So why the low effective tax rate?  According to both the Journal and Time, it’s due to a corporate tax break set into the stimulus package, which allowed corporations to use an accounting trick: they could take write-offs on capital investments all at once rather than over time.  Typically, you take a tax write-off as the value of a good depreciates – if you buy a computer, it loses value over time, and you write that in your tax returns.  Under the stimulus package, you were allowed to basically write off the whole purchase.  The result was huge write-offs for corporations.

Now, normally, this wouldn’t be a bad thing.

We’d expect corporations to take that money and dump it back into the economy by hiring and producing new products.  But that hasn’t happened – largely because this is a tax break rather than a permanent tax situation.  In other words, at some point, we’re going to go back to the old system, taxes are going to hike, and the corporations are saving up for a rainy day.

The rainy day is due to come soon.  As Time notes, “While 2012 will be a year of gridlock in Washington, tax reform will be on the top of the agenda for the President and Congress after the election, with corporate tax rates and loopholes a major target of reform.”  “Fairness” will triumph over good business sense, and we’ll see a major economic slowdown.  This is where Time goes wrong – the notion that fairness should dictate tax rates rather than what is productive for the economy as a whole.

And this is the problem with stimulus: it’s always frontloaded.  Until we dump the corporate tax altogether – which really would be fair, since the corporation gets taxed, then pays its employees, who are taxed, too – we’re going to get this bizarre system of deductions and loopholes that only the very wealthy corporations can afford.

So what took so long for this pervert to be caught?  According to the Contra Costa Times, the school is heavily attended by illegal immigrants.  Their parents were afraid to report the situation to the authorities for fear of being arrested and sent back to their home countries.  Manuel Flores, one parent at the school, told the Times that he wouldn’t attend a parents’ meeting, since the school “was full of police.”  Said a lawyer for some of the victims’ families, “One little girl told me she doesn’t want to come forward because she’s afraid her parents will be deported.”

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, “While rumors abound of illegal aliens who allegedly refrain from reporting crimes out of fear of deportation, we could find no substantiated cases of crime victims who were removed as a result of having reported crimes to authorities unless the victims turned out to be criminals as well.”  So this is a nonsensical problem.  But it is constantly dragged out by liberal advocates to suggest normalization of illegal immigrants.  The solution, of course, is twofold: first, encourage everybody to report crimes, regardless of immigration status.  Second, control the border.

What’s the point of this law?  Unless it’s to prevent horrific incidents like this, the only point is to raise cash for the state.  This has become the MO for California law enforcement: higher ticket costs, more tickets written.  California is now a police state – except when it comes to policing actual crime in hard-hit areas.  The state, counties, and cities task police officers with going after soccer moms going 45 in a 35 zone rather than monitoring drug-ridden precincts.

The trend is obvious, and California motorists know it: as McClatchy reported back in August 2011, “As the state and cities wrestled with shrinking revenue and growing budget gaps, the California Highway Patrol issued about 200,000 more traffic citations in 2009 than it did two years before.  Sacramento Superior Court, meanwhile, processed about 37,000 more traffic filings last year than in 2006 – a 16 percent increase.”  The size of the fines has escalated dramatically, too: “With the average fine costing as much as $250 and rising, the increase in CHP tickets produced as much as $50 million over two years. That money went to state and local courts, crime labs and other purposes.”

While officials maintain that no edict has gone out to give more tickets, the politics of the situation is clear: California’s hard up for cash, and they’re willing to do virtually anything to raise it.  That’s why in October, California created an “amnesty” plan for drivers with tickets older than January 2009 – if they paid up by the end of the year, they could pay half price.  That wouldn’t disincentivize bad driving, of course – it would just raise money faster for the state.  Meanwhile, liberals in California have rammed through a bill that blocks police from impounding cars of unlicensed drivers, mainly illegal immigrants – a measure that obviously increases vehicle danger, since illegal immigrants do not have insurance and are disproportionately likely to be involved in accidents.  In fact, unlicensed drivers are five times more likely to be involved in traffic fatality accidents than licensed drivers.

So this isn’t about safety.  It’s about cash, as always.  This is how police states are created – by out-of-control spending requiring somebody to fork over more dough.

Lorenzen-Strait

His job will be to “serve as a point of contact for individuals, including those in immigration proceedings, NGOs, and other community and advocacy groups, who have concerns, questions, recommendations or important issues they would like to raise.” This new role, says Lorenzen-Strait, will help ICE “focus the agency’s immigration enforcement resources on sensible priorities” – code for doing less, since the Obama Administration consistently makes a big deal out of the notion that most illegal immigrants aren’t dangerous and therefore should be left to their own devices – and “implement policies and processes that priorities the health and safety of detainees in our custody.” And he has one more job, according to ICE Enforcement Director John Morton: he’ll have to explain to all of us why ICE lets illegal immigrants off the hook.

What did Lorenzen-Strait used to do? He’s been with ICE since 2008. Before that, he was a pro bono attorney in Maryland, doing child advocacy and divorce work via Community Legal Services. How does that qualify you for working in immigration, exactly? And then there’s the question of money spent. It’s more and more obvious these days that working for the government is the quickest road to a healthy paycheck – and Lorenzen-Strait’s salary proves it. In 2010, he was paid $112,224 by the feds. We can only imagine that the salary has risen since then. Not bad for being a public relations officer who does nothing to actually enforce immigration law.

We’re constantly hearing that the government has trouble finding places to cut spending. This seems like a good place to start.

