Friday, February 27, 2009
Obama eyes revenues via green policy, taxing rich
President Barack Obama is moving to raise new revenues and curb a massive deficit through two key channels under his maiden budget plan: a 'green' energy scheme, and taxes on 'the rich'...
[You've probably forgotten the >9000-Earmarks in the 410 Billion 9-month (to Sept. '09) spending bill passed just yesterday...
Well, evidently today's another day...]
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Obama's Budget: Almost $1 Trillion in New Taxes
President Obama's budget proposes $989 billion in new taxes over the course of the next 10 years, starting fiscal year 2011, most of which are tax increases on individuals.
1) On people making more than $250,000.
$338 billion - Bush tax cuts expire
$179 billlion - eliminate itemized deduction
$118 billion - capital gains tax hike
Total: $636 billion/10 years
2) Businesses:
$17 billion - Reinstate Superfund taxes
$24 billion - tax carried-interest as income
$5 billion - codify "economic substance doctrine"
$61 billion - repeal LIFO
$210 billion - international enforcement, reform deferral, other tax reform
$4 billion - information reporting for rental payments
$5.3 billion - excise tax on Gulf of Mexico oil and gas
$3.4 billion - repeal expensing of tangible drilling costs
$62 million - repeal deduction for tertiary injectants
$49 million - repeal passive loss exception for working interests in oil and natural gas properties
$13 billion - repeal manufacturing tax deduction for oil and natural gas companies
$1 billion - increase to 7 years geological and geophysical amortization period for independent producers
$882 million - eliminate advanced earned income tax credit
Total: $353 billion/10 years.
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[Or, to explain this budget in graphical terms:
Obama can't win war on business
Making war on business is no way to stimulate an economy. But read between the lines of President Barack Obama's address to Congress and you find a battle plan for a broad attack on industrial America.
His proposals reflect a stunning disregard for the impact of government policies on economic output and a clear preference for jobs created by government spending rather than private investment...
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THE DEFICIT CHARADE
."And that's why today I'm pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office,"
President Obama said at his summit. But what does that mean?
- The administration says President Obama's promise to "cut the deficit we inherited in half" means he will reduce it from $1.3 trillion in fiscal 2009 to $533 billion in fiscal 2013.
- This $533 billion deficit -- that President Obama vows will be the lowest annual deficit he runs in any of the next four years -- is larger than any deficit the profligate President Bush ran before this recessionary year.
- In fact, President Obama's planned $533 billion deficit for fiscal 2013 is more than twice as large as the $248.1 billion deficit Bush ran in 2006 and more than three times as large as the $162 billion deficit Bush ran in 2007.
Every dollar President Obama borrows and spends, like every dollar President Bush borrowed and spent, adds to the permanent burden of government laid on the backs of our children.
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THE 2 PERCENT ILLUSION
President Obama has laid out the most ambitious and expensive domestic agenda since LBJ, and now all he has to do is figure out how to pay for it. On Tuesday, he left the impression that we need merely end "tax breaks for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans," and he promised that households earning less than $250,000 won't see their taxes increased by "one single dime."
This is going to be some trick, says the Wall Street Journal. Even the most basic inspection of the IRS income tax statistics shows that raising taxes on the salaries, dividends and capital gains of those making more than $250,000 can't possibly raise enough revenue to fund Obama's new spending ambitions.
Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and "the wealthiest 2 percent":
- Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006 (that's about 7 percent of all returns; the data aren't broken down at the $250,000 point).
- These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62 percent of all federal individual income receipts.
- The richest 1 percent -- about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 -- paid some $408 billion, or 39.9 percent of all income tax revenues.
These combined increases won't come close to raising the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Obama is going to need. Even if Obama confiscated 100 percent of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006, this would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue - or about half the spending he's proposed so far.
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Many Americans Question Fairness of Tax System
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 42% say people who earn twice as much as they do pay less than twice as much in taxes. At the same time, 37% say those who earn half as much pay less than half as much in taxes.
Only 14% believe those with higher incomes pay a higher share of it in taxes.
[*More proof that class warfare propaganda campaigns work.]
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Government Is Still the Problem
In early October, as the meltdown of the financial industry gained momentum following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 59% of U.S. voters agreed with Ronald Reagan that“government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows that this basic view of the American people has not changed: 59% of voters still agree with Reagan’s inaugural address statement. Only 28% disagree, and 14% are not sure.
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[Make that media popularity:]
One month in, Barack Obama's approval slips, disapproval doubles
One month down, 47 to go.
And Barack Obama's poll numbers have slid almost 10% already. According to the latest Gallup Poll, the new president's approval rating of 68% in January has slipped now to 63%, about average for recent new presidents one month in.
