Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Thursday, August 25, 2011

Those Damned French

By BJ Bjornson

Do you all remember about a week or so ago, when Warren Buffet called for a special tax on the super-rich? And that Fox News quickly denounced this multi-billionaire financier as being a socialist? Well, we now have proof that Fox News was right. Some of those snooty French rich folks just made the same offer to their government to help deal with the deficit, and even worse, it appears that that pinko-commie Sarkozy is planning on taking them up on it! And to think he has the balls to call himself a conservative!


The French government is to impose an extra tax of 3% on annual income above 500,000 euros (�440,000; $721,000).

It is part of a package of measures to try to cut the country's deficit by 12bn euros over two years.

. . .

Sixteen executives, including Europe's richest woman, the L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, had offered in an open letter to pay a "special contribution" in a spirit of "solidarity".

. . .

They said: "We, the presidents and leaders of industry, businessmen and women, bankers and wealthy citizens would like the richest people to have to pay a 'special contribution'."

They said they had benefited from the French system and that: "When the public finances deficit and the prospects of a worsening state debt threaten the future of France and Europe and when the government is asking everybody for solidarity, it seems necessary for us to contribute."


Can you imagine? It�s a wonder any of those French people managed to make so much money with their quaint ideas about how �shared sacrifice� actually applies to the super-rich as well as the poor. No fear however, the Republican Party will make sure such insanity never takes root in the U.S. The rich�s riches must be protected at all costs, after all.



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  1. John BallardAugust 25, 2011 at 5:25 AM

    The contrast is even more stark than meets the eye. The report I heard said that not only do the French pay a graduated tax, the rich are also assessed a "wealth tax" of about 3% of all assets ANNUALLY. (Compare with the US property tax, which in the US is not only designated for state and local revenue but is limited to actual real estate at whatever the "assessed value" happens to be -- a slippery and politically tainted process if ever one was contrived.)
    Imagine how loud the screams would be if anyone proposed even a one-time surtax on net worth above a certain amount. And the idea of a permanent tax of that nature would never pass the giggle test in Washington.

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