The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) intends to purchase sixty Remington Model 870 Police RAMAC #24587 12 gauge pump-action shotguns for the Criminal Investigation Division. The Remington parkerized shotguns, with fourteen inch barrel, modified choke, Wilson Combat Ghost Ring rear sight and XS4 Contour Bead front sight, Knoxx Reduced Recoil Adjustable Stock, and Speedfeed ribbed black forend, are designated as the only shotguns authorized for IRS duty based on compatibility with IRS existing shotgun inventory, certified armorer and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts.

Submit quotes including 11% Firearms and Ammunition Excise Tax (FAET) and shipping to Washington DC.

Those tax return auditing sessions must be getting really, really tense.

Seriously, this underlines the essential threat of violence that underlies all taxation.  How is it that so many people who claim to be nonviolent, and to support only nonviolent policy, are the ones who vote for MORE taxation and redistribution to cure the “inequalities” of society?

h/t:Of Arms And The Law

UPDATE:  That bit about “compatibility with IRS existing shotgun inventory” is interesting.  That implies a rather large existing inventory, since if you’re buying sixty new ones, you wouldn’t worry about whether they were compatible with only a small number of currently owned ones.

Hey…  maybe they’re just going skeet shooting.

Do skeet pay taxes?

Our music is saturated with references to newness.  We all remember the big Disney hit, A Whole New World.  And can you imagine even for a minute that James Brown would have sung, Poppa’s Got A Slightly Used Bag?  You Make Me Feel Brand New, Brand New Day, New Kid On The Block….the list goes on and on.  In fact there is an entire genre of music known as “New Wave”.  Of course classical composers have jumped on this bandwagon too.  Dvorak penned the New World Symphony and he wasn’t even American..go figure!

Our politics (The New Deal), our literature (Brave New World), our advertising (“new & improved!”), and our vernacular speech (“turning over a new leaf”) all attest to our love of new. We compliment others when we say, “it’s the new you!” And when someone has been ill we give encouragement by telling them that in no time they’ll be “good as new”.

Nothing displays our love of new more demonstrably than the celebration of New Year’s Day.  We mark it as a fresh start, an annual genesis, a time to initiate personal improvement.  We make New Years resolutions, we begin a new calendar year.  It’s “new” at it’s best.

Politicians understand Americans and their love of “new”, and they use it as a very effectively campaign tool.  With each election cycle and with debate on major issues like health care, taxes, banking, finance, the military, etc, we are told new is good and old is bad.  Political candidates who successfully market themselves as a part of “new” and completely disassociate with “old” usually stand a pretty good chance of being elected, especially if “old” is unpopular.

In many instances we embrace “new” and equate it with “better” even though most of us have had experiences with new versions of something that does little more than make us long for the old version (software!).  And who hasn’t picked up a familiar food product in new packaging to note that there is now less of the product inside the package, but it costs more!

But “new” is NOT always “better”.  And we need to learn that lesson once and for all. I think John Updike is right.  However, this time the price tag on “new” is costing us more than we or our children can ever afford to pay.

The patient takes vitamins and minerals in doses recommended by most physicians, and gets plenty of exercise.

The patient eats a reasonably healthy diet. However, the patient depends to a large degree on imported food, which is often expensive, though the price goes up and down to a degree, and while the patient could grow plenty of home grown food, the patient hasn’t been planting enough lately to sustain present and future dietary needs. So the patient is hungry, and losing weight

The patient is mysteriously ill. Upon examination, it appears that the patient has been slowly poisoned. The patient’s immune system and general state of health might have been sufficient to cover the symptoms of the poisoning longer, except for the strain imposed by the recent hunger and weight loss. The symptoms have been coming on for sometime, but only recently have they become indisputable, as what seemed subclinical does of the poison accumulated in the tissues enough to cause big problems.

Some physicians suggest simply stopping the poison immediately, engaging in a crash program to feed the patient, and growing lots more food for the future, starting today. The basically healthy patient’s immune system and generally good habits will reverse the effects of the poison.