What isn't average, however, is Obama's new disapproval rating -- 24%, or 50% higher than the 16% average for a month-old new presidency.
And it's twice the 12% disapproval rate that Obama had last month.
Additionally, Obama's support has weakened among middle-class Americans, those touted during the campaign as benefiting from his promised tax cuts. Among that working crowd, Obama's approval fell from 69% to 58%.
Historically, 63-62% approval after a month is about average; Ronald Reagan had the worst at 55%, and Jimmy Carter had the best at 71%. Look how they turned out.
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[Isn't that interesting about Regan and Carter - any chance media bias influenced those early numbers {before actual performance trumped spin}? MEANWHILE, the 'poll' getting all the TV coverage:
Survey Reveals Broad Support for President
President Obama is benefiting from remarkably high levels of optimism and confidence among Americans about his leadership, providing him with substantial political clout as he confronts the nation’s economic challenges and opposition from nearly all Republicans in Congress, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
A majority of people surveyed in both parties said Mr. Obama was striving to work in a bipartisan way, but most faulted Republicans. [?]
[Same President, same basic polling topic - just a complete lack of context {trending or historical} with a little partisan demagoguery thrown in. What bias? And to think an organization like this is going bankrupt - go figure.]
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Mastermind of 9/11 gives Texans a chill
Rep. Michael McCaul called the moment chilling and eerie. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said she froze in place. And Rep. Pete Olson stared through the one-way glass, thinking, “My God, that’s the man who planned the attacks.”
There he was in a stark cell at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, kneeling on a prayer rug, head bowed, wearing the white cap of faithful Muslim men worldwide. [snip]
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 44, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 al-Qaida attacks on the United States, appeared thinner than in the photos taken the 2003 night of his capture in Pakistan. [snip] But from what three members of Houston’s congressional delegation observed during a tour of the Guantanamo Bay facility, Mohammed remains every bit as bent on America’s destruction as the day he orchestrated the synchronized suicide attacks against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. [snip]
The visit, cleared by Attorney General Eric Holder, was part of the Obama administration’s new public relations campaign to show human rights advocates that all 241 prisoners are being treated humanely...
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Gitmo in Conformity with Geneva Convention
The Guantanamo Bay prison where terror suspects are held was examined by a special task force ordered by President Barack Obama. In its 81-page report, released Monday, the task force concluded:
“After considerable deliberation and a comprehensive review, it is our judgment that the conditions of confinement in Guantanamo are in conformity with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention.”[Again, control of language as spin: the conventions explicitly do not apply to those who have acted as the terrorists have - yet again and again it's portrayed as if they somehow do - and is this what we're to believe 'humane' treatment of terrorists is to mean?...>]
The report also noted that the prison, popularly referred to as Gitmo, keeps its thermostat set between 75 and 80 degrees, provides art classes to the prisoners, and holds a library of 13,000 books, 900 magazines, 300 DVDs and regular TV programs. Also, there is a “detainee newsletter.”
Every prisoner has a copy of the Koran in the language of their choice. Each prisoner is given prayer beads, cap, rug and current prayer schedule. “Guards and staff have received specialized cultural and religious sensitivity training,” and the report adds, “guards have been disciplined for interfering with prayer time.”
The recreation includes a “large recreation yard with facilities/equipment to support soccer, basketball, volleyball, jogging, table tennis, foosball (sic), treadmill and elliptical machines – for up to 20 hours daily.”The prisoners are provided three hot meals per day with between 4,500 and 5,000 calories daily. They have “six menus for detainees to choose from,” with a typical meal consisting of “meat, starch (plus bread), vegetable, dessert, fruit, fruit juice or similar drink.”
[more, disgusting.]
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I Will Defend to the Death Their Right to Silence You
In Amsterdam, the capital of freedom and tolerance, a Dutch Muslim nearly decapitated filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who had made a movie that criticized the mistreatment of women in Islam. Dutch cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot's depiction of Mohammed set mobs of Muslims in a rampage not only in Holland, but all over the world. Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders produced a 17-minute film Fitna, which juxtaposes quotations from the Koran and documentary footage of Islamic leaders inciting violence (jihad) based on those quotations. Wilder is on 24-hour police protection since al-Qaeda issued a fatwa calling for Wilder's murder.
There is some pushback. Despite the threats to his own life, Geert Wilders has come to the U.S. this week to make the case for an "International First Amendment." Wilder and the International Free Press Society, in conjunction with the Center for Security Policy, are speaking out against the he insinuation of Shariah legal codes and practices into Free World.
