TEA PARTY EXTREMISTS: attacking the aristocracy bureaucracy.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSEN: "[A]fter a half-century in our self-created racial labyrinth, no one quite knows who qualifies as an oppressed victim or why -- only that the more one can change a name or emphasize lineage, the better the careerist edge. The real worry is that soon we will have so many recompense-seeking victims that we will run out of concession-granting oppressors."

RANDOM THOUGHTS on redistributing the wealth from the retirement lane.

I just received one of those 'It wasn't Bush's fault' chain emails that keep coming around. One data point caught my eye: on January 3, 2007, when the Democrats took control of both Houses of Congress, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 12,622. On January 3, 2011, when Republicans regained control of the House, it closed at 11,671. During the four years Democrats owned Congress, the DJIA lost 7.5%. Using the DJIA as a proxy for the 'evil rich millionaires and billionaires', I'd have to say that the Democrats did a pretty good job of destroying redistributing wealth.

On Friday, with Republicans holding only 1/2 the Congress, it closed at 12,861. The DJIA has recovered 10.2% in less than 1-1/2 years....

WHAT'S NEXT after ObamaCare? The Heritage Foundation proposal is reasonable if there is no (federal or state) mandate for a minimum level of coverage.

WHY IS A GHOST TOWN being built in New Mexico?

WHEN REALITY DOESN'T WORK FOR YOU, invent a new one. It used to be that when they had a 'different reality' we called them insane. Now we call them Democrats.

THUG LIFE: The Left's Idea of Tolerance.

DUELING MOTHER'S DAY VIDEOS: guess which one is less political....

DID THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN learn from the EPA, or conversely?

ONCE AGAIN, the Washington Post proves its liberal bona fides:

The end of the hairy, joyless feminist; The Bible made me do it; How ExxonMobil bends Washington - and everyone else - to its will; 5 myths about gay marriage; Obama's 'Julia' says 'I do' to the Hubby State; and Is Mitt Romney's love for America a Mormon thing?,

all in the Sunday Outlook section.

All the headlines are actual headlines. None have been changed from the print edition.

MOVIN' ON.

ADDED: Facebook Co-Founder Saverin Gives Up U.S. Citizenship Before IPO.

LOOK! A SQUIRREL: ObamaMedia's shiny object strategy.

USAF AIRCRAFT: 1947 to Present.

ARE BABY BOOMERS stealing jobs from the young? I doubt it, given that the 55-up workers are most likely to be those in long-established careers.

But judge for yourselves in Political Calculations' Part II and Part III posts.

PRESIDENT OBAMA announces support for square circles.

FAA CRITICIZED as slow to respond to safety concerns. Er, that's exactly the point. The leviathan we lovingly call the U.S. government was specifically designed to be slow to respond in order to dampen the whims and fads of the electorate. It's also true that that loveable levithan has also imposed upon itself duties and responsibilities far greater than the Founders ever envisioned.

COMMERCIAL SPACE IS MOVING FORWARD: Spaceflight Inc unveils the Sherpa in-space tug.

PAUL GREENBERG: The Power of One Free Man.

SHADOW'S WORLD: five years ago today.

THE LAFFER/LOVITZ CURVE. From Zombie at PJMedia:

Remember the Laffer Curve?

First popularized in the ’70s and ’80s, the Laffer Curve was a brilliantly simple economic graph which demonstrated that government revenue grows as taxes are increased only up to a certain point, after which revenues begin to decline as tax rates approach 100%. The high point on the curve shows the optimal tax rate for bringing in the most revenue.

The reasoning behind this is self-evident. Obviously if tax rates are 0%, then the government will collect no tax revenue; but if tax rates are 100%, then the government will almost certainly also collect no tax revenue, because there would be no motivation for anyone to work, earn or invest, since all their income would go directly to the government. A tax rate of 100% may sound tempting at first, but since it would precipitate an economic collapse, the end result would be no economic activity to tax, and thus no revenue. Therefore, the most effective tax rate is somewhere in the middle; the trick is determining exactly where.

Keep the Laffer Curve in mind as we turn our attention to the astounding recent political transformation of comedian Jon Lovitz. On April 23, a recording of a Lovitz comedy routine savagely criticizing Obama’s “bullsh*t” class warfare rhetoric went viral on the Internet, and before long Lovitz was cropping up everywhere, in great demand as the spokesman for everyone disgusted by Obama’s claims that high earners “don’t pay their fair share” in taxes. And this is coming from a self-described Democrat who voted for Obama.

The 'Lovitz Curve' is, of course, just the Laffer Curve applied to that curious subset of rich liberals who have demanded that they be taxed more when it appears to them that their demand will be accepted -- e.g., there is a tax rate beyond which even rich liberals won't pay.

What is amusing to anyone somewhat conversant with calculus is that the Laffer/Lovitz Curve is merely an application of Rolle's Theorem, which was first published in 1691:

Let the function f be defined and continuous on the closed interval a..lte..x..lte..b [..lte.. means 'less than or equal to'] and differentiable in the open interval a..lt..x..lt..b [..lt.. means 'less than']. Furthermore, let f(a) = f(b) = 0. Then there is at least one number c between a and b where
f '(x) is zero; i.e., f '(c) = 0 for some c such that a..lt..c..lt..b.

The proof is available in any number of introductory calculus textbooks; I used my old college text, Thomas' Calculus and Analytic Geometry (1962). Rolle's Theorem is an existence theorem; translated into economic-speak, it doesn't tell us what the tax rate is beyond which government income starts to drop, but it most assuredly tells us that there is one.

PRESIDENTIAL FIRSTS.

IT'S THE NARCISSIM, STUPID.