Some physicians suggest continuing the patient’s calorie restriction, cutting back on the vitamins and exercise, switching to a different poison (but reducing the dose) and using leeches to drain away the bad blood. When it’s pointed out that the vitamins and exercise are usually good things, and that poison is usually a bad thing, these practitioners assure the patient that the problem was an unexpected reaction between the nutritional supplements and the low grade poison dose, and the new poison is really a purgative to help clear the system of the effect of too many vitamins, and won’t do any harm. When these doctors are asked if the patient really shouldn’t be eating more, they say it’s good to be skinny, and research shows that skinny people live longer, anyway. They point to all kinds of studies that seem to prove all of this, and cite complicated sounding theories to justify the counter-intuitive nature of their prescriptions. Trust them: they’re the experts. And besides, even if the patient starts growing more food again, it will be many years before enough can be grown to adequately feed the patient (aren’t growing seasons usually annual things?). And even if the patient eats more, the patient will just start exercising more again, and burn the calories, and what good will that do?

I know which advice I’d follow, if I was the patient.

The patient, of course, is the US economy.

The vitamins and exercise are the tax cuts put in years ago by the Bush administration and Congress. Strictly speaking, the vitamins are the tax cuts (think antioxidants that prevent cross-linking), and the exercise is the additional economic freedom those cuts created for productive activity that drove the huge success of our economy for six years after 9/11, until the combination of oil prices and the housing/financial meltdown drug it down about a year ago.

Did you get the pun?  The housing/financial meltdown “drug” the economy down.  Ouch…

The diet is oil and energy, and we don’t make anywhere near enough of our own, which is part of the reason prices were so high not long ago.  Don’t be fooled!  Even though prices have fallen far off the $150/barrel highs, oil is still in short supply for an active, vibrant economy.  You can’t have a speculative bubble without an underlying “shortage,” and right now people are simply doing less that demands energy. But our access to energy is going to reflect itself in our ability to “rev up” the economy as we grow out of the recession.  The combination of a true structural energy shortage for a vibrant economy, plus the inflation that is going to result from the printing of new money, is going to result in higher oil prices than we’ve ever dreamed of, within a relatively short time, as the economy improves, demand goes up, and the worth of money goes down.

The mysterious poison (that “drug” we mentioned, the one with inevitably serious side effects) is government interference in the marketplace, particularly in trying to repeal the basic laws of economics. One of the main things that poisons do is to interfere with normal biological processes, and market interference is little different. There are many of these poisons, and when one of them is having an obviously negative effect on the patient, too many so-called experts suggest we try a different one. The problem is that all such interference is toxic for our economy. Some amount of government interference is probably inevitable; after all, we take medicines that are essentially poisons, because our overall organisms can handle it in small amounts, and the medicine sometimes helps resolve a short-term problem. But you will die young on a steady diet of high doses of all kinds of medicine, regardless of how beneficial some medicines are in short term use for very specific problems. A body can tolerate just a very few “maintenance” medicines for a long life, and they must have very mild side effects to be survivable.

A few years ago I had some blood tests that revealed serious problems.  My doctor couldn’t figure it out, and sent me to a specialist.  He looked at the list of medicines I was taking, and simply took me off everything but the absolute minimum.  My blood-work improved dramatically, as did my overall health.  What had happened was “medicine creep”, where the doctor prescribes one thing, then another to deal with the side effects of the first, then another, then another, and so on.  It took an expert to decide to do very little, while the mediocre practitioner tried to do too much.

We are toxic with government economic medicine right now. The physicians who are prescribing it were wrong about the LAST ten prescriptions, with side effects they claimed we wouldn’t experience, and with frequent failure in the purpose of the medicine, even WITH the deleterious side effects. And they are planning to send us the bill for their professional services, anyway. The very best thing they could do is to withdraw all but the very minimum of economic medicine (meaning a tolerable toxicity), and let the body heal itself. It will.

But our president and Democrat congress have big plans. They want to put us on about a dozen VERY STRONG maintenance medicines for life, medicines with serious toxic side effects, medicines that have not ever worked for any other patient over the long term, and send our children the bill.

