taxing oil companies

Once more, with feeling: Oil companies pay plenty of their “fair share” in taxes





As one commenter says, low-information voters will never, ever get this. None of it.

For example, the key figure is not the amount of profit -- what's key is the % return on investment.

Corporations don't pay taxes, they just collect them from consumers and pass them along to Government.

Make the corporate tax rate zero, like it should be, and the taxation system will suddenly become much clarified.

But why even try, it's all hopelessly beyond these people's powers of comprehension, making it easy for Obama to demagogue them about The One-Percent, etc.

Socialism has the advantage of being very readily understood by a four-year-old, but with the disadvantage that it doesn't work and makes everyone poorer -- except the Government elite that's busy crippling wealth creation and running the economy into the ground.

Byron

Memorial Day prediction

Toby Keith - COURTESY OF THE RED, WHITE AND BLUE (THE ANGRY AMERICAN)

Very stirring, no doubt.  But whose ass will end up with the boot in it?

Color me highly pessimistic. By 18-24 months after we leave Afghanistan it will be like we were never there. We're trying to accomplish something that is no longer doable, if it ever was. When you announce a withdrawal date, you should pack up and leave that same day, because it's over and everybody knows it, especially the enemy. I expect to see the Afghani version of our loyalist Vietnamese hanging from the skids of the last US helicopters leaving the embassy in Saigon. Karzai will live in luxury on the French Riviera, becoming richer yet by giving speeches and seminars to appreciative European audiences, detailing how clueless and inept the whole US effort was.  

Iraq was doable, and after many missteps it was partly done and could have become a reasonably democratic beacon for the region. But the Obama regime has, for its own political reasons, been deliberately and systematically pissing away that whole effort and whatever fruits it could have yielded.

In its day, the Persian Empire was the greatest, by far, that the world had ever seen, and it may be that again. The West, fat and happy, has been steadily running out of moral energy; the East is lean and hungry, and on a mission from God. We think we can win with technology (drones!), but technology can be copied or stolen and used in new ways. Primitive IED's have taken a terrible toll.

Our advantage in technology will not decide things. More important is the fact that we no longer have the kind of moral certitude that justifies ruthless, wholesale slaughter of the enemy, the destruction of his cities, his food supply, his economy, or any of rest of the brutal, nasty stuff that it takes to win wars. We are technologically advanced, but the moral advancement that we take pride in (multicultural gay marriage!) makes us increasingly ill-equipped to defeat the kind of enemy that is rising in the East. Our response to the so-called "Arab Spring" is a telling example. By refusing, on moral grounds, to support the tyrant bastards who could protect our interests by suppressing radical Islam, we are enabling the rise of Islamist/Jihadist states, sworn enemies who proclaim themselves to be dedicated to our destruction, across the whole southern shore of the Mediterranean.

There will be no Islamist insurgency of any consequence in China, because the Chinese will hunt them down and kill them like roaches. We, on the other hand, being morally more advanced, read them their rights, provide them with legal counsel, continue to pay them welfare and other benefits, agonize over whether to try them in military or civilian courts, and on, and on. The implied question and its answer is so obvious I won't even bother to pose it.

Muslims took Spain by military force, then built pleasure palaces like the Alhambra that were the most beautiful the world had ever seen. The refinement and intricacy of their decorative art became nothing short of amazing, ravishing. But vengeful, ruthless military force fueled by militant Christianity eventually defeated them and lay waste to most of what they'd created. The beauty of their fine art did not save them, and the ingenuity of our technology will not save us.

Byron

Rioting in Sweden

Stockholm riots leave Sweden's dreams of perfect society up in smoke

The best article I've seen on the topic, it debunks most of the easy explanations for what's going on. It looks to me like a case of relative (not absolute) deprivation, coupled with various excuses for not trying harder to catch up to the standard set by the Swedish. I strongly suspect that some other ethnic groups -- Chinese, Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe, Indians -- which, arriving in similar numbers, would be running the place by now. Maybe there's a multiplier effect between the culture these immigrants bring with them and the enticements of a very generous welfare state. Or, it could be that a very generous welfare state will work its reverse magic on the energies of any immigrant group, or almost any. 

