Alan Boyle doesn’t review the movie per se, but rather talks about its making and makers.
Category Archives: Business
Why Government Can’t Run A Business
This isn’t really news, of course, but apparently, the lesson has to be relearned over and over.
I heard an interview a couple days ago with the Democrat who’s planning to challenge Chris Dodd in the primary, and he pointed out that he had started and managed several successful businesses, whereas Dodd had done nothing but be a politician his entire life. I wonder what he thinks of the Democrat president and vice president…, neither of whom has run so much as a lemonade stand? Or maybe Obama did when he was a kid, and his communist mother subsidized it?
The Problem With Soaking The Rich
They can vote with their feet:
We believe there are three unintended consequences from states raising tax rates on the rich. First, some rich residents sell their homes and leave the state; second, those who stay in the state report less taxable income on their tax returns; and third, some rich people choose not to locate in a high-tax state. Since many rich people also tend to be successful business owners, jobs leave with them or they never arrive in the first place. This is why high income-tax states have such a tough time creating net new jobs for low-income residents and college graduates.
One has to be particularly pig headed not to understand this.
[Thursday morning update]
Adios, New York:
Last week I spent 90 minutes doing a couple of simple things — registering to vote, changing my driver’s license, filling out a domicile certificate and signing a homestead certificate — in Florida. Combined with spending 184 days a year outside New York, these simple procedures will save me over $5 million in New York taxes annually.
By moving to Florida, I can spend that $5 million on worthy causes, like better hospitals, improving education or the Clinton Global Initiative. Or maybe I’ll continue to invest it in fighting the status quo in Albany. One thing’s certain: That money won’t continue to fund Albany’s bloated bureaucracy, corrupt politicians and regular special-interest handouts.
I thought it was stupidly amusing the other week when “Governor” Paterson expressed such glee that he was chasing Rush Limbaugh away with his policies. Well, there are a lot of other people who won’t be any more happy than Rush is to continue to fund these parasites.
[Bumped]
[Evening update]
A disgusting but apt metaphor from Mark Steyn:
As Miss McArdle notes, whether you bail out states “too big to fail” or let them go bankrupt, it will cause pain to taxpayers. But the pain of the latter is relatively short-term. Passing Sacramento’s buck to Washington will accelerate the centralizing pull in American politics and eventually eliminate any advantage to voting with your feet.
Not to be too gloomy, but the country feels like it’s seizing up. It’s as if California and New York have burst their bodices like two corpulent gin-soaked trollops and rolled over the fruited plain to rub bellies at the Mississippi. If you’re underneath, it’s not going to be fun.
I hope that a bailout of California and New York will have huge electoral blowback (including from many Californians, like the ones who voted down the continued state tax and spending on Tuesday, and New Yorkers).
The Left’s Conundrum
How to blame George Bush for Europe’s recession:
Do you notice anything funny about these numbers? Here is what I notice: the recession in the US is milder than that of Europe. Every country on this list had more economic shrinkage from 2008 to 2009 (Q1 to Q1) than did the US.
How could this be? Did they all have George Bush for President? Did they all succumb to free market ideology in the last eight years? Did they all repeal part of Glass-Steagall? Did they all spend wildly on an unnecessary war in Iraq? Did they all bankrupt themselves with out-of-control defense spending?
It’s a mystery.
Collapse
There seems to be no public support for cap and trade, or a carbon tax. Glad to see that many are coming to their senses. Of course, we didn’t really have a choice last year at the voting booth on this issue, because McCain is such an economic ignoramus.
Fascist Democrat Thuggery
Apparently, these people are impervious to irony:
We were outraged to read in today’s New York Times that you are actively opposing our efforts to achieve a diminuation in foreclosures by voluntary efforts… We have set a hearing for November 12, and we invite you now to testify. We believe it is essential for our policymaking function for you to appear at such a hearing, and if this cannot be arranged on a voluntary basis, then we will pursue further steps.
