I don’t know much about Larry Cooney, except that he has been a contributing commenter at the Tank and that he was a Washington State delegate for Ron Paul. Now he is running to represent Kitsap.
Get a website and send us the link, Larry!
I had a similar conversation to this one, but without the moderator. I said that I was displeased about the Seattle smoking ban which demands that smokers stay 25 feet away from the entrance of an eating or drinking establishment. A friend of a friend (who seemed inordinately upset about the topic) exclaimed that he liked the ban because he didn’t have to breathe smoke while getting plastered at the Pacific Inn. I tried to explain that that wasn’t my point, but alas, it was to no avail. He assumed I was a smoker demanding an indoor puff and we got all derailed from there. I am not a smoker.
The moral is that the electorate votes on what they like, not theoretical understandings of personal liberties. You need tyrannical regimes and revolutions to make them think like that. But even after our own revolution, we founded a republic in the hope that representatives could think more abstractly than the majoritarian will. I still hope about that.
Here is a prime example of that. The woman insists that secondhand smoke and transfats are bad, but skips to the conclusion that they should be outlawed. She makes no argument to that effect (though, to be fair, she didn’t have much time). For her, it just simply follows.
Will Bunch at philly.com has this to say to ABC debate moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos.
With your performance tonight — your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters – you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues…
Sounds good. I’m always happy to read a good criticism of the mainstream media. The same entrenchment that allows for William Kristol to secure a job at the New York Times after proving consistently wrong for the last ten years, also allows George Stephanopoulos to continue existing and Chuck Gibson to continue sagging. But then I read part of Will Bunch’s beef:
…me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes….And Charlie…could you be any more out of touch with your viewers? Most people aren’t millionaires like you, and if Pennsylvanians are losing sleep over economic matters, it is not over whether the capital gains tax will go back up again.
Is it common for journalists to misunderstand the impact of capital gains taxes on our economy? I doubt that I see more yield from my capital investments than the average Pennsylvanian, but I’m nonetheless concerned with how they will be levied in the future. Here is why:
For a while until the Bush tax cuts of 2001 capital gains taxes rivaled the highest levels of income taxes. So if I invested in an American business that turned a profit, I would likely have to pay around 40% of my returns to the federal government. The same goes if invested in gold, petroleum, grain, or classic automobiles. The problem is that, while that sounds like a windfall for the government, it has a chilling effect on investment. When the market is up, the chilling effect is negligible- prices still go up and investors still realize returns, so everything continues swimmingly.
The problem is that value sometimes depreciates, especially when market bubbles burst. When that happens and the markets start to look bear-ish, investors flee like they were breaking from the penitentiary. Worse, the first investors to leave are the foreigners who tend to have more liquid investments and readier access to other markets. This leaves American investors holding the bag, often with capital investments that are worth less than what the investors originally paid.
But why should non-millionaire Pennsylvanians like Will Bunch care about all that? First, if non-millionaires are not investing in capital assets, they should be. The federal government adds your income to your capital gains together to determine which tax rate to apply. Those who are in the lowest tax brackets are taxed on their capital gains lower than they have been in years, thanks (again) to the Bush tax cuts.
Second, and perhaps more important, where does Will Bunch think jobs come from? About half the jobs in the United States come from publicly-traded companies. That means that over half the jobs come from companies that are equipped to buy and sell their capital assets as casually as their officers flirt with their secretaries. If they lose investors -and they *will* lose investors if the Democrats raise the capital gains tax as they have sworn in blood to do- they will only be able to expand the job supply by leveraging existing profits. This reduces shareholder dividends, which also drives away investors.
For some real-world examples, consider the fallout after the bubble burst of 2000. Then, foreign investment dwindled to almost-nothing. Only the Bush tax cuts brought them back (sorry if you don’t like Bush, but there’s really no question that it worked). The reciprocal to that, of course, is that the threat of a Democrat President could drive it all away again between the months of November and January. This time, the American investors may be more savvy, aware of the foreign flight, and may follow suit. That could knock the the bottom out of the entire market. So, sorry Will Bunch, but capital investment is a pertinent question if one cares about the economy. If Will Bunch thinks that capital gains taxes are unrelated to overall economic conditions…or if he thinks that Pennsylvanians don’t care about them, he is mistaken and they should.
Sure, Gibson and Stephanopoulos probably stunk last night, but I wouldn’t trust another journalist to tell me why.
This is a bit telling isn’t it? If Nixon hadn’t floated the dollar or if we had returned to some pseudo-gold standard, the price of oil would be about $15/barrel right now. Currently, it is at $115/barrel. I remember a conversation with someone who identified herself as a libertartian about Ron Paul’s monetary platform. She said that one of the things that she found crazy was the idea of a return to the gold standard. For the record, Paul never advocated a return to the gold standard, but he did advocate lifting the capital gains taxes on gold, which would allow people to trade it freely and force the dollar to compete. Instead, the Looney Toons characters on Capital Hill have a complete monopoly over currency, which is hardly a backdrop for a sound monetary policy. So while Paul’s policy on gold may be a little remote, it’s hardly crazy.
My theory on why we haven’t fixed an obviously broken monetary policy? It’s because all the politicians who know shit from Shinola (Shinola was a shoe polish) run on a platform of fixing it. Sure, we want it fixed, but we don’t know shit either. Everything sounds crazy to us. If it takes longer than 15 seconds to explain to the public, politicians are better off just doing it.
I’ve read Andrew Sullivan being right before, but his statement about William F. Buckley takes the cake:
So the most influential conservative of his generation endorsed both the Vietnam and the 2003 Iraq wars, and came to regret doing both. I think one of the great divides within conservatism today is between those conservatives who think war can solve problems and that government needs to be “heroic” and those who are skeptical of both arguments. These past few years have persuaded me that war is in fact the natural enemy of conservatism - because it enlarges government and destroys freedom and fans those emotions that most cloud judgment. Pre-emptive war, without any plans for the aftermath, may perhaps be the antithesis of every conservative impulse known to history. Pre-emptive war to seize non-existent WMDs is almost a text-book example of conservatism repealing itself.
I plead guilty in retrospect, but am reassured that changing one’s mind in the wake of new facts is not a crime or a sin. It is a conservative virtue - and one that Buckley, alas, didn’t share with most of his successors. Can you imagine Hugh Hewitt ever conceding that he was once mistaken?
So do many of us, Big Sully. The sad fact is that many Republicans won’t plead at all out of sheer pride. They could be helping to push this country in a Classical Liberal direction but no one has opened the door to that ethos. I don’t think Republicans really care about what their demagogue leaders do. I mean…they do, but only because those demagogues keep reminding them to. They need new demagogues. Libertarian demagogues. Someone who can use Bush’s cowboy attitude to promote devolution and self-governance. You would think that would go over.
