Age Must Be Catching Up With Paul Volcker

(Austrian) Economics, Democracy, Humor, Vulgar Politics
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There’s no shame in Paul Volcker’s being confused. It’s common for men his age (82) to slip into an afternoon slumber and wake up discombobulated — it can take a little while to reorient. And that’s when the memory is working well; but, let’s face it, an elderly man’s memory isn’t always fully functional. So that’s why I think it’s only fair to cut the Chairman of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board some slack for his comments yesterday when he announced that taxes were likely to rise in order to “tame” the deficit:

The United States should consider raising taxes to help bring deficits under control and may need to consider a European-style value-added tax, White House adviser Paul Volcker said on Tuesday. Volcker, answering a question from the audience at a New York Historical Society event, said the value-added tax “was not as toxic an idea” as it has been in the past and also said a carbon or other energy-related tax may become necessary.

Though he acknowledged that both were still unpopular ideas, he said getting entitlement costs and the U.S. budget deficit under control may require such moves. “If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes,” he said.

See, he has to be confused because my memory still works really, really well, and I remember this from the campaign:

Old “joke”: Know how you can tell if a politician is lying?

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America’s love affair with generals

Democracy, Vulgar Politics
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Foxnews, The Associated Press and the UK’s Telegraph are all hinting that General David Petraeus may run for President. Foxnews and the Telegraph are actively promoting the idea. The Drudge Report spread the rumor as well. Petraeus was the architect of the “surge” which the government says was a towering success, although the exact nature of this success has never been explained or defined. Obviously “success” has nothing to do with a peaceful or orderly or prosperous Iraq.

So, we’re told that Petraeus is a grand phenom as a general.  We’re also told that he is a brilliant mind, fearlessly independent, a man of few words, and an evenhanded weigher of facts uncolored by the ideological battles of the day.

Never mind the fact that this description could be applied to every single other general put forward as the nation’s next greatest president whether it be Norman Schwarzkopf or Colin Powell or Douglas MacArthur. Americans eat this stuff up, although the idea that high-ranking generals aren’t politicians firmly entrenched within the beltway is based on nothing resembling reality whatsoever.

Toby Harnden, writing for the Telegraph nicely recycles some fanciful American ideas about generals:

Many voters yearn for an outsider, someone with authenticity, integrity and proven accomplishment. Someone who has not spent their life plotting how to ascend the greasy pole, adjusting every utterance for maximum political advantage. …

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Taxing Cannabis

Democracy, Drug Policy, Taxation
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Enough signatures having been gathered for The Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010, Californians will have the chance to vote on legalizing marijuana next November. The measure, known popularly as the “Tax Cannabis Act,” would decriminalize the plant and its psychoactive uses statewide, leaving it to the state’s counties and cities to tax and regulate . . . or continue to prohibit. (If passed it would also severely test the two weakest Amendments to the United States’ Constitution, the Ninth and Tenth.)

Though this could be a major step forward against the barbaric war on drug use, may I express some sadness at the measure’s title, and the way some folks argue for it? “Legalize it so we can tax it!” What a depressing mantra. This binding of freedom to eternal victimhood by the state irks me. It’s the giving of a base reason to do a noble thing.

Of course, nobility of thought is the last thing on most people’s minds. …

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