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April 2007
Let’s talk more FairTax
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Writing about the dubious aspects of the proposed FairTax, as I did in a recent column, turns out to be a bit like kicking over an ant hill. As soon as the column was published, FairTax zealots swarmed by the hundreds to defend their cause. In fact, many of their responses were downright startling in their similarity. Email after email made almost exactly the same points in almost exactly the same language, as if they had been indoctrinated. The indoctrinator in chief, talk-radio host Neal Boortz, made some claims about my work on his show, which I address here. Apparently, he also challenged me to debate the issue, which I’m more than ready to do. I’ll go live on his show — the same forum he used to criticize my work — and we’ll talk it over. Yet for some reason, Boortz now refuses to let his audience hear that discussion. On Wednesday, we published a rebuttal to my column from the folks at FairTax.org, giving them access to our readers to make their argument. But apparently that’s a one-way street.
First-class ego, third-class brain
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
House Speaker Glenn Richardson is a loose cannon — a ham-fisted, power-mad bully with no political finesse. From the beginning of the legislative session to the end, Richardson behaved shamefully. I can’t wait to see what he does in the special budget session.
If Republicans in the House have any self-respect, they will replace Richardson as speaker before the next session. Not only has he placed special pleaders and his high-octane ambitions above the interests of average Georgians, but he has also made his Republican colleagues look bad. Surely they won’t stand for that.
Read full column.
Fair Tax Follies
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Under the proposed Fair Tax, low-income Americans won’t pay taxes; corporations won’t pay any taxes either. Yet its advocates guarantee that the Fair Tax will generate the same amount of revenue as today’s system. Basic arithmetic requires that somebody’s taxes increase. Who will that somebody be? To read Jay Bookman’s column, click here
At the main Web site of the Fair Tax movement, I plugged the Bookman family financial data into the FairTax calculator. The model reported that the Fair Tax would save me $7,500. As it happens, I also had access to the 2006 tax return of a rather wealthy couple who reported an adjusted gross income of $765,801 and paid $203,021 in federal taxes. What would this couple, a certain George and Laura Bush, pay under the Fair Tax?
Plugging their data into the calculator, I learned that the Fair Tax would cut their federal tax burden by $74,596.
I then began to punch invented numbers into the model, determined to find somebody, even a theoretical somebody, who would pay more. A family with $1.5 million in income, with a $4.5 million mortgage? Nope. Under the Fair Tax, they would save $436,624.
So who would pay more?
How should Christians respond to Chocolate Jesus?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The head of the Catholic League called the chocolate sculpture of the crucified Jesus, on display briefly this week in New York City, “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever.” The protest caused the art gallery where the sculpture, dubbed “My Sweet Lord,” was being displayed to send it back to the artist’s workshop. As skirmishes over religion go, this one was fairly short-lived. But it happened during Holy Week, the most sacred week of the Christian calendar. What lessons can we draw from this latest battle between artistic expression versus deeply held religious beliefs? Or should we have ignored it altogether?
Will Bloggers Get it Right in Iraq?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The U.S. military later this month will allow a group of bloggers to travel to Iraq and cover the war. Two of those bloggers, Jeff Emanuel and Victoria Coats, write that they hope to present a story of the war that has yet to be told by the mainstream media, which they say is overly negative. “We share the view of this conflict as an historic enterprise with profound ramifications for Americans and Iraqis - and our world,” they write. “We see hard-won progress and noble sacrifice that can and should lead to victory. However, we see that being threatened by an inexplicable willingness among our political leaders to despair and to capitulate - a willingness which is both fed by, and reflected in, our media, which has embraced the promotion of a vicious and escalating cycle of defeatism.”
Are they right? Has the mainstream media been overly negative in its coverage? Will the bloggers get the war right or is this a Pentagon spin attempt?
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