Category: Politics

Trying not to start the public floggings

Marxist Economics

Elections, Marxists

From POTUS-wannabe Pocahantas comes this policy proposal:

Democrat presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren wants to use federal excise taxes to reduce gun and ammunition sales.
Her gun control, made public in August on Medium, shows Warren believes the current ten percent excise tax on firearms is too low. She wants to raise that tax to 30 percent while increasing the tax on ammunition to 50 percent.
Because excise taxes are paid directly by the consumer–the taxes are added to the price of the goods–this means a $500 gun would immediately cost $515 and the price for a $20 box of ammo would immediately rise to $30.
Warren claims this taxation policy would “bring in new federal revenue” that can used for “gun violence prevention.” And she simultaneously suggests the tax would raise the price on guns and ammo to a level sufficient to stifle sales.

So using her “economics”  it would go something like this:

  • Currently, 1,000 rounds of 7.62x39mm (eeevil AK ammo) @ $300* yields $33 (@11%) in excise tax revenue

So therefore Madame Marxist suggests that with her plan:

  • 1,000 rounds of eeevil AK ammo @ $300 would yield $150 (@50%) in excise tax revenue… whoopieeeeee a net gain of $127 stolen taxed by the gummint.

Except of course that in the real world, AK ammo sales would fall to 100 rounds and yield only $15 in excise taxes (a 50% loss in revenue).  “Yay yay yay, but ammo sales have fallen!” she would pronounce.  But why  would sales fall so precipitously, she asks?  Because of the higher tax?

Because, you Commie coksucquer, during the months before you could enact this poxy tax increase, we AK owners would buy countless millions  of rounds of ammo, so that we’d have enough stored for the lean years — just like we did before the term of that other socialist asshole Barack Obama — and resume buying once an actual American became president again.

Ditto all those eeevil AR-15s and AK-47s you hate so much:  we’d buy so many before you could touch them, the gun factories would have to institute 365-day / 24-hour shifts just to cope with the demand.

I swear, I’m a huge fan of the First Amendment and I like to hear politicians spell out their proposed policies;  but I would also propose that anyone using idiotic economics theory (like the above) to create policy should be forced to wear a dunce cap and be beaten with wet spaghetti — just because of their naked stupidity.

And this phony bitch wants to run things?

* (example) Wolf Performance (WPA) is $304 / 1,000 at Cheaper Than Dirt at time of writing.

More Blue State Idiocy

Gummint, Marxists

NYGov “Fredo” Cuomo just ruled that the tides may not rise past a certain level in New York, ever again.

Just kidding.  Actually, he did this stupid thing (among so many  others):

The Cuomo administration is ordering National Grid to provide natural gas hookups to over 1,100 previously denied Brooklyn-based customers.  The Public Service Commission, the state body that licenses and oversees public utility companies, announced Friday that National Grid must provide service to customers or else face “millions of dollars in penalties.”  Previously, 1,157 customers had been denied service due to National Grid’s moratorium on all new gas hookups, announced in May.

Why did National Grid do this?

As you may recall, plans for a new natural gas pipeline from New Jersey were killed off by the state government under pressure from environmental activists.

In other words, there isn’t enough gas flowing into New York to provide service to new customers.  So what’s going to happen when gas demand starts to peak (as it usually does) in the bleak midwinter?

If they continue to hook up new customers, you’re going to see the backpressure in the lines start dropping during peak demand hours. If you look at the configuration of a typical gas furnace installation you’ll note that if the incoming gas pressure drops too low, the furnace will simply shut down for safety reasons until the pressure is restored. The same is true for many other appliances that use natural gas or propane.  Since peak demand typically hits during a severe cold snap in the winter, what Cuomo is ordering could result in a lot of people suddenly going without heat, most likely near the furthest extreme of the gas lines.

And New Yorkers are gonna start dying of cold and exposure.

Here’s my take:  Fuck ’em.

If the people of New York are going to continue to vote assholes like Cuomo into power year after year, decade after decade, I fail to see why I should have any sympathy when said assholes’ idiotic policies turn round and start biting the very people who voted them into power.

New Development

Politics, The Gun Thing

Actually, it isn’t.  I was just teasing.

September 2019 saw 10 percent more gun sales than September 2018, according to two analyses of background check data released this week.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the gun industry’s trade group, estimated there were over one million gun-sale background checks last month, a 10 percent increase over September 2018.

Remind me again when the Commie candidates started blabbing about confiscating our guns?  September 2019, was it?

