Racial (and Racist) Tendencies are Human Nature

Racial (and Racist) Tendencies are Human Nature

It has always struck us as amusing that American whites are so sensitive to charges of racism, and the mental gymnastics most are prone to engage in when it becomes propitious to deny their own race based patterns of thinking. It would appear that whites are the only people who take time to express their own color-blindness.

Of course this is a response to the racial grievance industry in this country.We still talk about reparations that would be paid to blacks who may or may not be related to someone who suffered from the practice of slavery one and a half centuries ago. The money would be taken, or extracted, in Henry Louis Gates' formulation, from whites who mostly have no familial relationship to slavery, possibly even family to soldiers who fought and died to end the peculiar institution. The grievance industry has been so successful in extracting cash, jobs, and favors from whites in this country that an irrational subculture, with its own language, has evolved. The fear whites have developed to being called racist has combined with the blacks' institutional demand for unearned goodies, like jobs or acceptance to schools they do not qualify for, such that they have encouraged the "soft racism of low expectations" that vexes and besets them so. They have created for themselves a permanent underclass, and it is mostly due to their own efforts that so many American blacks remain ensconced within it.

Now a body of research is emerging that confirms that much of the behavior that is condemned as racist is actually neurologically based, that is, hard wired, in the human brain. We do react differently to people depending on their race, and the way we react to many social situations is indeed related to brain structures that are genetically passed along sown the generations.

Nothing to be ashamed of - we react to race in ways that have nothing to do with evil racism, we act the way we do because of human nature. This is not racist stereotyping, it is survival skills and instincts we learned in the primordial goo, from before the dawn of time. Not that anything will change now that we know this, since the race blame game is a core power center of the political left. It is, after all, the political left that has no respect for science when it is revealed as an inconvenient truth to their policy prescriptions. But next time my son gets rejected for a school or a job he worked hard to qualify for while some undeserving black child breezes in, I will tell him to smile. After all, none of us can help being the way we are. Human.

Costly IRS Mandate Slipped into Health Bill

Costly IRS Mandate Slipped into Health Bill

Costly IRS Mandate Slipped into Health Bill

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Posted by Chris Edwards

Most people know about the individual mandate in the new health care bill, but the bill contained another mandate that could be far more costly.

A few wording changes to the tax code’s section 6041 regarding 1099 reporting were slipped into the 2000-page health legislation. The changes will force millions of businesses to issue hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of additional IRS Form 1099s every year. It appears to be a costly, anti-business nightmare.

Under current law, businesses are required to issue 1099s in a limited set of situations, such as when paying outside consultants. The health care bill includes a vast expansion in this information reporting requirement in an attempt to raise revenue for an increasingly rapacious Congress.

In a recent summary, tax information firm RIA notes the types of transactions covered by the new 1099 rules:

The 2010 Health Care Act adds “amounts in consideration for property” (Code Sec. 6041(a) as amended by 2010 Health Care Act §9006(b)(1)) and “gross proceeds” (Code Sec. 6041(a) as amended by 2010 Health Care Act §9006(b)(2)) to the pre-2010 Health Care Act categories of payments for which an information return to IRS will be required if the $600 aggregate payment threshold is met in a tax year for any one payee. Thus, Congress says that for payments made after 2011, the term “payments” includes gross proceeds paid in consideration for property or services.

Basically, businesses will have to issue 1099s whenever they do more than $600 of business with another entity in a year. For the $14 trillion U.S. economy, that’s a hell of a lot of 1099s. When a business buys a $1,000 used car, it will have to gather information on the seller and mail 1099s to the seller and the IRS. When a small shop owner pays her rent, she will have to send a 1099 to the landlord and IRS. Recipients of the vast flood of these forms will have to match them with existing accounting records. There will be huge numbers of errors and mismatches, which will probably generate many costly battles with the IRS.

Tax CPA Chris Hesse of LeMaster Daniels tells me:

Under the health legislation, the IRS could be receiving billions of more documents. Under current law, businesses send Forms 1099 for payments of rent, interest, dividends, and non-employee services when such payments are to entities other than corporations. Under the new law, businesses will be required to send a 1099 to other businesses for virtually all purchases. And for the first time, 1099s are to be sent to corporations. This is a huge new imposition on American business, costing the private economy much more than any additional tax that the IRS might collect as a result.

There appears to have been little discussion before this damaging mandate was slipped into the health bill and rammed through Congress, but a few business groups did raise concerns. Here’s what the Air Conditioner Contractors of America said:

The House bill would extend the Form 1099 filing requirement to ALL vendors (including corporate) to which they pay more than $600 annually for services or property. Consider all the payments a small business makes in the course of business, paying for things such as computers, software, office supplies, and fuel to services, including janitorial services, coffee services, and package delivery services.

In order to file all these 1099s, you’ll need to collect the necessary information from all your service providers. In order to comply with the law, you would have to get a Taxpayer Information Number or TIN from the business. If the vendor does not supply you with a TIN, you are obligated to withhold on your payments.

Private transactions are the core of a market economy, and the source of America’s growth and prosperity. Now the federal government is imposing a vast new web of red tape on perhaps billions of these growth-generating private exchanges.

