TAX

Restoring freedom at home "Governments in the U.S. take approximately 40 percent of the country's total income in taxes. In other words, nearly half of all the income generated each year is sent to governments to spend. How free are you when governments take half of your income? Serfs in the 16th and 17th centuries typically owed their feudal lords only a quarter of their crops and livestock, and often much less. Our forefathers fought a war for independence over tax levels that were far lower than those we now pay without complaint."

Costs of the federal tax system : "In 2005, Americans will pay about $2.1 trillion in combined federal taxes. However, the amount of taxes paid does not reflect the total cost to taxpayers -- taxpayers also bear compliance and efficiency costs, according to a new study by the Government Accountability Office. Combining the lowest available compliance estimates for the personal and corporate income tax yields a total of $107 billion (roughly 1 percent of GDP) per year. The GAO says estimating efficiency costs are very challenging because the tax system has extensive and diverse effects on behavior."

Tax reform timidity : "The president's tax reform panel's report is due at the end of this month, but don't hold your breath if you were looking for the reform that is really needed. Preliminary signs are the panel will recommend relatively modest (but several desirable) changes to the federal tax system. For decades the present income tax system, with its tens of thousands of rules and regulations, has been widely recognized as so complex no one human, no matter how talented, can understand it. The present system puts even those who fully intend to comply with the code at risk of being convicted as tax felons because it is impossible to know with certainty when one is or is not in compliance (even federal tax courts rulings sometimes rule contradict other federal tax courts). The short, but correct, word for such a system is tyranny. It is also extraordinarily expensive to administer, both by the government and the private sector."

Tax reform panels says: Cut mortgage deduction: "The real estate lobby is already screaming. Representatives from California and other real-estate bubble states are voicing opposition, saying that their states would bear most of the shifted burden. Brokers and others in the real estate industry say this would hurt their business. What those in the real estate pressure group are not saying is that the tax breaks for real estate, such as the deduction for mortgage interest and property taxes, is what drove real estate prices up in the first place. To the extent they are beneficial, government's goods and services such as highways, streets, parks, schooling, security, welfare aid, and farm subsidies, all drive up rentals and the price of land, since these are paid for mostly from taxes on wages. The big landowners are now screaming because government will reduce their subsidy."

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ELSEWHERE

A black professor calls for the extermination of all whites and we hear nothing about it from the mainstream media. How odd! They're too busy re-running pictures of terrorists being humiliated at Abu Ghraib, I guess. And two little girls who expressed WHITE nationalist sentiments got blanket coverage, of course.

Rafe Champion notes some good sense from one Australian black leader: "Noel Pearson delivered an inspiring address in Sydney at a CIS symposium this evening. He used the image of a staircase of opportunity to signal the need for something more substantial to assist outback Aborigines than the "ladder of opportunity" that has been advocated for suburban battlers. The foundation of the ladder consists of healthy social norms, mores or morals. He described this as a thoroughly conservative approach in a non-derogatory sense and he noted that people in the mainstream of society where the mores are essentially healthy need to realise what life can turn into when the moral framework has been seriously eroded by the wrong mix of incentives and payments."

The Adam Smith blog has an amusing post on why Homer Simpson is a far better influence than either Karl Marx or Noam Chomsky. I have previously made a similar point myself.

Wonders will never cease: "A Saudi columnist says the violent jihad movement of Islam is similar to, or even worse than, Nazism, and that for the West not to oppose it will lead to consequences worse than Nazi Germany."

Why am I not surprised? "A Senate report is criticizing nonprofit groups that employ people with disabilities for handing out excessive salaries and benefits to their top executives, among them the chief executive officer of Roseville-based PRIDE Industries Inc. Michael Ziegler, a 60-year-old businessman who has helped turn PRIDE into the nation's largest employer of people with disabilities, received $594,000 in salary and bonuses, according to the company's 2002 IRS filings. Ziegler and members of PRIDE's board defended the pay Monday, saying it includes bonuses for two different years."

Why "liberal elites" can't sink America: "Jonathan Last has written a fascinating piece in The Weekly Standard titled 'Rule America?' where he suggests that there are ominous parallels between the United States of today and a sinking, subdued Great Britain of the 1930's, dragged down by the hostility of the liberal elites of the time. In fact, go ahead and read it yourself! Go on! Do it right now, at www.weeklystandard.com. ... And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one reason why our own liberal elites will never succeed in bringing America down. What am I talking about? Why, how easy it was for you to read that article, by merely clicking a button! The Internet is going to save America ... or, I should say, the New Media will, by breaking the liberal elite's media monopoly."

Russia: Hail the good revolution: "It wasn't the Bolsheviks that swept away the Czar in a heroic seizure of power; they came to power instead in a squalid little coup that stabbed in the back Russia's first chance at real freedom. Remember all those stories and images of people rampaging across Palace Square and storming the Winter Palace? That wasn't the Bolshevik hordes storming the citadel of Czarist oppression -- that is a lie. There were no hordes; there was no storming of the Palace -- not by the Bolsheviks anyway; and the Czarist oppression had already been swept away some months before in the 'Good Revolution' of February. The Bolsheviks didn't sweep away oppression; they brought it back."

There is a good new site called Eye on the U.N. with daily updates on the shenanigans there.

The latest Carnival of the Vanities is now up with lots to read.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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