Well, before we say "why Clinton and Obama, but not W?" we also need to ask about Reagan; and Panama, and Grenada, and assisting Iraq in the targeting of chemical weapons attacks, and any other little actions I've forgotten about. I hate the situation in Libya. I hate *that* Obama has lent US support to it, but as a member of NATO, he was under great pressure to do so. Still, while my mindset is not this simple, I can't help but remember the sick joke that fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity. Next: if he is deserving of scorn for attacking, doesn't that make George W. better by comparison? I'm sorry - George W. doesn't get better, even if Obama is bad. This isn't a race, where a terrible President looks better if his successor isn't good enough (or even if his successor is worse!). I've learned long ago that the President has a great deal of power, de facto if not de jure, over the military. And as much as I despise the use of military force, complaining about a limited use of it is not going to accomplish anything, except get you mocked by war mongers (who are Very Serious People - see that solemn expression?).

An interesting (and vile) thing to consider is this: a large amount of the reasoning used to determine what could be done was not based upon what was lawful, or right, or within our principles - it was based on what could get people in trouble. One of the most horrifying things I saw was a group of soi disant conservatives reveling in the idea that there couldn't possibly be anyone with legitimate standing to accuse the Bush administration of violating FISA. No one could bring a case, because no one could lawfully have the information needed to bring a case! Now, I want to emphasize that what I found horrifying was that these people clearly thought that the Bush administration was breaking the law, but that there was simply no way to prove it. As if this made it okay! Clearly, their side, their clique, was winning, and that was all that mattered. This same thing has resonated throughout the civil rights violations in the war on terror. It's not so much whether it's *right* to imprison people in Guantanemo; it's that there's no legal authority that has the power to compel us to act otherwise. It was a clear violation of the UN charter to attack Iraq - but that would be a matter for the Security Council, and even if a resolution came before the council condemning us, it'd be vetoed - so who would bother to raise the complaint? With this kind of attitude, it's impossible to expect us to live up to our ideals.

I've seen it said (and I have no basis for determining the veracity of these claims) that the Westboro Baptist Church's entire raison d'être is to generate lawsuit income. They might sue a government entity for refusing to allow them to demonstrate; they might sue a person if that person assaults them; they might sue anyone or anything they can sue for monetary damages. Is this true? I don't know. I do know it's a much better explanation for their behavior from a human perspective than any other explanation that I've heard. A financial incentive makes a lot more sense than any other explanation.

You know, I remember Molly Ivins used to talk about this. And she had what struck me as a pretty strange policy. Her policy was forget the immigrants - hit the people who hire them. Put people in jail for hiring illegal immigrants. And yes, that includes the couple that hires a housekeeper or nanny who is in the country illegally. Part of the reason she said this was that you can't build a fence people won't find a way over. But it also seemed a bit cold. It puzzled me. It didn't *sound* like Molly Ivins. But then I realized something. Who do we go after right now? Just the immigrants. Just the people who want to work. And what does that do? It puts all of the power in the hands of those who hire illegal immigrants, and it removes all of the power from those who are looking for work. Make it so businesses are scared to hire folks who might be here illegally, and you will by-god get a good guest-worker program in place quickly. Because the businesses will demand it. Now, the employers get the benefits of near-slave labor (people who have to clam up and not report abuses) and there's this wonderful political issue about "getting tough on immigration". Turn it around, make it so businesses are the ones who are targeted, and we cut off the source of illegal immigration (the jobs that they're seeking), or, we get a good guest worker program. In either case, we actually work on the problem, rather than just pounding on a bunch of poor people who just want a chance to work and make some money.

