Clipfile - October 8, 2008

“How can any fiscal conservative or libertarian maintain any enthusiasm for a GOP candidate whose instinct is to outbid the Democrat in squandering our money?” - “martinra”

Posted by: Old Grouch in Clipfile at 17:35:40 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Red autumn leaves

Outside my window, on a grey Wednesday morning.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Dear Diary... at 15:35:14 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Random Linkage - October 5, 2008

From Charles G. Hill:  The Wall Street Journal demonstrates how to do a disclosure statement, and the way to handle reporter conflicts of interest.

From Rachel Lucas:  Sizing cats, and why Sleeping With One Eye Open is a good idea.

From Breda:  Brief Encounter

And if my earlier hint to read this post by Brigid got past you, consider this  another.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 19:33:27 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Martin Feldstein as Groucho Marxist

So the House of Representatives passed the pork-ified Senate bailout bill, bringing the taxpayers-are-on-the-hook total to One Trillion Eight Hundred Billion Dollars.

Think they’re finally done with us?  Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

A successful plan to stabilize the U.S. economy and prevent a deep global recession must do more than buy back impaired debt from financial institutions.  It must address the fundamental cause of the crisis: the downward spiral of house prices...

The recently enacted financial rescue plan does nothing to stop this...

We need a firewall to break the downward spiral of house prices.  Here's how it might work.  The federal government would offer any homeowner with a mortgage an opportunity to replace 20% of the mortgage with a low-interest loan from the government...  This would be available to new buyers as well as those with mortgages...

...The total size of the mortgage-loan program might be as much as $1 trillion... - Martin Feldstein

*HONK*
Make that TWO Trillion Eight Hundred Billion Dollars!

Hey, it’s only money!

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 17:28:43 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Little arrows, for me and for you...

Much of the uproar about the Senate’s pork-ified bailout bill has centered around the first item on this list:

The special provisions include tax breaks for:

• Manufacturers of kids’ wooden arrows - $6 million.
• Puerto Rican and Virgin Islands rum producers - $192 million.
• Wool research.
• Auto-racing tracks - $128 million.
• Corporations operating in American Samoa - $33 million.
• Small- to medium-budget film and television productions - $10 million.

Turns out there are two stories here.

The first story is that the items on this particular list aren’t actually expenditures. Nobody is being given $6 million. What’s happening is a tax is being eliminated.  But in Congress’s upside-down “all your money belongs to us” accounting, anytime some poor benighted taxpayer gets to keep more of his hard-earned bucks it gets listed as an expense.  (And we actually pay these people to make up rules like this!)

Okay, the second story: What’s this all about?  For that we go to a pair of reader e-mails over at The Corner:
The first:

Under the Wildlife Restoration Act… [aka] the Pittman-Robertson Act… guns and hunting equipment are taxed... [The taxes are] returned to the States under matching grants to fund their hunting programs. Hunting arrows are subject to the tax… The purpose of the wooden arrow exclusion is to exempt toys from what is otherwise a hunting excise tax.

Understandable, except, as it turns out, “toy” arrows used to be excluded:

This provision was included to correct a mistake that was made several years ago in the JOBS Act, when the excise tax on archery arrows was changed from a percentage tax to flat rate of 39 cents. As a result of the imposition of this flat tax rate, producers of wooden practice arrows that cost 30 cents each are now required to pay 39 cents tax on each arrow – more than doubling the cost of these arrows.

So WTF is the JOBS Act (and wtf do jobs have to do with taxing arrows?)? Well, a search over at THOMAS turns up “H.R.4520 • the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004.” H.R.4520 turns out to be yet another one of those  everything-including-the-kitchen-sink bills that Congress loves so dearly. The table of contents page for this monstrosity runs 17 screens on my browser.  And sure enough, buried in the middle^[1] is Title III (“Tax relief for agriculture and small manufacturers”), Subtitle C (“Incentives for small manufacturers”), Section 332^[2] (“Simplification of excise tax imposed on bows and arrows”).  To wit:

SEC. 332. SIMPLIFICATION OF EXCISE TAX IMPOSED ON BOWS AND ARROWS.

(a) BOWS- Paragraph (1) of section 4161(b) (relating to bows) is amended to read as follows:

(1) BOWS-

`(A) IN GENERAL- There is hereby imposed on the sale by the manufacturer, producer, or importer of any bow which has a peak draw weight of 30 pounds or more, a tax equal to 11 percent of the price for which so sold.

