Rich Lowry wrote a great commentary on Democrats who themselves become filthy rich using the same tax code that Mitt Romney uses, even while they demonize those that do. It is a laugh. I mean are we to believe that Barack Obama with all his book royalties, isn’t filthy rich? And that his tax accountants aren’t right now exploiting the same Congressionally-crafted tax loopholes as any other wealthy American would?

For that matter, I recall in 2004 two of the most brazen and wealthy Americans — John Edwards and John “Heinz Ketchup” Kerry — running on the Democrat ticket. Where was the outrage then?

Here’s Lowry:

Stephanie Cutter, an adviser to the Obama reelection campaign, wrote a scathing memo the other day about Mitt Romney’s experience at Bain Capital, subtitled “Profit at Any Cost.”

Cutter sounded like a sworn enemy of private equity. Except a few years ago, she was a spokeswoman for J.C. Flowers, a private-equity firm. Why do work for J.C. Flowers when there are so many other worthy ventures needing communications help that don’t make insane amounts of money and pay incredibly well?

Presumably Cutter wanted to be as well compensated as possible, by J.C. Flowers and the “several Fortune 500 companies” her communications firm served, according to her bio. This is utterly unremarkable but for the fact that she is part of an Obama team that argues there is something inherently wrong with income inequality. In his signature Osawatomie, Kan., speech, President Barack Obama asserted that rising inequality hampers those at the bottom. If that’s so, shouldn’t the people around him endeavor to keep from adding to the injustice by making too much money?

But none of them goes out and gets poor. Very few of them, it seems, even go out and get middle-class. They get rich. Many of them climb right into the 1 percent. Obama economic adviser Alan Krueger gave a speech recently lamenting the shrinking middle class, without mentioning that the reason for its diminishment is that so many people have risen all the way out of the middle. By Krueger’s (perverse) standard, major Obama officials have heedlessly contributed to the destruction of the American middle class by earning too much.

Consider only the chiefs of staff. President Obama’s new chief of staff, Jacob Lew, made $1.1 million in one year working for Citigroup. His prior chief of staff, William Daley, made $8.7 million in roughly one year working for JPMorgan Chase. His original chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, made $16 million working for an investment firm. Judging by this record, President Obama only feels comfortable entrusting his affairs to men who have earned outrageous paydays.

The Obama 1 percenters abound. President Obama’s first national economic director, Larry Summers, earned $600,000 as president of Harvard, then went to a hedge fund where he made $5 million in one year, before joining the administration. His first budget director, Peter Orszag, left to make $2 million to $3 million a year at Citigroup. His current national-security adviser, Tom Donilon, got $7 million from his work at Fannie Mae from 2000 to 2003.

Certainly Obama’s top aides don’t have to make millions in finance, but they’d almost have to go out of their way not to get rich. In the aggregate, they are smart, highly educated, and hard-working. They tend to marry people with the same characteristics. They have relatively stable families. They have success — indeed, the 1 percent — written all over them. They probably would be scandalized to work at a private-sector job paying “only” $50,000, the median household income in the U.S.

In a report that has the tone of a revelation about it, the New York Times discovered that the 1 percent is a “varied group, one that includes podiatrists and actuaries, executives and entrepreneurs, the self-made and the silver spoon set.” By one estimate, the 1 percent starts at households making $380,000 a year. That means in 2005, Michelle Obama alone was almost making enough to hoist the Obama household into the dreaded 1 percent with her $316,962 job at the University of Chicago Hospital.

Is it too much to ask that one high-profile Obama official leave government and refuse to make more than $70,000 a year out of solidarity with the middle class and commitment to income equality? Of course it is. Just as the definition of a recession is when someone else loses a job, greed is when someone else makes a lot of money. For anyone hoping to get to the top, the collective message of current and former Obama officials should be clear: Do as they do, not as they say.

It’s a shame that Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, et. al. spent so much time mimicking Democrats in demonizing Mitt Romney for being rich because if nothing else it takes their eye off the ball — defeating a quite weak President Obama by focusing their energies on his truly poor economic decisions. I realize that there needs to be some weeding out of candidate positions and that before they can run on Obama they must run on their immediate competition, but every minute spent off of Obama’s economy is a minute for which Obama is grateful.