Byron

Ugly

For me the problem is not Roe v. Wade, because I thought the Supremes got it right in that decision.

But the expansive interpretations that followed are something else.

Even if you dismiss the various moral arguments about late-term abortion, the aesthetics should count for something, and they are nasty.

I can't believe many doctors had this kind of work in mind, and I'm not surprised that these procedures end up falling to butchers like Gosnell:

Former abortionist tells Congress: Ban late-term abortions

EPA scandal next?

Vitter: EPA FOIA scandal ‘no different than the IRS disaster’

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/17/vitter-epa-foia-scandal-no-different-than-the-irs-disaster/#ixzz2V3hymCk0

The sole upside to having Obama and his band of corrupt thugs in office is that they are making the case for constraining and downsizing Government far more effectively than libertarians ever could have.

Everyone with eyes to see is beginning recognize the monster Government has become, turning citizens into servile subjects who quiver before a massive, multi-pronged administrative-surveillance-enforcement apparatus that can, if it decides to, destroy them, their families, their enterprises, their livelihood, their everything.

The Tea Party people are easy to mock in some respects, and the liberal media has lost no opportunity to do that. But on this issue they are dead right.

Byron

Perfect summary

Historian Victor Davis Hanson:

Government has become a sort of malignant metasisizing tumor, growing on its own, parasitical on healthy cells, always searching for new sources of nourishment, its purpose nothing other than growing bigger and faster and more powerful—until the exhausted host collapses.

IRS, btw, will be the chief enforcer of ObamaCare, giving them one more way to attack political enemies.

It's no wonder Obama and his minions are so eager to disarm the citizenry, by legislative coercion or regulatory fraud.

(The fraud is to promise that a Government background check registry would not be used to round up the guns of the law-abiding, never, never, never, perish the thought.  Anyone foolish enough to seriously believe such tripe doesn't deserve to live in a free society in the first place.)

Byron

How serious?

I'm trying to figure out how serious this IRS scandal is. Specifically, did the Obama team successfully rig the 2012 Presidential Election by deliberately suppressing the GOP vote? 

It's being reported that nearly 500 Tea Party and similar grass-roots conservative organizations were put through the IRS wringer during Obama's first term, leading up to the election that gave him a second term. 

Post-election analyses showed that Romney lost because of a disparity in turnout: Too many in his voter base did not show up at the polls on election day, while Obama's voted in record numbers. This has generally been attributed to a weak turnout effort by Romney, compared with a very sophisticated one by the Obama forces. Romney's get-out-the-vote effort, the ground game that depends on local-level volunteers, seemed to lack enthusiasm; it was a strangely low-energy operation. 

Was that an effect, the intended effect, of a calculated intimidation effort by Obama's IRS?

We know that many conservative organizations threw in the towel when their leadership was presented with impossible demands and years of delay in applications for non-profit tax status. At the same time, parallel Democrat organizations had been waved through and were up and running.

Was there a deliberate program of IRS intimidation leading up to the 2012 election, a program designed to target and neuter precisely those organizations that would supply the GOP effort with its energy, enthusiasm, and grass-roots involvement? The groups that would supply the juice that's so crucial in the closing days of a campaign and on voting day?

There is no doubt that those grass-roots conservative organizations were going to be critical for energizing the GOP effort leading up to the election, and especially for maximizing turnout on election day. But it's reported that IRS did not approve a single one for non-profit status during a period of 27 months leading up to the election.

The IRS abuses are a matter of known fact. The question is what IRS was up to, and what the effect of its activities were. Did IRS attempt to suppress GOP voter turnout by crippling the grass-roots energy base of the GOP campaign? Did the activities of the IRS determine the outcome of the 2012 election?

