Social security entitlement. In today’s Wichita Eagle Opinion Line, this comment was left: “Please stop calling my Social Security an ‘entitlement.’ I paid into it all my working life, and I just want my money back.” Two points: The writer seems to believe that just because people pay into Social Security, they’re entitled to benefits as through there was a contract in place. But there is no contract. Social Security benefits are what Congress says they are, and Congress can make changes at any time. … Second, the writer wants his money back, as though the money was paid onto some sort of investment account and has been working there earning interest. Unfortunately, the Social Security trust fund money has been spent. There’s nothing for the writer to get back except the future taxes to be paid by future workers.
New York Times may be offended. “The New York Times is carrying out a vendetta against Charles and David Koch, two of the very few rich people who support conservative and libertarian causes. The Times is offended, apparently, that the Left does not quite have a monopoly on big money. The paper’s editorialists flat-out lied about the Koch brothers, and had to issue a retraction.” … Referring to author David Callahan and a recent op-ed: “What is most striking about Callahan’s piece is its rampant hypocrisy. He himself is an employee of a left-wing organization that prefers not to abide by the transparency standards that Callahan advocates.” From Powerline: The Times Vendetta Continues.
Kansas Legislature website. Kansas Reporter writes: “Most hurdles now behind legislative website update.” The major problems I experience now are reliability issues, where many times clicking on a document produces the dreaded “Error 500 Internal Server Error” message. … The cost of the work, plus a new system for preparing legislative text, is some $11 million.
General Electric tax bill. The Washington Post looks at the New York Times and its reporting on General Electric and its taxes: “Unfortunately, for all its good work, the article has created at least one major misperception: that GE paid no U.S. income taxes last year and is getting a $3.2 billion refund from the Treasury. … The company says it’s not getting any refund for 2010 — validating [accounting professor Ed] Outslay’s analysis. Its 2010 tax situation? ‘We expect to have a small U.S. income tax liability for 2010,’ said Gary Sheffer, GE’s chief spokesman. How big is small? GE declined to say. The number is unlikely to be disclosed unless GE goes public with it or is forced to do so. One reason the Times was ensnared — and that it took us a while to sort this out — is that the material is confusing. Outslay drew up 10 GE tax metrics for us and could have given us at least six more. None shows what GE’s U.S. income tax bill is for a given year.”
Sweet deal for big sugar. Senator Dick Lugar, writing in the Washington Times, explains the harm to U.S. consumers from a tariff that benefits a few: “The collapse of communism brought an end to many of the world’s command-and-control economic systems and central planning by government bureaucrats. But a notable exception is the United States government’s sugar program. A complicated system of marketing allotments, price supports, purchase guarantees, quotas and tariffs that only a Soviet apparatchik could love, the U.S. sugar program has actually lasted longer than the Soviet Union itself.” The idea is that by keeping prices high and insulating domestic sugar produces from the world market, jobs are saved. Counters Lugar: “But in 2006, the Commerce Department calculated that for every sugar-growing job saved by artificially high prices, three manufacturing jobs in the confectionery industry are lost. Overall, from 1997 to 2009, more than 111,000 jobs were lost in the sugar-using food sector, according to Commerce data.” This is always the case with protectionist trade tariffs: a small number of highly-visible jobs are saved, at the cost of great economic harm spread across the economy, harm that is difficult to see. Sugar protectionism is only one such example. President Bush’s tax hike and Obama’s tax increase on tires are other examples.
Williams on role of government. A short lecture by Walter E. WIlliams. “Almost every group in our country has come to feel that the government owes them a special privilege or favor.” Conservatives too, he says. Williams highlights the contradictions of conservatives, who “don’t have a moral leg to stand on,” he says. “They merely prove that it’s a matter of whose ox is being gored.” He quotes H.L. Mencken: “Government is a broker in pillage” and “Every election is an advance auction on the sale of stolen property.” Williams says not to blame the elected officials we send to Washington and local centers of government. They, he says, are doing precisely what we send them there to do: “Namely, to use the power of their office to confiscate the property of one American and bring it back to another American to whom it does not belong.” Politician who say they would not do this — of course, they do not speak so bluntly on the campaign trail — would not be elected.
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