I wish politicians had to take the Hippocratic oath before taking office, which includes, if memory serves, this promise:

First, do no harm.

Unfortunately, instead of Hippocrates in office, we have hypocrites.

Obama is radically pro-abortion.  He is in favor of the killing of unborn infants with no restrictions, paid for with a government check.  He is also in favor of killing children born alive as a result of a botched abortion.  He is in favor of forcing doctors to perform abortions even if those doctors have a moral objection.

Does anyone remember Obama’s soft-spoken, relaxed and seemingly innocuous little comment to Joe the plumber?  “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody”.  We now see that what he meant was a wholesale destruction of capitalism and a premeditated effort to replace it with socialism.

Obama is robbing our future generations of any hope of prosperity by an orgy of federal spending unheard of in our country.

Obama is reaching into the board rooms of private companies and firing employees.  He has crossed a line between public and private sectors that is unprecedented.

Obama has just completed an international trip with the message of appeasement to our enemies.  When, in the course of human history, has appeasement ever worked?

Iran is on the threshold of becoming a nuclear power.  Is there ANYONE who thinks this is a good thing?

The laundry list of Obama appointees who were revealed to have unpaid taxes is shameful.  Is there ANY private citizen who could get away with this wanton disregard for tax laws by simply saying “Oops, I’m sorry”?

The Republican Party is currently populated with political eunichs.  Where is the voice of opposition?

Obama wants to socialize medicine.  If this happens it will complete his coup d’état and America as we know it will be gone forever.

Many citizens of this great country are simply left speechless by this apparently unstoppable. radical, ultra-liberal assault on America.  So many of us feel a combination of powerlessness and outrage in the face of what is happening.  Many are asking, “What can I do to stop this madness?”  Not all of us have a public forum from which to vent our frustrations.  Not all of us are eloquent of speech or skilled in writing.  But we all have family and friends.  We all live lives that are made up of relationships.  This is where the battle must be fought – one friend, one family, one realtionship at a time.  Those of us who do believe America is essentially good – that it was founded and made great on a firm foundation of Judeo-Christian beliefs, that it is a place where people can be free, that perserverance and hard work will be rewarded and that anyone can acheive the American dream – must share our convictions and persuade our family and friends that it is an America worth fighting for.  For outrage is not enough, feeling helpless and powerless is no excuse, and inaction is not an option.

Yeah, I know it’s starting to sound like there should be a choir humming “My Country Tis Of Thee” in the background.  I don’t care. It is a battle worth fighting…but we had better start now.

They are essentially refusing to make any significant cuts of any kind in state spending (a couple of cosmetic reductions, but nothing that matters, or will actually make a difference…  remember they call it a “cut” when all they’ve done is increase it by less than they’d planned).  And they are making a HUGE tax increase, across the board, in a state with very high taxes already.  They’re reducing the child deduction credit, hugely, directly increasing the tax bill of families.  They’re doubling the annual car tax.  They’re adding 12 cents per gallon gas tax, to an already high gas tax, compared to other states, and it ain’t for roads, it’s to fund bizarro offices and bureaucrats who do nothing but sit around dreaming up new regulations to harass people and business.  And, of course, to reward all the special interest groups and entitlement leeches who put them in office.  They’re raising the SALES TAX by 2 cents per dollar (some accounts say “only” 1 cent, but the 2 cent report persists), and California’s sales tax is already 8% in most places.  And there will be a 2.5% “surcharge” on income tax.  Holy Moley.

I am not rich by any stretch, just pretty middle class, and a quick tally leads me to believe that between all these things, I’ll spend about $2000 more in just California taxes per year in the new regime….  and one of my cars is a 2005 Prius (with about 120K miles on it now)!

What do all these taxes have in common?  They are very regressive taxes, meaning they hit lower income people the hardest, percentage wise, and families with children get hit the worst.  Whatever happened to the Democrats being the “party of the people”?

