Pete Spiliakos

Romney’s infamous 47 percent comment did not come from nowhere, but neither did it come from Romney’s personal idiosyncrasies. There was the Wall Street Journal’s “lucky duckies” editorial about lower middle-class families who had little or no income tax liability. There was Ari Fleischer’s column complaining that workers just below the median did not pay enough in taxes… . Continue Reading »

Okay, maybe not lose, so much as lose by huge margins. I think that Republicans would have trouble winning a plurality of the youth vote even if they did everything right, but losing the youth vote by twenty-three points at a time of elevated youth unemployment is just brutal. The College . . . . Continue Reading »

Reihan Salam argues that low-skill immigration impacts US society differently now than a hundred years ago.   Salam writes that the skills gap between low-skill immigrants and native-born American is wider now than in 1900 “and so this particular barrier to assimilation was much . . . . Continue Reading »

Yeah I know I’m late to the party, but here are my two cents, 1. It seems that Bachmann has made her greatest cultural mark as a focus of liberal self-congratulation. I don’t think sneering at a backbench House member who finished dead last in the one presidential delegate selecting . . . . Continue Reading »

1. Kate writes: The current progressive tax system is based in a class-envy model of taxation. Maybe for quite a few on the left, but many on the right ( including Greg Mankiw) can support a progressive tax system with no reference to envy. The diminishing marginal utility of the dollar is implicit . . . . Continue Reading »

and everybody else too. . . . . Continue Reading »

All the talk of Republicans needing to do better among Hispanic voters should not obscure that Romney also failed to maximize his vote total among white voters. Byron York has written a very wise column about how Romney’s Hispanic problem was primarily a middle-class and working-class problem… . Continue Reading »

Ben Domenech is one of the shrewder conservative writers out there. He supports a flat tax writing: The whole point of starting with the argument for a flat tax is to end up with a tax structure that looks more like Simpson-Bowles and less like the mess we have today . . . Of course Republicans . . . . Continue Reading »

These conservative reformers are total frauds.   They don’t really want to change policy.  That’s why they would never support cutting taxes on working-class families partly by eliminating deductions for high-earners.   It is also why none of them have come up . . . . Continue Reading »

National Review has it about right on the Gang of Eight’s immigration proposal. The “amnesty “absurdly includes people who aren’t even residents of the US. The internal enforcement mechanisms are too slow and their implementation should precede amnesty in any case. The Gang . . . . Continue Reading »