Some Light and a Lot of Heat

That is the way of it, when a great question falls into the public debate, or at least, that’s how it will look to the outsider. The extremes on either side bash away energetically at each other, the op-eds and the commentaries are reeled out like so many furiously unfurled rolls of toilet paper, until either the issue is resolved definitively, or everyone is quite tired of it — or some great event crashes in unexpectedly and renders the whole thing absolutely moot.

Read more

I Await a Lavish Apology

So, Bill Ayers himself admits that Obama began his political career in Ayers’s living room.

Some people owe me an apology.

Ayers, you may recall, is the leftist intellectual’s Timothy McVeigh (without McVeigh’s murderous competence). The comparison to McVeigh is not hyperbole. The psychology of political terrorists has been well studied by many people in many different countries. All studies conclude that such terrorists are megalomaniacal sociopaths who latch on to the most visible political movement of their time and location and then use that movement’s ideology to justify their crimes. They don’t actually care about the good the ideology purports to accomplish.

Instead, they care about exploiting the ideology to advance their own interest. The ideology merely justifies their sociopathic vainglory. The strategy behind both Ayers’s and McVeigh’s terrorism was to trigger a broad-based political upheaval that would leave individuals such as Ayers and McVeigh on top of society. They rationalized that by killing they could make themselves the pebble that starts the political avalanche. They desperately convinced themselves that they could murder their way to the top like Lenin or Mao.

Ayers never cared about all the things that contemporary leftists care about, and he never will. He doesn’t care about anybody or anything other than himself (although, like all sociopaths, he is very good at convincing people he does). Ayers isn’t a basically good person who went too far in advancing a good cause, he’s just evil. In another era, he would have killed for right-wing causes just as readily.

This makes the contemporary Left’s continuing embrace of Ayers, Dorn and other Weatherman sociopaths even more disturbing. They simply don’t care what these sociopaths did nor what they continue to profess. (Ayers has never recanted his terrorism and even let himself be photographed trampling an American flag in a grimy alley for a NY Times story published on 9/11.)  Neither are leftists concerned in the least that such an individual moved in the same small political circle and continually interacted with the person who is currently the President of the United States. Neither are they concerned that Ayers et al all heartily approve of Obama.

Worst of all, they are utterly unconcerned that Ayers is a prominent national educator with significant influence on the K-12 education of America’s children. In the video where he makes his admission, he is speaking to a group of teachers unionists and urging them to corruptly use their positions of trust as educators of children to advance Ayers’s political agenda. The audience has no problem with doing just that.

I really think that someone in the Chicago area needs to crowd source the tracking of Ayers and to publicly link him to every group or policy he adopts. The hardcore Left doesn’t care about Ayers’s sociopathy and murderous megalomania but I imagine others will.

What Do Hungry Children in Oregon Have to do with Tax Policy?

The recent edition of “Parade” magazine when I saw a list of things that you can do to help others in need. I was struck by their plea to “Feed Hungry Children in Oregon” where they said that

Oregon has the nation’s highest rate of “child food insecurity.” About 252,000 kids – or nearly 30% of the state’s youth – aren’t sure where their next meal is coming from.

This surprised me because I never thought of Oregon as a state that had this sort of poverty. The example they gave in the article was as follows:

My husband and I both work full-time, but we make minimum wage, and some months it’s either pay our bills or buy food, says his mom, Nichole (her child is featured in the photo, above).

While this is a sad and heart rending story, there is another connection as to why their parents are having a hard time finding higher wage work. Per the Tax Foundation:

Oregon’s personal income tax system consists of five separate brackets with a top rate of 11% kicking in at an income level of $250,000. That rate ranks the highest among all states levying an individual income tax.

While tax policy may seem arcane to individuals worrying about food security, it is important to realize the CRUCIAL impact that state income tax rates play in state competitiveness. Of all the components of a tax burden, the ONE element that can be most easily modified or avoided is the personal income tax levied by a particular state. For instance, if you earn $1M a year, you’d be paying about $75,000 more in tax in Oregon than you would in Texas, Florida, Nevada, or other states that don’t levy a personal income tax (it isn’t $1M times 11% because of the graduated nature of the tax up to $250,000 and the fact that state taxes are deductible on Federal returns, so the $75,000 is a rough estimate).

A high marginal personal income tax rate falls DIRECTLY on those most likely to invest in a business that would hire someone like the family in this photo. A high marginal tax is analogous to seeking out the very individuals that could bring a state jobs and economic prosperity and telling them to invest elsewhere. You could go door-to-door and punch them in the face, or just set the nation’s highest personal income tax rate, the net effect is exactly the same.

The biggest fallacy the high marginal tax crowd falls into is the “fixed pie” thinking – since businesses and high income earners are unlikely to move, if you tax them more they will just sit like sheep and take it and pay into the state to fund their myriad social programs. That may be true in the short run and for individuals that are tied to their community, but I guarantee that every wealthy person has an accountant who carefully tells them the negative impact of residing in such a high tax state and the benefits of moving elsewhere on their take-home pay. If they have a choice to invest more in Oregon or go elsewhere, other states look much more inviting. Over time, investment slows, and then there are more and more articles with the sad faced children just like this one, and pleas for the rich to pay their “fair share”.

The problem is, the rich aren’t stupid, and a high state income tax is basically pushing them to invest and live elsewhere, particularly somewhere warm with a tax friendly climate like Nevada, Florida or Texas.

Cross posted at LITGM