It was no surprise that pundits would try to score political points from the  Arizona tragedy.  Calls to curtail the legitimate language of dissent were broadcast before any information on the shooter surfaced.  From Townhall.com Carol Platt Liebau writes Left-Wing Blame Game Won’t Work With Arizona Tragedy.

An Excerpt:

almost 16 years after Oklahoma City – and after seeing similar gamesmanship in the wake of crimes like the Holocaust Museum shooting — Americans have become skeptical of cynical efforts to stigmatize entire ideologies based only on the actions of lone, clearly deranged criminals. That’s especially true where, as here, there’s no real evidence that the suspect actually subscribed to any coherent political creed.

Finally, the political climate has changed, drastically, since 1995. Many (if not most) Americans have just endured two years in which a liberal majority has governed against their own expressed wishes. By doing so, liberal politicians – from the President on down — have aroused widespread, deep-seated opposition among the electorate to an unprecedented degree. In such a climate, people will find it easier to distinguish between insane criminals and law-abiding dissenters from government policy, because they are likelier than ever to be dissenters themselves.

Given all of this, those on the left would be best advised to avoid cheap blame-seeking for political gain. If they persist in the dishonorable effort to discredit the beliefs of millions of Americans based on the criminal actions of just one, ironically, they may hurt their own cause most

at American Thinker Michael Filozof writes The Left, Not the Right, Owns Political Violence.

And blogger Blond Sagacity actually took the time to read about the assailant before commenting Jared Loughner is not a RIGHT WINGER.

In The charlatans’ response to the Tucson tragedy, The Washington Post, 1/11/11 George Will adds (Excerpt):

This McCarthyism of the left – devoid of intellectual content, unsupported by data – is a mental tic, not an idea but a tactic for avoiding engagement with ideas. It expresses limitless contempt for the American people, who have reciprocated by reducing liberalism to its current characteristics of electoral weakness and bad sociology.

HKO comment:

Besides being so factually incorrect, it is a shameless and morally bankrupt act to politicize such a tragic event, and use it to squash legitimate political dissent.  The vast majority of the American people know better.

I had about two dozen postings in American Thinker this past year.  A few for those who may have missed them:

The New Aristocracy

Why Elitists Fail

Finding John Galt

The Price of Equality

The Immorality of Class Warfare

Many of the readers’ comments are well worth the time.

Global warming- I mean ‘climate change’- mongers are unfazed by record cold temperatures. They are astute at explaining how record cold temperatures do in fact prove man made global warming and carbon dioxide emissions actually support their warming hypothesis, but only after the fact.   True understanding is of value in the power to predict.

In the American Thinker Howard Richman and Raymond Richman examine who really did understand the climate issues in The Winner of This Year’s ‘Best Climate Predictor’ Award (Clue It Wasn’t Al Gore!). The press seems to give the most coverage to those who understand the issue the least.  The worst predictor, Al Gore himself, received a Noble Prize for the subject he clearly understands very poorly.

Excerpts:

Gore’s prediction is clearly the worst of these three, yet he was awarded a million-dollar Nobel Peace Prize for bringing this issue to the attention of the world.  Schwarzenegger’s prediction comes in second-worst, yet he is angling for a global warming spokesman job in the Obama administration.  The IPCC’s prediction is third-worst, yet it just won a huge expansion of the U.N. bureaucracy at the Cancun Climate Conference.

Corbyn, like many other astrophysicists, has figured out that climate change is mainly due to extraterrestrial forces, including solar activity and cosmic rays, not carbon dioxide.  If you still believe in the theory that carbon dioxide causes climate change, click here to watch an excellent lecture by Jasper Kirkby at the Cern, one of Europe’s most highly respected centers for scientific research.  Astrophysicists have discovered that changes in the rate of cosmic ray inflow cause climate change and that solar activity shields the earth from cosmic rays.

I do not pretend to know enough about the science of climatology to know which side of this debate  is correct, but it is reckless and foolish to pretend that the debate does not exist.  Predictions of catastrophe from a population bomb (Thomas Malthus), massive toxin exposure (Silent Spring), running out of oil (Club of Rome), or now a disastrous outcome of man induced climate change have not ended as predicted even from noted scientists of their day.  How can we be certain that global warming does in fact exist, that it is necessarily a bad thing if it does (more people die from excessive cold that excessive heat and warming could lengthen growing seasons and increase food production), that it is man made and finally, that any of the policies promising to correct it would be effective.

