Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : America Under Siege: The End of Innocence -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: hdl who wrote (20474)	12/7/2002 5:16:28 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 27666

REVIEW & OUTLOOK URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110002737 Louisiana's Faux Republican Mary Landrieu reinvents herself as a conservative. Will she fool the voters? Saturday, December 7, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu has likened her tough Senate re-election campaign to "an out-of-body experience." She must be describing what it feels like to remake yourself as a Bush Republican to have any chance to win. For years a loyal marcher in Tom Daschle's anti-Bush army, Ms. Landrieu is a changed politician since the GOP sweep of November 5. Having opposed a homeland security bill for months, she recently flipped and voted for it. Having refused to make the Bush tax cuts permanent even after she'd voted for them, she now sounds like there's no tax cut she wouldn't support. And she notes whenever possible that she's voted with Mr. Bush 74% of the time. "I will work with the President, as I have in the war against terrorism, to reduce taxes, to support him in many, many ways," she said recently on NBC's "Meet the Press." Today's Louisiana runoff is about whether the GOP's Senate majority will reach 52, or stay at a more precarious 51. But more broadly it's an illustration of the dilemma faced by the entire Democratic Party given Mr. Bush's popularity. In Washington, liberal interest groups and partisan loyalties dictate that they take an anti-Bush line. But that can be suicide back home, especially in the South, where voters want to see the Bush agenda enacted. Ms. Landrieu finds herself in a runoff with Republican Suzanne Haik Terrell, the state election commissioner, because she failed to garner more than 50% of the vote on Election Day, as required by state law. She is now desperately trying to keep her seat by claiming to be a replica of her state's more popular Democratic Senator, John Breaux. That was the same strategy that Senator Max Cleland tried in Georgia. His GOP opponent, Saxby Chambliss, pounded Mr. Cleland's votes against homeland security and tax cuts. Mr. Cleland insisted that his votes were no different than those of popular, and more conservative, Democrat Zell Miller. But voters saw through the ruse and elected Mr. Chambliss. Ms. Landrieu is also doing her best to keep any national Democrats out of Louisiana. Though Bill Clinton carried the state twice and it hasn't elected a Republican Senator since Reconstruction, Ms. Landrieu wants to get nowhere near Mr. Daschle, or even potential Presidential candidates John Kerry and Al Gore. When Jesse Jackson showed up to raise money for her recently, the Landrieu camp issued a statement saying it had "nothing to do" with his appearance and endorsement. One large problem for her is that on nearly all major votes she's sided with these national liberals. Her 85% rating from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action is much closer to Hillary Clinton's (95%) and Ted Kennedy's (100%) than to Mr. Breaux's (55%). Unlike Senator Breaux, Ms. Landrieu voted against expanding tax-sheltered education savings accounts for parents and in favor of distributing the "morning after" abortion pill on school grounds. Another problem is that part of her own political base wants her to be more anti-Bush. Several prominent black state officials have withheld their endorsements, and she recently made a point to vote against Judge Dennis Shedd, a Bush nominee for the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in hopes of winning them over. But such votes only give Ms. Terrell an opening to argue that Ms. Landrieu will revert to reflexive anti-Bush politics once she's safely re-elected. Ms. Landrieu's tax-cut tap dance is especially artful. While she was one of the 12 Senate Democrats to back President Bush's tax cut, she has since voted more than a dozen times to gut its provisions. And now, in the sixth year of her term, she's suddenly come up with her own detail-free plan to cut payroll taxes by $100 million. Voters will have to decide if this is credible. For her part, Ms. Terrell has focused on traditional conservative themes like lower taxes and smaller government. She has touted her anti-abortion stance, called for making the Bush tax cut permanent and consistently supported higher defense spending and the anti-terror war effort. We can understand why Ms. Landrieu feels she has to pose as a Republican. But we also wouldn't be surprised if Louisiana voters compare the two candidates and decide they'd rather go with the real thing.

