Perhaps the best part of my online software business, school lunch choice, is that it is taxed as an LLC.  This entity can be as simple or as complex as I want it to be depending on how aggressive I want to get with deducting expenses.  Harrison Price from Just Politics, recently shared an article on Facebook discussing a recent recommendation by Obama’s FCC to impose a federal internet tax on digitial goods and services.

Currently, most ecommerce business models are taxed once the income passes through the entity to the income of the owner of the business.  Various states will regulate ecommerce to an extent with sales tax laws etc., but because most ecommerce transactions won’t be limited to a particular state, the reach of the states is a limited nuisance.

You have to love the logic in the recommendation by the FCC:

Digital Goods and Services Taxation

RECOMMENDATION 4.20:  The federal government should investigate establishing a national framework for digital goods and services taxation.
The National Broadband Plan is focused on increasing beneficial use of the Internet, including e-commerce and new innovative business models.  The current patchwork of state and local laws and regulations relating to taxation of digital goods and services (such as ringtones, digital music, etc.) may hinder new investment and business models.  Entrepreneurs and small businesses in particular may lack the resources to understand and comply with the various tax regimes.
Recognizing that state and local governments pursue varying approaches to raising tax revenues, a national framework for digital goods and services taxation would reduce uncertainty and remove one barrier to online entrepreneurship and investment.

Hmmmm.  Let’s look at the last 15 years.  It is pretty obvious that one of the most prevalent trends of the last 15 years has been an absolute dearth of new investment and business models surrounding the growth of the internet.  In fact I am having a hard time even thinking of one new company or innovative business model that has arisen as a result of the growth of the internet.  You would think that something as revolutionary as the internet would have had a bigger impact.

Imagine all the businesses that would exist if there were just more taxes on the internet

It is pretty likely that if Obama’s administration could just get a good federal tax in place that all the entrepreneurs and small businesses that are just waiting on the sidelines will finally jump in. Most of the small business owners I consult with tell me that the biggest obstacle to their business is that the federal government isn’t taxing everything they are doing. It really gets in the way of business. How are they supposed to know what to do with their businesses without the FCC telling them what to do? What are they supposed to do with their profits if they don’t give them to Washington?

I for one am pretty excited about this. Finally!!! Someone will decide to bring commercial value to the internet. Finally!!! Investors and entrepreneurs will decide to give this internet thing a chance.

What the FCC fails to recognize is that there already exists a national framework for digital goods and services taxations, and this framework is that there are no federal taxes on digital goods and services.  If there is one thing that causes Obama to lose sleep at night, it is probably the fact that there is an entire industry that is relatively untaxed and unregulated.

Going Rogue

Her memoir, Going Rogue, will have a first printing run of 1.5 million.  To put things in perspective, The Audacity of Hope, sold 200,000 copies in 2007.  By the time Obama was elected each of his books had finally sold a million copies.  Regardless of how you feel about Sarah Palin, her faux memoir is probably going to sell more copies in 3 months than Obama’s 2 books have sold in 3 years.

Selling a lot of books, however, isn’t the only indication of Palin’s rise.  Unlike Obama, when she speaks, results follow.  For example, how long have we been listening to Obama speak about healthcare.  Has it only been 6 short months of incessant, ubiquitous, incomprehensible speeches?  What are the results?  We have 5?  Or is it 6? bills?  How many thousands of pages?  How many speeches?  And where are we?

Palin on the other hand, posts a microblog, and the world listens.  Palin gets David Letterman to apologize to her daughter, a feat only matched by his cuckolded wife.  And most lately, Palin is determining who wins political elections.  Dede Scozzafava was comfortably winning her congressional race in the 23rd district of New York.  Then Palin endorsed her rival from the conservative party, Dan Hoffman.  Not less than two weeks later, Scozzafava is backing out of the race and throwing her support to Hoffman.  Whether you like Palin or not, with her we can at least get a glimpse of what leadership looks like.  Barack Obama, on the other hand is throwing the Democrat gubernatorial candidate in Virginia under the bus.

