It’s Monday, August 22nd, 2011….and before we begin, a brief word on recent developments in Libya: no one has a clue where this thing’s going. We only hope and pray, The Obamao having ceded any hope of U.S. control over events, whatever government is formed, it doesn’t make Khaddafi look beneficent in comparison.
Now, here’s the Gouge!
First up, Harvey Golub, former Chairman/CEO of Amex offers….
My Response To Buffett And Obama
Before you ask for more tax money from me, raise the $2.2 trillion you already collect each year more fairly and spend it more wisely.
Over the years, I have paid a significant portion of my income to the various federal, state and local jurisdictions in which I have lived, and I deeply resent that President Obama has decided that I don’t need all the money I’ve not paid in taxes over the years, or that I should leave less for my children and grandchildren and give more to him to spend as he thinks fit. I also resent that Warren Buffett and others who have created massive wealth for themselves think I’m “coddled” because they believe they should pay more in taxes. I certainly don’t feel “coddled” because these various governments have not imposed a higher income tax. After all, I did earn it.
Now that I’m 72 years old, I can look forward to paying a significant portion of my accumulated wealth in estate taxes to the federal government and, depending on the state I live in at the time, to that state government as well. Of my current income this year, I expect to pay 80%-90% in federal income taxes, state income taxes, Social Security and Medicare taxes, and federal and state estate taxes. Isn’t that enough?
Others could pay higher taxes if they choose. They could voluntarily write a check or they could advocate that their gifts to foundations should be made with after-tax dollars and not be deductible. They could also pay higher taxes if they were not allowed to set up foundations to avoid capital gains and estate taxes.
What gets me most upset is two other things about this argument: the unfair way taxes are collected, and the violation of the implicit social contract between me and my government that my taxes will be spent—effectively and efficiently—on purposes that support the general needs of the country. Before you call me greedy, make sure you operate fairly on both fronts.
Today, top earners—the 250,000 people who earn $1 million or more—pay 20% of all income taxes, and the 3% who earn more than $200,000 pay almost half. Almost half of all filers pay no income taxes at all. Clearly they earn less and should pay less. But they should pay something and have a stake in our government spending their money too.
In addition, the extraordinarily complex tax code is replete with favors to various interest groups and industries, favors granted by politicians seeking to retain power. Mortgage interest deductions support the private housing industry at the expense of renters. Generous fringe benefits are not taxed at all, in order to support union and government workers at the expense of people who buy their own insurance with after-tax dollars. Gifts to charities are deductible but gifts to grandchildren are not. That’s just a short list, and all of it is unfair.
Governments have an obligation to spend our tax money on programs that work. They fail at this fundamental task. Do we really need dozens of retraining programs with no measure of performance or results? Do we really need to spend money on solar panels, windmills and battery-operated cars when we have ample energy supplies in this country? Do we really need all the regulations that put an estimated $2 trillion burden on our economy by raising the price of things we buy? Do we really need subsidies for domestic sugar farmers and ethanol producers?
Why do we require that public projects pay above-market labor costs? Why do we spend billions on trains that no one will ride? Why do we keep post offices open in places no one lives? Why do we subsidize small airports in communities close to larger ones? Why do we pay government workers above-market rates and outlandish benefits? Do we really need an energy department or an education department at all?
Here’s my message: Before you “ask” for more tax money from me and others, raise the $2.2 trillion you already collect each year more fairly and spend it more wisely. Then you’ll need less of my money.
Particularly when, as the Cartoon of the Day, courtesy of Speed Mach, so tellingly observes, The Obamao’s demonstrated capacity for self-centered hypocrisy is quite literally beyond belief….even for a Marxist.
This headline says it all:
Obama Pushes for Action on Jobs While Vacationing on
Martha’s Vineyard
President Obama appealed to the patriotism of Congress as he urged members to act together to put people back to work. The president is vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, but he recorded his weekly Saturday radio and Internet address earlier in the week while in Alpha, Ill., during an economy-focused Midwestern bus tour.
He said that lawmakers in Washington could learn something from the people in small towns in Illinois and Iowa. (What….did he take a bunch of them to Martha’s Vineyard with him?!?) And if they did, Obama said there are some things they could get done right away, like passing a road construction bill or extending a reduction in the payroll tax that pays for Social Security.
“These are common-sense ideas — ideas that have been supported by both Democrats and Republicans,” Obama said. “The only thing holding them back is politics. The only thing preventing us from passing these bills is the refusal by some in Congress to put country ahead of party. That’s the problem right now. That’s what’s holding this country back. That’s what we have to change.”
Obama has been promoting those ideas and others for weeks and didn’t offer any new proposals or rhetoric Saturday. He’s saving that for a jobs package he’s to unroll in a post-Labor Day speech once he returns to Washington. Instead, Obama repeated familiar themes Saturday about working to recover from the recession.
