Warren Buffett Plans to Dodge the Death Tax

Everyone is oo-ing and ah-ing about Warren Buffett’s noble decision to give his wealth away to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But how noble is that?

James Taranto recalls that Buffett is supposed to be opposed to ending the death tax. Yet by giving his money away to the Gates’s foundation he is just as surely dodging the death tax as if the death tax were repealed.

If Warren Buffett is is favor of the death tax then he should just sit there and let the government take his wealth, or 55 percent of it, when he dies, and not engage in tax avoidance schemes.

The argument against the death tax is that it penalizes the owners of small businesses. If you own a business worth about $20 million then when your heirs have to pay the full death tax then they will likely have to sell the business to pay the death tax.

But that doesn’t apply to a publicly traded company like Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway which is traded on the stock market. The heirs, who may or may not be involved in management, just sell stock on the open market to pay the death tax and the business goes on as before.

Let’s repeal the death tax or failing that reduce it to five percent so that we doesn’t force heirs to sell the family business or the family farm.

All In A Day's Work to Betray Intelligence Assets

The declassification by the New York Times of the secret US program to monitor terrorist financial transactions seems to be perking along nicely. Hopefully, we are going to find that the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, the newspapers that declassified the secret program, seriously misjudged the national mood.

Hugh Hewitt has a telling point on the two newspapers. The two editors just don’t know much about the world except the lefty elite echo chambers in which they have worked pretty well all their lives.

The trouble with folks like Keller and McManus making these decisions is that they just don't know much about things other than newspapers... Between the two we get about 70 years of work exclusively inside of newspapers, and the vast majority of that within two ultra-liberal newspapers... [N]either has worked in government or even in any place of business other than newspapers. They are creatures of the MSM, through and through.

What they have done is lived in that thin world of liberal condescension, one that thinks itself rather above the grubby nationalism of the average American. In that rarified air, people don’t really have contact with the real world.

Hewitt acquitted himself well on CNN with Geneva Overholzer, pointing out that the media does not have exemption from the laws of the land. The First Amendment says that there cannot be prior restraint on publication. But not that newspapers can publish anything they want. Overholzer has the curious idea that the media “challenge power.”

The media in this country have always been at their strongest when they do challenge power.

Oh yes? When has the media ever challenged power? When has it ever done anything more than run with the hare and hunt with the hounds?

The fact is that the media spend 95 percent of their time sucking up to their sources (i.e., power) and 5 percent burning their sources when there is blood in the water.

You won’t find the media challenging the real institutional power in this country. Like the AARP. Like the plaintiff bar. Like the teachers’ unions.

And the question still is: Who is betraying national security secrets to the New York Times?

Horowitz and the True Believer

Activist David Horowitz is in the middle of a campaign to take the universities back from the left-wing radicals. His strategy is the Gandhian approach of challenging the university to live up to its ideals: Academic freedom, open inquiry, full range of views, and no political indoctrination from the front of the class. In this link he engages Peter Steinberger, a political science professor and Dean of Faculty from Reed University. And he gets everything he bargained for. Says Prof. Steinberger:

[N]o one could possibly deny the existence of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism. Similarly, no one could possibly deny the existence of “power relationships and injustice.” I repeat: no one. To assert that there is racism in the world is no more controversial than to assert that there is nitrogen in the world.

Now this is a very revealing statement. You would expect a moderate Dean of Faculty to say: “yes, we keep a lefty on faculty to serve up the racism, sexism, classism, homophobia stuff to the students. You need at least one true believer around for balance.” But you do not expect a Dean of Faculty to be drinking the KoolAid.

In fact, conservatives do deny the existence of the Four Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse. Or at least we say that overt conflict on the basis of race, sex, class, and sexual orientation is so far mitigated by modern society that it is not worthy of serious people’s energy.

In fact, conservatives would say that light-to-moderate discrimination is a spur to effort, rather than a barrier to a decent life.

We say that, of course, society is deeply affected by power relationships. But we say that the rule of law substantially mitigates the absolutism of power. And we go further and say that once you start up your “diversity,” your “outreach,” your affirmative action bureaucracies, you are introducing a power which is more unjust and capricious than the status quo ante.

We conservatives say that, by shining such a strong light on power relationships and injustice, liberals are ignoring the forest for the trees.

And when we hear someone say “No one could possibly deny the existence of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism... I repeat: no one,” we say to ourselves: “left-wing radical whack-job.”

Jay Cost: It's Still Hard For Dems to Win in 2006

Budding political scientist Jay Cost takes another look at the 2006 mid-term elections. He reiterates his previous analysis. It is going to be difficult for Democrats to do a 1994 and nationalize the election like Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay did 12 years ago. Here’s why

1. It is very difficult to beat incumbents. House members are political professionals. They are expert at taking credit for good news, and dodging responsibility for bad news.
   
2. There aren’t that many open Republican House seats, only 5 so far. In 1994 there were 22 Republican open seat victories.
   