Byron

Venezuela

And while Venezuela might be “oil-rich,” it’s become socialism-poor. To the point that they’ve run out of toilet paper. 

It's too funny!

Without markets, they'll never know how much of it to produce, or what its price should be.  And that goes for every product and commodity.

Other than details like that, centrally-planned economies work wonderfully! Their strong suit, of course, is Fairness -- before long, everybody is equally poor.

But even that isn't true, as the political elite -- the Planners -- always do very, very well for themselves.

It's the Economics of the Terminally Stupid.

Byron

Multi-Faceted IRS Scandal, etc.

 The Multiple Facets of the IRS Scandal

The article linked above summarizes three different aspects of the IRS scandal:

(1) Stonewalling of applications for non-profit tax status from Tea Party and other conservative groups;

(2) Use of the audit process to target, harass, and intimidate individuals;

(3) Illegal or improper leaking of confidential tax data during an election year by for partisan political purposes.


The article is well worth reading, because this is quickly becoming a Genuinely Big Deal.

What could possibly be more corrosive of trust in government than use of the IRS as a partisan political weapon?

Nothing I can think of. Bill Clinton got impeached for fibs about dicking around with Monica Lewinsky. Viewed against the standard being set by Obama's administration, that was less than trivial.

The wave of naive hope and idealism that Obama rode to the presidency is collapsing in disillusionment.

One near-certain accomplishment Obama can point to will be the creation of a new generation of political cynics. (Realists, actually.)

That's mostly not a bad thing, and it could be his signal accomplishment.

Kumbaya,

Byron

Out of control

 Government, that is:

APPARENTLY, THEY HAD A SPECIAL UNIT FOR THE JEWS, TOO: Politico: Israel-related groups also pointed to IRS scrutiny.

"Special units" with a special interest in Jews is hardly a novel idea -- google Einsatzgruppen some time.

The term "tyranny" above might seem to be a gross overreach, but it isn't. With respect to out-of-control Government generally, there will be, for example, a predictable attempt to laugh off HHS Chief Kathleen Sebelius's extra-curricular fund-raising from the companies her enormous agency regulates (see previous email). But the idea of establishing a privately-funded government-within-the-government is no laughing matter.

Gargantuan regulatory agencies, staffed by armies of political appointees and career bureaucrats, already exercise far too much unaccountable power.  If one of these outfits to decides to focus on you, your life is simply over, finished. The major remaining control is the ability of Congress to cut off funding, but that's precisely what would be weakened by private-source funding.  It's hard to imagine a worse idea, and it's extremely troubling that an agency head would even float it.

If you worry about, for example, the immense power of the EPA, just imagine if EPA could squeeze the oil and gas industry to privately fund its projects and operations, independent of Congress or anybody else who has to stand for election. If that's not the totalitarian nightmare, then I don't know what would be.  

Byron 

Losing WaPo?

Playing Politics With Tax Records

After being dutifully asleep at the switch for the past 4 years, the Washington Post seems to have been roused from its slumber, at least for a moment or two.

The editorial linked above is surprisingly strong, and the reader comments are highly atypical for a liberal newspaper.

The problems of the Obama Administration are suddenly piling up, foreign and domestic; "All-Politics-All-The-Time" is neither governing nor leading, and the bill for that is coming due:

Benghazi was an inexcusable fiasco, and so is the quickly disintegrating cover-up, Obama flopped in his cheap attempt to produce a sequester panic; there is still no discernible policy to deal with the increasingly toxic Arab Spring that Obama had earlier claimed to be "leading from behind;" patience is fast running out for Obama's failing programs for jobs and his failed approach to energy production; nervous Democrats are publicly referring to ObamaCare as an approaching Train Wreck; the personal capital Obama expended on gun control yielded nothing because the advocated controls bore zero relation to the mass shootings that supposedly inspired them; the Chinese and the Russians long ago pegged Obama -- President Red Line -- as a weakling and now hardly bother even to pretend to pay attention to his jabbering; and so on.