As with the federal government, all they know how to do is spend money they don’t have.  They have apparently no sense of how economics actually works.  They have no concept of what damage they’re doing to the business environment in California.  Businesses are leaving in droves, and other states are chortling at their windfall of new businesses.

I am in mind boggle.

And just to complete the picture, they’re about to approve ridiculous environmental regulations, and “endangered species” regulations, that will make it possible for the eco-pagans to sue just about everyone for just about everything.  THAT will really help the economic recovery, won’t it?

I’m crawling into a hole and pulling the lid in after me.  Then I’m getting out the shovel and digging deeper.

The California Republican party is just about the most pitiful entity since, I dunno, the Roman Viola Ensemble featuring Nero the violinist as guest performer.  They are simply gutless.

I didn’t know when we elected him that Arnold was planning to TERMINATE California as a viable state.

I think my ten year old would do a better job of running the state.  She actually counts her money to see if she can afford things.

But Arnold (RINO that he is) and the Democrats are throwing us to the lions…  who are very hungry, even though they were just fed yesterday.

President-elect Barack Obama, commencing face to face consultations with congressional leaders Monday, is embracing an unexpectedly large tax cut of up to $300 billion. Obama said the country faces an “extraordinary economic challenge.”

Besides $500 tax cuts for most workers and $1,000 for couples, the Obama proposal includes more than $100 billion for businesses, an Obama transition official said. The total value of the tax cuts would be significantly higher than had been signaled earlier.

The huge question, completely unaddressed by the AP in its report: what is the “starting line” from which the tax cuts will be calculated?

Is the tax cut going to take the current situation, with the Bush tax cuts still in place till 2010 or so, as the starting line from which to do further tax cutting?  Or are the tax cuts only to be calculated from the state of play after the Bush tax cuts expire?

Keep in mind that it is the Democrats who have always called it a “cut” in spending when the actual increase in spending is simply reduced from what had been planned.  Only in Washington DC Democrat-speak can you call it a “cut” when you’re increasing spending by 2% instead of 4%.

Is this really going to be a tax “cut”?  Or is this Dem-speak for less of a tax increase than they had planned?  And is it going to be calculated from the lower tax rates in force under Bush?  Does this mean the Bush tax cuts are going to be extended, with new cuts in addition?  The AP may be forgiven for not having answers to these questions, but to pretend the questions aren’t there by ignoring them is risible.

Of course, to report on this would require reporters who actually understand the subject, and who want us to know what’s going on, and aren’t just shilling for Obama during the honeymoon.  Obama had better move fast:  the honeymoon isn’t going to last forever

UPDATE:  This report from the Wall Street Journal is more comprehensive but still does not mention the fate of the Bush tax cuts when their current authorization expires in a year or so.

UPDATE: One of my more cynical emailers suggests that there will be NO real tax cuts of any duration (maybe very short term only), because he expects that the Democrats will let the Bush tax cuts expire shortly, so that they can take credit for “cutting” taxes that would stay lower if Democrats simply made the Bush cuts permanent.  This seems possible to me, given the nature of Washington doublespeak.

A blue collar man came home from a long day’s work to find his idealistic daughter had dropped in while doing some local community organizing. Like so many others in his income bracket, he considered himself to be a God fearing conservative, and along with most conservatives, was very, very much against income and capital gains taxes, especially on the rich.

But today he was deeply worried about the economic future of his naive, liberal daughter and his two grandchildren. Based on stories his parents told him about the Great Depression, his own shallow prejudice, and selected morsels of misinformation fed to him by right-wing talk radio, he decided to confront her right there and then for her own good.

He started by calmly and politely pointing out that Barack Obama was a Muslim, not a US citizen, and the President-elect was going to raise taxes on millionaires and force government funded abortions on everyone — even the men. Before the girl had a chance to respond to her father’s breathtaking ignorance, he muttered something about unions being responsible and trailed off. The girl, sensing something more was going on, asked him instead about his own job.

