RUTHFULLY YOURS

The nominal corporate-income-tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, the highest in the developed world. That’s the on-paper rate. The effective corporate-income-tax rate — i.e., the actual rate — is . . . a matter of some dispute, but Martin A. Sullivan, a highly regarded economist specializing in taxation, puts it around 28 percent. Others have estimated the rate to be much lower: A Government Accountability (ha!) Office study put the figure at about 13 percent.

Let’s put it at 0.00 percent.

In reality, the effective corporate tax rate varies substantially from firm to firm and from industry to industry. As Sullivan points out, corporations that operate exclusively within the United States pay an effective tax rate very close to that 35 percent statutory rate, and energy and mining companies generally pay a relatively high rate. On the other hand, multinationals doing most of their business abroad often pay much lower rates, as do many technology and pharmaceutical companies. For example, in 2013 Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil all had effective tax rates higher than the U.S. statutory rate, but most of their taxes were owed to foreign governments. Microsoft paid about 19 percent. According to S&P Capital IQ, neither Merck nor General Motors paid any corporate income taxes for the second quarter of this year, even though both brought tons of money. (About 22 and a half tons of money in Merck’s case, if you stacked it up in hundred-dollar bills.) Total federal revenue from corporate income taxes in 2013 was $274 billion, or 9.8 percent of total receipts.

When you point out to your average soy-milk-’n’-class-warfare type that the United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the world, and is alone among non-batzoid countries (looking at you, Zimbabwe and North Korea) in imposing that rate on the worldwide operations of domestic firms rather than only on business done in the United States, Moonbeam will reliably point to those lower effective rates as evidence that everything is hunky-dory. But the enormous variability in real tax rates between politically favored companies (Hello, First Solar!) and those lacking in political tax patronage is not an argument against reforming the corporate tax system — it’s an argument for abolishing it altogether.

At the risk of engaging in some absurd oversimplification, we do not really tax corporate income, meaning revenue, but corporate profits, meaning revenue minus everything that can be counted as a business expense — salaries, materials and supplies, inventory, maintenance, etc. (Ordinary operating costs are 100 percent deductible in the year in which the purchase is made, while capital expenses — investments in assets that have a useful lifespan of more than one year — are deducted over time.) A corporation could, in theory, reduce its taxable income to zero every year simply by giving its CEO a cash bonus equal to what would otherwise be its taxable income.

But in that case, the CEO would have to pay taxes on that money as personal income, presumably at the top rate of 39.6 percent, which is higher than the top corporate rate. And that is why it makes sense to scrap the corporate income tax entirely.

‘Utopian” can be a damning word. But, as the late socialist philosopher G. A. (“Jerry”) Cohen noticed, the word also carries a positive valence. Who, after all, wouldn’t enjoy eating pie in the sky?

In his very short 2008 book, Why Not Socialism?, Cohen capitalizes (pun intended) on this point. In dismissing socialism as utopian, conservatives are tacitly acknowledging its appeal as an ideal — indeed, as something that is too good for us.

Jason Brennan, assistant professor of strategy, economics, ethics, and public policy at Georgetown University, has recently published a pithy, nearly-as-short rebuttal titled (what else?) “Why Not Capitalism?” In it, Brennan attempts not only to refute Cohen’s arguments, but to show that a capitalist utopia would be even better than a socialist one.

Cohen’s book begins with a fictional story of a camping trip. Friends go into the woods, taking things like fishing rods, pots and pans, and canoes, which are treated as “under collective control for the duration of the trip.” Cohen writes, “There are plenty of differences, but our mutual understandings, and the spirit of the enterprise, ensure that there are no inequalities to which anyone could mount a principled objection.”

Cohen expects that most of his readers would prefer this “socialist” camping trip to a “capitalist” one. Imagine the clingy wilderness-goers having to barter with one another every time somebody wants to use the potato peeler! Not only is such a market system inherently less appealing (in Cohen’s eyes), it would also be less efficient, since nobody would be able to do anything without engaging in irksome market transactions.

Why not organize all of society around the socialist ideals realized in this camping trip? Cohen anticipates some answers. For instance, it may be the case that the possibilities of human camaraderie are too limited to extend beyond a small group of friends. Even if true, however, that observation doesn’t undermine socialism as an ideal. It only shows that the ideal is not achievable — for now. Cohen optimistically believes we may yet “design” better “social technology” to make the ideal a reality.

