Atheists are right about feminism!

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Liberals are wrong about Planned Parenthood! (Pt. 1)

Though liberals rarely give to charity, recent political fights have shown that they love pouring (taxpayer) money into at least one non-profit: Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortions in the United States.

Liberals tell us Planned Parenthood is a women’s health center, and that removing federal funding for Planned Parenthood will leave poor women without access to even basic medical exams, such as mammograms. As the video below demonstrates, this is wrong!

Liberals (including Warren Buffett) are wrong about Warren Buffett’s tax rate!

Yes, you read that right. Warren Buffett is wrong about his own tax rate. Let us explain:

The way Warren Buffett calculates his effective rate is by taking the amount of taxes he pays ($6,938,744 in 2010) and dividing it by his taxable income ($39,814,784 in 2010), giving him the number 17.4%, and leading him to erroneously conclude that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.

The way the Congressional Budget Office and other tax policy analysts calculate effective tax rate is by taking into account the total tax burden on an individual: including federal,state, and local corporate, income, capital gains, and inheritance taxes. This is how they calculated the tax burden on Americans as recently as the much-cited “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007” (pdf), concluding that our tax system truly is progressive if you don’t distort the numbers with disingenuous tax accounting like Warren Buffett does. And fortunately, since both Warren Buffett’s salary and taxes and Berkshire Hathaway’s (from which he derives the vast majority of his income) effective tax rate have all been publicly available for some time now, it’s simple to make the same calculation that the CBO makes for Warren Buffett!

The following table demonstrates this calculation:

And, unlike the CBO’s analysis, this does not include the inheritance tax that Buffett will eventually have to pay on each of the dollars he made in 2010, so, to be more precise, we should say that Buffett’s tax burden is at least 50.0%, much, much higher than his secretary’s.

I’ve attached the excel file. If you eat Democratic talking points with your Wheaties every morning, there’s nothing we can say to convince you. Otherwise, stop perpetuating the lie that Warren Buffett pays a lower tax than his secretary.

Sources: CBO, Berkshire Hathaway 2010 Annual Report, Reuters, ABC News

Liberals are wrong about welfare!

“More spending on welfare!” has been the rallying cry of the modern liberal movement since LBJ implemented his Great Society in the 1960s:

Has the steady increase in welfare spending done anything to lower poverty in America? Per capita, inflation adjusted welfare spending has increased over 5x since Great Society programs were implemented in 1967, so the poverty rate must have gone down accordingly, right? Well, no. It’s actually gone up about 1%.

That’s right, since the Great Society came into full force in 1967, welfare spending has increased by a factor of 5, and the poverty rate has also increased.

Here’s a chart showing per capita welfare spending (federal, state and local) as a percentage of per capita income alongside the poverty rate since 1967, the first year total welfare spending increased from the previous year after LBJ’s Great Society (welfare spending had gone down the previous 3 years, and so had the poverty rate!):

Perhaps liberals can finally admit that welfare isn’t the answer to poverty, and that often it leads to the sad culture of dependency witnessed from Maine to Florida.

Sources: Census Bureau (poverty, income, and population), usgovernmentspending.com (welfare spending)

Liberals are wrong about “Citizens United”!

Liberals say that the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission established “corporate personhood” and that overturning the Citizens United decision would eliminate corporate personhood.

 

President Obama, a former University of Chicago lecturer who never published a single piece of legal scholarship during his twelve years teaching at the law school, went so far as to publicly criticize the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision during his State of the Union address in 2010.

Turns out liberals are wrong about Citizens United.

While President Obama and the Occupy people may think that corporate personhood is a new concept, the notion has been accepted since the Marshall court. Chief Justice John Marshall’s court first recognized corporate personhood in its Dartmouth College v. Woodward decision in 1819. Later courts have continued to recognize the constitutional rights of private corporations in Munn v. Illinois (1877), Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), Northwestern National Life Insurance Co. v. Riggs (1906), Connecticut General Life Insurance Company v. Johnson (1938), Wheeling Steel Corp. v. Glander (1949), First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978), and most recently Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010).

As other writers have pointed out, the notion of corporate personhood is fundamental both to liberal democracy (by securing the rights of individuals to conduct business) and to the modern economy (by giving businesses longevity). Furthermore, since it’s impossible to distinguish between a media corporation and a non-media corporation, a free press requires the extension of First Amendment protections to corporations.

TL;DR? Centuries of constitutional law show that people don’t forfeit their constitutional rights when they associate in groups, the police can’t arbitrarily raid office buildings and steal their property, and the New York Times can’t be censored by the government.

Liberals are wrong about the Defense Authorization Act!