Except they’re not.  Today, according to the AP, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans that they eat too much bread and rolls, and that such foods account “for more than twice as much sodium as salty junk food like potato chips.”  No wonder we’re fat.

Unfortunately, the federal government that now tells us that we eat too much bread is the same government that originally told us to stuff our pieholes with … bread.  Remember the original food pyramid?

I remember this pyramid – I grew up learning about it in my vaunted public school.  Notice how the bottom section is enormous, and suggests 6-11 bread, cereal, rice and pasta servings each day.  Why did the government originally mandate that?  According to Harvard Medical School’s Eat, Drink and Be Healthy (Simon & Schuster, August 2001), the government was attempting to help out farmers via the Department of Agriculture’s recommendations.

Dr. Walter Willett of Harvard Medical School says that the original pyramid blatantly ignored the evidence against grains.  “There’s an inherent problem with the USDA creating the pyramid,” Willett said.  “The economic interests are so strong …. It’s very difficult for them to be objective, so it’s probably the worst possible agency to do the pyramid.”  As anybody who has ever tried to lose weight by eating bagels can tell you, the food pyramid is a dramatic failure.

The last time the government tried to make everybody skinny, in other words, it made everybody fat instead.  Now the government’s trying to make everybody healthy – by telling us we don’t need early mammograms.  Do you trust them?

This, of course, is blatantly false. To begin, the Constitution says nothing about marriage whatsoever, which means that its definition is left to the states to decide. Second, there are plenty of great reasons to uphold traditional marriage and to disapprove alternative forms of marriage, ranging from thousands of years of history to state interest in childbirth to state interest in child rearing. Thirdly, the notion that the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution applies to homosexual behavior rather than innate distinctions like race is absurd. Marriage laws approve and disapprove behavior, not status. While gay rights advocates like to equate race and sexuality, the two are vastly different – you can’t shake your race, but your behavior can always change, no matter how unpleasant that change may be. Behavior is routinely regulated by the states and invariably affects people differently based on whether or not they engage in said behavior.

Leave aside the absolutely correct charges that this ruling is a legal abomination, and the fact that our judiciary wields far too much clout overall. Let’s focus instead, for a moment, on the impact this ruling will have on the presidential race.

President Obama has been able to elude the question of same-sex marriage overall. His slippery rhetoric indicates that he’s pro-civil unions but anti-same sex marriage but is “evolving.” This ruling will force him to take a side. He will likely attempt to suggest that this is a decision best left to the courts, but he’s never taken that position before – see, for example, campaign finance reform. It’s unlikely that the gay community or the religious community will allow him to get away with that.

If Obama is forced to answer for his position on same-sex marriage, he will be in serious trouble come election time. He is already suffering from low approval ratings among religious groups, and just this week he alienated Catholics with the Health and Human Services announcement that birth control coverage would be required from Catholic employers. Minority voters, especially Latinos and blacks, are anti-same sex marriage as a rule (which is why Prop. 8 passed in the first place – many blacks showed up to vote for Obama in California and voted in favor of traditional marriage at the same time).

While the press likes to complain about the right wing on social issues, the fact remains that same-sex marriage is not a popular movement in key states for Obama. In Florida, for example, 53% believe that same-sex marriage should not be legal, as compared to 37% who believe it should be; in Ohio, that split is 53% to 33%; in Pennsylvania, it’s 51% to 38%. Overall, Americans are moving in the direction of same-sex marriage (a Pew poll showed that Americans now approve same-sex marriage by a 46-44 margin), but older people and nonwhites are particularly against it (just 39% of nonwhites support same-sex marriage). In short, this is not a winning issue for Obama.

It becomes even more of a losing issue because it is being imposed from above by the courts. Obama has largely been able to avoid potential controversy arising from the fact that he will likely have two more Supreme Court nominees if he’s re-elected. With this issue making its way to the Supreme Court, there’s little doubt that this will now become a key campaign issue.

But now, even Hispanics are having second thoughts about Obama. According to a December Ipsos-Telemundo poll, Obama’s approval rating among Latinos is now down to 56%, as opposed to 86% in April 2009. Although Obama’s unfavorables have risen among Latinos, however, only 14% strongly dislike Obama’s presidential approach. That means there’s room for Obama to move the needle up once again.

He’ll have to do it soon. Obama threatens to match John Kerry’s negative Catholic electoral record – Kerry lost the Catholic vote 52-47 in 2004, and he lost white Catholics 43-56. He still won Pennsylvania, a heavily Catholic state (53%), but he lost Florida (26% Catholic) and Ohio (24% Catholic). The most heavily Catholic battleground states other than those three are New Hampshire (35%), Arizona (31%), Louisiana (30%), and Wisconsin (29%). Obama’s anti-Catholic moves may hurt him there.

We’ve actually already seen some movement in terms of the Catholic vote.

According to the National Catholic Register, in 2010, “For the first time in recent memory, the number of Catholic Republicans in the House of Representatives, 61, nearly equals the number of Democratic members at 64 or 65. That marks a dramatic shift from two years ago, when there were 98 Catholic Democrats and 38 Republicans. Catholic membership in the Senate remains relatively stable.”

But don’t get too hopeful yet, conservatives. Polls from the Public Religion Research Institute show Obama beating Mitt Romney 48-40 among Catholics, and defeating Gingrich 56-32. Will Obamacare’s anti-Catholic bent hurt him? Of course. It’s unclear whether it will hurt him enough against either a newly-converted Catholic with a checkered marital history or a Mormon candidate with problems connecting to lower-income voters.