Category Archives: News commentary

Many people are chortling that the libertarian Heartland Institute, one of the leading skeptics of anthropogenic climate change, had documents about its campaigns stolen and published. This is only fair, they say, since Heartland didn’t complain when someone stole the emails of leading government-funded climatologists that showed that the scientists were manipulating the data to make global warming appear more real.

Now global warming activist Peter Gleick has admitted that he is the one who used subterfuge to obtain the Heartland documents. Heartland had claimed that one of the documents was faked. Gleick says someone sent him this document anonymously, and to confirm it Gleick called Heartland pretending to be a board member and asked to have the institute’s board reports sent to him. He then released all the documents, including the spurious one, to the press.

As the Wall Street Journal observes, what the documents actually reveal is that Heartland operates on a relative shoestring budget funded mainly by individual donors, not corporations or government. It did receive a small grant from the infamous (and libertarian) Koch brothers, but Heartland says that grant was for a health care project, not climate change. Heartland’s total annual budget of less than $8 million is a tiny fraction of the budget of such groups as Natural Resources Defense Council ($95 million) or World Wildlife Fund ($238 million). Yes, those groups do other things with their money but so does Heartland.

Continue reading →

“Asking a billionaire to pay at least as much [tax] as his secretary is plain common sense,” says President Obama. When Warren Buffett announced that his secretary paid a higher rate than he did, some people calculated that he must pay her at least $200,000 a year to put her in an (average) 19 percent tax bracket.

Yet the latest report is that Warren Buffett’s secretary pays 35.8 percent of her income in federal income taxes, and other people in his office pay as high as 41 percent. Buffett himself supposedly pays only 11 percent. As dramatic as this sounds, the problem with this story is that the marginal federal tax rate is 35 percent. In 2010, people only paid that rate on incomes over $373,650; the rate on all income up to that amount is lower. If a married person’s income is $400,000, for example, and they they take only the standard deductions, their tax rate is less than 27 percent.

In other words, you can’t have a tax rate of 35.8 percent, much less 41 percent. If Warren Buffett’s secretary is paying that much, she needs a new accountant.

Continue reading →