Why Warren Buffet wants to keep the Death Tax- More profit from his insurance companies!

The reason Warren Buffet is smiling is if congress keeps the estate tax AKA The Death tax, he will continue to sell millions of dollars worth of life insurance to off set the estate taxes. Is there no one in Congress that has read one of Thomas Sowell's books on basic economics? "Dough!" As Homer Simpson would say!

(Note: you may not be able to follow the link above to the whole story unless you are a subscriber- but give it a try anyway!)

Berkshire's Buffett Backs Estate Tax (Wall St. Journal)

By JOHN GODFREY November 14, 2007 3:54 p.m.

WASHINGTON -- Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chief Executive Warren Buffett said Wednesday that Congress should consider giving lower-income families a $1,000 annual tax credit rather than repealing the federal estate tax.

In testimony before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, Mr. Buffett noted that of 2.4 million Americans who died last year, roughly 12,000 paid estate tax. "You'd have to attend 200 funerals to be at one" where an estate tax was owed, Mr. Buffett said.

Mr. Buffett suggested that rather than repealing the estate tax, it should be reformed to have less impact on smaller estates, but tax larger estates more to raise the same amount of money.

He suggested an exemption from the estate tax of about $4 million, up from the current $3.5 million. That exemption would be indexed for inflation. But in contrast to prior years, the initial rates beyond that exemption would be relatively low, and would gradually increase, Mr. Buffett said.

Question to Mr. Buffett (that was never asked) How much life insurance did you sell last year to high income people designed to off set the death tax ? A billion dollars? Two?

Angry Left: Bush Hatred and its effect on rational thinking

My own experience with Bush haters has been confined to an older grad student on the Madison campus Humanitites building tiny parking lot screaming at the top of his lungs at me due to a Vote No to Cut and Run bumper sticker on my car, having my car keyed, and my email computer system mucked up. Why? Because I supported freeing 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq and the magnificent troops that made it happen. And, I had the audacity to display "diversity" in the form of a bumper sticker! I should know better to do that in Madison!

Note: The link above is to a Wall St. Journal article-it is a subscription service so it may not open to the entire article for you.

ANGRY LEFT

The Insanity of Bush Hatred
Our politics suffer when passions overcome reason and vitriol becomes virtue.

BY PETER BERKOWITZ
Wednesday, November 14, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

Hating the president is almost as old as the republic itself. The people, or various factions among them, have indulged in Clinton hatred, Reagan hatred, Nixon hatred, LBJ hatred, FDR hatred, Lincoln hatred, and John Adams hatred, to mention only the more extravagant hatreds that we Americans have conceived for our presidents.

But Bush hatred is different. It's not that this time members of the intellectual class have been swept away by passion and become votaries of anger and loathing. Alas, intellectuals have always been prone to employ their learning and fine words to whip up resentment and demonize the competition.

Bush hatred, however, is distinguished by the pride intellectuals have taken in their hatred, openly endorsing it as a virtue and enthusiastically proclaiming that their hatred is not only a rational response to the president and his administration but a mark of good moral hygiene...

And so, I told my Princeton audience, in the context of a Bush hatred and a corollary contempt for conservatism so virulent that it had addled the minds of many of our leading progressive intellectuals, Prof. Starr deserved special recognition for keeping his head in his analysis of liberalism and progressivism. Then I got on with my prepared remarks...

Bush hatred is not a rational response to actual Bush perfidy. Rather, Bush hatred compels its progressive victims--who pride themselves on their sophistication and sensitivity to nuance--to reduce complicated events and multilayered issues to simple matters of good and evil. Like all hatred in politics, Bush hatred blinds to the other sides of the argument, and constrains the hater to see a monster instead of a political opponent...

Prof. Starr shows in (his book) "Freedom's Power" that tolerance, generosity, and reasoned skepticism are hallmarks of the truly liberal spirit. His analysis suggests that the problem with progressives who have succumbed to Bush hatred is not their liberalism; it's their betrayal of it. To be sure, Prof. Starr rejects Bush administration policies and thinks conservatives have the wrong remedies for what ails America today. Yet at the same time his analysis suggests, if not a cure for those who have already succumbed, at least a recipe for inoculating others against hating presidents to come.

The conflict between more conservative and more liberal or progressive interpretations of the Constitution is as old as the document itself, and a venerable source of the nation's strength. It is wonderful for citizens to bring passion to it. Recognizing the common heritage that provides the ground for so many of the disagreements between right and left today will encourage both sides, if not to cherish their opponents, at least to discipline their passions and make them an ally of their reason.

Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a professor at George Mason University School of Law.

Wall St Journal: Poor get rich, Rich get poor

Candidates Gov. Mike Huckabee, Senator John Edwards

Lou Dobbs

We read in today's paper that white women have had a fivefold increase in wages, black women have made significant gains, with white men stagnant in earnings and black men dropping in income. Considering the outrageous near 50% High School drop out rate of black males and the disportionate number of black males serving time these numbers are not surprising on the descending mobility scale. White males flat lining on income? Whatever could be the reason for that?

