Clipping blog

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• The Delivery Presents – Eulogy for a Terrorist and the President’s PR Team
• Clearing the Browser Tabs – The Cain Train Friday Edition
• As Tax Increases Go, This One Would Be A Humdinger.

The Delivery Presents – Eulogy for a Terrorist and the President’s PR Team Posted: 06 May 2011 05:10 AM PDT I decided to bend a show rule or two in Episode 92 because it commemorated a special occasion. How often will I get to do a whole hour on the death of one of the most notorious killers in world history? There were a few interesting aspects to the Abbottabad Raid story and I could easily have tacked a whole second hour onto the show to cover them more fully. But you work with the time you have, yes? I covered the ground well enough so that you know where I stand and what questions I think are worth exploring further. We’re down to a bit more than a week to go in the “Delivery for The Delivery” fundraiser and I’d like to make up some serious ground. If you’ve been thinking about joining in but haven’t, now is certainly the time. If you know someone who might like to be part of things, please point them right to this link and tell them all the good things there are to tell about what I’m doing here. If there was ever a time to get behind good conservative new media, it’s right now. The Delivery - Episode 92

Clearing the Browser Tabs – The Cain Train Friday Edition Posted: 06 May 2011 03:10 AM PDT The first Republican Presidential debate went off last night and it looks like Herman Cain ran away with it. Yes, I know I’m a Cain supporter, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Check out the video in Stacy’s post on the event (which also features a brief exclusive post-debate interview) and listen to what the folks in that focus group have to say. See also this post by The Lonely Conservative and watch a little of Cain’s performance in the video clips provided by Duane Lester here and here. I think that focus group is very important and it’ll probably be given short shrift by the pundits, professional and otherwise. That’s a shame because those folks are just like millions of other folks who’ll head to voting machines all around the country in November, 2012 and they, not the pundits, will decide who becomes President. I’m sure someone can come up with a list of reasons why they think their opinion is worth more than the people in that room, but when it comes right down to it, simple voter enthusiasm matters more than anything else in the world. If Herman Cain can wow more and more of the country like he wowed that crowd last night, he will be our next President. It’s that simple. And now, links: This is a good interview with Andrew Breitbart, who is perhaps the most dynamic figure in the conservative movement right now. It’s odd that while our President is bound and determined to build up our welfare state, the British are showing open disdain for theirs. Spike the football? Yes, please. As a matter of fact, I hope we see a videotape of every SEAL who went on that Abbottabad raid in a giant high-five celebration like the Fun Bunch. Why is it that progressivism always sounds sinister when translated back to the original German? I do believe that Moe Lane has summed up the administration’s week-long blundering in one paragraph. Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) — still a class act. Normally I get a bit of a kick out of taking those quick political typology tests — you know, the ones where you answer 20 questions and it puts you somewhere on an ideological axis. Well, this one, by the Pew Research Center is horrible. Here’s a first look at China’s new space station. Let me say that again: China’s new space station.

As Tax Increases Go, This One Would Be A Humdinger. Posted: 05 May 2011 12:46 PM PDT If I hadn’t seen this at The Hill, I would have sworn it came straight from The Onion. The Obama administration has floated a transportation authorization bill that would require the study and implementation of a plan to tax automobile drivers based on how many miles they drive. The plan is a part of the administration’s “Transportation Opportunities Act,” an undated draft of which was obtained this week by Transportation Weekly. This follows a March Congressional Budget Office report that supported the idea of taxing drivers based on miles driven. Among other things, CBO suggested that a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax could be tracked by installing electronic equipment on each car to determine how many miles were driven; payment could take place electronically at filling stations. The CBO report was requested by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND), who has proposed taxing cars by the mile as a way to increase federal highway revenues. There is nothing here that is not completely bizarre. Let me count the ways: You have to believe the proposed new tax would punch lower and middle-class working Americans right in the gut. It would hurt people who live in the suburbs who have to drive to work most of all. It would also crush small businesses that rely heavily on transportation: delivery companies, restaurants (especially franchise restaurants like pizza shops), service-based companies that come to your home (like cleaning services, landscapers, and home repair contractors). Let’s take a guess at what sort of impact that might have. I’ll use myself as an example. I drive about 300 miles a week — my commute is fairly short, but I do a lot of “in town” driving. Now, let’s assume the tax is very modest, say 2 cents a mile. Over the course of a week, this new tax will cost me an extra $6. Over the course of a year I’ll pay the government another $312. Not terrible, right? Except that’s two or three weeks’ worth of groceries. Or a car payment plus insurance for a month. Or, with gas prices what they are, 5 weeks worth of gasoline. But there’s more. A lot more. Now imagine what that might do to a small landscaping business with a large coverage area that drives ten times the distance I do each week. Their tab would be $3,120 a vehicle. If they have three trucks, the bill goes up to just under $10,000 a year, not including the extra they may have to pay for lawnmowers and weed whackers for which they’d buy gas when they gassed up their trucks. What could a small business like that do with ten grand a year? How many people could a company like that employ part-time during the busy season if they had that money to spend? I’d guess at least a couple, even at $10 an hour. Remember, also, that this tax would apparently ride on top of existing gas prices, which right now hover around $4 per gallon. I seriously doubt the government would replace the 18.4 cent per gallon tax it already collects. After all, the idea is to collect more revenue, not replace one revenue stream with another. One might conclude that the Democrats are trying to drive up the cost of driving a car so that people would change their lifestyles to ones better-suited to the progressive ideology. But that would be crazy talk, wouldn’t it? One last point. The entire premise of this trial balloon is that we need more money for our highways, so let’s see whether that’s actually true or not. Earlier this year, Congress passed a transportation bill that spent almost $42.5 billion dollars on highway funding. If we divide that up among our 42,973 miles of federal highways, that breaks down to $988,993 per mile of interstate highway. We know, though, that Washington doesn’t restrict its spending to federal highways. So lets pretend, just for sake of illustration, that states don’t spend anything on their own roads and the transportation bill has to cover all 4 million miles of “public roads”. I know that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but even if we stretch highway money that far, we’d still spend $10,625 per mile of public road just for 2011. Does that seem like a lot to you? It certainly does to me. I’ve tried to find some good information on how much it should cost to maintain a mile of highway each year, but I’ve had no luck. I’ve found plenty of sources, mostly from government and highway industry sites, full of information about what they think it should cost, but those are hardly objective sources. I’m darned sure we can make the highway maintenance system a lot more efficient and effective than it is and I suggest we do that before we allow the Democrats to contemplate yet another unnecessary and harmful tax increase.

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