundamental reasons for the market's continued rise.

Read the whole thing at Was It a Sucker's Rally? - WSJ.com.

I have been saying for a while that I think things are going to get bad again, for at least a short period. I think we're headed for a "W"-shaped curve (two significant drops before the real recovery starts). I hope I am wrong.

Indeed, I think that with the record-setting spending from this administration (President *and* Congress), we are headed for even *more* trouble later. There are only two possible ways to fund that spending: exorbitant inflation, or exorbitant taxation. Either one is horrible. And leftist commie socialists wonder why the Tea Parties strike such a chord.

Kirk: I think I have the least to say about him, because he made the most of the opportunity to remold the character without changing it. If he didn’t seem Kirk-like to some, it’s a reminder of how much Shatner’s performance hinged - on - mannerisms, the abrupt! Gesture. There was one perfect moment when he nailed Shatner-as-Kirk, though: walking on to the bridge at the end of the movie. They must have loved that in the rushes, and it makes you wonder how much more he could have done. It was wise not to do more.

via » Blog Archive » Tuesday, May 12: the inevitable review.

I saw Star Trek this weekend, and while I have complaints, all is forgiven. The movie is a *whole* lot of fun. I rate it "full evening price", and I expect to see it in the theater at least one more time at a matinee.