Republican critics from within the party and from outside, have complained for a while now that the party has lost its way, and has therefore become an obstructionist party with no solutions of their own.  By going rogue, Sarah Palin might be playing a crucial role in helping the party find its new face, and here it is:

The Bean Counter

I haven’t been following this race very closely, but on the surface I can tell you one reason why Hoffman is a great candidate: He is an ACCOUNTANT.  If the trend of replacing Washington’s career politicians and lawyers with practiced and principled accountants can be replicated 100 times across the country, conservatives might have something to look forward to next year.  Every district in the country needs a nerdy, conservative, bean counter running with the simple message, “We can’t afford this.”

The fact that Sarah Palin is the one who gets this tells me that Obama better watch out, or we might get a new Messiah in Chief.

With Congress coming back to work and an expected intensification of the healthcare debate, I am imagining that at some point over the last few days the Obama administration had a meeting to discuss the following question:  How can we get more right-wingers with Hitler signs out on the streets?

Answer: Let’s broadcast an Obama speech to the youth of the country through the public education system.  That’ll get ‘em riled up.

Youth serves the leader

If this is the case, then this was certainly a brilliant plan by the Obama administration.  This otherwise “non-issue” has mobilized Obamaphobes into a frenzy.  As Obama becomes an increasingly toxic figure, many people, myself included, have the knee-jerk reaction to oppose everything that he does.  For the administration to take Obama’s toxicity to manipulate those who oppose him to become sidetracked over nothing is smart.  Well played.

Rather than oppose an Obama speech to students in public schools, we should be encouraging Obama to give more speeches.  I think he should have a speech for the kids every day, and the teachers should have to keep the kids in during recess to watch it.  To overexpose these kids to trite rhetoric, vague abstractions, and pathos driven banality at an early age, would be a healthy educational experience for them.  Perhaps an education such as this might yield a generation of voters that wouldn’t be as embarrassing my generation.

Those who oppose Obama should be enthralled every time he wants to interrupt prime-time television, to give yet another speech.  Ubiquity breeds irrelevance.  Let us hope that those who pull Obama’s string to make him talk never figure this out.

I close with a quote from George Will:

In August our ubiquitous president became the nation’s elevator music, always out and about, heard but not really listened to, like audible wallpaper. 

And some great quotes by Mark Steyn:

*The Omnipresent Leader has traditionally been a characteristic feature of Third World basket-case dumps: The conflation of the man and the state is explicit, and ubiquitous.

*Any self-respecting schoolkid, enjoined by his principal to be a “servant” to the head of state, would reply, “Get lost, creep.” And, if they still taught history in American schools, he’d add, “Oh, and by the way, that question was settled in 1776.”

*Now he’s giving a 112th [speech] — to a joint session of Congress — and this one, we’re assured, will finally do the trick. That brand-new Chevy may be rusting and up on bricks by the time he seals the deal, but America’s Auto Salesman-in-Chief will get you to sign in the end.

The president has made the mistake of believing his own publicity — or, at any rate, his own mainstream media coverage, which is pretty much the same thing.

*No wonder the poor chap’s running out of material. At the time of writing, one of his exercises for America’s schoolchildren is to suggest what you’d like him to do in his next speech. Here’s mine: Call in sick, sir. You’ll be doing your presidency a favor.

The president is not our ruler but our representative, a citizen-executive drawn from the people. It is unbecoming to a self-governing republic to require schoolchildren to (to cite another test question) select the three most important words in the president’s speech.

But, if we have to trudge down this grim road, go on, kid, I dare you: “That’s all, folks!”

Oh, wait. You have to rank the three most important words in order:

(1) Try (2) Something (3) Else.

Yes Master!