It is hard to imagine any field of science with more known and unknown variables than global climate prediction. When the tone of the language resembles religious fanaticism rather than an objective reality I can not help but remain skeptical whether scenarios of disaster serve the desires of political power rather than constructive scientific inquiry.

Randall Hoven writes in American Thinker, Class Warriors Got What They Wished For that the Class Warriors have created a great contradiction;  they wish both for a more progressive tax system and for less income disparity or fewer wealthy. Yet a highly progressive income tax system places a bigger burden on generating tax revenues on the very social segment they wish to minimize.  The result of this policy and this recession is that the tax revenue from the wealthy has significantly dropped.

In my article also published in American Thinker, The Immorality of Class Warfare, I point out the moral hypocrisy of those  who condemn the very segment we have deliberately structured our system to depend on. Hoven shows that this system is equally pragmatically flawed; not only is it morally repugnant but it is ineffective at supporting the huge growth in government services  that the class warriors demand.

An excerpt from Hoven’s article:

Revenues did not fall because of a tax rate cut; there was no tax rate cut between 2007 and 2009.  Revenues did not fall because of some give-away to the rich.  In fact, the problem was just the opposite.  Revenues fell because there were fewer rich and the rich made less money — just as class warriors wanted.

We had a progressive tax structure that relied on the rich getting richer.  Then we got what we wished for: for the rich to become like us.  So now we’re all broke.  We had a bubble-based tax system, and the bubble burst.

Why do you think revenues fell by over 20% to the federal government and states like California during the Great Recession, when GDP fell only 4%?  Because the federal government and states like California have extremely progressive tax structures.  You get rid of the rich, and you get rid of government revenues (and job creation).

Guest Blogger-

Roy Fickling is a very intelligent and experienced young entrepreneur and investor.  Among his company’s holdings are automobile distributorships, banks, and real estate- the biggest victims of the recent  financial collapse. He is very well read and travelled and has a very real and experienced understanding of not just the business world but the underlying economy.

I had shared an articled I wrote and posted on the blog at American Thinker titled Elitist Help for Business.  I sent the link to several friends, including Roy. One reader who disagreed with the premise exposed a stereotypically leftist view of the   economy.  He basically ridiculed “trickle down” economics, said the poor would spend a tax cut on necessities and socially good things and the rich would just buy “yachts and 20,000 square foot Swiss Chalets.”

Roy’s response was a bit long but so well written that I had to share it (with his permission).  Part of it follows: (he address issues raised in the quotation marks.)

Higher tax rates on the rich create the very poverty and unemployment that is used to justify their presence.  It is a vicious cycle that most serious economists recognize, including Obama’s own advisory team.

“We know generally the bottom 97% will spend their tax cut…”  Actually, we don’t know that.  It is a popular catch phrase with the press these days, but there is no proof of that.  In fact, evidence points to the contrary.

The Permanent Income Hypothesis (which Friedman earned the Nobel Prize for) postulates that personal spending depends on the average income expected over one’s lifetime, not the income in one particular year. If a person has no expectation that he will continue to receive the new-found money over an extended period of time, he is more likely than not to save a portion of the money.  Oops.  There goes Keynes’ money multiplier.  It becomes a money “divider”. The same is true (in reverse) for top earners and corporations who are currently sitting on tens of trillions of dollars in cash and low risk securities. The point is not to convince the top 3% to go out and buy new rims for their cutlass.  The point is to alleviate the fear of the top 3% that their money will be confiscated and that it is OK to go out and take risks by investing their money in something other than T-bills. Even if you believe Demand Side theory and the rich do “buy another yacht, or spend more time on the Riviera, or build another 20,000 square foot ski chalet in the Alps or the Rockies, or buy another play-toy sports venue, etc., etc”, wouldn’t that create they Keynesian effect you are hoping for?

Companies don’t go out and spend money on R&D, new equipment or more important, employees, if they have an expectation that they will not be able to enjoy the profits (the fruits of their risk).  Likewise, if they cannot quantify their future government imposed burdens, they are more likely to hunker down to weather the storm. Last year, I could tell you how much an employee cost to hire.  It was about 128% of the base salary.  Today, neither I nor a fortune 500 company can tell you what it will cost to hire an employee after benefits and taxes. If the goal is to get companies hiring again, we can start by not doing any more harm with this erratic “fiscal policy de jure.”

More of Roy’s response will be forthcoming.