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Healthcare Legislation in This Congress?
Tweet Share on Facebook February 13, 2007 Comment (2)My U.S. News column this week is about President Bush's healthcare proposal and Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden's interesting response. Now Wyden and nine other senators, five Democrats and five Republicans, have sent the following letter to Bush. Very interesting.
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Great Minds in the Same Direction Department
Tweet Share on Facebook February 9, 2007 CommentThree weeks ago in my U.S. News column, I took aim at what I consider the most dysfunctional part of our political process, the presidential selection system. Turns out I'm not alone. Larry Sabato, the University of Virginia political guru, feels the same way. In his latest Crystal Ball, he says "we are courting disaster" in the 2008 presidential primaries. He provides a helpful but necessarily still tentative schedule. Earlier this week the National Association of Secretaries of State chimed in, reviving a plan it proposed before that puts the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary first, followed by four rounds of other states' voting. And today the Washington Post editorialized on the subject, endorsing the NASS plan.
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The Next Populist Crusade
Tweet Share on Facebook February 8, 2007 CommentI'm with Glenn Reynolds of instapundit.com on this one. If we want to curb carbon dioxide emissions, then let's ban private jets. It's funny seeing those Hollywood stars private-jetting into Washington to tell the rest of us that we've got to have a lower standard of living. Let them fly first class, and save the Earth! But maybe we should make an exception for Warren Buffett, who has the nerve to christen his Berkshire Hathaway corporate jet "The Indefensible."
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Let's Hear It for the AMT
Tweet Share on Facebook February 7, 2007 CommentRuth Marcus has a good column in today's Washington Post on the alternative minimum tax, which she calls "Bush's stealth tax increase." It's accompanied, in the print edition and online, with a table that shows the percentage of tax cuts taken back by the AMT. The biggest hit is taken by people in the $200,000-$500,000 range, who lose 74 percent, while the AMT takes back only 7 percent of the tax cuts of people with incomes over $1,000,000–presumably because the credits for college tuition and state and local taxes aren't worth much to people like Bill Gates. (I remember reading that one year he paid 1 percent of all U.S. income taxes.)
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Rudy's in the Race
Tweet Share on Facebook February 6, 2007 CommentRudy Giuliani announced yesterday he's running for president. Here's video of Giuliani's appearance with Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes. Here's Glenn Reynolds's instapundit.com post on Rudy.
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Congressional Districts and Taxes–Who Pays the Most and Least?
Tweet Share on Facebook February 5, 2007 CommentHere's a fascinating item from the Tax Foundation, which has calculated the average rate of income tax paid in each congressional district and county. Of the top 10 congressional districts, five have Democratic congressmen and five Republican. But only three–Texas 32 and 17 and New Jersey 11– voted for George W. Bush in 2004. As the Tax Foundation's Gerald Prante notes, Democrats tend to represent the highest- and lowest-income tax districts. Just a few blocks north of New York 14 (East Side of Manhattan), the highest tax district in the country, is New York 16 (South Bronx), which gets more in refundable tax credits (like the earned income tax credit) than it pays out in taxes. Similarly, the following counties actually take in more from refundable credits than they pay in income taxes: Quitman, Miss. (Delta); Maverick, Texas (border); Todd, S.D. (Sioux reservation); Noxubee, Miss. (black majority); Holmes, Miss. (Delta); Hudspeth, Texas (east of El Paso, border); Shannon, S.D. (Sioux reservation); Zavala, Texas (border); Issaquena, Miss. (Delta); and Starr, Texas (border).
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Bookshelf/Computer Problems
Tweet Share on Facebook February 5, 2007 CommentI can't improve on David Frum's thoughts on J. H. Elliott's Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830. It is indeed a brilliant and thought-provoking book by a scholar of the highest quality. I would emphasize just this: Elliott makes the point several times (Pages 364, 375, 387, 398, 407, 411) that the British North American colonies were much better prepared for independence and self-government because they had representative assemblies, while the Spanish colonies did not. Had the British colonies not had representative assemblies, the history of the United States might resemble much more than it does the melancholy history of postcolonial Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, etc. Yet at one point, the existence of the representative assemblies was in doubt. King James II (1685-88) seemed to be on a course of systematically abolishing the representative assemblies. The New England colonies and New York were consolidated into a New England Confederation, with no representative assembly. James was more interested in the North American colonies than any other 17th-century English king; as Duke of York and Lord High Admiral in 1664 he had ordered the military takeover of Nieuw Amsterdam, which was renamed New York in his honor. Had he not been overthrown by the Dutch invasion led by William of Orange, stadholder of the Netherlands and from February 1689 King William III, James might have abolished the representative assemblies of the colonies further south. William's invasion and success, usually referred to as the Glorious Revolution, were extremely unlikely events, with enormous and continuing reverberations, and they are–shameless plug–the subject of my forthcoming book, Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers. Unfortunately, I read Elliott's book too late to cite it in my text or footnotes, though I did note that James's overthrow resulted in the reconstitution of the colonial assemblies.
Michael Barone
Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics. He has written for many publications—including the Economist and the New York Times.
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