Prediction: next April the untrue old saw about "women only make 75% as much as men" will be once again widely printed and reported in MSM. What is never compared is that women who work the same number of years as men have higher income levels. The Wall St Jrnal story below underlines that 'the poor" for over 83% of the population is a temporary condition as they move up in income and that the rich move down in wealth too.

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Movin' On Up WALL ST. JOURNAL November 13, 2007; Page A24

If you've been listening to Mike Huckabee or John Edwards on the Presidential trail, you may have heard that the U.S. is becoming a nation of rising inequality and shrinking opportunity. We'd refer those campaigns to a new study of income mobility by the Treasury Department that exposes those claims as so much populist hokum.

OK, "hokum" is our word. The study, to be released today, is a careful, detailed piece of research by professional economists that avoids political judgments. But what it does do is show beyond doubt that the U.S. remains a dynamic society marked by rapid and mostly upward income mobility. Much as they always have, Americans on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder continue to climb into the middle and sometimes upper classes in remarkably short periods of time.

The Treasury study examined a huge sample of 96,700 income tax returns from 1996 and 2005 for Americans over the age of 25. The study tracks what happened to these tax filers over this 10-year period. One of the notable, and reassuring, findings is that nearly 58% of filers who were in the poorest income group in 1996 had moved into a higher income category by 2005. Nearly 25% jumped into the middle or upper-middle income groups, and 5.3% made it all the way to the highest quintile.

Of those in the second lowest income quintile, nearly 50% moved into the middle quintile or higher, and only 17% moved down. This is a stunning show of upward mobility, meaning that more than half of all lower-income Americans in 1996 had moved up the income scale in only 10 years.

. . .. Two of every three workers had a real income gain -- which contradicts the Huckabee-Edwards-Lou Dobbs spin about stagnant incomes. This is even more impressive when you consider that "median" income and wage numbers are often skewed downward because the U.S. has had a huge influx of young workers and immigrants in the last 20 years. They start their work years with low wages, dragging down the averages.

Only one income group experienced an absolute decline in real income -- the richest 1% in 1996. Those households lost 25.8% of their income. Moreover, more than half (57.4%) of the richest 1% in 1996 had dropped to a lower income group by 2005. Some of these people might have been "rich" merely for one year, or perhaps for several, as they hit their peak earning years or had some capital gains windfall. Others may simply have not been able to keep up with new entrepreneurs and wealth creators.
The key point is that the study shows that income mobility in the U.S. works down as well as up -- another sign that opportunity and merit continue to drive American success, not accidents of birth. The "rich" are not the same people over time. . .

But the 58% of lowest-income earners who moved to a higher income quintile in this study is roughly comparable to the percentages that did so in several similar studies going back to the late 1960s. "The basic finding of this analysis," says the Treasury report, "is that relative income mobility is approximately the same in the last 10 years as it was in the previous decade.". . .

The great irony is that, in the name of reducing inequality, some of our politicians want to raise taxes and other government obstacles to the kind of risk-taking and hard work that allow Americans to climb the income ladder so rapidly. As the Treasury data show, we shouldn't worry about inequality. We should worry about the people who use inequality as a political club to promote policies that reduce opportunity.

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Here's a guy who would make a great Supreme court judge for Wisconsin!

(Click on photo to enlarge)

Had the great pleasure of meeting and hearing candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme court, Judge Mike Gableman speak today. Very impressive guy who speaks from the heart and in my opinion, would bring a needed dose of common sense to our Supreme court. You can view his intoductory video by clicking on the Link above.

Dollar is crashing and Adam Smith is rolling in his grave

One of the reasons the price of gas is going up is very simple. The dollar has been tanking for a number of months and "The Shiek of Air-rub-Bee" (with apologies to Spike Jones and his wonderfully funny musical take off on that old tune) is not about to take a 30% reduction in the price per barrel of oil since OPEC pegs the dollar as their currency. The dollar sinks, they take a cut.

Hey, the Canadian Looney is now on a par with the buck, and the Euro is what, at 1.45 to the dollar? When the French President and Chinese bankers are warning America and Congress about the faltering dollar it's time to WAKE UP!. Pres. Sarkozy said the dollar's decline could lead to "economic war" you know it is way past time to let the big banks take the hit for their foolish subprime loans,and raise interest rates to increase the strength of the dollar. That swhooshing sound if the sound of the world's investors dumping American investments and dollars and buying European, Euros, Swiss Francs and Gold.

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Adam Smith Growls WALL ST. JOURNAL November 9, 2007; Page A18


"The U.S. dollar is the linchpin of not only the American economy but also the world monetary system." Those words were the lead of an editorial in this newspaper on August 21, 1978, amid the inflation of the 1970s and the world's last great dollar crisis. Are we watching another such period today? It's not inevitable, but this week we all got a reminder of what such a thing looks like, and it isn't pretty.