Conservative blogs are under attack.  In my previous post, A Good Mob is Hard to Find, Paul decided to make a comment.  Now I don’t know Paul, and I don’t want to deter people from commenting on my blog, but Paul has some explaining to do.  Here is his comment, so we are all on the same page.  Notice how his comment does nothing to engage with the point I was making in my post:

 

It’s funny we hear Republicans say that they do not want “faceless bureaucrats” making medical decisions but they have no problem with “private sector” “faceless bureaucrats” daily declining medical coverage and financially ruining good hard working people. And who says that the “private sector” is always right, do we forget failures like Long-Term Capital, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Enron, Tyco, AIG and Lehman Brothers. Of course the federal government will destroy heathcare by getting involved, Oh but wait, Medicare and Medicaid and our military men and women and the Senate and Congress get the best heathcare in the world, and oh, that’s right, its run by our federal government. I can understand why some may think that the federal government will fail, if you look at the past eight years as a current history, with failures like the financial meltdown and Katrina but the facts is they can and if we support them they will succeed.

How does shouting down to stop the conversation of the healthcare debate at town hall meetings, endears them to anyone. Especially when the organizations that are telling them where to go and what to do and say are Republicans political operatives, not real grassroots. How does shouting someone down or chasing them out like a lynch mob advanced the debate, it does not. So I think the American people will see through all of this and know, like the teabagger, the birthers, these lynch mobs types are just the same, people who have to resort to these tactics because they have no leadership to articulate what they real want. It’s easy to pickup a bus load of people who hate, and that’s all I been seeing, they hate and can’t debate. Too bad.

 

As a former writing instructor, I know that Google can be an invaluable tool for exposing intellectual dishonesty.  In Paul’s case you can google search any random part of his comment, and you will find a screen that looks like this:

comment spam

You will see that I am not the only blog where Paul has copied and pasted his brainless ideas.  You might say comment spam is part of blogging, so why make a big deal out of this.  Well, this is more than a simple case of comment spam.  

For another example of this kind of comment spam, you can check out the post, Congress won’t take the medicine they prescribe, on Harrison Price’s blog.  Check out the comments on this post and you will find another comment spammer named Jacksmith.  I called jacksmith on his bluff in my own comments – I am Burro by the way.  Once again you might justifiably say, “So what.”  Ultimately, Paul’s comment is evidence that a claim I have been making since May of last year is correct.  Read Obama’s Biggest Weapon for some context and a great quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  My claim is that Obama’s biggest weapon is an army of witless supporters who will do whatever their master tells them.

Obama’s army of Storm Troopers is called Organizing for America, and he recently sent an email to this army of 13 million clones to engage in activities that support his healthcare proposal.  I imagine that Paul and jacksmith are members of this mindless herd.  Liberals are whining (redundant I know) that the massive protests by angry Americans are “astroturf” protests as opposed to authentic “grassroots” movements.  This is a stupid claim on their part that is backfiring dramatically.  On the other hand, I remember watching a documentary about the development of CGI technology in movies.  One of the defining moments of CGI was when they were able to develop programming that was sophisticated enough to create an image of a grass field where every blade of grass was moving independently.  Grass generated by CGI programming is a good metaphor for describing this new form of activism pioneered by Obama and Howard Dean where you can just send an email to your 13 million shills and they will go spam websites with manufactured comments.  We can call this form of protest “technoturf.”  Nancy Pelosi has said that the protesters of the healthcare bill are un-American, I would have to say that it is hard to argue that Obama’s army of mindless supporters are even human.  Just as a marionette without strings, or Obama without a teleprompter, Paul, wouldn’t be able to debate if he didn’t have a message from his master that he could copy and paste all over the internet.  While I am opposed to the shouting matches going on at town hall meetings, I am at a loss at how else you might get someone like Paul to acknowledge their humanity.

Paul was quick to disparage faceless bureaucrats in his comment, but I would take an army of faceless bureaucrats over an army of faceless apparatchiks any day.

Paul, if you want to debate, come to my blog and make a real comment.  I predict that he doesn’t.

These banks were able to pay back the money because they were able to raise capital.  They were able to raise capital, because there is a lot of money right now sitting on the sidelines looking for safety.  Because of the moral hazard created by the government bailing out the banks, these banks now look like a safe investment even though the past behavior of the institutions indicates otherwise.  Also, it is increasingly becoming apparent that this bailout money was financed by future inflation.  So in defense of Chuckles and Jake, I guess I would have to say that I would rather deal with trivial things like economic moral hazards and inflation rather than the apocalyptic demise of our financial system.

