Tom Nugent, a principal at Victoria Capital Management, writes at National Review Online of his intriguing plan to boost government revenues without raising income or corporate taxes:
According to a recent study prepared by Bloomberg, the value of the top-25 school endowments alone is a whopping $180 billion. So let’s do some math. The growth rate of these endowments over the past twelve months was 16.2 percent, with the managers of these funds retaining about 11.2 percent of that gain (based on a 5 percent payout). So if we assume these funds grow at a 12 percent rate over the next twenty years and distribute that 5 percent each year, their total value would be about $697 billion from growth alone. (Ongoing donations would make this total even bigger.)
Now, if the federal government imposed a 30 percent foundation tax on the investment gains of these endowment portfolios, the following would happen: The future value of the top-25 foundations would be “only” $469 billion twenty years from now — much less than $697 billion, but certainly enough to take care of each school’s related needs. However, the total revenues generated by taxing these endowments would be about $1.9 trillion over this time, enough to keep the tax man off the back of hard working Americans
Tobin Harshaw
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Dems in the Gay Rights Spotlight
Last night’s forum for the Democratic candidates sponsored by the gay-rights group Human Rights Campaign wasn’t a debate at all — the candidates appeared one at a time and the panel of questioners, including the rocker Melissa Etheridge, did a fair amount of cheerleading. Still, as the staff at CQPolitics reports, some candidates were a bit … well, uncomfortable:
Etheridge … asked [Bill] Richardson pointedly if he believes being gay is a personal choice or an inherent biological trait. Richardson voiced the most conservative view among the candidates. It is a choice,” he said quickly, looking down.
Etheridge repeated her question in a friendly tone, wondering aloud if Richardson did not understand her the first time. “I’m not a scientist,” he answered. “I don’t see this as an issue of science or definition. I see gays and lesbians as people … I don’t like to answer definitions like that that are grounded in science or something else that I don’t understand.”
The explanation didn’t seem to do much to calm the crowd, and soon after leaving the stage, Governor Richardson called Pam Spaulding of Pam’s House Blend, who was liveblogging at the scene and told her, she reports, that “this is something you are born with, and regardless of whether there is conflict about the science of it (homosexuality), I support full and equal rights. I fully support domestic partnerships.”
Spaulding finds the whole incident “perpexling,” and also thinks that Hillary Clinton was less than perfect: “An even bigger faux pas, if you can call it that, was Clinton’s reassertion that it should be up to the state to decide who can marry. This is simply not acceptable, given the history of bigotry legislated at the state level.”
Dan Blatt, one of the conservatives at Gay Patriot, is amused by Mike Gravel’s statements that marriage is a “commitment of two human beings in love” and that if there’s “anything we need in the world, it’s more love.” He adds that panel-member Margaret Carlson “is right to say there’s no daylight between him and Kucinich on ‘love.’ I agree with that sentiment. But, what does that mean politically? Are they going to create a Department of Love to sit next to Kucinich’s Department of Peace?”
Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof admits that he fell asleep early on, but still feels that the event accomplished two important goals:
First, it tells the electorate that the LGBT community is more than just people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered. Issues that impact the community impact us all. When there are over 1,100 laws and regulations on the books that specifically deny equal rights to those people — including me — they might as well deny all the rights we have as citizens in this country because we don’t get to fully participate, and in many cases we have to bear an extra burden, be it insurance, health care, inheritance, or even the simple matter of going on a two-for-one cruise …The second result of last night’s forum will be to put the anti-gay crowd, whether they’re hiding behind their religion or they’re just plain bigoted, on notice that the LGBT community can’t be taken for granted …An overwhelming majority of Americans think it is wrong to discriminate against gays and lesbians in hiring, and a growing number realize that there are gay people in their families, their work places, their schools, and that they vote.
Well, we’ll see if that proves true. But for now, it seems pretty clear that one person not taking the gay rights crowd for granted right now is the governor of New Mexico.
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