The dollar is "losing its status as the world currency," declared Xu Jian, a middling official at China's central bank, on Wednesday. "We will favor stronger currencies over weaker ones, and will readjust accordingly." That was perceived as a threat by China's central bank to diversify its foreign exchange reserves out of dollars and into other currencies, especially euros. While China later qualified those remarks, the dollar nonetheless fell again around the globe, stocks plunged, and gold and other traditional inflation hedges rose to fresh heights.

Meanwhile, French President Nicolas Sarkozy visited Washington and brought a dollar warning of his own. "The dollar cannot remain someone else's problem," he told Congress. "If we are not careful, monetary disarray could morph into economic war. We would all be its victims." The Frenchman was referring to the damage that the dollar's record lows against the euro are doing to Europe's exports, and the potential for a return to so-called "competitive devaluation," or what used to be called "beggar-thy-neighbor" currency policies.
* * *
Coming from opposite sides of the world, these are warnings worth heeding. For as our editorial explained 30 years ago, the dollar is far more than a medium of American exchange. It is a reserve currency, held by central banks the world over, and the core of the monetary system that underpins what has been a remarkable period of global economic growth. By toying recklessly with dollar devaluation, our policy makers are also toying with a far larger economic crisis than the current credit problems.

ANN COULTER McCarthyism: The Rosetta Stone of Liberal Lies

I audited American History courses at UW-Madison after I retired from the Music department. I wrote a short paper about McCarthy, and another about the book, DENIAL by historians Haynes and Klehr that have, based upon the information in the Venona Cables and the info. released after the collapse of the Soviet Union, absolute written documentary proof of all the Soviet Agents working in FDR's and Truman's administration. The result was total disbelief by the Teaching Assistant and fear that his Major Prof, would "kill me" (his words) if he turned in my papers.

There is no room for truth in the Academy today only dogma.

The title DENIAL was a straight arrow into the hearts of all of the established academic historians in the U.S. who still think Alger Hiss was "unjustly accused". There is even a named chair in his honor at an Eastern college- even though he was a traitor. Hiss also was the U.S. first Secretary to the U.N. in San Franciso-not surprisingly the USSR approved him without a struggle- he encouraged the entry of Soviet satellite states and agreed that any member of the U.N. security council could block any military action by the U.N. This is the main reason the U.N. is useless in stopping any tryrant in the world today.

This is Ann Coulter's Column of Nov. 7 2007. (Click on the title link above for the entire column.)

When I wrote a ferocious defense of Sen. Joe McCarthy in Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, liberals chose not to argue with me. Instead they posted a scrolling series of reasons not to read my book, such as that I wear short skirts, date boys, and that Treason was not a scholarly tome.

After printing rabidly venomous accounts of McCarthy for half a century based on zero research, liberals would only accept research presenting an alternative view of McCarthy that included, as the Los Angeles Times put it, at least the "pretense of scholarly throat-clearing and objectivity.

"This week, they got it. The great M. Stanton Evans has finally released Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies. Based on a lifetime's work, including nearly a decade of thoroughgoing research, stores of original research and never-before-seen government files, this 672-page book ends the argument on Joe McCarthy. Look for it hidden behind stacks of Bill Clinton's latest self-serving book at a bookstore near you.

Oh poor me: Another hoax victim of a hate crime on campus

Another campus hoax. (Please see also my related blog on Oct 26 about Garrison Keillor) This is from "The best of the Web" from the Wall St. Jrnal today. James Taranto. Another 'Hate' Hoax"A George Washington University student who told school officials that someone had drawn swastikas on her dormitory room door was actually responsible for the incidents, a university spokesman said," the Washington Post reports: The student, who was not identified, had complained that swastikas appeared on her door over a period of several days last month. A hidden camera positioned in response to the postings in Mitchell Hall, one of the school dormitories, led police to interview the student, who admitted responsibility, according to spokesman Tracy Schario. The student will not face student judicial action and officials will determine whether any District or federal laws were broken, Schario said. Over the weekend, another GW student was identified in connection with the writing of racial epithets and the drawing of swastikas on doors in another dorm called New Hall, Schario said. The U.S. Attorney's office is reviewing the New Hall case to determine whether criminal charges should be filed. That student has been barred from campus. So let's see if we have this straight: Paint a swastika on someone's door, and you're persona non grata and may face federal charges. Paint a swastika on your own door, and hey, enjoy the buffet! This column is averse to the idea of "hate crime" laws. They strike us as uncomfortably close to criminalizing speech, and also as enhancing rather than diffusing the power of hateful ideas. But if we have hate-crime laws, hoaxes like this ought to be prosecuted at least as vigorously as "real" hate crimes. The argument for hate-crime laws is that such crimes make innocent people feel as if they are targets because they are black or Jewish or gay. That is no less true if the perpetrator and the "victim" are one and the same. The judge who sentenced California professor Kerri Francis Dunn to a year in prison for vandalizing her own car with racial slurs had the right idea.