Month: July 2010

Kinsley revives it:

What debate there has been about the estate tax has concentrated on where the line should be drawn between the merely prosperous and the actually rich. The feeling seems to be that only the actual rich should be subject to the estate tax. I think this misunderstands what the estate tax should be about. It is not intended to punish people for having a lot of money. It is intended to raise the money we need to run the government, and to do so as fairly as possible. In 2008, very near its low ebb, it raised $25 billion. To the extent it sends a message, the message should be that we’re all in this together, to the best of our ability, and some of us are more able than others.

Alexander Hart goes to bat for the tax. I think a meritocracy should reward work not inheritance.

E.D. Kain thinks through the Shirley Sherrod affair:

I’m tired of both sides lobbing these race-grenades. The Tea Party ‘movement’ – whatever that means – is not racist anymore than the NAACP is racist. There are racists in the very fragmented conservative grassroots movement cobbled together under the title ‘Tea Party’ just as there are racists in every other big organization. I don’t like it when cynical political entertainers like Glenn Beck play on this theme. I find it exceptionally disingenuous to say that the Tea Parties aren’t racist but progressivism writ large is. The whole race conversation has imploded in the past two years, and perhaps that’s to be expected. Did we expect anything less with the ascendance of our first black president?

A reader writes:

You are so quick to pick up any stick to beat Israel with that you may not realize that the concept of rape by deception has found its way into U.S. law, and other Western countries as well. I have a job that does not allow me to spend more that the 30 seconds it took me to find these articles: the first talks about a 2008 proposed Massachusetts statute that would criminalize obtaining consent to sex through by deception, and makes reference to the fact that "rape by deception" is illegal in California and Tennessee; the second article discusses the two cases that served as the impetus for the proposed statue; a third covers a case in the UK.  I'm sure there are many more.

Whether we should criminalize the lying of men to seduce women is open to debate, and no doubt you have already concluded that an Israeli court would never have convicted a Jewish man who claimed to be Muslim to seduce Muslim women.  But even if that were true (and other than your reflexive antipathy for the Jewish state, there is no reason to think it is; Israeli courts do in fact convict Jews of crimes against Arabs), there are stories every day about unequal application of criminal law in the U.S. based on race.  For instance, blacks who kill whites are much more likely to be sentenced to death than whites who kill blacks. That makes the U.S. system deeply flawed but still Western.  As is Israel, with all its flaws.

I am truly sick of being accused of "reflexive antipathy" to the Jewish state. It's a lie. I desperately want Israel to survive as a Jewish state (just Google my record, will you, for decades) but believe it has gone deeply astray in the last decade, and the occupation is killing its soul and future. As for my reader's other points, I am unaware of any law in the West that treats racial or religious deception as the equivalent of rape that requires incarceration. I am unaware of any prosecution of Israeli Jews for rape posing as Arabs in order to get laid (if someone has such evidence, please let me know). As for the other Western cases cited, they are about doctors using their practice to sexually abuse women, a man somehow passing himself off as his own brother to have sex with his brother's girlfriend, and another bizarre story about a man posing as a doctor, citing intercourse as a form of treatment for vaginal infection!

This is not the same as suddenly realizing your lover is, say, a Mormon and thereby accusing him of rape-by-deception, or, say, a light-skinned black man being convicted of rape because he told his partner he was white. This is racial and religious bigotry, a form of Jim Crow-style racism, upheld by the Israeli courts. I notice my reader does not defend it. Who could? And I was careful in my post to assert that Israel is indeed far more Western than its neighbors. Just weirdly different at times – in this case, repulsively so.

Howard Gleckman demonstrates the failure of starve the beast theory, i.e. that the "best way to cut government spending is to cut revenues":

Delinking spending from taxes made all those new programs appear free, thus encouraging more of them. Bill Niskanen, president of the libertarian Cato Institute and former economic adviser to President Reagan, figured this out years ago. Bill concluded that if 20 percent of spending is financed by deficits, people will perceive that government programs cost only 80 percent of their real price. And, not surprisingly, they will be more popular at the perceived discount than at their full cost.

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A reader writes:

Honestly, I think one thing that is driving me absolutely bonkers about this whole issue is that Palin constantly paints New Yorkers (and everyone on the eastern seaboard) as not being of "real" America.  Yet here she a) rushes in to defend New York-as-America when she happily throws the east coast under the bus the rest of the year to appeal to voters elsewhere and b) clearly does not understand the fundamental value of freedom of religion that drove the founding of this country.

Another writes:

Let us not forget that Palin adores Manhattan, as evidenced by her RNC-funded shopping sprees at Saks Fifth Ave, Barney's and Bloomingdale's.  So maybe her concerns about what is built in that city can be justified. But as long as she's claiming NYC, she has to give up the fake small-town, "heartland," one-of-us charade.

Another:

I don't normally write in to blogs, but this issue is so infuriating to me that I felt compelled to add something.

I live in Astoria, Queens, one of the more ethnically diverse neighborhoods in New York, and I love it here. I live a few blocks away from a stretch of Steinway Street that's been dubbed "Little Cairo," because it's attracted a substantial Middle Eastern population, and you can see it in the hookah bars and Arabic script on the front of the stores. A few blocks in the other direction is a mosque and Muslim community center, which I frequently pass when I go for a run. Next door to my apartment building is a barber shop for Arab men.

Living around Middle Eastern and Muslim communities is part of normal life for me, as I would argue it is part of normal life for any New Yorker, even if they don't realize it. And that is why Sarah Palin's comments anger me so: she claims to speak for "us," to stand up for the common New Yorker who was so hurt by 9/11. And, of course, she's not "us"; in fact, she goes out of her way to demonstrate that she's not "us," and that we urban elites are what's wrong with this country. And now she wants to stand in for "us," because there is an even more nefarious "them" on which to focus her scorn and paranoia. The presumptuousness is astounding, and hurtful.

The anti-Angle ads will just write themselves won't they?

(Hat tip: TPM)

The tremendous popularity of the Old Spice Guy actually corresponded with a 7% drop in sales of his body wash. Lindsay Robertson tries to understand why.