Case in point: the recent decision by the Obama Administration to block (semantics aside, let’s call it what it is) to Canadian Keystone pipeline.

The decision is disastrously bad for a number of reasons, which will be highlighted, but even more striking is that they go against the very advice of his own economic and energy advisers and cabinet members. For example, here’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu:

“Having Canada as a supplier of our oil is much more comforting than having other countries supply our oil.”

Wow. No brainer, right? I mean how much grief do Democrats supply in every election cycle about the amount of oil we import from the Middle East. It is, they always tell us — albeit inaccurately and without factual merit — the reason for The Gulf War and 2004 invasion of Iraq. So, if that be the case, why not at least choose to get a larger proportion from our friends?

Of course, here’s the thing. Oil is fungible. It’s a commodity that can be bought and resold 100 times over before it reaches the American consumer. And whether or not an American president chooses to partner with Canadians determined to drill their own territory won’t change that fact. Thus the inevitable — Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said, fine, if you don’t want to partner with our pipeline than perhaps the Chinese will be interested.

You could say that with that decision, to borrow a quote from our current first lady, I’ve never been more proud of the Canadians. I don’t blame them. They’ve got a resource to sell. If we don’t want it, others do. And here’s the great irony. Not only will we be potentially buying Chinese oil then, but should the production price become cheaper than what some of our “enemy” countries can do, they may be prone to buy the Canadian-Chinese oil and turn around and sell back to the US too. That’s how commodities work.

But it gets even better. First, as historian Victor Davis Hanson labels it, and I do love this, it is “the antithesis of Solyndra.” The Chinese, and not Americans, get an estimated 10-20 thousand production jobs.

Here’s the most ironic and comical angle though — Obama’s decision is at best a zero-sum protection for the environment, and more than likely even worse for the environment. Like the Canadian PM said — they’re drilling, baby, whether we like it or not. The impact to the environment is therefore moot. It’s analogous to drilling in the Gulf of Mexico — whether we do or not the Cubans, Chinese, Venezuelans and others will. By taking part you can at least take the lead in doing it as cleanly as possible whereas if you forgo doing so you give no reason for another country to follow suit with improving standards and technology. And if an oil spill can occur in Canada (or the Gulf) from American mishap, the chances are even greater so when it’s China doing the work, or Cuba doing the Gulf drilling.

Here’s Hanson again:

If the Keystone project raises environmental issues, then every other comparable one would too. It is not as if the route bisects Yosemite on its way to Big Sur. How strange — we assume that the Saudis or the Turks can build pipelines across their own lands without environmental problems, but that we, the apparently less technologically advanced, cannot. We hear that oil is “fungible”; if so, each barrel that we pass on, someone else less green won’t.

With that decision — or rather lack thereof — we abrogate our leadership position and lose all influence to pressure these other countries into stricter standards. We accept all of the risk, with zero of the benefit. Bravo Obama!

In a weekly newsletter NRO columnist and author Jonah Goldberg had this to say regarding the Jerry Sandusky Penn State scandal:

“My father always used to say that the biggest source of corruption isn’t money, but friendship. He’s right. Go offer a newspaper editor or politician $10,000 to hire someone. Most won’t even consider it. But if a friend asks for a favor, the answer is much more likely to be yes. Friends strike bargains with friends, even though they could get a better deal elsewhere. Friends forgive mistakes in business because that’s what friends do.

Not all such transactions are corrupt so much as part and parcel of how civil society works. Besides, because friendship goes both ways, paying a premium for the trust and reliability of such relationships might actually be a good business decision. Which is simply to emphasize the fact that corruption is a very complicated thing, with variables and considerations not immediately apparent to those looking from the outside in. Still, tribal, familial, and social allegiances most certainly can be corrupting, in large ways and small. After all, in many circumstances we’re more likely to lie to our friends than to strangers. “I loved your column!” “I read your book!” “Your daughter’s beautiful!”