`(B) ARCHERY EQUIPMENT- There is hereby imposed on the sale by the manufacturer, producer, or importer--

`(i) of any part or accessory suitable for inclusion in or attachment to a bow described in subparagraph (A), and
`(ii) of any quiver or broadhead suitable for use with an arrow described in paragraph (2),

a tax equal to 11 percent of the price for which so sold.'.

(b) ARROWS- Subsection (b) of section 4161 (relating to bows and arrows, etc.) is amended by redesignating paragraph (3) as paragraph (4) and inserting after paragraph (2) the following:

`(3) ARROWS-

`(A) IN GENERAL- There is hereby imposed on the sale by the manufacturer, producer, or importer of any arrow, a tax equal to 12 percent of the price for which so sold.

`(B) EXCEPTION- In the case of any arrow of which the shaft or any other component has been previously taxed under paragraph (1) or (2)--

`(i) section 6416(b)(3) shall not apply, and
`(ii) the tax imposed by subparagraph (A) shall be an amount equal to the excess (if any) of--

`(I) the amount of tax imposed by this paragraph (determined without regard to this subparagraph), over
`(II) the amount of tax paid with respect to the tax imposed under paragraph (1) or (2) on such shaft or component.

`(C) ARROW- For purposes of this paragraph, the term `arrow' means any shaft described in paragraph (2) to which additional components are attached.'.

(c) CONFORMING AMENDMENTS- Section 4161(b)(2) is amended--

(1) by inserting `(other than broadheads)' after `point', and
(2) by striking `ARROWS- ' in the heading and inserting `ARROW COMPONENTS- '.

(d) EFFECTIVE DATE- The amendments made by this section shall apply to articles sold by the manufacturer, producer, or importer after the date which is 30 days after the date of the enactment of this Act.

Well, that’s clear as mud, innit?

But (assuming I’ve got the right JOBS Act^[3]) the problem appears to have been created when the authors modified Subsection 4161: The added paragraph (3) says “any arrow.”  No exemption for toys!

And there we have it:  The original law– the one that created the tax to fund the states’ hunting programs– was either so confusing, so complicated, or so expensive that someone complained, and when it came time to write the 2004 bill, someone in Congress stuck in a section to make sure the arrow manufacturers got taken care of.  Unfortunately, they screwed up, and the toymakers suffered collateral damage.

And four years later, the provision to correct that mistake gets buried in the 340 non-germane pages of the 2008 financial bailout bill.  Lovely!


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Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 00:48:26 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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All you need to know about the Senate bailout bill

110 pages of bailout.
340 pages of pork.



Need details?

UPDATE 081002 17:33:  Want more (you masochist, you!)?

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 16:30:21 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Or maybe they’d prefer not hearing from you

The House is limiting e-mails from the public to prevent its websites from crashing due to the enormous amount of mail being submitted on the financial bailout bill.

As a result, some constituents may get a “try back at a later time” response if they use the House website to e-mail their lawmakers about the bill defeated in the House on Monday in a 205-228 vote. - The Hill

Via:  doubleplusundead

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-30-

It’s more than a little depressing to realize that I’ve been hanging around the web long enough to witness the revived New York Sun’s birth and demise.

A quick troll ’round my favorite newspaper-related sites found the death of The Sun curiously unremarked: Jarvis, Newsosaur, Gannett Blog, Don Surber, Stephen Waters, Jay Rosen... nothing. Well, perhaps everyone is preoccupied with their own concerns. (God knows, the media in general, and print media in particular, are having a terrible time of it.) Perhaps it’s because, with a paid circulation of only 40,000, The Sun was a relatively minor factor on the New York Media scene. Perhaps The Sun was doomed to fail; a dead man walking that (finally) fell over,

Or perhaps was the paper’s politics: By failing to be reliably left-wing, The Sun offended many of the chattering class, and drew hatred from the looney left (and the anti-Israel looney right):

Anonymous (not verified) says:
October 01, 2008 11:33 AM
Great - another Zionist front goes down in flames. That they alligned themselves with right wing facist and racists says more about the moral aburdity of a movement which will take us all down unless we stop it.

Anyone might think twice before writing a post that draws scum like that.