3. In 1994 Republicans ran against Democratic incumbents in Republican-leaning districts who had voted for tax increases, gun bans, and national health insurance. A total of 22 Democrats lost their seats. But this year there haven’t been any bills where Republicans have voted against their constituents. “Unlike Democrats in the 103rd Congress, Republicans in the 109th have not voted against their constituents on salient issues.”
   

Since it is very difficult to beat incumbents, and since the Republican Congress has not forced its members to vote against their constituents, Democrats face a much harder task in 2006 than Republicans faced in 1994.

This is not to say that the Democrats cannot take the House, or that they cannot find a way to "nationalize" the election. It is only to say that 1994 cannot be their model. There are too many differences - in both the broader political environment and the actions of incumbent Republicans. To take the House, the Democrats are going to have to develop and implement a new strategy, one that we have never seen before.

And it must be said that there is no sign of that strategy yet.

Liberals Don't Think Laws on Race Apply To Them

The trouble is that you know that nothing good is going to come of this.

Columnist John Leo reports on how liberals believe that they don’t have to obey laws they don’t like. Particularly when the laws say that the government cannot discriminate on the basis of race.

• The American Bar Association is pressuring law schools to grant racial preferences in admissions in defiance of the law.
  
• California government at all levels has refused to abide by Proposition 209 that bans preferences and quotas in state jobs.
  
• In Michigan, “[a]t one point the board of state canvassers refused to put MCRI [Michigan Civil Rights Initiative] on the ballot, despite a court order to do so.”
  
• In Massachusetts a school district refused to allow a kindergarten boy to be excused from a sex education class despite a state law that mandated it.
  

You could say, as a conservative: Good, the worse the better. But that isn’t really true.

Because we know that when a segment of the people believe that the laws don’t apply to them, then there is nothing but trouble ahead.

And if the nation’s elite think that the laws don’t apply to them, that is even worse. The great benefit of law is that it provides protection for the weak. But the law must start with the submission of the powerful to its letter and its spirit.

Treating The Kos-ites as Mainstream

Back during the Vietnam War the liberal media treated the anti-war movement as mainstream and presented activists like John Kerry as responsible critics of the war.

But they weren’t. The anti-war movement was a left-wing group that, had it been on the right, would have been presented as a bunch of dangerous kooks.

Now we have another war, and now we have another anti-war movement. And nobody can tell to what extent this new movement is aided by the terror masters, just as nobody knew in the Vietnam era whether the John Kerrys were coordinating their activities with the North Vietnamese.

Day after day, week after week, the mainstream media treats the left-wing kooks as mainstream activists. So Newsweek’s Jonathan Darman does a piece on Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and presents him as a intimate of the powerful. “Maureen Dowd and Tim Russert [ask him] what the Democrats ought to do to win.” Moulitsas “chats with Senate leadership aides several times a week and has brainstormed with Democratic operatives about the fall campaign.”

Well, it’s a free country. But you can imagine what the MSM would be writing if the Kos-ites were a right-wing group that was raging away at the Republicans. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. You just have to remember the drumbeat of media hate against Pat Buchanan in 1992.

How would you rate Buchanan on a kook scale of 1 to 10? Maybe a 5? But you’d have to put the Kos-ites at 8 or 9.

Back in the 1970s the MSM used the anti-war movement as a catspaw to scratch the hated Richard Nixon. Now they are using the Kos-ites as a catspaw to scratch George W. Bush.

But what if the Kos-ites only draw blood on moderate Democrats like Joe Lieberman, and drive the rest of America into the Republican Party?

To The Trans-National Elite the Nation State is a Dirty Word

Remember this. The folks at the New York Times really don’t buy into all this stuff about nation states and fighting against evil-doers. They belong to the secular trans-national elite that subscribes to a faith that we are beyond atavisms like nationalism. Or at least we soon will be.

For these advanced folks, cycles of violence are caused by roots causes such as oppression. In fact, if you look at any conflict in the world, you will discover that at the root of it is the oppression of some marginalized group, whether people of color, gays, or the Palestinian people.

So we really should not be surprised or even outraged about the revelation of the “secret program of combing through a vast international data base containing banking transactions involving thousands of Americans,” as Eric Lichtblau and Sheryl Gay Stolberg put it.

If you work for the New York Times you probably believe that the War on Terror is a put-up job, a Pentagon plan hatched up with the Religious Right to take over the world.

The outrageous thing is that the disclosures of secret information about tactics and methods used by the United States government in pursuing terrorists makes the task of our fighting men more difficult. Maybe it will even result in people being killed.

The nation state has been a boon to the ordinary people of Europe and North America. It has freed them from the face-to-face community of blood kin, and created a successful, though abstract locus for their loyalty and belonging. And even in the bloody twentieth century only 5 percent of males were killed in wars, as opposed to 20-40 percent in primitive societies.

But the trans-national elite is above all that. They sneer at the miraculous nation state. They want to move on to bigger and better things, a global state without all the mess of democracy, a state that they will control, or think they will.

Ordinary people would do well to resist the plans of the trans-national elite and shame the newspaper that broadcasts to terrorists the operational plans and intelligence methods of the United States government.