A bit taken aback, the man admitted it was lousy. Truth be told, he was slowly falling behind on his bills. And yet he knew was relatively fortunate: Half the plant had already been laid off when their jobs were outsourced to cheaper overseas labor. The managers had run the company into the ground even as they awarded themselves lavish bonuses, while the remaining unskilled workforce was slowly let go one by one for what sounded like trumped up reasons, merely to save the company from paying any unemployment in the man’s Right to Work state. The man rarely missed a day of work in ten years, he had excellent employee reviews, and sometimes he even clocked out and worked for hours with no pay. But as a senior employee making more than newer ones, he was worried his job might be next. And if he lost his income and healthcare at the same time, years before Medicare or Social Security kicked in, his diabetic wife could go blind and the family might lose their home.

The girl said “Wow, that is awful. Well, too bad you’d turn down a million dollar raise.. “

The man shot back in surprise, “Why that’s crazy! I wouldn’t turn it down, I’d love it!”

The daughter replied coyly, “but to be fair you’d end up with less than $ 700,000 a year after taxes.”

The man laughed and said with more than a trace of patronizing contempt, “That’s almost twenty times what I make now! I wouldn’t complain a bit!”

Then the daughter slowly smiled, winked, and softly said, “Welcome to the Democratic Party, dad.”

It’s hard not to contain the laughter on this one.  Almost no conservatives believe Obama is a Muslim.  Almost no conservatives believe Obama will force abortions on anyone, and certainly not “the men”.  (?!?)  And of course, any prejudice held by a conservative is “shallow”, which means, I suppose, that prejudices held by Lefties are “deep”.  They’re deep, alright.  REALLY deep.  So deep it would take shovel and lots of experience cleaning barns to dig out.  But I digress.

And no, conservatives don’t worry about “raising taxes on millionaires”, because you can be a millionaire and only make $100K per year.  Conservatives worry about raising taxes on people who are creating opportunities for normal people to have normal jobs, whether they are millionaires or not.

It’s interesting that releasing “unskilled workers” is considered to be a bad thing.  “Unskilled workers” are lucky to have any job, and should remedy their situation post haste.  In the meantime, employers are not welfare agencies and make-work institutions, they are there to make a profit for the people who risked their money and time to create the businesses, which list does not include those unskilled workers.  Message, in all realism:  if you’re an unskilled worker, learn how to do something useful.  After you learn that, and get a job with it, expect to KEEP learning things, to upgrade yourself to take advantage of new opportunities in a constantly changing economy.  The world was not put here to give you cushy billet to recline in, but you were put here with the opportunities you need to do well, if you take advantage of them.  I have to wonder about someone who has worked in the same job for 10 years, and is this idealized employee, and is only making $35,000 per year.  What could they have been doing during those ten years to improve their options?

I don’t really know many people who “clock out for hours and work for no pay”.   Do you?  If you do, do you know five such people?  I didn’t think so.  Message to people who do this:  knock it off.  You aren’t helping yourself, or the rest of the employees in your company, or even your boss.  If you value yourself so little, go mow your neighbor’s yard for free or something.  At least that’s just straight ahead worthy service.

In any case, notice the obvious way we paint this guy as Mr. Sympathetic Character, complete with diabetic wife and extra-super-ultra work ethic?  Except, of course, that apparently he’s been too foolish to upgrade his skills over the years so that his value to his employer exceeds his cost to his employer.  But in the world of the Left, no public policy can be sold without having a victim to highlight.  So we’re treated once again to the caricatured evil employer, as if this is the norm all through the USA.

But the really, really stupid aspect of this:  the daughter is supposed to have triumphed over her stupid, stupid, ignorant father (the one who helped her get through college, most likely, and fixes her car when she’s run it into the ground driving around doing unprofitable community organizing), by pointing out how lucky he’d be to get to keep $700,000 of the year’s million dollar income, if he was so productive.

Several levels of stupidity here:

1)  Under Obama’s tax plan, he wouldn’t be keeping $700,000 but something closer to $600,000, and quite a bit less if he lived in a state with high income tax like California.  So her example is inherently a lie.  It’s entirely possible that he gets to keep only a little more than half, unless, like other well to do people, he shields his income in some way.  But since he’s so stupid that she wins the argument by lying and he lets her get away with it, he probably isn’t smart enough to do this.

