Seven days until Election Day, and I plan to be live-blogging election returns right here, so
stay tuned. Hopefully all True Believers should be prepared to do your civic duty on November 2nd.
On that note, here are a couple of interesting summaries on the state of the races as they are:
My personal estimate: The GOP will take the House, easily, with a net gain of perhaps 50 seats. They will end up with 48-49 seats in the Senate. I’d like to see them take the Senate; I’m a big fan of divided government. But looking at today’s polls, that’s still a bit of a long shot. Although, almost everyone agrees, GOP voters are a lot more fired up than Democrat voters. That’s not unusual in a mid-term election, but this year the difference is more pronounced than I’ve ever seen it in 30+ years of election-watching.
The primary focus of this year’s debate is, of course, the economy. One of my favorite economic thinkers and scribes is Dr. Thomas Sowell; have a read on his take on some old, old arguments on economics in Brass Oldies. Excerpt:
Classic songs from years past are sometimes referred to as “golden oldies.” There are political fallacies that have been around for a long time as well. These might be called brass oldies. It certainly takes a lot of brass to keep repeating fallacies that were refuted long ago.
One of these brass oldies is a phrase that has been a perennial favorite of the left, “tax cuts for the rich.” How long ago was this refuted? More than 80 years ago, the “tax cuts for the rich” argument was refuted, both in theory and in practice, by Andrew Mellon, who was Secretary of the Treasury in the 1920s.
When Mellon took office, there was a large national debt, the economy was stagnating, and tax rates were high, though the tax revenues were still not enough to cover government expenditures. What was Mellon’s prescription for getting out of this mess? A series of major cuts in the tax rates!
Then as now, there were people who failed to make the distinction between tax rates and tax revenues. Mellon said, “It seems difficult for some to understand that high rates of taxation do not necessarily mean large revenue for the Government, and that more revenue may often be obtained by lower rates.”
It’s amazing how these same arguments keep getting rehashed, over and over.
Stay tuned, True Believers! More to come.