Anyway, this is a long way of saying I don’t think there’s any amount of money — nor any job — that would cause me to turn a blind eye to something like this. But I could see it taking more effort and time to do the right thing if it were a friend or a loved one. I told one of my best friends yesterday that if it was him, I’d give him 24 hours to turn himself in or to commit suicide. I’d like to believe that’s true. I know I never want to be put to the test.

Great commentary by Sen. Lisa Murkowski regarding President Obama’s plan to enact a 5-year ban on all offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic and Pacific oceans. To wit, it only applies to the United States.

As we continue our endless debate on whether we should have more Outer Continental Shelf development and where, all our neighbors have chosen to proceed. Cuba, Mexico, the Bahamas, Canada and Russia are all moving ahead on offshore development adjacent to our borders.

Each of those nations has weighed the economic benefits of offshore production against the potential environmental risks. All five have decided it is in their best interest to proceed. This means two things for our nation.

First, we fail to boost our offshore production at our own expense. America’s neighbors are not drilling for fun or for sport; they’ve chosen to proceed to create new jobs, generate new revenues, and increase the energy supply and prosperity of their citizens.

… Less obvious, but just as real, are the environmental impact that may still result even if we refuse to boost offshore production.

Like it or not, development is now under way in waters all around us. Mexico is advancing on a deepwater well only 22 miles from U.S. waters in the Gulf of Mexico. Before year’s end, Cuba is scheduled to drill 60 miles from Key West, and the Bahamas are proceeding with leases not much farther away. Canada is actively drilling projects not far from Maine’s coastline and proceeding towards development in the Beaufort Sea, just east of Alaskan waters. Along Alaska’s western boundary, Russia is aggressively moving into the Arctic Ocean, with exploration at the very edge of the boundary of Alaskan waters.

In a few years, the U.S. could wind up in a regrettable position—exposed to all of the risks of offshore development but with no control and none of the rewards. … Sitting on the sidelines will also mean we have minimal influence on the standards and regulations for foreign operations. Regardless of our relations with neighbors, it’s not realistic to expect them to match our requirements if we are not demonstrating that they are both workable and profitable.

I was ROFL, as they say or rather tweet/text, when I read the part where senators recommended replacing Google search formulas with a “panel of experts.” I mean, if that doesn’t sum up everything that is wrong with the government I don’t know what does. Has any government panel of experts ever solved anything?

(Example, the first draft of Congress’s new “Volcker Rule” is already up to about 300 pages and has propted more than 1,300 questions on exactly how regulators will enforce the newly proposed banking rules. I know! They need a “Panel Of Experts! It reminds me of the brilliant movie Idiocracy).

[WSJ] Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, gave a remarkable interview this month to the Washington Post. So remarkable that Post editors preceded the transcript with this disclosure: “He had just come from the dentist. And he had a toothache.”

Perhaps it was the Novocain talking, but Mr. Schmidt has done us a service. He said in public what most technologists will say only in private. Whatever caused him to speak forthrightly about the disconnects between Silicon Valley and Washington, his comments deserve wider attention.

Mr. Schmidt had just given his first congressional testimony. He was called before the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee to answer allegations that Google is a monopolist, a charge the Federal Trade Commission is also investigating.

“So we get hauled in front of the Congress for developing a product that’s free, that serves a billion people. OK? I mean, I don’t know how to say it any clearer,” Mr. Schmidt told the Post. “It’s not like we raised prices. We could lower prices from free to . . . lower than free? You see what I’m saying?”

An absence of consumer harm didn’t stop senators from offering some improbable recommendations. Among them: that Google replace its algorithm with a panel of experts to ensure “fair” search results. As Google tries to improve the relevancy of its search results for consumers, some sites inevitably come up higher and some lower in the results. The losers now lobby Washington.

“Regulation prohibits real innovation, because the regulation essentially defines a path to follow,” Mr. Schmidt said. This “by definition has a bias to the current outcome, because it’s a path for the current outcome.”

Here’s a great commentary by Jonah Goldberg (from his G-file e-letter) on the OWS movement:

As I mentioned in the Corner, I love this story about the fraying tensions among the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Aside from the general schadenfreudtasticness of it all, I found this bit to contain some fascinating contradictions. Apparently some of the “facilitators” — you might call them the avant-garde of the avant-garde of the avant-garde of the lumpenproletariat — have started censoring and taxing the drummers.