Apparently some in Congress still understand the need to protect Free Speech. Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) has invited Geert Wilders to present the film Fitna to the United States Senate this Thursday in the Senate office once used by Lyndon B. Johnson. Our gratitude goes to Wilders and to Kyl and a strong message to those who are sacrificing freedom for political correctness. The credo of Western Liberty must not be distorted to read, "Islamists disapprove of what you say, so I will defend to the death their right to silence you."
Wilders' movie has been pulled from the web many times, but here is a link to Fitna the movie.
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How Democracies Become Tyrannies
Can a free people willingly choose servitude? Is it possible for democracies to become tyrannies? How? Back in 1959 the philosopher Eric Hoffer had this to say about Americans and America:For those who want to be left alone to realize their capacities and talents this is an ideal country.
Flash forward fifty years to the election of Barack Obama and a hard left leaning Democrat Congress. What Americans want today, apparently, is a government that has no intention of leaving any of us alone. [snip]
The deeper theme of Plato's Republic is the nature of education and the relationship between education and the survival of the state. In short, it's about a journey that results in the realization that justice and happiness in a community rests upon the moral condition of its citizens.
The short version of his theory is that the combination of freedom and poor education in a democracy render the citizens incapable of mastering their impulses and deferring gratification. [snip]
The progressive left in America has spent countless generations destroying the guardians of our inner citadel: religion, family, parents, and tradition - in short, conservatism and limits. When we exhaust the financial and moral capital of previous generations (and future ones, as with the current stimulus bill) we will dutifully line up at the public trough, on our knees.
[Highly Recommended > ]
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"A government big enough to supply you with everything you need, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have...."-- Thomas Jefferson
A FUNNY SORT OF DEPRESSION
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Are we headed to something like the Great Depression?
There is clearly much to be worried about. Most of America's private retirement 401(k) accounts have significantly decreased in value since last autumn's crash. Home equity has plunged. The unemployment rate is above 7 percent and climbing. [snip]
Given all that news, we are in a funny sort of depression. Our spiraling national deficit is being financed by China, Japan and other overseas concerns at almost no interest -- saving the United States trillions of dollars in debt service costs.
Nearly 93 percent of those Americans in the workforce are still employed. Americans, who import 60 percent of their transportation fuel, along with natural gas, have been given about a half-trillion-dollar annual reprieve. [snip]
The vast majority of American homeowners -- well over 90 percent -- meet their mortgage payments. They have no plans to flip their homes for profit. Most are confident that after a few years their houses will appreciate again. As for now, working young couples have a chance to buy a house that would have been impossible just two years ago.
The majority of working Americans are not pulling out their sinking retirement funds. Most are still putting away pre-tax money each month, apparently confident that within a few years their portfolios will return to their former value. Some are even consoled that they are now buying mutual funds at rock-bottom prices. [snip]
For the vast majority of Americans, the fall in prices for almost everything from food to cars has, in real dollars, meant an actual increase in purchasing power.
I live in southeastern Fresno County, one of the poorest regions of a now nearly bankrupt California. Many people are hurting. Yet to go to the local Wal-Mart is to see late-model cars in the parking lots and plenty of cell phones, iPods and BlackBerrys among the shoppers. Carts are stuffed with consumer goods, lots of food and Easter confections.
So are we in a depression that justifies a vast redefinition of government and a massive takeover of the private sector? Not quite. What we are a witnessing instead is a sharp downturn from the most affluent era in the history of civilization.*
For the last two decades, we borrowed and spent as if there were no tomorrow. Now we are living in that tomorrow of cutting back and making do. In relative terms, it is no longer 2005, but that does not mean it is 1932.
[*And we need remember what brought us that prosperity {hint: it wasn't government} - Highly Recommended > ]
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Paved With Renewable Mandates
Highly informed sources (don't you love that phrase) tell us that Senate majority leader Harry "Hands-Off-Yucca-Mountain" Reid will be pushing for the Senate to adopt a national renewable energy portfolio within the next two weeks. Reid has reportedly told Senator Jeff Bingaman (N.M.), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee, he wants a bill on the Senate floor within two weeks.
[Here we go again: two weeks, for a national energy policy.
We're witnessing the creation of the next major investment bubble, and it's green.]
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Repeal Health Care Fascism
[HT:BN]
Buried in Barack Obama's so-called stimulus bill is funding for a bureaucratic structure for the government to begin rationing the health care of the American people. (Snip)
Unless this is stopped, many of you reading this article right now will one day suffer death-by-liberalism, when the government bureaucracy decides that the health care you need is not worth the cost, or puts you in a waiting line where death will arrive before treatment...
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Hollywood Extols National Healthcare While Closing Its OWN Actors Hospital and Long-Term Care Facilities
The self-aggrandizing denizens of Hollywood constantly scold Americans over a lack of national healthcare. It is the biggest failure of American society ever that there is no cradle to the grave program for free health care, they constantly tell us.
