“The Tax Foundation reported last week that more than 143 million individual income tax returns were filed in 2007,

Tax Pain

and 46.6 million of those returns had a zero or negative tax liability, setting a new record for the number of “non-payers.” This group represented almost one out of every three tax returns filed in 2007 (32.6 percent, see chart above), and reflects tax filers whose exemptions, deductions, and credits wiped out any federal income taxes that would have been due. According to the Tax Foundation, every dollar withheld from the paychecks of the “non-payers” during the year was refunded, and in about half of the cases, substantial additional money was refunded to the tax filer. There were an additional 15 million people in 2007 who did not earn enough income to file a tax return, bringing the total number of Americans who paid no federal income taxes to more than 61 million, or 39 percent of the tax-eligible population (158 million including filers plus non-filers).”

Read the ugly details here.   Long…….sigh.

www.blog.american.com/?p=7951

For example, amid all the discussion about how to reduce our dependency on carbon-based fuels, stories like this one come out and remind me that we really could solve the problem if we made it more of a priority to do so. Consider the story’s lede:

Talk about a Eureka moment. Scientists at Sandia National Labs, seeking a means to create cheap and abundant hydrogen to power a hydrogen economy, realized they could use the same technology to “reverse-combust” CO₂ back into fuel. Researchers still have to improve the efficiency of the system, but they recently demonstrated a working prototype of their “Sunshine to Petrol” machine that converts waste CO₂ to carbon monoxide, and then syngas, consuming nothing but solar energy.

Well, how about that?  Is it really so far-fetched to think that such efforts could produce serious game-changing breakthroughs if we devote enough resources to them?  Considering what we got out of the U.S. Space Program in the 60s and 70s, I don’t think so.

Meanwhile, nations everywhere seem to be recognizing nuclear power’s potential as a safe, clean source of energy.   The Washington Post reports:

Nuclear power — long considered environmentally hazardous — is emerging as perhaps the world’s most unlikely weapon against climate change, with the backing of even some green activists who once campaigned against it.

Maybe we need to have more faith in our ability to solve the energy problem – whether one considers that problem one of excessive  dependence on unstable or unfriendly suppliers, or excessive emissions from carbon-based fuels.

Glenn Reynolds‘ comment:  “Not living up to the promises they made, is it? But don’t worry, health care will be totally different.“

Slowly but surely, middle class, and upper-middle class Americans are being awakened to the fact that federal taxes are being skirted by at least half of all Americans.  Half.  Governor Mitt Romney, in a recent private meeting in Los Angeles, stated that it is more likely that only 40% of all Americans are carrying the enormous federal tax burden today.  Under the new codes being enforced by the Obama Administration, that figure will probably become 50%.   Is it any wonder that there are “tea parties” emerging around the country featuring fed-up Americans who recognize more and more that the very rich are escaping tax-free, as well as those in the low-income sectors of our economy.   There is no shortage of compassion among American earners, but there is a conviction in Democracy.

Right now, there are too few patriots paying the freight.

I am less enamored of President Obama’s Cairo speech than Sonja seems to be.   Mark Steyn notes that the official State Department press release on the speech headlined it, “President Obama Speaks To The Muslim World From Cairo:”

Let’s pause right there: It’s interesting how easily the words “the Muslim world” roll off the tongues of liberal secular progressives who’d choke on any equivalent reference to “the Christian world.” When such hyperalert policemen of the perimeter between church and state endorse the former but not the latter, they’re implicitly acknowledging that Islam is not merely a faith but a political project, too. There is an “Organization of the Islamic Conference,” which is already the largest single voting bloc at the United Nations and is still adding new members. Imagine if someone proposed an “Organization of the Christian Conference” that would hold summits attended by prime ministers and Presidents, and vote as a bloc in transnational bodies. But, of course, there is no “Christian world”: Europe is largely post-Christian and, as President Barack Obama bizarrely asserted to a European interviewer last week, America is “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” Perhaps we’re eligible for membership in the OIC.