To Shane Engelerdt, a 19-year-old from Jersey City and self-described former “head drummer,” this amounted to a Jacobinic betrayal. “They are becoming the government we’re trying to protest,” he said. “They didn’t even give the drummers a say. . . . Drumming is the heartbeat of this movement. Look around: This is dead, you need a pulse to keep something alive.”

The drummers claim that the finance working group even levied a percussion tax of sorts, taking up to half of the $150-300 a day that the drum circle was receiving in tips. “Now they have over $500,000 from all sorts of places,” said Engelerdt. “We’re like, what’s going on here? They’re like the banks we’re protesting.”

Wait a second. The leadership of OWS is imposing a 50 percent tax rate on the most successful and entrepreneurial protesters and they’re regulating their ability to satisfy the consumer (as it were)?

This Engelerdt guy’s grasp of political theory is a bit off, though. First he says that the organizers are becoming the sort of government they’re protesting. Except that has it exactly wrong. They’re becoming the sort of government they’re demanding!

He then goes on to say that the decision to confiscate so much of the drummers’ obscene profits makes the organizers like the banks. But the banks don’t tax anybody — that’s government’s job. In fact, if these guys had their way, the drummers should be taxed at a much higher rate, right? Why should the drummers make so much more than the guy running the seminar on how to make hemp-twine condoms or the lady teaching folks how to recycle everything from urine to toilet paper?

Beyond the Occupy Wall Street crowd playing the part of the “useful idiots” of organized socialist, national socialist (i.e., Nazi)  and communist parties, you’ve got a massive number of economically-ignorant, naive or at minimum mis-educated youths who seem unaware that they’re protesting the wrong street: Instead of occupying Wall Street they should be occupying K-street, or better yet, the Independence, First, and Constitution streets that surround the Capital building.

[Bloomberg] Federal employees whose compensation averages more than $126,000 and the nation’s greatest concentration of lawyers helped Washington edge out San Jose as the wealthiest U.S. metropolitan area, government data show.

The U.S. capital has swapped top spots with Silicon Valley, according to recent Census Bureau figures, with the typical household in the Washington metro area earning $84,523 last year. The national median income for 2010 was $50,046.

The figures demonstrate how the nation’s political and financial classes are prospering as the economy struggles with unemployment above 9 percent and thousands of Americans protest in the streets against income disparity, said Kevin Zeese, director of Prosperity Agenda, a Baltimore-based advocacy group trying to narrow the divide between rich and poor.

“There’s a gap that’s isolating Washington from the reality of the rest of the country,” Zeese said. “They just get more and more out of touch.”

Total compensation for federal workers, including health care and other benefits, last year averaged $126,369, compared with $122,697 in 2009, according to Bloomberg News calculations of Commerce Department data. There were 170,467 federal employees in the District of Columbia as of June.

That’s right. People working for the federal government make more money than those who actually produce things, be they in Silicon Valley, New York City, Atlanta or B.F. Idaho. And why is that? Well as Tina Korbe points out the Beltway “boasts one lawyer for every 12 city residents” — that’s a lot of “fat cats” to grease the palms of your slimy senator or representative in turn for tax dollars and fabricated “shovel ready” phantom jobs required to sort through phone-book sized regulatory bills.

The Bloomberg report continues:

Lobbyists play a prominent role in the Washington economy. In 2010 there were 12,964 registered lobbyists, with most working in or around the nation’s capital, according to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington- based research group that tracks political spending. Spending on lobbying efforts reached a record $3.51 billion last year, up from $3.49 billion in 2009.

Ironically, while President Barack Obama and Democrats have been expressing solidarity with this confused lot of Marxists, they’re well entrenched in the Lobby enterprise.

This week the Washington Post reported that “President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate, according to new fundraising data. … Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all of the GOP candidates combined, according to a Washington Post analysis of contribution data.”

The Democrats are against lobbying and big banking… except when they’re for it.