And now, in keeping with these nearly universal Hollywood "principles," to prove how Hollywood is far more moral than we lowly citizens of flyover country, and to show that they are better than the great unwashed in the backwaters of America... Hollywood is closing its nearly 90-year-old Motion Picture Fund hospital and accompanying long-term living facilities for aging actors.
Yep, dumping it. Walking away. Fuggedaboutit.
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Most Say Affirmative Action No Longer Relevant
Americans are closely divided over the need for continued affirmative action programs now the country has elected its first African-American president.
Thirty-eight percent (38%) of adults say affirmative action is still relevant, but 41% disagree in a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Twenty-one percent (21%) are not sure.
Last August, prior to the election of Barack Obama as president, 46% of Americans said affirmative action programs were no longer needed.
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Southington Council Member Suspended For Comments
A long-time member of the Southington town council has been suspended for two weeks without pay from his job as director of the town's chamber of commerce for comments at a recent council meeting in which he referred to a Satanic symbol while mentioning President Barack Obama.
[Say something nasty about this president, lose your livelihood. Liberal tolerance in Amerika.]
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ABC 2001: 'Hard Core' Conservative Bush; 2099: No Label for Obama
Despite calling for massive new spending on education, universal health care and more money for bailing out banks, no ABC anchor on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning used the word liberal in describing Barack Obama's February 24 address to Congress.
In contrast, ABC host Terry Moran on February 27, 2001 anticipated that a similar speech by President George W. Bush would be "conservative." Following that address, he spun it as "hard core conservatism: fiscal restraint; deep, across-the-board spending and tax cuts; the privatization of part of Social Security."
[What bias? Move along...]
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What's Free Enterprise? Don't Ask Us!
Since the economy slipped into a recession last year, Americans have seen leaders of both parties push unprecedented policies in response to the downturn, including federal bailouts of banks, automakers and mortgage holders.(snip)
Do Americans understand the free enterprise system — the system that made this nation wealthy in the first place — well enough to intelligently scrutinize the policy proposals now being advanced by our elected leaders?
[1) Control the money. 2) Control the media. 3) Control the schools.]
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Slightly historical
So the proposed re-enactment of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in Quebec has been scrapped.
Even though it would have been entirely accurate, if appallingly over-sensitive to the losers, it told a truth that was not pleasant to militant separatists. And nobody wants to in any way offend anybody in modern Canada.
Welcome to the wonderful world of historical revisionism. [snip]
So what other historical truths must never be mentioned for fear of hurting feelings?
That Africans themselves often sold people to white slavers and that long after slavery was abolished, particularly under African and Arab leadership.
Or that the Ottoman Empire's surveys revealed that very few people lived in the area later known as Palestine until the Jews returned to it, and that it was not considered a nation state or a separate political entity.
Or that after Israel had conquered Gaza and the West Bank it offered them back to Egypt and Jordan and both refused. [because Israel's (only) 'price' is that it be recognized.]
Or that the Crusades were not known as such until long after they had stopped and that they were merely a direct response to Islam's invasion of the Christian heartlands of North Africa and the Levant.
Or that Joseph Stalin killed more people than Hitler, that Che Guevara was a mass murderer.
Or that Galileo was a faithful Catholic whose patron was a cardinal and that Copernicus was a priest. [missed that one][snip]
There is a terribly politically incorrect joke about French roads being lined with trees so that Germans can march in the shade. This joke should never be re-enacted because it might cause offense to someone.
Trees perhaps.
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[Point: Revisionist history is rampant in every sphere dominated by the Left; media, government and worst of all (public) education. It erodes the very foundation of our society. So what to do? {tell me if you've heard any of these before}:
Media: internet not TV.
Government: pay attention and act.
Education: demand universal-unencumbered vouchers {and elect those who support}.
Big problems don't have push-button solutions, they have paths to recovery - traversed one step at a time...]
Delta, Northwest mechanics reject union representation
Mechanics at Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines, the two carriers that merged in March to create the world's largest air carrier, have decided they won't be represented by a union, the company announced Thursday. (snip) The National Mediation Board, which oversees labor issues for railroads and airlines, revoked the union's certification this morning following a vote of the 6,700 employees.
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Anti-terror unit asked to protect Ayers
Millersville University has asked the regional counter-terrorism task force to provide security when William Ayers, a former militant anti-war activist, speaks at the university next month. Area law enforcement officers are disturbed.
Speaking on their behalf, Lancaster County District Attorney Craig Stedman said law enforcement must provide security if the university requests it, "regardless of how we feel about an unrepentant terrorist."
[Professionally done.]
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