Saturday Assets & Liabilities

Although I feel somewhat like a liabiliity myself for not having posted as much over the past couple days, I present this week's assets and liabilities as a way of getting myself back on track:

Assets

The U.S. House of Representatives, who this week voted to repeal the estate tax. The theory is that this tax redistributes wealth from the rich to everyone else. If that's true, I'm still waiting for a check for my share of the Rockefeller fortune. In reality, at "best" it double-taxes assets in the estate, and at worst it provides ample incentive for the outrageously wealthy to shunt their money into a variety of tax shelters so as to cleverly avoid any tax. Three cheers to Congress for trying (again) to remedy this situation.

Liabilities

The Europea Union (of course), this time for blocking imports of American genetically modified (GM) animal feed. I've posted already on the GMO issue below, so for here is merely suffices to say that this is a load of Belgian-cow manure. There is no actual scientific evidence that these genetically modified organisms are dangerous. The furur in Europe over this issue has been stirred up by a coalition of eco-weenies and cynical pols. At least the U.S. economy can absorb the hit from this ban. Third-world countries dependent on agricultural trade with the EU can't. So three jeers to the EU for perpetuating a costly myth.