doubleplusundead

Mr Obama’s proposal is better than what America already has, but not by much. His well-intentioned goal of broadening the tax base is betrayed by the preferences he insists on maintaining for manufacturing and “green” energy whose economic merits have been questioned, even by former members of his own administration. By maintaining many of the current tax breaks but apportioning them more variably, the tax code would become more complex rather than less so.

Mr Obama’s reform should bolster the case for manufacturing at home, but not by much. Alex Brill of the American Enterprise Institute dryly notes America’s top rate would go from the OECD’s highest to third-highest (once Japan enacts a planned cut); its effective rate would still be above the international average.

Pretty much says it all I think.

source

WASHINGTON — President Obama will ask Congress to scrub the corporate tax code of dozens of loopholes and subsidies to reduce the top rate to 28 percent, down from 35 percent, while giving preferences to manufacturers that would set their maximum effective rate at 25 percent, a senior administration official said on Tuesday.

Oop’s there is an Alternative Minimum Tax.

Mr. Obama also would establish a minimum tax on multinational corporations’ foreign earnings, the official said, to discourage “accounting games to shift profits abroad” or actual relocation of production overseas.

We have all seen how well that has worked on an individual basis.  maybe that part should be rethought. 

source

The rest of the article is just fanboyism.  “Obama is truly the friend of the working man” and such.  No kids chanting MMM MMM MMM but I am sure on the CBS news that will be a subliminal overtone.

Following up from last week.  In this article the Economist looks (briefly) at why it is so hard to reform regulation. 

The conclusion – Congress is full of morons who are scared of pimento farmers.  I’m not sure that the two are directly related but it does indicate that I, as a full fledged moron who lives in fear of pimento farmers rising up to kill me, should be in congress.

Besides the whole pimento farmer thing the article reinforced the point I was making about this election really being about who will best implement some sort of regulatory reform.  In a year when the Obama administration is “reducing regulation” they have proposed 194 new ones.  In contrast, the Arch-liberal George W. Bush administration proposed 141 in it’s first 3 years in office.  Probably still too many, although I would be a lot of them revolved around War on Terror activities, but quite a difference in numbers.

In a second (third if you count the one I posted last week) article the way the costs and benefits of regulations are calculated is examined.  Short answer, not honestly:

The minutiae of how regulators calculate benefits may seem arcane, but matters a lot. When businesses complain that Mr Obama has burdened them with costly new rules, his advisers respond that those costs are more than justified by even higher benefits. His Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which vets the red tape spewing out of the federal apparatus, reckons the “net benefit” of the rules passed in 2009-10 is greater than in the first two years of the administrations of either George Bush junior or Bill Clinton.

But those calculations have been criticised for resting on assumptions that yield higher benefits and lower costs. One of these assumptions is the generous use of ancillary benefits, or “co-benefits”, such as reductions in fine particles as a result of a rule targeting mercury.

…

If reducing fine particles is so beneficial, it would surely be more transparent and efficient to target them directly. As it happens, federal standards for fine-particle concentrations already exist. But the EPA routinely claims additional benefits from reducing those concentrations well below levels the current law considers safe. That is dubious: a lack of data makes it much harder to know the effects of such low concentrations.

So by claiming benefits from over-regulating already regulated particles the benefits of a regulation is artificially inflated while cost is artificially deflated.  This is not the only example of regulatory dishonesty provided.  (To be fair the article notes that the Bush administration was accused of similar chicanery in reverse, but I am with Ace, I think, in that I would rather err in favor of personal choice and freedom)

Just sayin’.

Who needs NASA anyway?

I know many people who would disagree with this article.  They should reconsider:

But red tape in America is no laughing matter. The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones that sound reasonable on their own but impose a huge burden collectively.

…

Two forces make American laws too complex. One is hubris. Many lawmakers seem to believe that they can lay down rules to govern every eventuality. Examples range from the merely annoying (eg, a proposed code for nurseries in Colorado that specifies how many crayons each box must contain) to the delusional (eg, the conceit of Dodd-Frank that you can anticipate and ban every nasty trick financiers will dream up in the future). Far from preventing abuses, complexity creates loopholes that the shrewd can abuse with impunity.

The other force that makes American laws complex is lobbying. The government’s drive to micromanage so many activities creates a huge incentive for interest groups to push for special favours. When a bill is hundreds of pages long, it is not hard for congressmen to slip in clauses that benefit their chums and campaign donors. The health-care bill included tons of favours for the pushy. Congress’s last, failed attempt to regulate greenhouse gases was even worse.

Complexity costs money.

That is basically what it comes down to.  We have an increasing number of increasingly complex laws and regulations that are a drain on both the economy and society in general.  There is a reason that one of the fastest growing professional areas is in “compliance”, because no one can understand the regulations.  That is a major reason why businesses aren’t opening or expanding and the associated costs are driving jobs overseas. 

Earlier this week my friend at Carnifex blogged about how the Catholic Bishops should STFU about birth control, people want it they should supply it in his view, I disagreed on the basis that it is a decision between the Church and it’s employees, not the state.  I didn’t get into this at the time  but I also disagree on the basis that this is a costly regulation.  Yes it’s only $9.00/month, but multiply that by all the women they cover and it’s a substantial amount of money that isn’t available for charity or free health care through their hospitals or any number of other things.

That’s why things like this are important and why we can’t afford to F**k up this election.