Category Archives: Treasury
Bystander President
Reagan was the Teflon president. He had an easy charm and nothing bad seemed to stick. Obama is the bystander president. He reads about bad things that happen on his watch as if they had nothing to do with him. He’s just like you and me, sitting at the bar madder’n hell. Except he gets to go on TV and complain. At least I get to draw a cartoon.
Economic Patriotism
President Obama’s favorite billionaire is making a run for the border. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway will finance Burger King’s purchase of Canadian donut dynamo, Tim Hortons.
Economic Patriotism
As a Canadian operation, Burger King will still have to pay US corporate taxes on earnings inside the United States. But earnings outside the US will only be taxed at the rate of the country where they occur. US companies have to pay taxes in the countries where they operate and also must pay IRS the difference between those rates and the US rate. The Obama administration calls this economic patriotism.
Burger King’s move is called a tax “inversion”. Matt Levine gives a great explanation in this Bloomberg article.
The US corporate rate, including state and local taxes comes to about 40%. That’s the highest in the world outside the Islamic State jizya. Roberto A. Ferdman provides a nice chart in the Washington Post showing the tax rates of the 34 OECD countries.
The nominal corporate tax rate in the U.S., which combines national, state, and city-level tax rates, is nearly 40 percent—the highest across all 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries. Canada’s, by comparison, is just over 26 percent.
Nixon Impeachment Advice
Judge Napolitano says, “the government is out of control”.
President Obama has taken to taunting Congress about impeaching him. Speaker Boehner says impeachment is off the table.
Nixon
August 7 is the 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation under the threat of impeachment. An 18 minute gap was discovered in a Watergate phone tape transcribed by Rosemary Woods. Lois Lerner has a two year gap in IRS emails.
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley says, “Obama is the president Nixon always wanted to be”. Tricky Dickey overachieved just by being himself according to Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. He says Nixon’s “southern strategy” turned the Republicans into a party of racists and homophobes.
No comment from the grave of Senate constitutionalist Robert Byrd.
Update: Here’s George Will on Nixon’s lawless activities 40 years ago. He wanted to use IRS to go after his enemies but didn’t trust the top people there.
Update update: Charles Krauthammer calls Obama’s plan to grant amnesty to 5 million illegals impeachment bait (nice picture):
Such a calculation — amnesty-by-fiat to deliberately court impeachment — is breathtakingly cynical. But clever. After all, there is no danger of impeachment succeeding. There will never be 67 votes in the Senate to convict. But talking it up is a political bonanza for Democrats, stirring up an otherwise listless and dispirited base. Last Monday alone the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee raised more than $1 million from anti-impeachment direct mail.
Lerner Wanted Grassley
The emails Lois Lerner didn’t lose show that she seemed to think she could sic IRS examiners on Senator Charles Grassley.
Apparently she and Grassley received invitations to speak at the same event but, this being the IRS, Lerner somehow got Grassley’s invitation.
Lerner Wanted Grassley
According to Politico Lerner emailed tax law specialist Matthew Giuliano saying, “Looked like they were inappropriately offering to pay for his wife. Perhaps we should refer to Exam?”
Giuliano turned her down.
Smug Koskinen and a Smidgen of Corruption
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen smugly insisted there isn’t a smidgen of corruption at the IRS. Oh wait, those were President Obama’s smug words. Koskinen smugly insisted he’s never been called a liar before.
He must have meant before he promised to produce Lois Lerner’s emails. Emails he knew at the time were missing.
Michael Gerson says IRS has, “undermined respect for authority. And it doesn’t seem even to understand the damage it has done”.
Well, they’re not the only ones. A year ago EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson conducted official business on an email account under the alias of Richard Windsor. Clever, no? She gave herself an ethics award for the scam. Windsor is now a fat cat at Apple, where Climate Change skeptic shareholders have been told to get lost.
The governing class is losing its fear of humans. Is it too late to yank the chain?
To Victor Davis Hanson the federal government has evolved into a sort of a “rogue organism”.
Add up these various alphabet-soup pathologies — well apart from the NSA, AP, and Benghazi debacles. Government agencies are now eager to venture into areas well beyond their mandates. They will use any means necessary to further the careers of their executives, massage data to enhance the administration’s agenda, or simply abdicate their responsibility to enforce the law at all if it is found to be politically incorrect.
In other words, we are witnessing a new federal government that is a sort of rogue organism that exists for its own enhancement and is willing to do anything necessary to help those who help it.