WSJ:

After Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as part of Dodd-Frank, President Obama said the government would prevent “hidden penalties and fees” and ensure “clear and concise information.” He promised banks that “unless your business model depends on cutting corners or bilking your customers, you’ve got nothing to fear from reform.”

Flash forward to today, and the full weight of Mr. Obama’s Washington is coming down on a bank for making perhaps the most transparent pricing change in the history of American finance. Is there any consumer who hasn’t heard that Bank of America will start charging a $5 monthly fee on debit cards? Could there be a simpler communication to allow consumers to consider other debit cards or other payment options?

For doing exactly what President Obama claimed that he wanted, the bank was rewarded by the President with an assault on national television. Mr. Obama told ABC television that the proposed fee “is exactly why we need this consumer finance protection bureau that we set up that is ready to go.”

When ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked if the fee could be stopped, Mr. Obama replied, “Well, you can stop it because it—if you—if you say to the banks, ‘You don’t have some inherent right just to, you know, get a certain amount of profit if your customers are being mistreated.’”

Mr. Durbin, incensed at the results of his plan to transfer wealth from banks to retailers, has been urging customers to close their accounts at Bank of America. Reasonable people can disagree about which politician is more economically irresponsible—the President who wants bureaucrats to dictate profit margins or the Senator who encourages a run on a bank.

Exactly. How did the Democrats expect the banking world to react to government price controls that cut their debit-card profits in half?

In any event, one should beware this new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — because a group of un-elected, unaccountable bureaucrats are now with us forever. Their actions have already created unintended disincentives that diminish consumer purchasing power and create fewer customer choices. It starts with debit. But one day they’ll move on to credit-card, prepaid cards, and so on.

WSJ:

All of the details weren’t clear in media reports as we went to press, but it seems Mr. Reid’s surtax would raise tax rates on millionaires by five percentage points starting January 1, 2012, or less than four months from now. That’s a year earlier than the tax increases that Mr. Obama is proposing. So much for the President’s promise that “nobody is talking about raising taxes right now.”

How this would stimulate a sluggish economy even under Keynesian economic theory is a mystery, unless you believe like Democrats apparently do that tax rates don’t matter to economic growth.

We doubt that’s how millions of small business owners will feel if they start paying a top marginal rate on their income—which they report through the individual tax code as Subchapter S companies—of 40%. That would rise to nearly 46% in 2013 under Mr. Obama’s other tax proposals (including deduction phaseouts), plus another 3.8% under ObamaCare’s tax increases on investment and payroll income. So Uncle Harry would take nearly 50% of everything they make. Who wouldn’t want to run out and hire more workers with that incentive?

Here’s a great tribute to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, by Kevin Williamson:

Jobs was sometimes criticized for not being a philanthropist along the lines of Bill Gates. Take this article, for example:

Last year the founder of the Stanford Social Innovation Review called Apple one of “America’s Least Philanthropic Companies.” Jobs had terminated all of Apple’s long-standing corporate philanthropy programs within weeks after returning to Apple in 1997, citing the need to cut costs until profitability rebounded. But the programs have never been restored.

CNN, being CNN, misses the point. Mr. Jobs’s contribution to the world is Apple and its products, along with Pixar and his other enterprises, his 338 patented inventions — his work — not some Steve Jobs Memorial Foundation for Giving Stuff to Poor People in Exotic Lands and Making Me Feel Good About Myself. Because he already did that: He gave them better computers, better telephones, better music players, etc. In a lot of cases, he gave them better jobs, too. Did he do it because he was a nice guy, or because he was greedy, or because he was a maniacally single-minded competitor who got up every morning possessed by an unspeakable rage to strangle his rivals? The beauty of capitalism — the beauty of the iPhone world as opposed to the world of politics — is that that question does not matter one little bit. Whatever drove Jobs, it drove him to create superior products, better stuff at better prices. Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content. Perhaps you do not think that Apple, or Goldman Sachs, or a professional sports enterprise, or an Internet pornographer actually creates much social value; but markets are very democratic — everybody gets to decide for himself what he values. That is not the final answer to every question, because economic answers can satisfy only economic questions. But the range of questions requiring economic answers is very broad.