Buying a business is a capital outlay deal. No expenses, no current deductions to speak of the and debt is serviced with after tax dollars. No. The debt is *serviced* with pre-tax dollars. Interest and expenses for debt are deductible. You're right that the value of the asset itself is taxable. If you did X hours of work, and were given a $250,000 office building, you'd be tagged as having earned $250,000. And buildings depreciate slowly (30 years, IIRC), so you can only depreciate a small-ish portion of the value. So, yes, this is, for all intents and purposes, "after tax dollars". (Remember the problem with Oprah giving away cars? Same kind of thing.) But if you take out a $250k loan (with the building as collateral), your liabilities increase by $250k, your assets increase by $250k, and your balance sheet doesn't change. Um. Okay - here's where I run out of knowledge. Your balance sheet certainly changes, because you'll make some payments, and increase your stake in the building, and you may depreciate some of it and... look, joke about how boring accountants are all you want, but smile warmly when you joke, they do hard, and valuable, work! A good accountant understands all the possible ways of playing this game out.

No business owner can put more than his/her after tax, after living expenses income back into their business. Wow. If you know what you're talking about, that's *very* misleading. If you don't know what you're talking about... well. You're right. Once a business owner has taken money as salary, it is taxable. And the owner can re-invest that after tax income into the business. However, if that money is spent as a business expense, to grow the business, it's not taxed. So, hire a worker, the salary and benefits are never taxed-to-the-owner. Buy a truck, and the truck is an asset, so the truck only gets deducted via depreciation, but if you lease the truck, the full lease is deductible if it's only used for business purposes.

On the other side, LongHairedWeirdo asserts that lower tax rates make it more expensive to hire people, given the opportunity cost of the higher after-tax income the business owner would forego. That seems a bit fishy to me, not given the math presented, but given the math not presented. A business hires more people because doing so will make the business more money than it otherwise would. No - businesses do not hire just to make money. They hire to *receive value*. This is a critical point. The person who cleans the office doesn't make the company money - but does provide value. The idea that a business exists "to make money" is what's ripping the soul out of the business community. A business is an investment - it needs to make a return (and earn a salary for the owner), or it's failing in its primary duty. But it's sole purpose is not "to make money". Its primary purpose is to provide some good or service to the community - and provide a living, and a return on investment. A great many businesses end up with some good piles of money to spend, and have to make decisions about how to spend it. The Reagan tax cuts made it much, much easier to decide to spend it on the salaries of the top people, and made layoffs, and offshoring, and cost-saving reductions in product quality, and so forth, that much more lucrative. But there is a flip side - raise rates too high at income levels that are too low, and you *do* reduce the incentive to work hard and boost your income. Tax policy is complicated. But I don't think we're doing it right, right now.

Tony P and LHW-- The argument that it saves you taxes if you invest in the business is correct only if the proprietor has an income stream separate from the business. Most don't--they actually need to take money out of the business to live on. Any business plan that doesn't include a salary to the Sole-P or working partners is so astoundingly broken there's not much point in discussing it. (But it's surprising how many beginners forget to include it, thinking they'll get paid "out of profits".) But if a business is successful, there's typically a time when there's some cash in hand, and decisions get made. Here's where marginal rates make a difference. Do you want to give the boss a raise? Or do you want to hire more workers? Well, with high marginal rates, the raise to the boss nets less cash, so paying more workers costs the boss less net cash than when marginal rates are lower. This is also where the big lie about businesses not hiring due to "uncertainty" is exposed. Every dollar spent on worker salaries is deductible; it doesn't matter if personal income tax rates might go up by 5 or 10% - you're not paying income taxes on the salaries you pay your workers anyway!

The other side of this is that lower rates make hiring employees more expensive (for non-incorporated small businesses). Seriously. Hypothetical example: Tax rate is 40%. You can spend $100k growing the business - hiring people, and paying other expenses related to that - or you can take it home as a bonus. Take it home: it's personal income. You take home $60k. Use it for hiring: it's a business expense, and fully deductible. You don't take home $60k, but you don't pay any taxes on it either! Net cost to you: the $60k that you could have taken home. What if the tax rate is 30%? Same scenario - but now, the cost of the hiring is $70k. You could have taken home $70,000, but instead hired people. The lower the top tax rate, the more personal income is lost to a Sole-P or partnership when they spend on business expenses.

