Conor Clarke

I'm still reading the Republicans' alternative budget (pdf), but I did want to highlight this graph from Republican Paul Ryan's Wall Street Journal op-ed on the subject, because it's pretty stupid: More »

The HHS nominee's tax problems are small -- compared to Tim Geithner's and Tom Daschle's -- and can be summed up like so: More »

One of the nice things about the Internet is that you no longer need to rely on a journalist's description of a bill: You can dig up the bill and read it yourself! (If you can handle the excitement, of course.) And in the case of Byron York's piece in the today's Examiner -- "Beyond AIG: A bill to let Big Government set your salary" -- it's worth going back to the primary sources. York's piece and the bill in question have gotten a lot of attention. Michelle Malkin… More »

First I thought that the proposals to tax back bonuses from AIG would be unconstitutional for bill of attainder reasons. Then Larry Tribe convinced me that it would be easy to design a tax bill that passed constitutional muster. But now I see that the Congressional Research Service has issued a report (pdf) on the constitutional implications of the tax clawback proposals, which concludes that "the strongest arguments against their constitutionality seem to… More »

If there is one word that is being used to describe the administration's plan for automakers, it is "unprecedented." The Hill says some Republicans "criticized what they saw as an unprecedented intervention into private industry by the government." But if there were one other word to describe the plan, it would be ... "precedented." David Brooks, for instance, writes that Obama's decision to keep the automakers out of bankruptcy is "an extremely precedented move."… More »

Michelle Malkin was going postal this morning about "new federally subsidized counseling services" for those suffering from economic hardships. Sounds like a crazy government boondoggle, right? Indeed it does. And Drudge seems to agree.But, fortunately for taxpayers and unfortunately for critics, the new "services" in question actually consist of a single page on the website of the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration. The page contains… More »

The conservative blogosphere is indulging itself in a bit of snark over this part of Obama's auto-industry speech:[I]n case there are still nagging doubts, let me say it as plainly as I can -- if you buy a car from Chrysler or General Motors, you will be able to get your car serviced and repaired, just like always. Your warranty will be safe.In fact, it will be safer than it's ever been. Because starting today, the United States government will stand behind your… More »

Among other things, earlier today Barack Obama made the case for why America needs a car industry. In his words, the industry is "an emblem of the American spirit" and "a once and future symbol of America's success" that "helped build the middle class and sustained it throughout the 20th century."But I piece than one element of Obama's automobile history -- something he's brought up more than once before -- has been dropped: The slightly wacky claim that we need to… More »

The Washington Times says it has damning new information about the relationship between AIG and Senator Chris Dodd:As Democrats prepared to take control of Congress after the 2006 elections, a top boss at the insurance giant American International Group Inc. told colleagues that Sen. Christopher J. Dodd was seeking re-election donations and he implored company executives and their spouses to give. I understand why this provocative, but I'm not sure why it's… More »

This is the damning-with-faint-praise conclusion of Chrysler's "Determination of Viability Summary" (a phrase sure to make Antonin Scalia wince): While the Company has made meaningful changes to its cost structure in the last few years, the combination of a fundamentally disadvantaged operating structure and a limited set of desirable products make standalone viability for the business highly challenging. As a result, the President's Designee has found that… More »

I'll post a few more tomorrow, but here's one for now. JohnGalt asks:What's wrong with nationalization?I have the impression that the people most opposed to it are not the middle/poor class but the business elite. [...] Anything else?Yes! In particular, four objections tend to pop up: More »

Why can't you get a slice of the new bank plan's pie? Matt Yglesias asked the question last week, and Daniel Gross asks it in his Slate column today. The basic point is that Geithner's new bank plan is unfair because it restricts access to non-recourse loans to big investors. Gross writes:If we taxpayers are going to be financing something close to guaranteed returns for hedge funds and private-equity firms, why can't we get in on the sweet deal that's being… More »

I didnt' have a chance to write about it yesterday, but I thought this Washington Post article on Obama's plan to cap charitable deductions was pretty misleading. (But of course I'm biased.) Here's the first paragraph:President Obama defends his proposal to cut the tax deductions that wealthy Americans can claim for their charitable donations by arguing that the shift would not have an adverse effect on giving, but two independent analyses concluded that the… More »

This might explain why it's hard to get answers about the bank plan. More »

One more note about the cuts at the New York Times: most of the big staff cuts are on the business side, which supports the theory that the Times is holding out on meat and potatoes reporting cuts in the hopes of being the "last newspaper standing." (If it's the last one standing, presumably it won't need to struggle much for advertising revenue to support its large reporting staff.) Where the cuts fall in the newsroom also support this theory. A friend texts:The… More »

The New York Times reports on bad news at the New York Times:Facing a steep drop in revenue, The New York Times Company plans to cut the pay of most employees by 5 percent for nine months, in return for 10 days' leave, and will lay off 100 people and make other budget cuts, executives said on Thursday.This is an usual way of cutting costs. Sticky-wage theory says that across-the-board salary cuts are rare because they have across-the-board effects on company morale… More »

At least that's what Congresswoman Michele Bachmann seems to think (via Matt Yglesias). She is proposing new legislation to "ensure that the U.S. dollar remains the currency of the United States." This is a weird development for many of reasons, but the three that come to mind most quickly are: More »

I spent some of the morning at The New America Foundation's conference on the London G-20, where George Soros delivered a talk about the financial crisis and took questions. One of the first questions was: Are you pleased with where the Obama administration is going? To which Soros -- a longtime Obama supporters -- replied:I give them very high remarks in every area except one. That is the recapitalization of the banks.Soros's preferred recapitalization method was… More »

I spent some of yesterday afternoon reading about Senator Benjamin Cardin's proposal to make it easier for newspapers to achieve tax-exempt nonprofit status. The law has the mixed blessings of novelty, and I think that on balance it's a good idea.But here's one question that I started to wonder about: How does the law actually define a newspaper? (Or "qualified newspaper corporation," in the legal parlance.) The law -- I've stuck the pdf at the bottom of this post… More »

Marty Feldstein attacks on the president's proposal to reduce the rate at which high-income taxpayers can deduct charitable donations:In effect, the change would be a tax on the charities, reducing their receipts by a dollar for every dollar of extra revenue the government collects. It is hard to imagine a rationale for taxing schools, hospitals, medical research budgets and arts organizations in this way.Let me try to awaken his imagination. More »