I’ve not been a regular Sun reader (although I did link one of their stories yesterday), but from the impressions I’ve drawn and the reactions I’ve read, it appears that the paper’s backers set out to do “good” journalism, largely succeeded in doing so, and had fun doing it. Which, one would think, deserves celebration.  Not to mention respect and admiration for taking on the quixotic task of creating a newspaper from scratch in the 21^st century.  Oh, well...

I find that I still have a bookmark set for Ira Stoll’s earlier Smarter Times.^[1] I hope we’ll hear more from him â€“ and the others who made The Sun what it was â€“ in the future.


Elsewhere:

Related:

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Posted by: Old Grouch in The Press at 18:01:57 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Preparing the battlefield

The Washington Post actually criticizes a Democrat:

[House Speaker] Pelosi deserves no praise for her leadership on Monday.  Even stipulating that we are in the closing weeks of one of the most important political campaigns in a generation, her inability to rise above the tendency to score political points was inexcusable.  Monday’s vote was a moment to set aside those instincts and talk about the package as an example of Washington’s ability to work cooperatively in a time of crisis.

Instead, Pelosi accused Bush of economic policies that create “budgetary recklessness” and “an anything-goes mentality.”  And she closed with a partisan call to arms.  “In the new year, with a new Congress and a new president,” she said, “we will break free with a failed past and take America in a new direction to a better future.”

And Glenn Reynolds notes

Strikingly, these criticisms come from The Washington Post, not some right-leaning publication.

Well, before we celebrate the Post’s sudden attack of bi-partisanship, let’s engage in a little Kremlinology.  When the Official Democrat Media prints something counter to expectations, the reason must lie beyond the obvious. Let’s look past the surface to find the story-behind-the-story.

First off, on reading the entire piece, it’s immediately evident that it’s not as radically deviant as the anti-Pelosi quote, taken in isolation, would imply. After a single-sentence paragraph to set the scene, writer Dan Balz spends 10 paragraphs (582 words) wailing on – wait for it! – the Republicans.  From the ineffectiveness of President Bush, to the “ideology” of the House Republicans (“crucial in any decision” says an unnamed “veteran of a past Republican administration”), to the “disarray” of the Republican party in general (“leaderless and lacking in cohesion”), to John McCain (“raised more questions about his own style of leadership”), etcetera, etcetera: The list is long, and no stone is left unthrown.  It goes on and on, paragraph after paragraph, winding up with a couple of extracts from former-Bushie Peter Wehner’s NRO Corner post (“foolish and irresponsible” “lame and adolescent”).  Then, finally, Balz is ready to tackle the Democrats.

If anyone’s keeping statistics, they get four paragraphs.

Now, Pelosi’s speech was out of line.  In fact, it was so far out of line with what any reasonable person would have expected from the Speaker of the House that failure to acknowledge it would have left Balz tiptoeing past an elephant the size of China.  So he does, but in curiously muted terms.  Pelosi showed an “inability to rise above the tendency to score political points.”  The strongest language (fairly) characterizes the speech’s conclusion as “a partisan call to arms.”  Oh, and there’s a wrist-slap for Harry Reid, too: “[Reid has] sounded grudging in his comments about the Democrats’ willingness to participate in finding a solution to a problem that he argues is wholly the fault of Bush and the Republicans.”  “Grudging,” huh?  Like he was just having a bad day?  Certainly nothing ideological there!

Having come this far, the question remains: What’s this all about?  The answer lies in the piece’s final paragraph:

...Anger at Washington will feed a hunger for change, and it's likely to fall harder on the GOP as the party that holds the White House.  But for the next president and the next Congress, whatever its makeup, Monday’s performance should be looked at as an example of what it was, a performance designed to undermine the public’s confidence in its elected leadership.

As he dog-whistles the “change” slogan, Balz issues a warning: Any Republican (or Democrat, for that matter) who fails to go along with the next (i.e., Obama) adminstration’s program of Hopeful Changitude (or is it “Changeful Hopeitude”?) will be condemned by the press as “ideological,” or â€œundermining the public’s confidence,” or “not by any means representative of a governing majority in the country,” or (if they’re feeling generous) “partisan.”  The press will uphold its side, sincerity and principle will be granted only to the anointed, and all others be warned..

Of course, we already knew that.

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Sites linked - September, 2008

59 posts in September. 30 more than last month (which now becomes the year-to-day lowest), the most since February (62), and the fourth highest ever.  Totally blew away last year (28).

The September linklist is below the jump...
more...

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