Gary Jason, RCP: The UAW was given a big chunk of new GM in the crooked bankruptcy settlement. To be precise, the very monster that drove GM off the cliff — the UAW — received 35% of the stock in the new company. With the sale of the stock in the new GM, the UAW earned an immediate $3.4 billion in selling about one third of its shares. Moreover, if

Cafe Hayek’s Don Boudreaux reprints his letter to the LA Times: You write that “Washington’s compromise on estate taxes provides an unnecessary handout to a few thousand wealthy families” (“The state of estates,” Dec. 9). Whatever are the merits, or lack thereof, of a tax on estates, you are deceptively wrong to call a decision not to raise that tax a “handout.” Because taxes are paid from resources created and

Krauthammer: Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 – and House Democrats don’t have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years – which just happen to be the two years

WSJ: […] he House Democratic Caucus was brimming with fury at being excluded from the negotiations that produced the agreement. In a closed-door meeting Thursday, the caucus passed a resolution stating that the tax-cut deal would not be brought to the House floor for a vote unless it was changed. “Just say no!” Democrats chanted before the vote, according to an aide in the meeting. Despite the angry caucus vote,

WHY ARE THEY HOLDING THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS HOSTAGE! Here’s what the GOP needs to do: immediately call for an actual tax cut — beyond the continuation of the current decade’s long tax rates — on all those paying taxes on incomes up to, say, $1 million a year. Go with 5-10%. And then they should follow Milton Friedman’s counsel and make the case for insisting those rates become “permanent”

At what point does it become comical to insist on calling yourself a conservative while at the same time claiming the case need be made that socialism is of necessity not consonant with the founding ideals of the American experiment? The TEA Party movement — and its electoral successes — stands as a pointed rebuke to those who told us how unhelpful it was for “purists” and “extremists” on the

2.1 million new legal (mostly low-wage) workers during a time of effective 17% unemployment just isn’t enough to help the economy recover. What we really need is a coerced return to a heavily unionized labor force. Because America is crying for a return to that Jimmy Carter-era prosperity! Washington Examiner: When labor lawyer Craig Becker’s nomination to the National Labor Relations Board was rejected by a bipartisan vote of the

Via Rush Limbaugh, the US delegation at the Cancun global warming summit, in draft version of final summit agreement, agrees to as much as 1.5% of GDP transfer of wealth per year to the UN (above and beyond dues) to combat man-made global climate change — though the language of the agreement doesn’t specify that the money go toward combating global climate change. This is money we don’t have. And

Crony capitalism? The hell you say. AJC: The Obama Administration has quietly granted even more waivers to one provision of the new federal health reform law, doubling the number in just the last three weeks to a new total of 222. One of the more recognizable business names included on the newly-expanded list of waivers issued by the feds is that of Waffle House, which received a waiver on November

We figure we’ll just ram this through now. Don’t bother reading it. It’s a big-time cost-cutter, filled to the brim with stuff Americans want. Trust us. Time to vote!