Month: April 2009

Income Tax For All!

Ari Fleischer wants lower earners to pay more taxes:

In 2001, the bottom 60% paid 16.3% of all taxes; by 2005 their share was down to 14.3%. All the while, this large group of voters made 25.8% of the nation's income.

Joe Weisenthal responds:

As a matter of math, Fleischer is probably right. The idea that we can continue to raise revenue, while shifting more of the burden onto fewer and fewer people is a pipe dream.

Think of the grand scale of the government's ambitions, from fighting wars to providing universal healthcare. Are we really to believe that all this can be done via a tax increase on the top 2%? That's obviously hogwash. What's more is that top 2% is getting sharply poorer fast, given the collapse of the financial industry.

So does Radley Balko:

Ari Fleischer says everyone should have to pay some income tax. That isn’t going to happen, though I agree with his main point–that it isn’t healthy for an increasingly small percentage of income earners to be funding a rapidly growing federal government. Milton Friedman argued for a negative income tax for the poor instead of deductions, which seems like a more politically palatable way of addressing the problem. At least then, everyone feels the bite when government grows. Personally, I don’t like the privacy violations, money laundering laws, and control over our lives the government gets by funding itself with an income tax. But switching to a national sales tax probably isn’t going to happen, either.

Face Of The Day

GEORGIAMASKMutafaOzer:Getty

A Georgian masked activist attends an anti-Saakashvili rally in front of the parliament building in Tbilisi on April 13, 2009. Georgia's opposition vowed to boost pressure on President Mikheil Saakashvili with round-the-clock protests outside his office as up to 20,000 rallied for a fifth day to demand his resignation. By Mustafa Ozer/AFP/Getty.

Mrs Palin’s Kinda Guy

Mudflats has some great new reporting on Sarah Palin's nomination to be Alaska's attorney general. It all has something to do with lima beans, homosexuals, and how hot the governor looks in a sponsored jacket. I think. And this Ross classic, on the Exxon Valdez spill:

We see almost every day, the same films of what appears to be the same oil-soaked duck pulled out of the water. The state claims to have a number of refrigerated vans filled with about 30,000 carcasses of waterfowl killed by oil. No doubt some of these birds were casualties of oil. But had several thousand people combed Prince William Sound for dead waterfowl any prior summer, as they did in the summer of 1988 [sic], there is no doubt that an equal number of dead birds could have been accumulated.

Lazy Partisanship

Scott Payne laments:

…hyper-partisanship requires very little of us, aside from a willingness to swaddle conventional wisdom in the cloths of self-righteous arrogance. Inasmuch as the human condition is lined with greater demonstrations of sinking to common denominators than rising to potential expectations, the Durdenesque fight club of hyper-partisanship is a sadly predictable state of affairs.

Really Heavy Metal

Attention Maggie Gallagher: someone wants to marry the Eiffel Tower – among other inanimate objects:

Amy Wolfe is a confident 32-year-old American who also lives in New York State. She too has been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, and has been in relationships with models of spaceships, the Twin Towers, a church organ and a banister, though her main lover – since OS people believe in polygamy – is a fairground ride called 1001 Nacht, located at Knoebels, an amusement park in New York State.

When we filmed her at Knoebels visiting 1001 Nacht, we witnessed Wolfe kissing, caressing and talking to the austere, crane-like machine, and I began to feel both uncomfortable and a little frightened. Wolfe truly believes the machine talks back to her. As I watched, I wondered not for the first time whether I was crossing the line from a documentary film-maker to a voyeur. Should I have left her alone? "No, no – show our love for the objects," Wolfe insisted. "Give us our voice. People must understand we are not fetishists." And so I stayed.

The Cannabis Closet

A reader writes:

Since I was a teenager I've struggled with bipolar disorder. In the worst craters of depression I've driven myself to starvation and self-mutilation. I've attempted suicide twice. Traditional therapy never worked because I never gave it a chance. I'm an arrogant and defensive son of a bitch, and self-indulgently preferred my private masochism over admitting I needed help. After one particularly bad incident that landed me in the ER, I was prescribed a standard for-profit mood stabilizer. After a few days I threw it away. Cannabis discovered me one evening my senior year of college.

At first I was underwhelmed. But those weed-lubricated gatherings of wannabe-writers and pseudointellectuals steadily increased in frequency until they were almost nightly. Somewhere along the line I woke up one morning, and my first thought was not to hope I'd be involved in a fatal car accident that day. From then on I was hooked.

Today I'm a very successful web entrepreneur. I've never had a boss. I have employees on three continents and netted a robust six figures last year. This year I'll make more. Several months ago I got engaged and we bought a five-bedroom house in the inner DC suburbs. We adopted two abuse-rescue dogs that we're slowly nursing back to health. I'm extremely active in local politics and was an Obama precinct captain during the election. Once a week I teach a cooking class to kids at our church. I'm 25 years old. And I get high twice a day.

Am I psychologically dependent on pot? Probably. Am I a textbook case of irresponsible self-medication? Almost certainly. But can someone please tell me what the harm is? I use a vaporizer and take antioxidant supplements to mitigate (somewhat) the cancer risk. I buy my pot from another nondescript suburban guy who has a small grow closet in his basement. My drug money does not finance international terrorism. I smoke alone, with the shades drawn, and never drive under the influence. I have never taken any other illegal drugs. I have never broken any other laws.

Marijuana gives me a balance I've been unable to find anywhere else in life. It is much, much cheaper than a therapist and prescription antidepressants. It has allowed me to function normally – in a weak moment I might even say quite admirably – for the past several years, whereas without it I do not doubt for a second I would've eventually attempted suicide again.

The Next Gulag

Thoreau is deflated:

Bagram is the new Guantanamo, and we cannot rest easy as the prison at Guantanamo closes.  If anything, Bagram will be worse, because it is even farther from the US, in a place even more dangerous and more difficult for journalists and lawyers to reach.  In this, at least, Obama is smarter than Bush:  If you want to have a gulag, you have to put it in a remote and dangerous locale (like the Soviets did in Siberia), not on a tropical island in a region where planes can fly without being fired upon.