Keep talking, assholes, and we’ll keep buying.  We’re already the most heavily-armed civilian population on Earth — and if this trend continues, we’re soon going to be more heavily armed than all other nations on Earth, combined.

Remember this?
That was my ambitious goal.  I just never thought it was going to be Democrats  who actually did it.

 

Foreign Entanglements

Elections, Marxists, Politics

I’ve been wondering where Socialist POTUS-candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been getting the foundation for their Lefty economic policy proposals because, frankly, neither strikes me as much of an intellectual heavyweight — Warren’s tokenist Harvard Law degree notwithstanding.

I wonder no more, and the headline to this article alone tells us why:

Two French economists from Berkeley advising Warren and Sanders on wealth tax

As the expression goes, it’s hard to see how you could fit much more annoying shit into a single sentence.  As for their economic philosophy, we have this:

There are competing explanations for the rise in inequality. Those on one side argue that wealth concentration is natural as a result of globalization, technology gains, and economic growth, which give enormous rewards to the smartest, innovative, and most hardworking people. Drastically increasing tax rates, they say, would discourage innovation and hurt the economy.
The other camp sees rising inequality as unfair, immoral, and a threat to society.
Saez and Zucman are firmly in the second camp.
…
Saez, 46, and Zucman, 32, are both originally from France and have each worked in the past with Thomas Piketty, the famous French economist whose research on wealth and income inequality made him a best-selling author.

Ah, jeez.  Piketty’s work is horribly slanted — it’s full of the Chomskyist research “methodology” so eloquently debunked by Bill Whittle, in that by taking a shovelful of beach sand and extracting a few black grains and discarding the rest, one can “prove” that all beaches contain not white, but black sand.  Ditto Piketty, whose oh-so data-driven proposals for taxing wealth (as opposed to just income) were initially latched onto by many European governments:

So far, at least 15 European countries have tried wealth taxes. All but four, though, have repealed them, most recently Saez’s and Zucman’s homeland of France.

As we saw recently with Frogland, when their dotgov imposed more and more restrictions on wealthy Frenchmen, capital and its owners simply fled the country for more tax-hospitable climes.

Which of course means that despite the documented failure of such policies, our own home-grown Lefties like Warren and Sanders are keen to implement them Over Here.

But that’s the Left for you:  never let facts get in the way of theory.  And the Marxist “problem” of “income inequality” has proven to be, well, insoluble short of outright Leninism — confiscation of wealth and murder of an entire economic class (the kulaks) being the hallmarks thereof.  (And for Lenin’s “kulaks”, read our modern-day Leninists’ “gun owners” as the disposable class, cf. Beto and Swalwell’s statements thereof.)

Which should tell you all you need to know about Warren and Sanders.  It’s not just your guns they’ll confiscate:  it’s your pension fund, your property and your livelihood as well.

Prove me wrong.

Medical Care Under Socialism

Elections, Health, Marxists

Apparently Bernie Sanders, socialist Senator and POTUS wannabe, had a heart attack on the campaign trail but survived after some pretty nifty (and quick) medical care — after which the Commie asshole had the nerve to bellow:  “Medicare For All!” (his campaign slogan).

As Dan Greenfield has pointed out:

While Bernie’s timetable of getting an angioplasty within a day might not sound that impressive to Americans, in the British NHS system, the median time from assessment to treatment is 55.3 days.  Mean times for treatment have been cited as being 80 days.  The maximum NHS waiting time is supposed to be 18 weeks and almost 16% of patients in the UK have to wait more than 3 months for an angioplasty.
Canada’s socialist system has angioplasty waiting times of around 11 weeks.  And that’s after you get an appointment to see a specialist.
…
Bernie waited a day in Vegas to get his angioplasty.  In Norway, he would have waited 39 days.
In Finland, which Bernie has also cited as an inspiration for his socialist program, he would have waited 22 days.  In Sweden, another favorite of American socialists, Bernie would have waited 42 days.

Greenfield also points out (and I paraphrase) that as President Sanders, the man who would have implemented socialized medical care, Our Bernie wouldn’t ever be subject to the same kinds of waiting periods imposed on others:  oh no.  He’d have been whipped into Bethesda Naval Hospital within the hour, and had an angioplasty a couple hours later.

Which is always the way with Communists:  the ordinary people suffer while the nomenklatura  get only the best.  And under socialism, ordinary individuals’ lives are irrelevant as long as the principle is upheld.

Well, I wish the evil old bastard had croaked, just on principle.