“Every market, even a socialist market, is a system of predation,” Cohen writes in the concluding lines of Why Not Socialism? “Our attempt to get beyond predation has so far failed. I do not think the right conclusion is to give up.”

For Brennan, the right conclusion is satire. In Why Not Capitalism? he amusingly draws on the world of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, an animated series on Disney Junior, in order to parody Cohen.

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/09/03/Kerry-The-Bible-Commands-America-Protects-The-Planet-For-Muslim-Countries

Wednesday at a ceremony to appoint Texas lawyer Shaarik Zafar to be special representative to Muslim communities, Secretary of State John Kerry said it was the United States’ Biblical “responsibility” to “confront climate change,” including to protect “vulnerable Muslim majority counties.”
Kerry said Scripture, in particular the Book of Genesis, make clear it is our “duty” to protect the planet and we should look at Muslim countries “with a sense of stewardship of earth,” adding, “That responsibility comes from God.”

The world seems to be falling apart.
Only lunatics from North Korea or Iran once mumbled about using nuclear weapons against their supposed enemies. Now Vladimir Putin, after gobbling up the Crimea, points to his nuclear arsenal and warns the West not to “mess” with Russia.
The Middle East terrorist group the Islamic State keeps beheading its captives and threatening the West. Meanwhile Obama admits to the world that we “don’t have a strategy yet” for dealing with such barbaric terrorists. Not long ago he compared them to “jayvees.”
Egypt is bombing Libya, which America once bombed and then left. Vice President Joe Biden once boasted that a quiet Iraq without U.S. troops could be “one of the great achievements” of the administration. Not now.
China and Japan seem stuck in a 1930s time warp as they once again squabble over disputed territory. Why all the sudden wars?
Conflicts rarely break out over needed scarce land — what Adolf Hitler once called “living space” — or even over natural resources. A vast, naturally rich Russia is under-populated and poorly run. It hardly needs more of the Crimea and Ukraine to screw up. The islands that Japan and China haggle over are mostly worthless real estate. Iran has enough oil and natural gas to meet its domestic and export needs without going to war over building a nuclear bomb.

As the Obama administration struggles to address the threat from ISIS and plans to go to Congress in the coming weeks to up its commitment against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, multiple media reports indicate that the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) is operating openly with ISIS and other designated terrorist groups. And yet financial and military support for the FSA is the keystone to the administration’s policy in Syria.

Some background is essential.

It was just over a year ago that the Institute for the Study of War’s Liz O’Bagy was opining in the Wall Street Journal about her travels to Syria and purported discovery that the Syrian “rebels” really weren’t bloodthirsty jihadists, but moderates worthy of U.S. financial and military support — in particular, heavy weapons. Her claims about the Syrian rebels, particularly the FSA, were cited and praised by Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator John McCain.

That view, of course, quickly came crashing down as O’Bagy came under fire for failing to disclose that she was also a paid agent of a Syrian rebel front. (She had also lied about her academic credentials.) Within two weeks of her op-ed appearing, she was fired from the Institute for the Study of War, though she was hired two weeks later by Senator McCain as a Senate staffer.

At the same time that O’Bagy’s career was taking a hit, the narrative that the Syrian “rebels” were all secular moderates was quickly collapsing. A Rand Corporation study appeared two weeks after O’Bagy’s op-ed saying that nearly half of the Syrian “rebels” were jihadists or hardline Islamists (as if there were a discernible difference). Meanwhile, the FSA was under serious pressure from the very jihadist groups that Ms. O’Bagy had assured were not a problem.

Another practical problem developed with providing weapons to the FSA. As soon as weapons shipments from the CIA were arriving in Syria, the FSA weapons caches were being raided by jihadist groups, including ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the official al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, under very suspicious circumstances. The problem got so bad that by last December, both the U.S. and the UK had stopped weapons shipments to the FSA.

But by April of this year, the Obama adminstration’s CIA weapons spigot was turned back on, with the FSA now receiving heavy weapons, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. And in late June, President Obama asked Congress for $500 million to arm and train the FSA.

Under the headline “The World in Flames,” Henry Kissinger warns in a London Sunday Times op-ed of the consequences of state failure and anarchy in the Muslim world. Read it carefully: Kissinger reviews the collapse of America’s idea of exporting democracy during the Arab Spring and its dire consequences. He suggests that the US needs to work with Russia to put out the fire:

Participants in the contests search for outside support, particularly from Russia and the US, in turn shaping relations between them.

