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Posts Tagged ‘Clinton’
November 17th, 2015 at 9:47 am
Poll: Just 15% of Military Personnel Hold Favorable Opinion of Hillary Clinton
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Year after year, the public rates the U.S. military the most trusted and popular institution in American life.  Now, at a moment in which the military may play an increasingly vital role in protecting us against growing terrorist threats and and increasingly restive antagonists like Russia and China, a new poll reveals that Hillary Clinton’s standing among military personnel can only be described as atrocious:

Hillary Clinton is still in line to win the Democratic Party’s nomination to be the next commander in chief, but few Americans in the military have a good impression of her.  A new Rally Point/Rasmussen Reports national survey of active and retired military personnel finds that only 15% have a favorable impression of Clinton, with just three percent (3%) who view the former Secretary of State very favorably. Clinton is seen unfavorably by 81%, including 69% who share a very unfavorable impression of her.”

For someone applying for the job of Commander in Chief, that is an ominous sign, and one that may receive increasing attention as the 2016 election approaches.

September 25th, 2012 at 2:19 pm
Romney’s Admirable Charitable Giving

John Podhoretz wrote the column I was intending to write. “[T]he release of these tax records,” wrote Podhoretz, “leaves no doubt about one thing: Mitt Romney is an extraordinarily, remarkably, astonishingly generous man. A good man. Maybe even a great man.”

Well, yes.

The media kvetching about Romney’s tax returns is so misplaced as to be sickening. The story isn’t that Romney paid “only” 14.1 percent of his income in taxes. The story is WHY that rate was comparatively low. The measure of a man isn’t how much he pays in taxes; some of us, after all, think that much of the money paid in federal taxes is wasted. If I had a million dollars and a choice of whether to let the feds spend it or to give it to a charity I trust, I would give it to a charity without a second thought. The charity will do more good with it than the feds will. More people will benefit, and the benefits will be more lasting.

For the idiotic media (forgive the redundancy there) to carp about the “low” taxes is for them to buy into the notion that tax-paying is somehow noble while (and this is a really strange but growing sub-belief on the left) that charitable giving is somehow selfish. How twisted! How morally depraved.

For Mitt Romney to have donated so much money to charity is indeed a mark of his great decency as a human being. I welcome the comparisons with the Gores’ and Bidens’ pathetically low amount of giving, and with Bill Clinton trying to claim a tax deduction for the donation of used underwear (yuck!). (Yes, Clinton really did that — or at least Hillary did, with regard to Bill’s used underwear. But this was before anybody might have wanted to test it in a lab….)

Romney, a private man, apparently has been donating huge amounts to charities long, long before he ran for public office. These donations are those of the heart, not of a cynical mind. It’s about time he gets some credit for it.

July 5th, 2011 at 2:26 pm
How to Solve Investment Outflow

David Malpass and Stephen Moore have a great column at the Wall Street Journal about investment money flowing out from the United States rather than into the U.S. from abroad:

Americans are taking their investment dollars abroad at a faster pace than foreigners are bringing capital to these shores. In 2010, for example, U.S. investment abroad was $351 billion—$115 billion higher than foreign investment here. Economic recoveries are periods when investment capital usually surges into a country, but since this weakling rebound began in the middle of 2009 the U.S. has lost more than $200 billion in investment capital. That is the equivalent of about two million jobs that don’t exist on these shores and are now located in places like China, Germany and India.

One cause of this bad situation is federal over-spending:

Today, foreigners are financing food stamps and the next bridge to nowhere while Americans are building state-of-the-art production systems abroad. This is the real pernicious “crowding out effect” of the federal government’s borrowing.

But another big cause is high corporate income taxes, which make investment here far less rewarding:

Capital flows to where it is most highly rewarded, and low marginal tax rates on the returns to capital and business income create a gravitational pull on global funds.

Even former President Clinton says so:

“We’ve got an uncompetitive rate. We tax at 35 percent of income, although we only take about 23 percent. So we should cut the rate to 25 percent, or whatever’s competitive, and eliminate a lot of the deductions so that we still get a fair amount, and there’s not so much variance in what the corporations pay.”