What's becoming increasingly clear is that Obama's abilities are limited to basically these:

First, he's a gifted campaigner and speaker, at least in settings where he can't be challenged about the truth of what he's saying.

Second, he's very good at currying favor by promising people free stuff paid for with somebody else's money.

Third...there is no third.      

If the lame-stream media ever wakes up, notices that the emperor has no clothes, and starts doing its job -- lately there are hints that some in the liberal media actually may be rousing themselves -- then the Obama Regime is kaput.  There is no there there, and never has been.

Byron

Tyranny

Kiss the First Amendment goodbye, because it's gone, baby, gone -- in the one setting where it should be absolutely sacrosanct.  But the PC lunatics have taken over the higher (than what?) education asylum.  As usual, the enforcers of this destructive nonsense are (surprise!) Federal regulatory agencies, which means everybody's a political appointee, nobody stands before the voters for election.

I send money to FIRE every year; I'm going to double the amount.


FEDERAL GOVERNMENT MANDATES UNCONSTITUTIONAL SPEECH CODES AT COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES NATIONWIDE

Among the forms of expression now punishable on America’s campuses by order of the federal government are:

•     Any expression related to sexual topics that offends any person. This leaves a wide range of expressive activity—a campus performance of “The Vagina Monologues,” a presentation on safe sex practices, a debate about sexual morality, a discussion of gay marriage, or a classroom lecture on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—subject to discipline.
•     Any sexually themed joke overheard by any person who finds that joke offensive for any reason.
•     Any request for dates or any flirtation that is not welcomed by the recipient of such a request or flirtation.

There is likely no student on any campus anywhere who is not guilty of at least one of these “offenses.” Any attempt to enforce this rule evenhandedly and comprehensively will be impossible….

Ah, but to the Controller Mentality that last bit is the beauty of it, a key feature, not at all a bug.

The purest power to wield over your subjects is Prosecutorial Discretion, the freedom to pick and choose who's in your crosshairs.

An actual conviction isn't necessary, because the target is personally and financially ruined by the process itself, no matter what.

Worse, these ridiculous speech codes are enforced by Kampus Kangaroo Kourts made up of Progressive-Activist students and faculty, with arbitrary punishments meted out without any of the procedural protections a defendant has in a real courtroom. This is 'Darkness at Noon' territory, a Kafka-esque nightmare for anybody caught up in it; all that's lacking are the torches and black hoods.

A professor friend of mine:  "If the Government was an animal, you'd take it out behind the barn and shoot it between the eyes."

I haven't spoken to him lately, but I suspect by now that he'd be advising a double-tap.

Byron

Actual journalism

The Benghazi Scandal Grows

Given the national media's consistently wretched performance on multiple fronts, it's all too easy to forget what journalism is supposed to be and do.  Below is a reminder. (Warning: Those requiring that their news reference Kate Middleton's baby bump will be disappointed and lose interest after a few paragraphs. They should proceed immediately to the comfort zone provided by Today, Good Morning America, and the video version of People Magazine known as NBC News.)

Back here in the real world, further investigation must determine:

(1) Who was responsible for the US Embassy being left unguarded in the first place, despite warnings of trouble from Embassy staff and the precautionary withdrawal of personnel from other foreign installations in Benghazi; and

(2) Once the attack was underway, who decided not to send help, supposedly because none could possibly arrive in time, despite the fact that there was no way to predict how long the attackers could be held off, and therefore the time-window available to save our people was not known.

Also, given the narrative of document revisions described below, Gen. Patraeus and other CIA leadership should be asked to testify in defense of their rather facile compliance with demands from the Obama Administration to alter their report of what took place at Benghazi. What are the limits, if any, on the CIA's willingness to re-write its reports for the political purposes of an incumbent administration? And in that light, what kind of document, exactly, is a CIA assessment?  

Byron