Complements of Bruce Lee

A friend of mine from law school posted this link on Facebox (sorry if you've already seen it on there). The graphs are not merely nice. They are delicious.

Gas Prices Abroad

Chris can probably testify directly to this, but the New York Times ran the above piece today about gas prices in the U.S. as compared to both oil producing countries and the nations of Europe. Ryan and I had been talking briefing about how Europeans have been used to paying over 4 dollars for gas for a while, and this chart indicates why. At least nearly half (and often more) of a gallon of gas in Europe is government tax.

Now, far from bringing these economies to a halt, this tax appears to have provided a steady revenue stream while at the same time encouraging conservation rather than consumption. And with continued (and obvious) evidence that higher gas prices increase reliance on public transportation, a higher gas tax seems like a double bonus. Whereas European citizens benefit from the tax by consistent, substantial investment in public transportation, the problem in the United States is that as oil compaies rake in the profits, they eventually push people people in the right direction (public transportation) but leave those people at the mercy of systems that generally are not adequately funded.

I hadn't intended to bring this around to Barack Obama, but I shamelessly will. The whole story reinforces the incredible short-sightedness of McLasik's plan to have a "gas tax holiday." Obama definitely scores a point on this one. The really ballsy position would be to reccommend a phased increase in the federal gas tax to match European levels. As gas prices will significantly rise anyway, all citizens should benefit from well-funded, viable transit alternatives rather than continue to be simply "taxed" by the oil companies.

The "deracialisation" of American politics, according to Krugman

Paul Krugman is annoying (and still showing a few sore loser cards in his hand) but today he had some interesting thoughts on Big Government and racism in America

Attn: McGroinald lovers

Suck on what Rutherford Mudcock has to say about Barnacle X. O'Barnacle

To Be Fair

Obama's tax plan appears to be slightly but noticeably better than Klinton's. He expressly proposes increasing the capital gains rate to 28%, which is not good enough but is a start. And as the article states, he seems to want to concentrate on using tax provisions to give lower working class people a boost. Klinton's plan appears to focus on creating a bunch of kinda goofy tax incentives for the middle class.

Rob Roy vs. H-K

The denizens of the "left-wing" of the Democratic Party have spoken. They maintain that Hickory Klinstone is too friendly with business to be trusted to implement a satisfactorily progressive domestic policy agenda. Some have even gone so far as to say that, should O'Bama lose the Democratic Party's primary, they will not vote for H-K. Brushing aside, for the moment, the very significant fact that Rob Roy's foreign policy figures to be wildly more aggressive than Klinstone's, this view is drastically, dangerously wrong.

It is true that, for a short time early 2000's, Rob Roy was a pretty moderate Republican (he opposed some of Box's tax cuts, he supported Sarbanes-Oxley, he supported Campaign Finance Reform, he opposed torture; of course, he has "flip-flopped" on many of these issues since and has always been a foreign policy hawk). But this is no longer the case. With respect to Roy's domestic agenda, consider his tax plan:

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2008/pdf/tax_agenda.pdf

Some highlights:

He would make the disastrous Box tax cuts permanent.

58% of the benefits from his promised his tax cuts will go to the top 1%. As a reference point, "only" 31% of Box's tax cuts went to the top 1%. Under Roy's plan, the bottom 60% would get 4% of the benefit and the bottom 80% would get 9% of the benefit.

He would reduce the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25%, and he would allow the immediate expensing of corporate investment (rather than cost recovery through depreciation over the useful life of the investment). The result is that corporations could face negative tax rates on debt-financed investment (since they could deduct the entire value of the investment AND deduct the interest on the debt).

His tax cuts would cost $2 trillion in lost revenue over the next 10 years, thereby forcing draconian spending cuts. My educated guess is that those cuts won't be made in defense spending.

Under his plan, the difference between the rate of federal tax on labor income and the rate of tax on capital income would be increased. Capital income is already taxed less than half as much as labor income (14% vs. 30.5%). His stated goal is to totally eliminate the taxation of capital income.

As the report demonstrates, his agenda is 100% compliant with the Norquistian radical anti-tax movement.

Please, for the love of God and of anything that remotely resembles a left-leaning agenda, PLEASE vote for either Democratic candidate over R. Roy. At least Kleinstein promises to repeal the Box tax cuts on people making >$250,000, and to stop taxing carried interest (part of the compensation for the grossly overpaid general partners of hedge funds and private equity funds) at lower capital gains rates.

Raibeart Ruadh also opposes any kind of universal health care proposal and wants to at least partially privatize social security. See https://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/19ba2f1c-c03f-4ac2-8cd5-5cf2edb527cf.htm and http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/0B8E4DB8-5B0C-459F-97EA-D7B542A78235.htm. In short, he is the most Criminal of All Garbages and must be stopped.