Bradley R. Gitz
Posted on Sunday, August 10, 2008
Everyone has things that irritate because they don't make a bit of sense and make us wonder about the intelligence of our fellow man. Among the more baffling for this observer are: That so many people are so mesmerized by Barack Obama speeches that are filled with nothing but meaningless platitudes and slogans. I haven't been able to find anyone yet, not even the most fanatical Obamaniac, who can tell me what "We are the ones we have been waiting for" actually means. That the United States, a supposed bastion of free-market capitalism, has the world's second highest corporate tax rate; for that matter, that we even have a corporate tax at all. Most countries don't. Only people pay taxes. Corporations simply pass down the cost of taxation to consumers in the form of higher prices for products and services. That so many Americans are baffled by our growing dependence upon expensive foreign oil when they have for decades endorsed or at least meekly accepted policies that have made it virtually impossible to explore and drill for oil here at home. There is no country in the world with richer or more varied energy resources than the United States. Alas, there also is no country with more rigid and senseless environmental restrictions that prevent us from utilizing those resources. If you can't drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an uninhabited, pestilence-ridden wasteland where the proposed drilling site comprises an area roughly the size of Boston Airport visà-vis the state of Massachusetts, where can you ? That people eager to apply the death penalty to crimes beyond murder, e. g., kidnapping and child rape, don't realize that it would only increase the incentives for those committing such crimes to murder their victims.
That anyone would believe that a "windfall profits" tax on oil companies would somehow help our energy situation. When you tax something you get less of it, so why would we want to get less oil at a time when supply constraints have been driving up prices ? And what, for that matter, constitutes a windfall profit ?
That just about everything coming out of Hollywood these days seems to feature a comic book superhero, is a paint-by-numbers sequel or is based on an old (and often bad ) TV show. Obviously at some point movies stopped being made primarily for adults and began to be made primarily for 13-year-olds. Or is it simply that in our dumbed-down culture and with our idiot public education system, there is less difference than there used to be between adults and 13-year-olds ?
That the few movies that aren't made for kids tend to be movies about the war in Iraq that depict American soldiers as war criminals or helpless victims. Movies like "Redacted" and "Rendition" didn't bomb because the war is unpopular, but because moviegoers don't want to put up hard-earned money for a lecture from leftist directors whom they suspect couldn't identify Iraq on a map and don't know one end of an M 16 from the other.
That any sentient creature would favor an increase in the capital gains tax rate. Whatever one thinks of supply-side economics, the one area in which the supply-siders have been unquestionably correct is on capital gains, where the rate cuts enacted by Bill Clinton in 1997 and George W. Bush in 2003 have led to an actual doubling of the tax revenue collected through the tax. So, again, why would anyone want to raise a particular tax if the likely effect would be to reduce economic growth, reduce the income of tens of millions of Americans who have to pay the higher rates and reduce the amount of tax revenue that the government would end up collecting as a result ?
That so few people seem to have noticed that the price of oil began to drop at precisely the point when Bush lifted the ban on offshore drilling. It isn't just supply-and-demand that influences oil prices, but also expectations of future supply and signs that we are serious about increasing it.
That, in the era of the global democratic revolution, the smart folks of the International Olympic Committee decided to hold the games in China. The Olympic ideal may be to separate athletics from politics, but it is precisely the point of totalitarianism that you can't separate anything from politics. Maybe it was just that Havana, Pyongyang and Tehran were unavailable.
—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz teaches politics at Lyon College at Batesville.
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