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My friend Hank Adler, co-author with me of The Fair Tax Fantasy, professor of accounting at Chapman University and retired partner at Deloitte, on the so-called Buffett rule:
The United States Senate is set to vote on the "Paying a Fair Share Act of 2012" on April 16, 2012. This bill would enact the so-called "Buffet rule" and impose a new type of minimum tax on all taxpayers with income over $1 million. The specific goal is to insure a minimum income tax rate of 30% on income of over $1 million.
When first proposed, the "Buffet rule" plans would have disallowed or minimized the value of charitable contributions. Mercifully, because of months of lobbying by non-profit groups, the "Paying a Fair Share Act of 2012" includes in its calculation of this minimum tax, the opportunity to offset gains with charitable deductions in a manner somewhat similar to existing law.
Is it a good idea? Perhaps, we should ask a hypothetical question about a hypothetical series of events. Let's suppose that Bob and Clara Citizen sell the family business in January of 2013 for $5,000,000. To make it easy, let's assume the entire $5,000,000 is a capital gain and they immediately invest the $5,000,000 with a wealth manager they have known for years. Six weeks later, the wealth manager is arrested for fraud and the money is gone. (Think Madoff.)
Seemingly forever, when disaster strikes, taxpayers have been able to claim a casualty loss on their tax returns to offset their other income. (The casualty loss can be theft, natural disaster. Think Katrina.) Apparently the Senators sponsoring the "Paying a Fair Share Act of 2012", essentially the entire Democratic leadership in the US Senate, are unaware that the casualty deduction is wiped away by this bill and Bob and Clara would essentially face a 30% tax on the $5,000,000 which has been lost.
The issues here are not the 30% tax on the wealthy. (A discussion of the impacts of higher taxes on the wealthy and its impact on the economy is the grist for lengthy dissertations.) The issues here are about competence and politics. The proposal is terribly flawed as apparently not a single thought was given to the long standing casualty loss deduction rules in the Internal Revenue Code. Perhaps the sponsors of the bill may be far more interested in scoring a few political points than in furthering well thought out tax legislation.
This proposal is endemic of everything that is wrong in the US Senate. The Senate cannot find time to pass a budget, but apparently can spend unlimited time on legislation designed to score political points.
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My Townhall.com column this morning argues that MSNBC's Joe Scarborough has fallen into the Pauline Kael trap of projecting on to the country the opinions of the various Manhattan-Beltway media elites whose collective judgment not only rallied to George McGovern in '72 but which also was confident of Jimmy Carter's re-election in 1980.
The fundamental conditions that drove the GOP landslide of 2010 remain in place, and the president's incredible blunder of admitting near an open mic to the Russian president that he has a secret, post-election agenda which he cannot embrace openly now because of the pending election will mark the moment when he lost the ability to come back in voters' minds.
Let's be blunt: The president admitted he would be deceiving the voters from now until November on a critical part of his agenda. Even if his existing record was marginally acceptable as opposed to a long trek of disastrous innovations and failed "recovery summers" and gigantic deficits, still he would be in deep political trouble because of this admission of fundamental dishonesty vis-a-vis voters.
Mitt Romney, by contrast, has emerged from the GOP nominating process admired by all as a man of great personal character, and identified as a "moderate" by the MSM, which is not true but which will help with independent voters in the fall. And while the "war on women" nonsense might have worked in a pre-media literacy world, it is now just a risible Manhattan-Beltway media elite riff, every bit as authentic as Anthony Weiner's staged outrages, and backed up by a moral standing every bit as imposing as Weiner's, or Elliot Spitzer's, or Keith Olbermann, or, most recently, the deeply bigoted Lawrence O'Donnell. Meanwhile, the conservative critique of Obama has spread far and wide, is understood, and is ignored only at the MSM's peril, as Kurt Schlicter argues this morning in the Washington Examiner.
Things thus look very good for the GOP at this moment, far better than anyone could have imagined in November 2008, when Republicans were expecting a long, long journey in the wilderness. Now it is just a question of staying consistent and purposeful, and of raising money and networks of volunteers. The election will close to a dead heat, then Romney will surge ahead at the Tampa convention, Obama will get a huge bounce from Charlotte, then seesaw polls that are tweaked by turnout models to achieve the results desired, and then a "sudden break" to Romney to explain the widespread rejection of Obama on election night.