Obama’s foreign policy statements are full of soft nonsense like that.  I am still amazed that in the Cairo speech the President transtioned from speaking of the Holocaust to the plight of the Palestinian people by saying, “On the other hand . . . .”  There is no other hand to the Holocaust, and whatever legitimate complaints the Palestinians have, a discussion of them doesn’t belong in a major speech, right after the Holocaust, introduced by the phrase “on the other hand.”

The Real World

In a separate but closely related piece, Victor Davis Hanson tells A Farmer’s Tale. His beginning ‘graph:

Obama reminds me a little of myself–at 26. I had left the farm for 9 years to get a BA in classics, PhD in classical philology, and live in Athens for two years of archaeological study-all on scholarships, TAships, research-ships and part-time summer and school jobs tucked under the aegis of the academic, no-consequences world. By the end of endless seminars, papers, theses, debates, discussions, academic get-togethers, I had forgotten much of the culture of the farm where I spent years 1-18.

. . .

Then after the requisite degrees I left academia, and returned to farm 180 acres with my brother and cousin-and sadly was quickly disabused of the world of the faculty lounge.

It’s a compelling story, especially in light of  President Obama’s background:  he is a man who has never been in business and has spent most of his adult life surrounded by liberal academics.  The rest of Hanson’s piece is an absolute must-read.

The World of Automobile Manufacturing

The always formidable Mickey Kaus notes that GM’s top products executive wondered publicly why Saturn Motors failed, saying, “we don’t have the time or the resources to take 10 years to figure it out and possibly turn it around.”  Kaus:

I could have saved him the 10 years, as could about 85% of the readers of Car and Driver, because it’s obvious why Saturn flopped: The company had built a popular brand as a sort of feel-good anti-car–vaguely tractor-like, noisy, but made of semi-indestructible plastic by dedicated Tennessee workers and–unique in nearly all of GM–actually reliable. GM threw all this away and filled Saturn showrooms with cars designed to appeal to totally different buyers: rebadged mainstream Opels. They were OK, but creepily overstyled and not so reliable. End of explanation.

Kaus’s concluding paragraph makes me want to go out and buy a Ford:

Detroit cars will sell when they’re bulletproof [meaning, cars that work], not when they’re green . . . . But only one of the Big Three U.S. car manufacturers has made dramatic progress catching up to Japan on the bulletproof front–and it’s not Chrysler or GM. It’s the one that hasn’t gone broke. …

Indeed.

These reams of paper featured on our page today are the actual pages of the General Motors-United Auto Workers labor contract.  In 2007, contract negotiations between the two resulted in an unprecedented $50 billion millstone around the corporate neck of General Motors.  The $50 billion price tag covered GM’s responsibility to retirees only, consisting mainly of health benefits.

Every so often The New York Times does something right, and today the newspaper has a superb question and answer article that is essentially “the General Motors bankruptcy made simple!”

If you own an American-made car, or are planning on buying one from GM, you’ll want to read it.

This late find…On October 27, 2007, The Washington Post reported the following deal between the General Motors and the United Auto Workers.  The devil is in the details:

“At the core of the new deal is the transfer of retiree health-care payments from GM to the UAW. GM will pay an estimated $35 billion into a trust designed to appreciate in value and pay health-care benefits for retired workers for at least the next 80 years, the union estimated. In return, GM is able to unload a $51 billion burden in retiree health-care obligations from its books, enabling the troubled company to borrow money more easily and move more nimbly against competitors. GM’s health-care liability is more than twice the company’s $21 billion market capitalization.”

Somehow General Motors management was more intent on keeping the corporation afloat in the moment, rather than in the future.

Another indicator of GM’s lack of vision?  The automaker’s top-selling vehicle?  The  The Chevy Silverado.  It’s biggest, gas-guzzling, pick-up truck.