If Nov 2012 rolls around and we still have 8%+ unemployment (and perhaps 7%+), who are people going to blame? It ain't going to be John Boenher and the GOP, let me tell you. That depends. One thing Obama has to master is the art of demanding "a bill that (he) can sign" (assuming he's demanding good legislation, of course). If he can do this, there are more paths to success. If the Republicans play ball, and the economy improves, he gets to claim credit. If they refuse, and the economy stays lousy, he gets to say "I told them to pass X!" If the Republicans play ball and the economy stays lousy, they can't blame *him* for the failure. If they refuse, and the economy booms, hey, the economy is booming! But he has to modify his stance. He's been a "community organizer" for two years - that's a good thing, let's figure out what we *can* do, and do it. But that's not a key for political success when one side wants to paint your side as evil. Now, he has to *lead*. He has to say "this is what the nation needs!" and make the Republicans look bad if they refuse to step up to the plate with *something* (that is: something besides tax cuts and deregulation).

The genius of Bowles-Simpson is that it manages to gore at least one of everyone's oxen. That's not genius. Look: if you come up with a brilliant plan to deal with a big ugly thing, you probably will hurt (and therefore piss off) a lot of people. But that doesn't mean pissing people off is the mark of a good plan. Pissing off everyone in this context isn't genius; it's cheap cunning, at best... a marketing strategy.

I'd like to point out that, by capping the maximum tax rate at a ridiculously low 23%, there'll be a 3 to one incentive to: cut wages and benefits move jobs overseas to save labor costs produce shoddy items, thereby saving money act in any way (honest or dis-) that increases profit. It's true, there'll be little incentive to shelter income, but there's correspondingly little incentive to use it or lose (too much) of it. Tax policy is a very tricky thing; there's a reason that, under a 70% marginal rate, the middle class did much better than they did under a 30-40% top marginal rate.

65 isn't the new 55 for anyone (certainly not since we last adjusted the SS retirement age). 65 is the new 63, but only if you are well off. For the bottom quintiles, 65 is the new 65. Chuckle. Okay, I was being facetious, but nevertheless, I stand corrected. My point was that, for some of us more-comfortable types, it's easy to think of adding a year or two to our working years. But we shouldn't be thinking like that - we should be thinking about everyone, and that includes people who will never be able to get a job that's not (in some sense) physically demanding.

I've seen a few people mention raising the Social Security full retirement age. I used to think this was semi-okay myself - but then, I'm an IT worker. Manual laborers don't have the same luxury as I do of expecting to get a job sitting down and earning money by hitting the right keys on a keyboard. I'm sure that 67 is the new 55, and all, but 67 is pretty damn old to be told you *have* to keep working, or face a substantial "early retirement" benefit cut.

Another recurring theme by some on the left is that confiscatory tax rates don't necessarily discourage people from working and making as much as they can. Yet, as rates fell, those that could make more did make more. All those extra dollars, taxes were paid on them (or should have been), thus showing that lowering taxes increases tax revenues by increasing the desire to earn more money. This is a very incomplete picture of the situation. With higher tax rates, people will "make" less money as salary because each dollar they take home as salary is taxed higher. For example, if you have to pay a 70% tax rate, hiring a personal secretary to bring you coffee and pick up your dry cleaning costs 30 cents on the dollar. You might figure that it's worth $10k to have such a worker(salary and other expenses = $33k gross, less $23k you'd have paid in taxes). At a 30% tax rate, the cost of that secretary more than doubles - now the secretary costs you $23k, and you're more than twice as likely to take the money home as salary (obviously - because there's twice as much money as stake!). But this is not because you're working harder and making more money. It's because you're choosing to keep the money rather than hire someone to fetch coffee and dry cleaning! The side you present - a striver chooses not to strive quite as hard, because taxes are so high that the extra money has too little value - can also exist. But if the rates are set on sufficiently high income levels, you'll see very little of this kind of behavior.