Any questions?!?
Were The Obamao really serious about creating jobs and growing the economy, he should take a tip from Jeff Jacoby, courtesy of the fastest Conservative alive:
When ‘inconsequential’ means ‘better’
To many liberals, Rick Perry’s audacious pledge to make Washington as “inconsequential in your life as I can’’ is tantamount to a pledge to bring back the Dark Ages.
Commenting on Twitter as the Texas governor announced his presidential candidacy, longtime Washington journalist Howard Kurtz wondered: “Perry wants to make DC ‘inconsequential in your life.’ Does that include Medicare, Soc Sec, vets’ programs, air safety, FDA?’’ Former Bobby Kennedy aide Jeff Greenfield ran through a litany of Washington’s contributions to American life – from railroads, interstate highways, and the Hoover Dam to land-grant colleges, civil rights, and subsidized mortgages – and marveled at the depth of the right’s “disdain for all things Washington.’’
But it isn’t highways or veterans’ programs or minority voting rights that conservatives find so objectionable about Washington. When Perry speaks of making the nation’s capital “inconsequential,’’ he isn’t proposing to dismantle the Hoover Dam. Hard as it may be for liberals to accept, the Republican base isn’t motivated by blind loathing of the federal government, or by a nihilistic urge to wipe out the good that Washington has accomplished.
What conservatives believe, rather, is what America’s Founders believed: that government is best which governs least, and that human freedom and dignity are likeliest to thrive not when power is centralized and remote, but when it is diffuse, local, and modest.
“It is not by the consolidation or concentration of powers, but by their distribution, that good government is effected,’’ wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1821. In part that is because central planners and regulators rarely know enough to be sure of the impact their decisions will have on the innumerable individuals, communities, and enterprises affected by them. “Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap,’’ Jefferson dryly remarked, “we should soon want bread.’’ The Beltway blunders of our own era – from the subprime mortgage meltdown to Cash for Clunkers to minimum wage laws that drive up unemployment – would not have surprised him.
But that isn’t the only reason that shrinking Washington and decentralizing power promotes better government. While curbing the federal behemoth is important in its own right, it is indispensable to the moral health of a nation rooted in the conviction that men and women can govern themselves. Our social arrangements tend to work best when they are organized at the lowest possible level, closest to concrete, day-to-day experience. Only as a last resort should we seek to transfer power upward, from individuals and families to city hall, or from city hall to the state house, or from the state house to Washington. This is the principle of subsidiarity that historically underpinned American federalism.
Once, it was commonly understood by Americans that the best way to get things done was to do them privately.
“Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations,’’ an impressed Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835. “They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies . . . but associations of a thousand other kinds – religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools.’’’
But as government grows larger and more powerful, it crowds out private action. It replaces local, familiar, and organic institutions with remote bureaucratic ones. As state and federal governments swell, taking over functions that used to be left to individuals and voluntary organizations, communities are weakened. Increasingly citizens are taught to rely on government, rather than on themselves or their neighbors. They develop a sense of entitlement, and entitlement in turn fuels selfishness. Other people’s needs come to be seen as the government’s responsibility. Government gets bigger and better – and citizens get smaller and smaller.
Of course some functions can only be performed at the national level. But Washington does far more than it should, in so many ways treating Americans like children who cannot be trusted to run their own lives. The effect of that infantilization has been an erosion of the virtues without which no free society can thrive: Work, honesty, discipline, gratitude, moderation, thrift, initiative.
The way to undo that erosion? We can start by making Washington more inconsequential.
For a related item, we turn to today’s Money Quote, and an insightful observation on the reality of “green jobs” from Walter Russell Mead in American Interest, courtesy of the WSJ:
“It’s understandable and even forgivable that a political candidate would talk about green jobs on the hustings, especially when the Democratic Party is divided between job hungry blue collar workers and fastidious greens who break out in hives in the presence of coal. What worries me isn’t that the President’s team advised him to make a few speeches on this subject. . . . What worries me is that they didn’t understand that making something this bogus a central plank of his actual governing plan on an issue as vital as jobs would have serious costs down the road.
Many liberals want green jobs to exist so badly that they don’t fully grasp how otherworldly and ineffectual this advocacy makes the President look to unemployed meat packers and truck drivers.
Let me put it this way. A GOP candidate might feel a need to please creationist voters and say a few nice things about intelligent design. That is politics as usual; it gins up the base and drives the opposition insane with fury and rage. No harm, really, and no foul.
But if that same politician then proposed to base federal health policy on a hunt for the historical Garden of Eden so that we could replace Medicare by feeding old people on fruit from the Tree of Life, he would have gone from quackery-as-usual to raving incompetence.