So let me get this straight. Barney Frank, Maxine Waters et al are trying to get banks to do something “voluntarily” by threatening them with “further steps.”
But we shouldn’t worry about threats of tax audits.
The Last GM Dealership
…in the birthplace of General Motors:
We remain the only GM dealership in the city limits of Flint. Isn’t it ironic that the birthplace of General Motors has only one dealership? The employees of the dealership for the most part felt confident that our performance and Mr. Applegate’s integrity and straight forward way of doing business would sustain the storm and survive the cut.
Some felt that our location would be a hindrance to our longevity….perhaps it worked in our favor…who really knows…it’s impossible to second guess or try to predict GM’s thinking. Remaining in business is not only a victory for Mr. Applegate and his employees but also a victory for Flint. I feel that is the untold story. How strange would it be for Flint not to have a GM dealership?
It would be surreal, like the empty field that I saw a couple weeks ago when I drove past where the old AC Spark Plug plant, near which I grew up, and where my father and brother worked for decades, used to be.
How The Mighty Fall
What are the signs of incipient failure or collapse?
Great enterprises can become insulated by success; accumulated momentum can carry an enterprise forward for a while, even if its leaders make poor decisions or lose discipline. Stage 1 kicks in when people become arrogant, regarding success virtually as an entitlement, and they lose sight of the true underlying factors that created success in the first place. When the rhetoric of success (“We’re successful because we do these specific things”) replaces penetrating understanding and insight (“We’re successful because we understand why we do these specific things and under what conditions they would no longer work”), decline will very likely follow. Luck and chance play a role in many successful outcomes, and those who fail to acknowledge the role luck may have played in their success—and thereby overestimate their own merit and capabilities—have succumbed to hubris.
Might not be bad reading for the president.
“Revenue Neutral”
Sorry, there’s no such thing as a “revenue neutral carbon tax.” Or if there is, you’d stumble on it by pure luck:
The most important point is that revenue neutrality is most likely a mirage. We would have to maintain the carbon tax for decades in order to generate the consumption reductions that advocates argue will occur, but FICA rates aren’t static over decades. In 1950 the FICA rate was 1.5%; by 1970 it was 4.8%; by 1990 it had risen to its current rate of 7.65%. It has been stable for about two decades, but meanwhile the programs that it (in theory) funds are in crisis.
Over the next few decades, we should expect to be in bitter political fights over changing retirement ages, benefit levels, access to publicly-funded medical care, tax rates, and other measures designed to make these programs financially stable. The FICA rate will not be insulated from this process. Who could possibly say that when it has increased in irregular and unpredictable steps to, say, 15.3 percent between now and 2028 in response to various political crises, that, but for the carbon tax, it would otherwise have been 16.5 percent?
I’ve previously discussed this conceit of politicians that they can predict the economic effects of their nostrums:
When a politician says that he’s going to either cut or increase your taxes, he is engaging, wittingly or not, in a conceit and a deceit. He says it as though he has the power to do any such thing, when in fact he does not. He has no power except to reduce or increase the rate at which you pay taxes, whether on property, income, or whatever.
Think of it as the difference between a joystick and a mouse. With a computer mouse, you can point directly to the place that you want to be on a screen. With a joystick, you can only control the rate at which you move toward it, and in so doing, the target may move, and it may move faster or in a different direction than you can keep up with using your rate control. Politicians talk about tax cuts as though they have a computer mouse that allows them to pass a law and a specified amount of revenue will roll in, but the reality is that they have a slow joystick, with a nebulous relationship to the eventual goal.
As Manzi says, TANSTAAFL. I think that dropping both sides of the payroll tax until the economy recovered would have been a hell of an instant stimulus, but eventually, that money’s got to be put back into the system.
Bad Policy Advice
Not surprising, of course, considering that it’s coming from Paul Krugman:
In other words, we should start a trade war with China (and India, Brazil, and the entire rest of the developing world) to force their compliance with an economically destructive program of global emissions mitigation. Excellent.
It’s almost like they want to ruin the world economy.