That was supposed to be a clever sally at Dr. S's proposal to let defaulters keep their property. As is often the case, "he shoots, he misses, no one notices." Right. I know what it was supposed to be. But my point is, if the bank made the loan and didn't follow the proper legal procedures to keep clear right to the title in the event of default, they don't have any more right to the property than the buyer does. Taking it from the buyer, and giving it to the correct claimant is appropriate - but first, you need to find that claimant, and that claimant has to make the claim. If there is no possible claimant, then I do think that a resident buyer should be able to retain possession, unless/until someone comes up with a better idea. I don't agree that there's any moral hazard attached to the buyer ending up with a windfall when there's no valid claimant. This isn't a case where the buyer did something wrong; it's a case where the banks did something wrong: failing to keep proper records. Now, in cases where there is a clear claim, sure, foreclose away.

None at all. Banks will continue to lend money to people who want or need to buy a home, even if the people who buy the home are free to default and retain possession. This is entirely consistent with the rule of law and so there is no reason not to let defaulting home buyers keep something they've ceased paying for. We should have the same rule for cars and large screen TV's. Let me see if I have this right. If one person has forfeited their right to the property (by not making payments on the mortgage) you think it's okay to give the property to someone else who has no right to it? You it's consistent with the rule of law to say "you don't deserve it, so we're giving it to someone else who doesn't deserve it either"?

I said the old lady "speculated" that the price of her house would go up. That was not totally wrong. She held on to the house in hopes that its price would go up. That's pretty much the definition of what speculators do. But I recognize that some people hesitate to call it speculation when somebody merely holds on to an "asset". The old lady did not engage in any form of speculation. She did gamble in a manner that others were swearing was okay. The problem in this case was that the bank should have recognized that it's risky to lend that much money on a house to a person who probably can't afford to pay it, and must pay it off by selling it. But some financial wizards at the bank said "it's no risk at all! We'll just bundle up the mortgage as bonds, and sell the risk off! People are buying these bonds like hotcakes!" Since there seemed to be no risk to the bank, and pure profit generated by making the loan, the bank wasn't speculating either. The funny thing is, the buyers of the loans were all following conventional wisdom, that prices were rising, and people just don't *walk away* from mortgages, so they weren't speculating either. At some point, it should have been obvious to everyone that the bubble was a bubble, and unsustainable. The problem was, it was now a game of hot potato. How do you cover your own positions, and avoid an ugly bankruptcy? Here, buying and selling would have turned into speculation, except there was a secondary crisis. Everyone was leveraged. They'd borrowed money to buy these mortgage bonds, based upon the value of the bonds. And they had to mark to market - those bonds were worth as much as they could be sold for, no more. And no one would buy them any more. If they marked down the price low enough to find a buyer, then their loan holder would say "you don't have enough assets to cover the loan, come up with more, or pay off the loan." (This is known as a margin call.) Speculation didn't happen, because no one could afford to sell at prices where speculators started to nibble - the margin calls would make them collapse like a house of cards. So, what happened wasn't the result of speculation. It was the result of a lot of money games, where everyone tried to act in their own best interests first (and their company's second), and piled up a lot of imaginary assets. Sometimes this works out well - a hot startup company needs capital, it starts selling stock at $10, people think it'll be worth $50 next year, and buy it at $40. Suddenly, that company has $30/share of purely imaginary money - and, if it's run well, might just be worth an honest-to-god $50/share next year. But sometimes, that imaginary money is based upon an unsustainable set of price increases in houses, magnified and multiplied by nothing but blind confidence that "the system" won't collapse... until it does.

And of course the food companies will often deal with speculators also. Without these evil creatures the system wouldn't function. Speculation is a particular type of activity - high risk gambling that could pay off extremely well. You don't need speculators. (There are those who argue that speculators serve a purpose - drawing attention to possible fluctuations. But that's not *necessity*.) You do frequently need people who will "gamble" on these contracts, because businesses are too careful with their money to gamble this way. These contracts give people the ability to plan for the future. But you don't need speculators.