But President Clinton doesn’t go far enough. For a long, long time I’ve argued that the corporate income tax should be eliminated entirely.
The problem, in short, is that nobody has any incentive to invest those dollars, or to lend them for investment, here in the United States. Eliminate the corporate income tax and, immediately, every American corporation becomes more profitable by as much as a third. All the pensioners who own stock in those companies get richer — immediately. All the workers with company stock-share plans get richer. Prices will drop as companies can make more money, net, even with lower prices. Companies also would save billions of dollars spent in tax-form preparation, and in time spent figuring out tax-avoidance schemes. The economy will get more efficient when tax considerations no longer distort decision-making.

Real interest rates will drop due to market forces (rather than through panicky fiats from the Federal Reserve Board). And, wonder of wonders, companies that have been moving operations overseas will now reverse course and race back within our shores — bringing hundreds of thousands of jobs with them. All of those complaints about “outsourcing” will end, virtually overnight.

That’s why this is one “pro-corporate” reform that also is overwhelmingly pro-labor. The Congressional Budget Office has noted that “domestic labor bears slightly more than 70 percent of the burden of the corporate income tax.”

At last measurement, the corporate income tax was taking in $195 billion per year. I argue that a large chunk of that would be recovered, even without the dynamic growth effects of the tax cuts, via near-immediate growth in dividends and capital gains and therefore in the taxes on those dividends and capital gains. I further argue that, under any reasonably dynamic analysis, especially one which takes into account the tremendous growth in tax revenues after prior cuts in taxes on investments, the economy won’t actually lose any money at all — but the whole economy will be stronger, jobs will be more plentiful, and even the ethics of Washington will be improved:

Indeed, it is all the mucking around in the weeds of the tax code and in the pig trough of spending earmarks that leads otherwise well-meaning congressmen to become favor-dispensers rather than statesmen. Without a corporate income tax to fool with constantly, a huge chunk of the grounds for favor-dispensation will be taken away.

So, again, eliminate the federal corporate income tax entirely. Doing so would go a long way toward completely ending the recession.

March 15th, 2011 at 12:10 pm
Byron York: Obama No More Invincible in 2011 Than George H. W. Bush in 1991
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Yesterday, we noted that Obama’s 2012 reelection odds may not be as high as many currently assume, especially with even higher inflation, gas prices and international chaos on the horizon.  Recalling 1991 and the supposedly invincible President George H. W. Bush, Byron York makes the same point with a brilliant summary quote:

Back in 1991, the pundits discussed how hard it would be to defeat a president with a job-approval rating of 90 percent.  Now, they’re talking about how hard it would be to defeat a president with a job approval rating of 47 percent.”

August 26th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
The Curious Case of Herbert Hoover
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President Hoover

There has been a lot of talk in the media (here, here and here) about how Herbert Hoover was a great miser and should have spent his way out of the economic downturn like Obama is attempting to do.  The myth might be as old as Hoover’s administration: Hoover was a free-market Republican who let Americans suffer instead of attempting government intervention.

False.  It’s hard to believe that a quick search through our own budget data proves that Hoover was more of Keynesian, someone who spent plenty and raised taxes in his vain attempt to “prime” the U.S. economy toward a resurgence.

Reviewing budget numbers from the White House’s own budget, we see that Hoover drastically increased the size and scope of government.  When Hoover arrived in the White House in 1929, he inherited a surplus of $734 million (back when that was real money).  After he left in 1933, the surplus turned into a $2.6 billion deficit.

Of course, some of this decline was due to lower revenues as a result of the depression, but looking at the outlays during his tenure and you’ll see a massive increase in the size of the federal budget, partly with the help of a Republican Congress as well.  From 1929 to 1933, Hoover increased federal outlays from $3.1 billion to approximately $4.6 billion, a 48% increase. From 1931 to 1932, outlays surged 30%.  Yes, Hoover was a real miser, a free-market fiend who hated spending the money of hard-working taxpayers.

To put Hoover’s 48% increase in perspective, progressives often assailed President Bush as a free-market disciple who refused to spend money on levies, the poor, or the uninsured.  During Bush’s tenure, estimated federal outlays surged 57%, even more than Hoover and LBJ’s Great Society (approximately 50%).

So, the next time you hear someone say that a runaway free-market caused the Great Depression and our current crisis, just remind them that Bush made LBJ look like Uncle Scrooge and Hoover drove federal expenditures faster than President Clinton.  Old rumors die slowly but this is one that needs to end now before we continue to perpetuate even more big-spending government boondoggles.