But it will take hard work and money. So as I head off to a long Easter weekend after today's show, I ask that if you have any time this weekend --and a few dollars to spare the Republic's future-- you visit the banner box on the right marked Hugh's List, and pick one or all of these races to donate some dollars to and commit to helping again and again. We need Romney to win, and we need the Senate back in GOP hands and the House majority in tact. Things look good. The win in November could be sweeping. But it will require a great deal of work from across the country, and it will require complete indifference to the spin coming out of the networks and the Obamian Beltway press and his Chicago gang of political thugs.
For a lesson in refusing the narrative of the MSM elites, read the interview below between Mike Allen and myself. Mike is a fine guy --a wonderful fellow in fact-- and one of my favorite D.C. journalists, but his new book is full of the "made-in-Chicago narrative" that has infected every Manhattan-Beltway media organization. It is crucial to push back against that narrative every single day, and to do so not just to your friends and family, but also via contributions of time and treasure to the key campaigns, from Romney's down to the NRCC. That's why I put my list together, and why I hope you visit it sometime over the next four days.
Thanks in advance for diving in, and have a blessed Passover or a Happy Easter.
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The transcript of that conversation will be posted here later, and it includes the unusual parallels in Romney's and Obama's backgrounds:
Read More...HH: As I said in hour number one, the Republican race for the primary nomination is still over. It’s still over, it’s been over since Florida. But if you want to know why it’s over, why Mitt Romney’s going to be the nominee, you may want to go to Politico.com and order the brand new e-book, Inside The Circus by Mike Allen and Evan Thomas. It’s their second installment in their sort of instabooks that come out throughout Campaign 2012. Now, their White House correspondent and principal political prognosticator extraordinaire, Mike Allen, joins me. Hello, Mike.
MA: Well, Hugh, thank you so much for having me on.
HH: Hey, congratulations. Inside The Circus was a wonderful read. Like the first one, I sat down and read it cover to cover in a single sitting. How’s it doing?
MA: Very kind of you. It’s doing great. It’s one of the best selling political e-books ever, and it’s because of the great Evan Thomas, who is an amazing writer, and Jon Meacham, the editor and conceiver of it. So our idea was to do that old Newsweek project, remember, where they would embed a reporter during the campaign, and they couldn’t write anything until after the campaign. Now, for the digital age, we are doing it in real time. So Jon Meacham calls is Teddy White in real time. At least that’s what we’re shooting for.
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Governor Romney's triple-play yesterday should oblige even the biggest booster of President Obama in the MSM --and there are many-- to begin to write about the general election match-up that is a certainty, pushing the "brokered convention" that was always fantasy to the shelf alongside Game of Thrones.
The choice before country come November is stark and too important to explain in a quick post, but the GOP nominee has the perfect day on which to begin to introduce himself as the alternative not to other Republicans but to the disastrous president who has caused so much harm and brought so much misery in the wake of his inane rhetoric of hope and change.
The president's risible speech yesterday --see Guy Benson's epic analysis of it here-- and Joe Biden's astonishing 11-minute answer to a question on gas prices yesterday, give Romney the perfect opening to lay out in comprehensive fashion the many and keep differences between how the country has been run in the past three-plus years versus how it will be governed in the next four.
This means Romney's writers have to pivot from writing with one eye over his shoulder at Santorum and Gingrich and focus squarely on the president who has begun to slip the moorings of reality. Every day should bring from Team Romney a new barrage of facts and responses --today for example Romney should be blasting not just Obama's genuinely absurd litany of doom from yesterday, but also the president's attack on the Supreme Court, the Fifth Circuit's response, and the president's demand for "space" from, and promise of flexibility to, Russia's Medvedev and Putin.
Every day, on every subject, contact, contrast, contrast.
I will be interviewing Mike Allen today about his new book, Inside the Circus, co-authored with Evan Thomas, that is really a sort of witness protection program for Beltway campaign consultants and alleged Romney "advisers." It is a fun and gossipy read but it missed much of the big struggle underway between Obama and Romney because Team Romney wasn't pushing its general election strategy out the door to even to Allen, the best Beltway reporter.
