Daily Archives: April 24, 2012

It’s the Government’s and you’re lucky to have any

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Sayeth Professors Diamond and Saez today in a column on how high taxes won’t hurt growth.

Read the entire column because it’s worth a “feel” for how people like that think.
This comment from a Peter Spicer was perfect. [bold is mine]

This analysis seems to suggest the entire goal of tax policy is to maximize taxes extracted from an individual. What happened to liberty and personal property?

Apparently the authors think that the governments job is to gather as many tax dollars as they possibly can without hurting the economy.
Not sure why they think the government knows best what to do with those dollars.

I don’t have any skin in this game, but until our elected officials can be trusted to spend wisely, the government’s job really ought to be to live on as little as possible.

Regarding Yesterday’s Outrage

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The WSJ has a great column about the 8.5Billion, (yes Billion!) dollars that Obama is using of your money for re-election.

A quote from the column:

The GAO auditors show a dry wit in expressing skepticism about Medicare’s “stated research goal” for the test. The demonstration project’s design “precludes a credible evaluation of its effectiveness,” GAO says, since all Medicare Advantage insurers get the pay-for-performance bonuses.

In other words, there’s no control group to test which approaches work better. It’s a demonstration project without the ability to demonstrate. Professional courtesy prevents the GAO from saying outright that the bonus program is purely political, but the report suggests as much.

And a great new bumper sticker from the comments:

Romney 2012: Because Obama is a Total D*ck

The Ryan Budget

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First off….at least someone is taking budgeting somewhat seriously.

Second off….Marc Thiessen has become one of my favorite columnists. Today he is writing about a bishop’s attack on the Ryan budget for being so mean.

Bishop Stephen Blaire, chairman of the bishops’ Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, recently wrote to Congress declaring that Ryan’s budget “fails to meet [the Church’s] moral criteria” because it does not require “shared sacrifice,” which Blaire [like Obama] defines as tax increases and cuts to “unnecessary” defense spending. Some of the proposed spending cuts in Ryan’s budget, Blaire said, are “unjust and wrong.”

Thiessen writes back scathingly:

Put aside for a moment the fact that “shared sacrifice” appears nowhere in the catechism of the Catholic Church. It is a reelection slogan for the Democratic Party. Put aside, as well, the fact that the bishop of Stockton, Calif., has near-zero competence to judge what military spending is necessary or unnecessary. The fact is Ryan’s budget does not cut spending at all

Enjoy the whole thing.