The New York Times editorial board and liberal British newspaper The Guardian are both claiming that the recent defense bill passed  by Congress could “give future presidents the authority to throw American citizens into prison for life without charges or a trial” (NYT) and “allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantanamo Bay” (The Guardian). Senator Dianne Feinstein has said the same. They are all wrong — even liberals think so!

As Mother Jones explains, the bill does no such thing. It codifies the role of our military in domestic counter-terrorism, but it does not by any measure allow indefinite detention of US citizens for no reason.

Obama-Corzine were wrong!

So says the RNC:

Liberals are wrong about facts!

Liberals are wrong about facts. More precisely, about what they are and how to check them. Courtesy of Mark Hemingway at the Weekly Standard.

Liberals are wrong about abortion and Islamism! (Hitchens was right.)

Liberals engage in logical acrobatics to justify, among other things, the destruction of innocent human life and the terror of Islamic fundamentalism. Thank God (or, as he would probably prefer, luck) for the freethinker who can break rank and call out his liberal comrades–with characteristic wit and candor–when they are wrong. Mr. Hitchens was often right as pertains to the terrestrial; we hope for his sake and ours he was wrong on the divine. R.I.P.

Liberals are wrong about unemployment benefits!

The Center for American Progress has recently claimed that increases in unemployment insurance, and other unemployment benefits, create jobs. The White House agrees:

They are wrong.

They conclude that Congress should therefore act now to “pass this bill!” Remind you of anything?

This reasoning seems strange. From an economic standpoint, increasing unemployment insurance is equivalent to increasing the amount government pays people to be unemployed, or increasing the length of time that government will pay people to be unemployed. It is natural that paying people more to be unemployed will result in more unemployed people. This effect has been documented over and over again, both before and after the recent recession.

The San Francisco Fed says “Extended benefits reduce the hardship on unemployed workers and their families during this severe downturn. However, they may also reduce the incentive of the unemployed to seek and accept less desirable jobs, which in turn may raise the measured unemployment rate. Indeed, some European countries may have higher natural rates of unemployment because they offer more generous unemployment benefits than the United States.” They have a paper (pdf) on the topic, which suggests that the increase in unemployment benefits during the recession accounts for about 0.8% increase in the unemployment rate.

The Philadelphia Fed (pdf) makes a similar case, citing papers that demonstrate that a one week increase in the length of unemployment benefits leads to an increase of 0.15 weeks in time spent unemployed.

Of course, since unemployment benefits amount to an injection of money in the economy, studies have concluded that their stimulative effects increase GDP. The Center for American Progress cites these studies, claiming that because they increase GDP, they must also decrease unemployment! Well, turns out the study (pdf)  they cite doesn’t say a single thing about the effects of unemployment benefits on unemployment!

Let’s, for a second, take them at their word, and assume that their calculation that these benefits add 700,000 jobs a quarter to the economy is correct. Since they cite a 2.0x multiplier effect in mid-2010, and don’t take into account the fact that these multiplier effects decrease over the course of a recession, we’re making a very generous assumption!

Their mistake? They don’t take into account the negative incentives created by extending unemployment benefits, so let’s incorporate those effects into their analysis.

The median unemployed job-seeker today is unemployed for 22 weeks. Let’s say that, instead of the bill proposed by Obama, the length of unemployment benefits goes down from the 99 weeks it is now by about 40 weeks to about 59 weeks (depending on the state), as the Republicans’ bill proposes, by the end of 2012.

That would mean decreasing the amount of time people spend unemployed from 22 weeks to 22 – 0.15*40 = 16 weeks by the end of 2012 — that’s a 27% decrease! Even if unemployment stays the same, decreasing the amount of time people spend unemployed by 27% is equivalent to decreasing the unemployment rate by 27%, which is equivalent to adding 27% x 13.3 million unemployed =  3.6 million jobs to the economy over one year!

That’s 900,000 jobs a quarter, which is much more than the 700,000 the Center for American progress says will be created through the boost in GDP.

Not taking into account the negative effects of unemployment benefits on employment is either bad, lazy, or dishonest economics. When you take these well-documented effects into account, it turns out that this part of the Republicans’ bill might actually create jobs! The liberals are wrong again.

Update (12/17/2011): The bill that has now passed the Senate pays for the extension of unemployment benefits by raising the fees that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac charge mortgage lenders. Since for every dollar added to the economy in the form of unemployment benefits, a dollar is simultaneously taken away from the economy in the form of higher fees to mortgage lenders, the bill essentially robs Peter to pay Paul, and therefore the study (pdf) that the Center for American Progress bases its entire analysis on, which studies a situation where the payroll tax cuts are not paid for immediately, no longer applies. Even the stimulative effects of the extension of unemployment benefits are therefore in question, making the Center for American Progress even more wrong than it was before!

Sources: The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, BLS, TheHill.com (for links, see above)