However, that is if you limit to the bailout to the original one crafted by Bush and Paulson.  The system probably could have contained the inflationary effects of printing $700 billion.  This would have been like a nice dose of Viagra to an otherwise limpid economy.  The Obama administration is behaving like a bunch of teenagers who broke into Grampa Keynes medicine cabinet.

For example: 

Yet one more example of the viability of advanced computer modeling

This chart was used by Obama’s expert team of economist and their magical modeling computers to sell Obama’s stimulus plan.  Of course Obama was all over the news the other day promising that these jobs will come; after all, his experts with their magical computers are telling him so.  Meanwhile tax collection rates are plummeting because large numbers of people aren’t working, and Obama’s innocent little $1.75 trillion forcasted budget deficit will soon balloon to $2 trillion.  When most people’s incomes drop or disappear, they slow their spending.  Then again, most people haven’t reached the point of economic enlightenment that characterize democrats, where laws of economic scarcity can be mitigated with good intentions.

In conclusion, I am glad I was wrong and banks are paying back taxpayer money.  I just wish they were paying it back to someone else other than our prodigal political leaders.

I found a good blog that explores some of these ideas: Carter’s Second Term

Indiana Flag

Promise-keeping, including honoring contracts, is the default position of a lawful society. But suddenly, many citizens’ legal claims are merely starting points for negotiations with an overbearing government.

-George Will

In an editorial after the general election, Bill Ruthhart wrote in the Indystar of the event where the eleven members of the Indiana electoral college voted for Obama.  In a quaint display of imagery, he describes how these Democrat electors innocently stumbled through the ceremony, since it was clear that none of them had done this before.  After all, it has been 44 years since Indiana last voted for a Democrat for president.  After they placed their votes, those in the room had a definitive Obamasm.  This is a nice piece of imagery to describe the general election.

One elector of note was Charlotte Martin, a retired school teacher.  Of the event she said, ”Indiana has not (voted for a Democrat) since 1964, and to think I was an elector — it’s just amazing.”  Amazing indeed.  I wonder how amazed she is now that her retirement benefits are on the line because of Obama’s policies.

Recently, Indiana’s Governor MItch Daniels, has labeled Barack Obama’s policies as shock and awe statism.  He and the state treasurer are denouncing Obama’s treatment of Chrysler’s creditors.  Apparently, the pension fund that supports Indiana’s retired school teachers owns $42.5 million dollars of secured Chrysler debt.  Of course, according to Obama, as purchasers of secured debt the Treasury of Indiana has engaged in irresponsible “speculation.”  While it is true that there is an Amendment in the Constitution, the 5th one to be exact, that says the Government can’t take your personal property, it is possible that Obama sees a deficiency in this amendment.  Even though it spells out what he can’t do, it doesn’t spell out what he must do for the UAW that in many ways contributed to his election – probably especially in Indiana.  The answer for Obama is to say, “Screw the law, Screw legal contracts, Screw the NEA, Screw retired

Obama's Speech Writer

teachers, Screw Indiana, I’ve got constituents to pander to.”  I don’t envy his position.  Who do you choose to pander to?  Americans who think the Constitution is important?  That pesky document.  The NEA?  They supported you too after all.  Indiana?  They bought into your “Hope” snake oil, and voted for a Democrat President for the first time in 44 years.  Hmmm!  How do you keep everyone happy when the interests of one of your constituents directly contradict the interests of another of your constituents?  This sounds like a problem for Barack Obama’s speech writer to solve – PETA should interfere to protect the rights of that poor overworked chimp.

