Under the title "Dumb and dumber," a prof schools Hillary

Hillary Clinton, in a recent address at the Brookings Institution: "The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing the kind of employment issues [the U.S. is] -- whether it's individual, corporate or whatever the taxation forms are...Brazil has the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere, and guess what --- they're growing like crazy. And the rich are getting richer, but they're pulling people out of poverty."

Economics Prof. Ralph R. Reiland, in a piece titled Dumb and Dumber, responded in the American Spectator:

"In fact, Brazil doesn't have the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere. Cuba wins that race to fully bloated statism and excessive confiscation of income and wealth. And guess what --- they're not growing like crazy and there's still a shortage of fish even though the country is surrounded by water.

Fishing isn't easy, explains Nick Miroff, a correspondent who covers Cuba for GlobalPost.com, when "Cuba's communist government is so paranoid about illegal departures to the United States that it strictly controls who can own or use boats."

Imagine a nice day on the water. You're nothing, a peon, and the government is everything. You're on a dinky raft held together by some inner tube strips from a '59 Chevy, trying to hook a fish for dinner when some gun-toting government enforcers pull up in a speed boat. "Hey, nutso," they holler (that's "estar mal de la azotea" in Spanish, i.e., "to be off one's nut"), "you a mental case, crazy enough to try to escape to the U.S. hell from the workers' paradise?"

Then the water cops confiscate your fishing rod and you feel lucky that you weren't dropped in a dungeon for 10 years for excessive individualism and trying to steal a sea trout from the people.

Hillary also got it wrong about Brazil growing fast by way of excessively squeezing the rich and by having the highest tax-to-GDP rate. The top marginal tax rate on income in Brazil is 27.5 percent, a substantially lower rate than the 35 percent (and soon to be 39.6 percent) top rate in the United States.

Similarly, the top corporate tax rate in Brazil is 34 percent, lower than the combined federal and state corporate tax of 39.1 percent in the United States, the second-highest rate in the industrialized world (only Japan's 39.5 percent combined rate is higher than the U.S. rate, but 24 states in the U.S. have a combined corporate tax rate higher than top-ranked Japan). 

In other words, if Hillary Clinton is saying that the U.S. should copy Brazil's tax structure in order to get the economy moving and stimulate job creation, that would mean a cut in the U.S. corporate tax rate and a one-third cut in the top U.S. income tax rate, the opposite of her call for higher taxes on the rich.

More broadly, Mrs. Clinton is ignoring the volumes of evidence that show a negative correlation between tax hikes and economic growth.

Who says you can't draw blood as a blogger?

John Coyne wrote a review of Game Change, a chronicle of the 2008 presidential campaign, in which he said this: "The F-word was apparently McCain's trademark. And for readers of Game Change, that's how John McCain, who deserves better, will be remembered."

To which, in The American Spectator's blog, Quin Hillyer responds:

"But WHY does John McCain deserve better? Coyne never explains. Nor could he, because McCain does not deserve better. Does anybody doubt that this man of volcanic and inexcusable temper uses the F-word with reckless abandon? Does anybody doubt that this man of deep grudges, reportedly flagrant infidelities, an intense mean streak, and a disdain for the actual substance of most domestic political issues would easily lend himself to caricature precisely because his own manifold flaws make him a walking caricature all on his own?

It was fellow Republican Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, after all, who early in 2008 -- not somewhere back in distant memory, but in the presidential election year itself -- told The Boston Globe that 'The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.' Cochran was talking about the same McCain who parachuted in to immigration-bill negotiations at the last minute and started yelling at Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, with frequent F-bombs, that he, McCain, knew more about the issue than anybody there, even though he had been gone from the negotiations for six weeks.

Why does John McCain deserve better? Certainly not for flyng off the handle like a lunatic on crystal meth when the financial crisis hit in September of 2008. He soon took to spluttering that it was all the fault of SEC Chairman Chris Cox, a solid conservative and all-around good guy who actually had nothing whatsoever to do with the crisis -- no oversight over the things that went bad, etc. (Actually, McCain's criticism was even more ludicrous than most: The one and only thing that he specifically blamed Cox for NOT doing was something Cox actually had already done.)

McCain certainly dos not deserve better for providing crucial support to His sidekick Lindsey Graham's personal and petty vendetta against Pentagon legal counsel William J. Haynes, when Haynes was up for a well-deserved judgeship -- when Graham and McCain in effect accused Haynes of giving approval for torture, when he had done nothing of the sort.

McCain deserves no credit for running a terrible campaign that saddled us with Barack Obama as president..."

All I can say is, "uff da."