I suggest that since Obama “won” on the fiscal cliff and taxes were “raised on the rich”, that we all let the media go with that meme.

Paychecks are coming out now and they are all……..lower.
Why? Must be Obama’s clever negotiating. [don't look behind the curtain]

Sure, that’s what did it.
ht Jim Geraghty

Obama is proudly proclaiming that he saved the middle class from a tax hike, and that he only raised taxes on the rich. But since most voters perceive their taxes in aggregate — that is, what’s left on their pay stub after everybody takes their bite — they’ll probably perceive the opposite, that an income-tax hike supposedly targeting the rich made their paychecks 2 percent smaller. Thus, they’ll be even more skeptical than usual, since they’ll think the last tax hike on “the rich” hit them instead.

Luckily, we don’t care.

I actually don’t have a problem with having internet companies collect sales taxes. This story in the WSJ by Chistine Gregoire and Sally Jewell basically agrees with me.

Local retailers—who create jobs for our families, friends and neighbors—have long been required to collect and remit state sales taxes. By contrast, online vendors that operate from out of state are under no such requirement, even though the taxes are still owed by the consumer in the 45 states that collect sales taxes. This disparity undermines the competitiveness of the retail marketplace and diverts $23 billion from state and local treasuries every year.

I do have a problem with throwing this in as an addendum to a defense authorization bill. Do you really believe we will ever actually deal with Medicare when we can’t get congresspeople to actually vote on something like this?

In a column by Matthew Yglesias you hear why raising Medicare eligibility to age 67 to keep it solvent is a bad idea. Because if the federal government doesn’t pay for these costs, then somebody has to and it will cost them more than the federal government.

That’s why raising the eligibility age is such a poor policy. Moving a patient off the Medicare rolls and onto the private market doesn’t just shift costs from the government to the patient. It also entails a massive increase in costs.
The Kaiser Family Foundation has found that lifting the eligibility age from 65 to 67 would reduce federal spending by about $5.7 billion in its first year of full implementation. But that would be offset by $11.4 billion in spending by other parties. That includes $3.7 billion in higher costs for 65- and 66 year-olds, $4.5 billion from employers through company-sponsored insurance, $0.7 billion from state governments, and $2.5 billion in higher average prices for third parties once younger seniors are shifted out of the Medicare risk-pool and into the general population.

Let’s take this a further step. We all need food. If the government, like Walmart, were in charge of negotiating food prices, then it could get the cheapest price available due to it’s negotiating power by covering so many people. Since they don’t, it costs us MORE money than we’d like, so the Federal Government should be covering our food costs.

Same with housing and transportation and cable tv. The government due to their negotiating power can theoretically get better prices on everything, so we really ought to be in even bigger debt and covering more things! YAY government.

I think you generally need a degree to be a journalist, but apparently there is no requirement to actually think.

And I’m not keeping up very well.

In Europe, farmers spray down parliament. Why?

Farmers want an increase of up to 25% in their prices to cover costs.

EU milk is often sold at below production costs due to a drop in international demand and increased competition.

The European Milk Board (EMB), which is co-ordinating the protest, says small farmers are being forced out of business.

In Belgium, for example, the wholesale price for a litre of milk is 0.26 euros (£0.21; $0.34) but the cost of producing it is 0.40 euros, the board said.

Dairy farmers in Shropshire, England, recently won a price increase to £0.29 (0.36 euros) per litre from a leading processor but reported that the cost of production was still £0.31 (0.38 euros).

The EU is the world’s largest milk producer and in 2010 nearly 47% of its 123bn euro budget went on subsidies and other forms of financial aid for farmers, including dairy producers.

I didn’t realize that Europe was totally socialist and that boards set prices.

Then I read about the raisins here in the good ol US of A.

For over 80 years, raisin farmers have been forced to give up to 47% of their crop to the federal government for little or no payment.

It’s not the only commodity in that situation either. I am naive.