                                                                                            -Homer Simpson

Being Popular is the Most Important Thing in the World

When I was in 8th grade we had our annual student body elections.  The race for student body president was your classic “popular kid” vs. “the loser that everyone was voting for just as a joke.”  Of course the loser won.  Those who elected this loser put him in a position of high-profile mockery.  During times like lunch and class breaks, when teenagers normally socialize, he would go around and try to be included in all of the popular cliques in school.  Many of the popular kids pretended to be his friend because it was great fun to ridicule him.  And what was the point of their ridicule?  Answer: that he thought he could actually be their friend.  All through high school this kid tried to be friends with the popular kids and the athletes.  I remember the jocks tying him up with ropes and hanging him upside down from the basketball hoop in gym class.  Despite daily events like this, he still tried to fit in with these groups that were hostile to him.  As a disinterested onlooker, I couldn’t figure out why someone would shamefully continue to be friends with those who made him feel so worthless.

When I taught Freshman English at a university, I had a student in one of my classes.  He was from Venezuela.  His family had fled to the United States after Hugo Chavez came into power.  All of their private property had been seized by the government.  They weren’t rich oil tycoons or drug lords.  His family was an average member of the Venezuelan middle class who owned a home and a small piece of land.  Chavez seized their home and their land and pretty much kicked them out of the country for opposing his policies.  

Apparently, after Obama left Europe last week, European leaders have been making fun of him behind his back.  Classic junior high politics.

Now Obama is down in South America trying to fit in with that “oh so cool” group – South American Socialist Dictators.  I am crossing my fingers that we get to see Barack Obama tied up, hanging upside down from a basketball hoop and him saying, “I’m cool, right guys?” 

I have been impressed with the measures taken to see that private capital replaces public capital in these industries as soon as possible, although time will tell whether this ends up to be the case.

I don’t know how much time Jake thought it would take to tell us whether the “impressive measures” being taken to see that private capital replaces public capital are working, but things aren’t looking good.  You can read the latest installment of Just Politics to find that certain banks are trying to give back their bailout money that they were forced to take, but the Obama administration won’t have any of that.  I will borrow the quote that Harrison cited from the WSJ:

Fast forward to today, and that same bank is begging to give the money back. The chairman offers to write a check, now, with interest. He’s been sitting on the cash for months and has felt the dead hand of government threatening to run his business and dictate pay scales. He sees the writing on the wall and he wants out. But the Obama team says no, since unlike the smaller banks that gave their TARP money back, this bank is far more prominent. The bank has also been threatened with “adverse” consequences if its chairman persists. That’s politics talking, not economics.

Think about it: If Rick Wagoner can be fired and compact cars can be mandated, why can’t a bank with a vault full of TARP money be told where to lend? And since politics drives this administration, why can’t special loans and terms be offered to favored constituents, favored industries, or even favored regions? Our prosperity has never been based on the political allocation of credit — until now.

Of course the disturbing nature of these developments are only amplified as we dig into how cap n’ trade is going to work.  Enron, was the company that first came up with the brilliant idea of carbon offset derivatives.  Unfortunately they are no longer around to live the dream.  Now our friendly government owned financial institution, AIG, (how lucky we taxpayers are to have acquired this fine firm at a time when we need someone with demonstrable genius in trading complex financial instruments) is wanting to be a player in the cap and trade regulatory regime.  How else, other than through back-door taxation, is this company ever going to get the money to pay us back.  If imposing new taxes on us through cap and trade financial instruments is AIG’s plan for paying back the tax dollars that it took, then I guess all I can do is lament that people like Jake got suckered into voting for Obama.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY_utC-hrjI

Barack Obama’s rhetorical stance of this video is absolutely asinine, and if Hallmark diplomacy is what we have to look forward to for the next four years, then I want Bush back.  If we are going to have a bumbling “donkey’s rear-end” (censored by Olivia) in the whitehouse, then let’s at least have one that will protect American interests.  Maybe we should take Obama’s multicultural approach to solving more of our problems.  We should send white cops to the streets of Compton and have them bust rhymes on the street corners to get gangstas to stop committing gang related crimes.  Or maybe we can have border patrol agents dress up in sombreros and ponchos on the Cinco de Mayo to reach out to the drug lords and cartels who are currently shooting up everything that blinks on the border.

