Couldn’t Help But Notice (032207)

Don Luskin is right about this: If the objective is to start putting the brakes on Uncle Sam’s 9% average annual tax-receipt growth, there are two ways to do it: raise the highest marginal tax rates (revenues won’t grow much because economic activity will slow down) or lower them yet again (increased economic activity will generate enough taxes to make up for the lower rates, as has happened MULTIPLE times in Australia; Hong Kong; Iceland; and Ireland, about which Chris Edwards at Cato [HT Carter Wood at the Manufacturer’s Blog] has a great post).

Unfortunately no one in Washington is talking about lowering tax rates further, but is only playing defense against proposed massive tax increases. Some people need to remember what the best defense really is.

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Someone needs to tell me why allowing kids to get through school using “Black English Vernacular” (HT Return of the Conservatives, whose “Reasons to Home School” counter may be in need of an additional digit soon), combined with inadequate “Real World English” speaking and writing skills, isn’t negligence at best, and child abuse at worst.

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It’s scary to be agreeing with Eleanor Clift on anything (about 85% of the way through the transcript; HT 2008 Election Watch via Lead Us Forward), but she’s saying something I’ve said for at least the past six weeks or so (just not here) — If ever there was a chance for a third-party candidate to pull off the upset of the century (or, actually, the last 148 years or so), it would be 2008, because the GOP and Democrat nominees will be known by the end of February. Buyer’s remorse has lots of time to set in during that time. But I believe a third-party candidate can only win:

• If he or she draws huge numbers of new voters to the polls, as there are way too many people in the two major parties who are so set in their ways that they’d vote in Jack or Jacqueline the Ripper if he or she had the correct party label.
• If there is only one truly major third-party threat.

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Any fair economic history of Mexico has to consider the government’s nationalization of the oil industry 69 years go to be among the country’s biggest mistakes. But despite Pemex’s current woes, I expect that the idea of privatizing its assets is still unthinkable. That’s a shame, as it may be one of the better answers to the question of how to move Mexico’s economy into the 21st Century.

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Every time I think about removing comment moderation, another good reason not to comes along — like this one (HT Instapundit). I believe I’ve at least a dozen “legitimate looking” trackbacks and pings come in during the past week alone; when I visited these sites, it was obvious that they were just aggregating web content without human intervention, and I didn’t let the pings or trackbacks through. The linked article says that some of these sites could be malware purveyors. I don’t believe that the spam blockers with catch this, and I don’t want to expose readers to it.