And since we’re on the subject of “green“, it’s time for the Environmental Moment, brought to us today by Erika Johnsen and Townhall.com:
I would just hate to have to be the one to break this to the President (er, scratch that. I would probably relish it.), but when the President returns from Martha’s Vineyard to present his highly anticipated economy-and-jobs plan, I hope for both his and the American people’s sake that it doesn’t contain more dreamy outlines for the creation of ‘green’ jobs. Because when you’ve lost the zeal of the Gray Lady, you know something’s up:
In the Bay Area as in much of the country, the green economy is not proving to be the job-creation engine that many politicians envisioned. President Obama once pledged to create five million green jobs over 10 years. Gov. Jerry Brown promised 500,000 clean-technology jobs statewide by the end of the decade. But the results so far suggest such numbers are a pipe dream….
A study released in July by the non-partisan Brookings Institution found clean-technology jobs accounted for just 2 percent of employment nationwide and only slightly more — 2.2 percent — in Silicon Valley. Rather than adding jobs, the study found, the sector actually lost 492 positions from 2003 to 2010 in the South Bay, where the unemployment rate in June was 10.5 percent.
Federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show. Two years after it was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize drafty homes, California has spent only a little over half that sum and has so far created the equivalent of just 538 full-time jobs in the last quarter, according to the State Department of Community Services and Development.
I have to admit, I never thought I’d see the day when the NYT would publish the phrases “green jobs” and “pipe dream” in the same piece. And it feels so good.
Also damning for the green jobs agenda, today Gallup released its Job Creation Index, and in the first half of 2011, energy-and-commodity producing states dominated the job market (as well as Washington, D.C., the home of our ever-self-multiplying federal bureaucracy).
Then there’s this from Juan Williams:
The Rage on the Left Is Just Beginning
Soooo….this is new….how?!? Earth to Juan: these people have been pissed off their entire lives!
Meanwhile, having failed (thankfully!) to gain the power and position necessary to oversee Team Tick-Tock’s destruction of another segment of the American financial system
Elizabeth Warren’s Potential Senate Bid May Reunite
Scott Brown With Tea Party
Consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren’s likely entry into the U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts could re-energize Tea Party support for Sen. Scott Brown, whose moderation in Washington has deeply disappointed the conservative grassroots movement that swept him to office in early 2010.
“I think she has the capacity to do that,” said Christen Varley, head of the Greater Boston Tea Party, who described Brown’s relationship with the Tea Party as “tense.” “When you look at the contrast and the ideas and policy agenda that she would bring to Washington, she’s so far off the New England moderate scale, it does run the possibility of re-energizing Tea Party support for Sen. Brown,” she said.
Tea Party activists across the country rallied around Brown in late 2009 to help him win the Senate seat once held by the late Ted Kennedy in a major political upset that halted President Obama’s health care bill in its tracks. Even though Democrats were able to regroup after losing their supermajority in the Senate and eventually pass the health care bill, Brown continued to enjoy Tea Party support despite his votes for several Democratic jobs bills.
But the honeymoon ended last summer when Brown voted at the last minute for Obama’s financial regulatory legislation, known as Dodd-Frank, prompting many Tea Party activists to cry betrayal. The final straw for others came earlier this year when Brown opposed Rep. Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget plan, which drew praise from conservatives and scorn from liberals for its proposal to privatize Medicare, among other things.
No; one need not be Kreskin to know they’ll vote for him….but we predict they’ll send whatever campaign contributions they can afford elsewhere.
On the Lighter Side….
And in Tales From the Darkside….
Rep. Maxine Waters: ‘The tea party can go straight to hell’
Where Muddied Waters will undoubtedly be on hand to greet them!
Finally, we’ll call it day with “Best To Let Natural Selection Run Its Course” segment, and this curious tale out of the Beehive State:
8-Year-Old Searching for Food, Water Gets Stuck in
Chimney
A boy searching for food and water got stuck in a chimney at a home in Utah, fox4kc.com reports. Richard and Sandy Draper told the station they were returning to their West Valley City home from dinner at around 7:30 p.m. Friday when they heard someone yelling.
The couple originally thought the yelling was children playing in the backyard, but discovered that the noise was coming from 8-year-old Stephen Hopkins, who was stuck in their chimney. “I could hear a voice in my chimney and I said, ‘Are you in the chimney?'” said Sandy Draper. A wall had to be ripped out of the home to let Hopkins out, according to the station.
West Valley City police say Hopkins had been reported missing by his mother earlier in the day after he left his home and didn’t return. “They asked him why he had gone down the chimney and he said he was looking for food and water so evidently he was wandering the neighborhood,” said Richard Draper.
At the risk of appearing harsh, we were 8-years-old once; yet despite plumbing the deepest recesses our extensive memory banks, we cannot recall a time we believed chimneys signified either food or water.
Have a great week!
Magoo
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