For someone who has spent his life suckling the teat of multiculturist wolves, you would expect Obama to demonstrate blind faith in the multiculturist paradigm.  This video is proof of Obama’s dogmatic belief in multiculturalism.  He is assuming that if he engages Iran by invoking one of their national holidays and letting them now that he has read a culturegram, and if he ends the video with an arabic phrase, then maybe the leaders of Iran will forget 30 years of hostile relations and dismantle their nuclear program.  The problem here is that Obama wholeheartedly believes that he has engaged the Iranians through an Iranian paradigm.  Unfortunately, this multicultural gesture only reiterates the fact that Obama is engaging them through a Western paradigm, multiculturalism.  In a way, Bush’s policies towards Iran were more pure in a multicultural sense than this farce of Obama’s.  Bush didn’t ever have to condescendingly speak to the Iranians in Arabic to communicate with them.  Maybe Bush understood that Iranians don’t really want to talk to us.  By not talking to them, Bush did a better job of engaging them through their own cultural paradigms.

Not surprisingly, the Iranians were offended by the video.  Here is Khameini’s response to the video:

He (Obama) insulted the Islamic Republic of Iran from the first day. If you are right that change has come, where is that change? What is the sign of that change? Make it clear for us what has changed.

Apparently, Iran’s leaders see right through Obama’s rhetorical gesturing.  It would be nice if the American mind could be so penetrating. 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqgBhgg68-g

Of course this naval incident in the Strait of Hormuz happened on the same day that Obama sent out his Hallmark video card to the Iranians.  Whether the President likes it or not, as Commander in Chief, the blame for an incident like this ultimately falls on his shoulders.  Incidents like this symbolize his attitude towards the military, and unfortunately an incident like this communicates messages that are far more profound than can ever be expressed in a “Discuss the Relationship” chat video.

If I were president, and my foreign policy strategy for dealing with hostile nations was to send them the equivalent of a Hallmark style Youtube video, I would have sent the video below.  However, instead of saying God Bless America at the end, I would say “Allah Bless America” as a gesture of mulitcultural acquiescence.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgpZDMfJLAM

The following quote from an article by Peter Wehner and Paul Ryan in the Wall Street Journal illustrates where we could be headed as Tweedle Dum leaves office and Tweedle Dumber is inaugurated:

The last several months are a foreshadowing of a new era of government activism, rather than an unfortunate but necessary (and anomalous) emergency action. We will soon shift from a market-based economy to a political one in which the government picks winners and losers and extends its reach and power in unprecedented ways.

If you didn’t read the article that I linked above, you probably ought to.  Especially if you are someone who is frightened by the government’s recent desire to get involved in some of our most important industries. 

Doesn’t anyone else seem to be a little worried that the government is bailing out financial institutions, auto companies, and if you got enough hope, maybe the health care industry.  The government is targeting only the industries that will create the most dependence.  You don’t see the government targeting retail stores and restaurants with their bailout measures, because people don’t rely on these industries like they do the financial and healthcare industries.  The government only wants to play in the industries where it can create dependent citizens out of us.

I would prefer that the government get out of the picture, and the market can sort things out.  When centralized economic systems fail, it is proof that they don’t work.  When a capitalistic economic system fails, it is proof that the system is working.  When a centralized economic system fails, you end up with an insolvent government unable to provide entitlements to its dependent population (See bankrupt California for an example of the latest failure on socialism’s long list of failures).  When a capitalistic system fails, you end up with a new generation of entrepreneurs and innovators who discover how to create wealth again out of the failed assets of previously existing enterprises.  This process is painful, but in the long run it is very rewarding.

The big story this weekend is that Circuit City is going out of business and going to liquidate its assets.  Read this article for a great rundown of why this happened.  I especially like the graph at the bottom of the article that explains why Circuit City failed.  Would it be better for the government to get involved here, or would it be better for Costco and Best Buy and Walmart to reap the rewards for better running their businesses?

It would be nice to see our government, which is no stranger to failure, recognize that failure happens, and that failure is an option in a capitalistic economy.