But that strategy begins today, and hopefully it is revealed in seven months of unbroken "See what the president is done? Here's what I will do" speeches and events. The president did a wonderful job of opening the door to general election debate with is tete-a-tete with Medvedev, his attack on SCOTUS and yesterdays almost deranged speech warning of mid-air crashes and the end of the nightly weather. We can only hope he clings to his third-string speechwriters the way he has clung to his self-absorption in all matters. Romney by contrast needs the first team and a seven month schedule of speeches and events that pound home again and again the facts of Obama's incompetence, and the awful reality of what four more years would look like.
All the nonsense of the war on women, all the absurd lame jokes about "microphones I can see"; all the arrogance and self-pity of the president and all the laughable self-regard of the Chicago gang; all the Beltway-Manhattan media elite boosterism --all of that no longer matters.
What matters is the case that Romney makes for the urgent need to sweep the Chicago gang out of D.C. from top to bottom, to carve the metastasizing government back to its essential services, to rebuild its defenses and balance its budget, and to be serious about "one nation" with one set of rules.
Romney will be president if he executes a calm, detailed campaign that promises the country the turnaround it so desperately needs.
And if he gets the support he will need to counter billions in direct and indirect expenditures. The hard left has the country in its grip. That grip will not easily be pried open. It is everyone's job to help, and many should start today via www.MittRomney.com.
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And lots of you ordered Rhett Smith's The Anxious Christian. Let me know what you think, even though I am pretty certain you will find it an extraordinarily useful book. (See the reviews at Amazon.)
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The president showed a bit of "Chicago rules" for SCOTUS yesterday, which should push any wavering anti-Obamacare justice into the "strike-it-all-down" camp. It is truly a remarkable thing for the POTUS to ramble on about the SCOTUS, but we saw it before in the 2010 State of the Union, and we will hear all about it throughout the summer and fall, and Obama tries to make the Court's exercise of its authority to "say what the law is" yet another occasion for wrecking yet another institution.
The Wall Street Journal has a piece on this absurd bit of editorializing. Senator Kyl has a piece in today's Wall Street Journal on this absurdity. I interviewed Senator Jon Kyl about the president's absurd and stilted remarks --"duly constituted law"?-- and that transcript is here. (Kyl also has an important piece in the Journal on the president's tete-a-tete with Russia's Medvedev.) Read the whole thing for updates on spending and missile defense, but here's the key exchange on the president's assault on the Court:
Read More...HH: Well, I want to start with you by playing for you something the President said, and I remind everyone that Senator Kyl’s been on Judiciary for as, have you been on it for all eighteen years?
JK: Yes, I have.
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Intimidation in the Court: The President, the Supreme Court and the Constitution
By Clark S. Judge: managing director, White House Writers Group, Inc.; chairman, Pacific Research Institute
NOT among the checks and balances that the Constitution incorporates into our system is intimidation by the president of the Supreme Court. But intimidation appears to be the course President Obama has selected, following his solicitor general’s stumbling defense of Obamacare before the justices last week.
Conservative commentators have been gloating ever since that it was only natural that Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., whose job it is to argue cases on behalf of the government, stammered through his presentations. It was, in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words during the three-day review, “a heavy burden” to advocate the constitutionality of this particular law. In the weeks before ramming Obamacare through the House of Representatives without a single vote from the opposition party, then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi indicated on her official website that she believed the Constitution put few if any limits on Congress’s scope of action. As Michael Barone recalls in his current column at National Review Online (tinyurl.com/6vh77eo), one (now gone) House Democrat told his constituents when questioned on the matter at the time, “I don’t worry about the Constitution.” Still, according to the president speaking to reporters yesterday, questioning the constitutionality of this law adopted with so little attention to the Constitution would be an act of unwarranted and rarely employed judicial activism.
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His take on Game of Thrones is here.
Dan Doherty's review of The Hunger Games here.
Bookmark Hanlon's site for a quick guide to what the next generation of critics are saying.
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