To: hdl who wrote (20474)	12/7/2002 5:17:30 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27666

Jack Kemp December 7, 2002 Five easy pieces of tax reform URL:http://www.townhall.com/columnists/jackkemp/ I wasn’t going to write about taxes for a second week in a row, but then I read Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s interview with the Financial Times, which troubled me in light of several other recent signals indicating that the Treasury may be heading in what I consider to be the wrong direction on tax reform. It was good to hear O’Neill say that the Treasury is in the process of “cataloging all the ideas that have been advanced over the last 10 or 20 years about how one might restructure the (tax) system.” The bad news is it appears the Treasury may prematurely have whittled down the ideas it will submit to the president from the catalog. The Financial Times quoted the Treasury secretary saying the reforms that were most likely were the ones that were “minimally controversial and not very costly.” This comment sounds harmless enough, if somewhat timid, but it is worrisome when considered in the context of a Wall Street Journal report several weeks ago by Alan Murray in which there were hints that Treasury bureaucrats may be predisposed to “reform” the tax system with a scheme similar to the one proposed by Yale University law professor Michael Graetz. Graetz’s proposal would add a 15 percent value added tax on top of the current income tax, making it not only “not very costly” in O’Neill’s terms but almost certainly also capable of generating vast new revenues to fuel the growth of government. The incidence of a VAT is so stealthy that few taxpayers would perceive or understand who is actually paying the tax. Rather than addressing the fundamental flaws that plague our existing tax system, the Graetz plan would simply eliminate the income tax altogether for families earning less than $100,000, almost 90 percent of all current filers. This trick would minimize controversy among voters by the same old political stratagem of shifting an ever larger share of the income tax onto an ever smaller share of taxpayers. Taxpayers earning more than $100,000 a year would be forced to pay the hated alternative minimum tax with a 25 percent rate. Such “simplicity,” however, would come at the expense of imposing even heavier penalties on the chosen few who now would pay both a VAT and an unreformed income tax. Ernest S. Christian and Gary Robbins, two former Treasury Department officials, offer a very attractive alternative, which they call the “five-easy-pieces” approach to tax reform. None of the components is strange or exotic, and the president doesn’t need to pore through a catalog of past recommendations; he already endorsed the five easy pieces right after the Waco economic summit last summer. Christian and Robbins suggest a method of maintaining the American tradition of taxing income while lowering the exorbitantly high marginal tax rates that discourage work, penalize personal saving and depress business capital investment, which substantially depress productivity and wage gains. Their approach also would eliminate the perverse aspects of the current tax code that greatly disadvantage American manufacturers and exporters. Consequently, the five-easy-pieces approach would also eliminate tax incentives for U.S. companies to move offshore. The five incremental amendments to the current tax code that would begin the reformation process and simultaneously give the economy an immediate boost are: (a) lowering marginal rates (including capital gains tax rates); (b) eliminating the double tax on corporate earnings; (c) accelerating depreciation, ultimately to the point of 100 percent first-year expensing for business capital investment; (d) expanding the Roth IRA to all personal saving; and (e) excluding export and other foreign trade income of American companies from tax in much the same way that other countries already do in the world marketplace. Some of the five easy pieces would probably have to be gradually phased in. However, in order to bring the benefits of fundamental tax reform immediately to economically distressed areas and territories - especially those areas and territories adversely affected by free-trade agreements - I would add a sixth easy piece to the mix: nationwide enterprise zones of choice that would give people at the bottom of the economic ladder and many state and local public officials a stake in tax reforms. Let’s allow each state and territory to designate, consistent with specific federal guidelines, enterprise zones of choice within their jurisdictions in which individuals and businesses living and located within the zones would have the choice of being taxed under the current tax code or under the tax code as it would eventually exist with the five fundamental reforms fully phased in and fully implemented. It would be relatively inexpensive, and not only would enterprise zones of choice give economically troubled areas a jump start economically, they would also provide nationwide laboratories of controlled experimentation - a proving ground - for fundamental tax reform. Five easy pieces of tax reform, nationwide enterprise zones of choice, a president with a mandate and two whole years before the next election. Sounds like the makings of a powerful bipartisan package that will be good for America. ©2002 Copley News Service

To: hdl who wrote (20474)	12/7/2002 10:40:28 AM
From: Richnorth	Respond to of 27666

Correction! The team that built the atom bomb was not all Jewish. The team comprised of scientists from several countries. However, Robert Oppenheimer, a Jew, was the director of the atom bomb project. In the book, "Brighter Than a Thousand Suns" you will see that Oppie (R.O.) was a very controversial figure ---- a gifted theoretical physicist who thought it was not possible to build a more powerful nuke, the hydrogen bomb; and he destroyed the career of a good and loyal friend (one Chevalier) in order to shield himself from suspicion he was a communist sympathiser.