This means that occasionally you'll see work that could be usefully done, and people idle. But it also means that we don't find we can't build refrigerators because some bureaucrat allocated too many people to making toaster parts, and forgot to allocate any to making come critical refrigerator part. That's not the issue we're seeing. What we're seeing is that people have been screaming about costs for so long that critical infrastructure has been left falling apart. Now, we could have been spending money to improve that stuff over the long term, but NO!COSTS!TAXES!SMALL GOVERNMENT! has been riding the brakes. Had this not been happening, it's quite possible that the overall economy would be bigger, and we'd have had a better time absorbing the shocks. Hell - with a bigger "real" economy - real people doing real work creating or maintaining real wealth - there might be a better business model out there than "figure out a way to get someone to pay a lot of money for something that has a lower intrinsic value, and get rich by doing that." (Obviously, money-games aren't the *only* business model out there. But they're too damn big a piece of the pie.) However, to be excruciatingly fair, the stimulus couldn't even find enough truly "shovel ready" projects to fund. And the *worst* way to handle crucial infrastructure is to do a rush job because you can get money now. (Not that slow, careful planning is all that good. Prediction: Seattle will still be debating the damned monorail in 2020.) The problem is that most people don't get what an economy *is*. At its root, it's a way that we create a functioning society, whether it's making sure we all have nice straw huts and good meat curing for the winter, with plenty of grain stored up - or whether it's making sure we have a nice house to live in, in a decent neighborhood with a well stocked grocery store close by. It's not about voracious accumulation of wealth. That this is often possible is a side effect, and not an entirely unpleasant one - sometimes those voracious wealth acquirers help build the bigger economy. But that's what it's become. And because of that, the middle class gets squeezed. They've been getting squeezed for the better part of 30 years, and it's starting to hit the limit. And without them, the economy collapses. Now, the real tragedy here is that, with a thriving middle class, you have a much bigger economic pie. There's lots more money flowing, and lots of ways for a smart, hardworking person to find a way to make a nice pile of money. But it means that those most benefiting from income inequality be willing to take a hit, and they're often the least willing to do so.

One issue with the progressive tax structure: people who make higher incomes tend to have a greater interest in government services. A person making $30k is basically paying for the government and services needed to produce a $30k/year job. You can make that kind of money with the resources and support of a small town. A person who can make ten million a year requires a lot more resources, a lot more infrastructure, and depends more highly on law enforcement and the courts. It's true - the person making $30k might be employed by someone making $10 million - so the person making the $30k might benefit as well from the person being able to make $10million. But that's an indirect benefit. Complaints about progressive taxation are often founded in an unwillingness to admit how much the government helps and protects the wealthy.

Re: "supply side" arguments, keep in mind that at the upper levels, a lot of them fall apart. The fear is that, if someone is going to get taxed "too much" on a large amount of profit, they might not work "too hard" to get that large amount of profit. But there's two issues to consider. One, we're not near that point in marginal tax rates. Our upper rate is 40%, when the tax cuts expire. You're still taking home a nice chunk of change after paying your tax bill. Two, a great many (most?) big dollar decisions aren't about *work*, they're about use of a pile of money that's already earned. Take it home as salary, or find some way to deduct it - which is more attractive? Tax rates have to go pretty high before the attractiveness of "just take it home" starts to fade. (I think 50% is a big psychological barrier. At that point, you can double a charitable contribution if it's deductible, and your net take home pay is the same.) The other side of it is that a marginal rate that discourages "just take it home as profit" isn't necessarily a *bad* thing, depending on how people can deduct the money. They might plow the money back into the business, donate to charity, start other businesses, etc.. If you are taxed at 70%, you might think that paying $60k a year in salary and benefits for a personal assistant is a good deal - it's $18k a year out of pocket to you. If you're taxed at 30%, you're paying 42k, 2.33x as much for that assistant - you'll get your own damn coffee.

That being said, a refusal to even acknowledge there are objective reasons to oppose this mosque is, by definition, bigoted. I'm simply pointing out that the blanket "bigoted" argument is wrong and unhelpful. I'm truly sorry that my attempts to do so are the worst effort yet. I'll be quiet now. Um. Could I suggest you change the word "objective" to something else? There are no "objective" reasons to oppose the mosque. There might be reasons held by those who are acting in good faith, who are not bigoted towards Muslims. However, I believe that, in nearly all of those cases, people would not have those objections if there wasn't a hatefest intentionally whipped up over this.