2)  If he got to keep, say, $800,000 of his annual million, including state taxes, what would he do with the other $200,000?  I’m guessing it wouldn’t go into a mattress somewhere.  It would be in bank, and being loaned to other people and stimulating the economy.  Or it would be invested in the stock market, and fund companies that employee lots of people and create products that improve our lives.  Or it would just be directly spent on whatever he wanted to buy, which would itself create economic activity that will employ other people, both directly and indirectly.

3)  When he realizes that he gets to KEEP almost as much money by only earning $800,000 as by earning a million, and reduces his economic activities to suit, the entire economy loses a little, both in terms of his own productivity, and in terms of the productivity that he has less excess cash to fund, by investing, saving, or buying.

4)  When the government gets that extra money that is extorted by higher taxes, by definition, it won’t be placed where it will do “the most good”, for a very simple reason:  NO ONE, not one person on the planet, knows where that is, certainly not some congressional subcommittee or federal bureaucrat.  Only the market “knows”, and only the market has mechanisms that, in aggregate, attract money exactly where it needs to go to provide the most value to the society as a whole.

This silly little tale gives me hope, though.  If this represents the understanding held by common Democrats of how the world works, and what conservatives actually think, their tenure in Washington DC might be quite brief.

The punchline of the narrative should be:  “Welcome to the Dumbocratic Party, Dad, none of us can count, either, and we all understand that wet-behind-the-ears girls with no understanding of how the world actually works can beat Dad in an argument every time.”  Which is exactly what she was taught in college, of course, by her Lefty profs, many of whom have never held an actual job in the market economy, but are experts in it nonetheless.  “Breathtaking ignorance” indeed.

The punch line?  This really IS a fairy tale.

McCain and Palin, plucky foes of spreading the wealth, must have known that such spreading is most what Washington does. Here, the Constitution is an afterthought; the supreme law of the land is the principle of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Sugar import quotas cost the American people approximately $2 billion a year, but that sum is siphoned from 300 million consumers in small, hidden increments that are not noticed. The few thousand sugar producers on whom billions are thereby conferred do notice and are grateful to the government that bilks the many for the enrichment of the few.

Conservatives rightly think, or once did, that much, indeed most, government spreading of wealth is economically destructive and morally dubious — destructive because, by directing capital to suboptimum uses, it slows wealth creation; morally dubious because the wealth being spread belongs to those who created it, not government. But if conservatives call all such spreading by government “socialism,” that becomes a classification that no longer classifies: It includes almost everything, including the refundable tax credit on which McCain’s health care plan depended.

Hyperbole is not harmless; careless language bewitches the speaker’s intelligence. And falsely shouting “socialism!” in a crowded theater such as Washington causes an epidemic of yawning. This is the only major industrial society that has never had a large socialist party ideologically, meaning candidly, committed to redistribution of wealth. This is partly because Americans are an aspirational, not an envious people. It is also because the socialism we do have is the surreptitious socialism of the strong, e.g. sugar producers represented by their Washington hirelings.

In America, socialism is un-American. Instead, Americans merely do rent-seeking — bending government for the benefit of private factions. The difference is in degree, including the degree of candor. The rehabilitation of conservatism cannot begin until conservatives are candid about their complicity in what government has become.

The power to tax, in any amount, for any purpose whatsoever is at the root of the corruption of the American ideal.   The founders understood this, and carefully limited what Congress could do.  But Amendments since then, put in place by a people with less wisdom than the founders, have allowed essentially unlimited taxation of anyone for any purpose, limited only by what is politically feasible, and does not produce immediate economic disaster (long term disaster being just fine, it seems).  We may be about to find out, the hard way, exactly what those limits are.

There is one sentence in Will’s article that I’m sure has been true in the past, but I’m not so sure is true in the present: “Americans are an aspirational, not an envious people.”

I am afraid that, for a majority of Americans, their main aspiration may be to acquire the objects of their envy, by any means necessary, except actually earning them.