Russia’s goals are largely strategic: at a minimum to prevent Syrian and Iraqi jihadist groups from spreading into its Muslim territories and, on the larger, global scale, to enhance its position vis-à-vis the US.

America’s quandary is that it condemns Assad on moral grounds — correctly — but the largest contingent of his opponents are al-Qaeda and more extreme groups, which the US needs to oppose strategically.

Neither Russia nor America has been able to decide whether to co-operate or to manoeuvre against the other — though events in Ukraine may resolve this ambivalence in the direction of Cold War attitudes.

Political Islam has brought large parts of the world into something resembling the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, Kissinger says (and of course I agree: I have been citing the 30 Years War example for a decade):

Zones of non-governance or jihad now stretch across the Muslim world, affecting Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mali, Sudan and Somalia. When one also takes into account the agonies of central Africa — where a generations-long Congolese civil war has drawn in all neighbouring states, and conflicts in the Central African Republic and South Sudan threaten to metastasise similarly — a significant portion of the world’s territory and population is on the verge of falling out of the international state system altogether.

As this void looms, the Middle East is caught in a confrontation akin to — but broader than — Europe’s 17th-century wars of religion. Domestic and international conflicts reinforce each other. Political, sectarian, tribal, territorial, ideological and traditional national- interest disputes merge. Religion is “weaponised” in the service of geopolitical objectives; civilians are marked for extermination based on their sectarian affiliation.

Some conventional wisdom about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is easily debunked. One such bit of nonsense is that Palestinians have or will turn on Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank after the losses in the recent fighting with Israel. After suffering over 2,000 casualties, seeing 32 tunnels destroyed, and losing two-thirds of its rocket inventory by firing them with little effect or having them destroyed by Israel, the perception is that Palestinians, deep down, have had enough, and see no benefit from the Hamas strategy of confronting Israel every two years.

Of course, this theory suggests that anything any Palestinian in Gaza believes or desires has anything whatsoever to do with who governs the territory, and in what fashion. If you subscribe to the notion that all politics is local, then Hamas is now stronger than ever. That seems to be the message explaining why Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is now by far the top choice [1]to become the head of a unified PA-Hamas government, securing a 61% to 32% victory over Mahmoud Abbas if elections were held today. Most remarkable is that support for Hamas has soared in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), which escaped the fighting. Palestinians in the West Bank are demonstrating that resistance is easy to support when someone else, somewhere else is fighting and getting hit. This “courageous” support for Hamas from Palestinians in the West Bank mirrors the “courage” shown by Hamas leaders who hid below ground while allowing the locals to be killed as human shields.

Of course there is an easy explanation out there for Hamas’ popularity, and the lagging support for Abbas, Fatah, and his Palestinian Authority. That would be the purported “land grab” by Israel in the West Bank, all of 988 acres, which naturally will destroy the chances for peace and reconciliation and the two-state solution. Muslim extremists can massacre people in one country after another in the Middle East and Muslim world, but Israel taking land it already controls to build houses, pending any legal challenges (got that?), is the ultimate threat [2] to the survival of the world.

This “logic” depends on the badly mistaken notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the central explanation for the behavior of Islamists anywhere. If only Israel would stop building houses, then peace would be achievable between Israel and the Palestinians, and all the myriad Muslim grievances in dozens of countries on every continent would miraculously disappear. Such is the obsession with what Jews do, but more to the point, the intensity of the hatred [3] of Jews and the state they control — a cause that journalists the world over, many parts of what might be called the “global left,” have signed onto. U.S. President Barack Obama seems to have been immersed in the holy waters of rage at Israel as well, according to spokesmen [4] in his administration, most notably Martin Indyk:

And Mr. Obama — No Drama Obama, the president who prides himself on his cool, a man whose emotional detachment is said to explain his intellectual strength — is enraged. With Israel. Which has just been hit by several thousand unguided rockets and 30-odd terror tunnels, a 50-day war, the forced closure of its one major airport, accusations of “genocide” by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, anti-Semitic protests throughout Europe, general condemnation across the world. This is the country that is the object of the president’s rage.

St. Louis is now Ground Zero for the “war on black males”: So named by Spike Lee after a white cop shot a black teenager, unleashing ten days of riots and rage and free shopping in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson.

But here is what Spike Lee did not say: Black people are winning the war. At least in St. Louis.

Black-on-white crime is an everyday fact of life in this once vibrant city. And more and more people — the ones who are left, anyway — are wondering why local media refuse to tell the truth about it.