I understand why some object to a bridge builder who has stated that America is "an accessory to the crime" that was 9/11. I may understand what he meant by that, but there is certainly a less offensive way to state those ideas. I believe an objection to Rauf's involvement at Park51 based on that statement to be non-bigoted. And that's the game that's being played, you see. A political leader can try bashing on Muslims - but it's risky. It might backfire. they might look like a bully. So, they have to find a way to bully Muslims that you can whitewash really nicely, and make it look pretty. So they find something. And they count on other people to rally around it. And, pardon the crudity, they throw shit against the wall to see what sticks, and when they find just the right sticky shit, that's what they keep flinging. If it hadn't been Rauf saying that, "you know, the US has done some stuff that pisses off a bunch of Muslims, and that's why there are some people who hate them" there would have been something else... or, they would have dropped Ms. Sherrod as their enemy - whoops, sorry, why did Shirley Sherrod pop into my mind? Or, they would have dropped Rauf, and found another target. Now, what you're saying is not entirely incorrect - there are people who, in good faith, oppose the project because they were fed a lot of lines about him, and they, themselves, are not committing a bigoted act. But they believe what they believe because of the bigotry of others (and the carefully contrived public hating generated by the hate machine). Pragmatically, sometimes it's best to say "I understand how you feel that way - but I still think you're wrong, and here's why." But a person who gets misinformed, and does something wrong, needs to realize how awful their actions are. Being too gentle does not do them a favor, because what they're doing is still *wrong*. As for: The general insensitivity of it all. This is a mass grave of 3,000 people. If one is trying to build a bridge to understanding, one would (I think) try to understand the feelings of those you are trying to reach, regardless of whether they are irrational and not force the issue. I don't think the "don't give in to bigots" argument works at all. I think it is a matter of respect. Here's the thing: no one gave a damn until it was made a big hatefest. There were some sparks flying that were deliberately fanned into flames. But let's pretend that I'm being too cynical. I *could* possibly be wrong. I'm not - but, let's pretend. There were leaders who could have tamped all this down. "Yeah, it's insensitive" they could have said to the Palins and Gingriches and (I'm sure) the Limbaughs and Becks, "but you know what? If we bring it up, and let it become big, splashy headlines, it'll be ten times more hurtful than if we just let it quietly happen. And if we discuss our concerns with enough community leaders, there might be a better way to handle this than raising a mighty stink." So, I'll ask you: who was *more* insensitive? The guys who planned a quiet little construction project in Manhattan, or the people who started screaming that it was a horrible, horrible thing, by a horrible, horrible man, and kept flinging shit until they found stuff that stuck? Listen: I sympathize with your point of view. There was a time I'd have said the same sort of thing. But that was before the last 18 years where I saw how much hate could be used as a tool of politics.

BC: But not every objection to Sharia law or the mosque near ground zero etc. should be labeled bigoted. That's not engaging in true debate either. If people are using "Sharia" as an unquestionably bad thing, they are being prejudiced, at best - they are forming judgments before they have the facts (pre-judging - hence, prejudice). Is this "bigotry"? Well, that depends - if calling it bigotry makes that person realize they're engaging in something ugly, and decide not to make the same mistake in the future, yes. If calling it merely "factually incorrect" will accomplish that instead, I'm willing to go with factually incorrect. But bigotry is a fair name for the evil of attacking something different without knowing that it's bad. As for opposing the center's location, yes, I do think that's bigotry - it's treating people badly because they're Muslims. That doesn't mean a person who thinks that they shouldn't build it there is a bigot - there's a difference between a person engaging in some unthinking bigotry and being a bigot. I'll be glad to avoid the use of the word bigot if it helps me make a connection to someone and explain that, no, there's no reason to bully those nice, peaceful Muslim folks. But that won't mean that bullying those nice folks isn't bigotry.