For what purpose? So the spendthrift Congress can shake a few extra bucks out of private industry? The business sector is the generator of America’s high living standards, but most federal legislators just see it as a kitty to be raided or a cow to be milked dry.

I’m stunned that there wasn’t a broader debate before such a costly mandate was enacted. If it goes into effect, it will waste vast quantities of human effort in filling out forms, reworking computer systems, collecting and organizing data, and fighting the IRS. The struggling American economy can’t afford anymore suffocating tax regulations. This mandate is a giant deadweight loss. It should be repealed.

Andy McCarthy on Global Warming

Andy McCarthy on Global Warming

"From the premise that AGW is undeniable, the alarmist side leaps to the extravagant conclusion that we are therefore capable of, and obliged to, do something meaningful about it. On the other hand, the skeptics (I am one) too often deny the premise — not because it's false but because it may be frivolous. That is, relatively speaking, it may be nothing more than a drop in the ocean. I suppose it is undeniable, in absolute terms, that the drop increases the ocean's volume. The increase, though, appears so de minimis that denying it makes sense in the greater scheme of things. Yet, the alarmists deride the skeptics over their denial as if they were denying something as basic and incontestable as that two plus two equals four. For their part, the skeptics continue denying — even if they are wrong in absolute terms — because they fear alarmists have set the table in such a way that to concede the premise is to concede the draconian remedies alarmists have in mind. The debate gets nowhere."

"You say: "Put yourself in the position of a senior government leader tasked with making real decisions that affect the lives of millions. What would you do if faced with a matter of technical disagreement on such a quantitative-prediction question among experts?" I'll tell you what I would do. I would say that, given our finite capabilities and the shortness of life, AGW may not be a problem at all, and, if it is a problem, it is not urgent enough to obsess over. Not if I am a senior government leader of a country trillions of dollars in debt who is also tasked with making real decisions about unsustainable entitlement programs, the high likelihood that states will soon default, 10 percent unemployment, crippling new taxes and inflation on the horizon, a global war against jihadists whose mass-murder attacks — and their catastrophic costs — are impossible to predict, the imminence of game-changing nuclear capability in a revolutionary jihadist state that has threatened to wipe Israel off the map and whose motto is "Death to America," aggression from other hostile nations, a judiciary that is steadily eroding popular self-government, and a host of other actually pressing problems."

"That is, I would say it's not the government's job to gather together "the leading subject matter experts to produce a review of the known science" and then have their product "reviewed by a standing body of leading scientists ..." If the issue is truly important enough, the experts will sort that out themselves. Meanwhile, I’d conclude, get back to me when you have more certainty about the nature and extent of the problem, plus a compelling case that it's worthy of being on my plate given all these other first-order challenges. And when you come back, make sure that you have a proposal that makes economic sense in light of the straits we're in, and that you are ready to explain why I should not discount the problem based on (a) the rampant fraud that has been perpetrated to make the problem seem dire, and (b) the financial interests of the alarmist community in the existence of the problem."

From Andy's reply to the Jim Manzi piece, at The Corner on NRO.

Our Lives, Our Fortunes, and Our Sacred Honor

Our Lives, Our Fortunes, and Our Sacred Honor

Dhimmitude

Dhimmitude

In sympathy for all those who are under a fatwah by the benighted and cruel slaves of the gutter religion, violent Mohhamadism, I present their profit Mo, fucker of children and killer of women.

Tea Party Racists

Tea Party Racists

Quote for Today

Quote for Today

"Claims that the [AGW] science is settled border on criminal and certainly illustrate complete lack of understanding of climate science or deliberate ignorance for political ends or both."

Dr. Tim Ball writing in Canada Free Press.

Quote of the Day - Edmund Burke

Quote of the Day - Edmund Burke

"What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics."

Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797)

Quote of the Day - Mohandas Gandhi

Quote of the Day - Mohandas Gandhi

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

Mohandas Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

Quote of the Day - William J. H. Boetcker

Quote of the Day - William J. H. Boetcker

“You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatreds. You cannot establish security on borrowed money. You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man's initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”

William John Henry Boetcker (1873–1962)
(This quote is often erroneously attributed to Abraham Lincoln.)

Quote of the Day - David Manning

Quote of the Day - David Manning

"He [Obama] is an American who grew up in Hawaii, whose foreign experience was of Indonesia and who had a Kenyan father. The sentimental reflexes, if you like, are not there."

David Manning, former British ambassador to the U.S., to a House of Commons committee reporting on the relationship between Britain and the U.S.A.

"You Picked a Fine Time to Lead Us, Barack"

"You Picked a Fine Time to Lead Us, Barack"

True Costs of Health Care Reform

True Costs of Health Care Reform

Quote of the Day - Burt Prelutsky

Quote of the Day - Burt Prelutsky

“Surely something must be terribly wrong with a man who seems to be far more concerned with a Jew building a house in Israel than with Muslims building a nuclear bomb in Iran."

Burt Prelutsky (b 1940)

Quote of the Day - John Adams

Quote of the Day - John Adams

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence"

(“Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,” December 1770).

John Adams (1735-1826)