The latest example came Sunday evening. A group of black people on bicycles surrounded, threatened, and robbed two horse-drawn carriages — the kind you find in the nicer parts of town where tourists congregate.

A place where black mob violence used to be rare. Not anymore. Not for a long time. Not in St. Louis.

The local CBS affiliate reported that two suspects have been arrested, and the owner of the carriage company put on a brave front, saying crime is unusual in that part of St. Louis:

“We’ve been there seven nights a week for 35 years and never had an issue with anything,” Jerry Kirk says. “This is the first time that we’ve ever had an incident this way, and I’m not aware that there’s ever been an incident like this ever before.”

To its credit, the news station allowed readers in the comments section to tell the full story of racial violence and denial that its own reporter did not — or could not — say. And they did, by the hundreds:

“I’m from St. Louis,” said one reader at the CBS St. Louis web site. “This happened in the big tourist area called the Riverfront, right along the Mississippi. Right across the river is East St. Louis, Illinois, totally crime ridden. The truth is that rampaging “teen” boys come streaming across the bridge all the time to beat people, rob them and terrorize families, especially during big festivals. Yes, I’ve seen it personally and it was damned scary. I’m shocked to hear this carriage owner say this has never happened to his employees before. They’re either very, very lucky, or he’s lying. The area needs cops stationed down there along the Riverfront 24/7. Thank God Missouri finally has concealed carry.”

In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt intervened in a strike by Pennsylvania coal miners, exceeding his Constitutional authority as president. When this was pointed out to him by Republican House whip James E. Watson, Roosevelt allegedly yelled, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!”

This outburst reflected the novel Progressive view of the Chief Executive. Instead of the Constitution’s limited powers focused on specific needs, such as national defense, beyond the capacity of the individual states or local governments to address, the President needed more expansive authority in order to serve the “people.” Over 100 years later, Barack Obama has governed on the same assumption, one that undermines the Constitution’s structure of balanced powers and limited government, and puts at risk our political freedom and autonomy.

In January of this year Obama famously asserted, much less honestly than did T.R., his willingness to shed Constitutional limits: “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help they need. I’ve got a pen and I’ve got phone.” And he’s been true to his belief during his nearly six years in office. He has changed his own signature legislation, Obamacare, 42 times. He has also used his “pen and phone” to change immigration laws, gun laws, labor laws, environmental policy, and many other statutes that should be the purview of the legislative branch, to which the Constitution gives the law-making power.

Other presidents, of course, have used signing statements and executive orders. But Obama has pushed this traditional prerogative far beyond the bounds that presidents in the past were usually careful to respect. But the ideas behind this expansion of power are not peculiar to Obama, and transcend any one man. They come from the Progressive worldview that rejects the Constitution’s philosophical vision of humans as driven by conflicting “passions and interests,” and eager to amass power in order to gratify both. The Progressives, on the contrary, believe that human nature can be improved, and that technocrats armed with new knowledge of human behavior and motivations can be entrusted with the concentrated power necessary for managing that improvement and solving the new problems created by industrialism, technology, and the other novelties of modernity.

In terms of the federal government, the key to this new vision is the executive branch, led by an activist president. Woodrow Wilson was quite explicit about these ideas. In 1890 he wrote of the need for a “leader of men” who has “such sympathetic and penetrative insight as shall enable him to discern quite unerringly the motives which move other men in the mass.” He knows “what it is that lies waiting to be stirred in the minds and purposes of groups and masses of men.” This sympathy is one “whose power is to command, to command by knowing its instrument,” and the leader possessing this “sympathy” cares only “for the external uses to which they [people] may be put.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/telling-the-truth-about-islam-on-the-streets-of-l-a-on-the-glazov-gang-1/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Nonie Darwish and joined by Samira Tamer, L.A. ACT Chapter Leader, who joined the show to discuss, Telling the Truth About Islam on the Streets of L.A., focusing on how her group, along with the Counter-Jihad Coalition and Truth Defenders, is confronting Islamic supremacism on 3rd Street Promenade:

Don’t miss this week’s second Glazov Gang episode with Dr. Jim Tolle, the Senior Pastor at El Camino Metro Church in Los Angeles. Pastor Tolle joined the show to discuss The Notion of “Sin” in Islam and Christianity, analyzing how the stark contrast in two religions’ values fosters peace and forgiveness in one — and violence and killing in the other: