Why Not Pay Higher Taxes?
5) Less Efficiency?
Conservatives believe that they can spend their own earned money more efficiently than can unneeded (note that I say “unneeded,” because in every budget crisis, government threatens layoffs in fire and police first to scare the public into maintaining all sorts of social service agencies) state departments, whose employees are not subject to market forces and view yearly funded budgets as sacrosanct rather than predicated on a good peach crop, a fickle oil well, or uncertain demand for a vacuum cleaner. Millions of conniving minds figuring out the best way to save money and maximize profit have an efficiency that a monolithic centrally planning government octopus simply does not. Bigger government and higher taxes, whether in Greece or California, are not a prescription for economic growth that can best get us out of this deficit cycle.
6) Inequality by Income?
Not all conservatives believe “inequality” is definable by income alone. Does the chiropractor who makes $150,000 and sends his kid to Santa Clara University ($50,000 per year) on his own dime do all that much better than the DMV supervisor who makes $60,000 and has his child eligible for state and federal college grants? To the conservative, most (not all, to be sure) subsidies and breaks for college, housing, medical care, occasion debt relief, etc., are income adjusted and go to the lower and lower-middle classes. The subsidized housing tract 2 miles away from my farm has houses (ca. 1800 sq. feet) that are as nice or nicer than those in the old section of Palo Alto where I have 600 sq. ft. studio apartment. I imagine that the Selma counterparts also have an array of subsidies not extended to the upper-middle classes in Silicon Valley who are paying $1 million for an older and much smaller home. Income is not the only benchmark of poverty or wealth.
7) Psychological
Conservatives are also tired of being demonized. One “pay your fair share” is OK; dozens of “millionaires and billionaires” and other class warfare rhetoric become tiring. Psychologically, the top-bracket earner is now resigned to something like this: “The more I pay the more ‘they’ hate me, so why pay any more if the slurs will be the same either way?” Does anyone believe that should Obama get his new tax hikes, he will cease the class-warfare demagoguing as in, “Thanks to that noble 5% we finally balanced the budget”? (As opposed to, “Now that we have that problem of income tax hikes temporarily out of the way, we can go after….”)
8) Sic Transit Gloria
Income is not static. Most go in and out of top brackets, especially in non-salaried business. Many of the top earners tat I know are not salaried and were not making what they are now at 40 and won’t be at 65. They view their 50s as a brief window to store enough nuts for winter — a fleeting period in their lives when they are mature, experienced, still hale, and finally figured out how to make some cash for the less rosy future when they will be not so healthy or fortunate.
9) The Private HHS Department
Tax-resistant Americans also find ways to redistribute their money without government help. I know dozens who give far more to charities than do far wealthier liberals. I think statistics will back that up. Somehow paying the mortgage for a daughter, picking up the funeral bill for a cousin, loaning a brother-in-law cash for his business — all that never computes into wealth and poverty statistics, despite the fact that in every family there are “cash cows” whom everyone seems to approach for help (and they rarely go away refused). Is there a government form that asks of the middle class, “How much help, direct or indirect, have you obtained from a relative — parent, sibling, cousin, child — this year?”
Every word is spot-on. I did a friend’s quarterly taxes as a favor. He paid 45.7% of what he made as taxes, all up.
Why would anyone start a business, when that’s what he’s facing?
This is one of those perfectly obvious “if this goes on…” problems. How long are people going to strive, if it all goes away in taxes?
I used to joke about my raises that I was allowed a pizza and a six pack of good beer extra each month. Next year, my assistant is going to take a two percent cut off the top of her monthly income – amounting to at least one less pizza and six-pack of decent beer each month – to support a system that is clearly failing.
How long are people going to bother?
Plus some of that cost is obviously passed onto consumers so the gov’t creates inflation while pocketing the part of the merry-go-’round as a skim.
Has the Supreme Court ever weighed in on the legality of charging wealthier people more? How is that legal? Let’s have a flat tax, no deductions and for every one regardless. How’s that for equality?
I have no objections. But I suggest you insert your earplugs now, because the screaming is going to reach a very high decibel level.
Yes, the Supremes have rendered a decision and they have concluded that the equal protection clause doesn’t pertain to income taxes and that it is okay for the government to institute higher tax rates for high earners.
Which amendment to the constitution is the one that guarantees equal application of the law to all? Why does this not apply to taxation? Notice that it is the supreme court that would decide or in this case decide not to decide, a functionary of the national government in D.C.
As far as I am concerned the SC is virtually corrupt by virtue of living a privileged ivory tower life consisting of academic precedent and erudite views of society as if we were lab rats.
They’ll fiddle and do fiddle while the Constitution has become a suicide pact put on a platter and handed to the Third World and corporate interests.
Equal application of laws is in the Constitution, Legislative Branch, if I remember right. (Too lazy right now to search and read.)
Congress has the power to raise taxes. So, why did we need the 16th Amendment? Because they kept running afoul of the equal application clause. The 16th Amendment established that they no longer need to apply taxes equally to everyone. Shoot, I believe that, technically, they can tax you specifically, as an individual, at 100% if they wish, although the Supremes might strike that one down.
Maybe that’s how we get rid of the 16th. Full Republican control and they raise taxes on specific individuals like Soros, Kaiser, etc…. >:)
Good answer! very good answer, thanks.
No Bill of Attainder shall be passed!
No, that’s just the income tax.
You didn’t count the property tax he undoubtedly paid, nor any sales tax he may have paid, nor the multiplied hundreds of taxes that were rolled into the cost of every product and service he bought.
It’s likely that his REAL tax rate was closer to 90%.
But then, nobody really knows how much each of us is paying.
All we know for sure is that our Founding Fathers went to war over less.
A LOT less.
The simple answer is congress culturally cannot be trusted with money. They spent the social security lock box, they’re already spending the Obamacare funds )http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/24/money-slated-for-health-law-gets-detoured/) even though the program was underfunded (leave it to congress to steal money from an underfunded program!) and they will spend whatever extra money (if any) comes in from higher taxes. Forget whether the money is “wisely” spent or not, they simply cannot stop spending. They have a spending problem like an alcoholic has a liquor problem. It is so ingrained at this point, it is likely a total waste of time to talk about closing the deficit. Congress as an institution is addicted to spending and cannot be stopped, probably not even by a crisis. I think it’s a terminal case.
“They spent the social security lock box…”
Bad news. There never was such a lock box.
No, no lockbox. We’ve been left instead with a Mary Swanson suitcase full of IOUs, all duly signed by Lloyd Christmas. It’s all there! Count ‘em!
This is only becuase greedy billonaires paid nothing in taxes since the Reagan’s cuts in the 1980′s. The Social Security trust fund had to raided to pay for these tax cuts and the nuclear missles he built. Raise taxes back up to 70% and the problem would take care of itself.
President Reagan was promised by Tip O’Neil, then speaker of a Democratic majority house, that for every $1 he cut taxes that $3 of spending would be cut. Tip never upheld his end of the bargain.
If you were willing to also reinstate the loopholes and shelters and “investment tax credits” legally available to taxpayers back in the days before Reagan’s tax reforms, it might not be a total catastrophe. But if you are suggesting a 70% tax rate given the current arrangement of deductions and credits, you better believe it would be the end of YOUR political career, as you have no idea just how destructive the government is, and with that level of siphoning off capital, it would make the current economic troubles look like boom times.
Micha is correct. The “lockbox” is a myth. Social Security takes in money and that money needs to be invested somewhere. That “somewhere” in US Treasuries i.e. US debt. Less risky than the market.
Until the government can’t afford to redeem the bonds and there’s no money to pay the benefits. We’re there.
As long as there’s paper and ink, the government will have money. Whether that money is worth anything is another matter.
What the president and the other geniuses haven’t figured out, I guess, is that the mega-rich can just say, “I’ve had enough of being blamed for things I didn’t cause” and just pick up and move to friendlier climes.
Yes, but. The $200,000 a year orthodontist can’t – and that’s who they are after. Evil producers.
You are thinking too much Atlas Shrugged not enough real life. Which country offers as much economic opportunity as the US as well as a polity more in favor of goods and service providers? You may find countries with lower taxes but they will offer less in terms of market size and or average purchasing power or you may find comprable markets with similar or higher tax rates. Of course, this is just a basic fundamental question. We can go beyond this and see that in order to transfer or create income creating enterprises in other countries it is often necessary to learn one or more new languages, adopt elements of the culture and become re-licensed. And then, finally, one must go live in another country, leaving behind friends and family. I´m convinced most people would rather pay 95% in taxes before doing all that.
I wish very much that your idea was correct. If there was a sizable country with a somewhat similar culture to the United States, more people might consider moving there. This in turn would lower the tax base in the united states, which in time, would force the government to nationalize everything including its citizens (think Berlin Wall) or adopt more competitive tax policies.
Alas, for now and the foreseeable future it is not so and the only way out is to fight against wrong-headed policies. Of course, if I´m wrong and such a place does exist, please let me know. I´ve traveled and studied quite a bit and I´ve yet to find it but my bags are packed.
You have not been keeping up with times.
America was ranked first in economic competetiveness in 2008. We’ve since dropped to 5th.
and Atlas is indeed shrugging.
Our “betters” will never concede a system where other peoples’ money is spent by others. Can’t happen. The universe would split open and swallow everybody if that were to occur. Money must be spent by bureaucrats. Who else has the proper training to spend funds? Just look at how successfully they run the Postal Service. Point proved.
The other thing that pisses me off is the level of incompetence and waste in the Federal government, and its subsidiaries at the state and local levels. The chief psychiatrist for the state of California’s prison system reportedly makes over $800,000/year, in compensation, health care and benefits, and the value of his pension. The mayor of Bell was mistaken: he should have gone into the state prison system instead of city politics.
But the other problem is that programs are judged on their size. I have an actual rule in this instance, which I composed some years ago: “We judge the level of our compassion in this country by the amount of money we’re willing to waste, failing to solve a problem.” I think that sums it up pretty well. What good does it do a homeless person if a bureacrat in the local low-income housing administration gets a raise? None, of course, but the budget being increased implies we care more about homelessness than we did last year. The amount of bureaucratic bloat in the country, and especially the state of California, is appalling.
There were two articles in the paper yesterday. One recounted that the State of California buys vehicles for all of its elected officials (with their paychecks you’d think they could afford to buy their own, but apparently not) and the cost has (of course) been skyrocketing. So the state’s budget authorities have decided to tighten their belts by switching over to a mileage system, where the lawmaker will get a stipend per mile he drives on official business. The problem? The state auditor set the rate at more than $.50/mile, with the result that the state will wind up paying *more* money than they do now.
The other article involved the woman who headed the “First 5″ program here in Southern California. This a program that essentially tries to teach toddlers to read, keep them active, and so forth. The lady in question was pulling down in excess of #240,000/year, but an audit of her office found all sorts of irregularities. Rather than fire her, they asked her to resign. Her contract stated that she got a year’s pay if she was fired without cause, but nothing if she either resigned or was fired for cause, with an extra month’s bonus if she could show she hadn’t been given a month’s notice of termination. She claimed that she was fired without cause (because they hadn’t fired her for cause, but had forced her to resign) and got the full 13 months of salary, plus her health care for a year. Thing is, we tax people who make a lot less than this, in order to get someone who can’t run the system and its books properly, but who can game the county government and get a quarter of a million dollar payday for doing nothing.
Until people get outraged by this sort of thing (you only see glimpses of the outrage, frankly) we’re going to continue to dig ourselves in deeper. Pensions and pay of government employees, yes, even emergency personnel like police officers and firefighters, are going to have to be examined, and we’re at least going to have to consider lowering some of them, if we want to avoid impoverishing the whole country. Sad, unfair perhaps, but inevitable…
“[T]he “First 5″ program here in Southern California [is] a program that essentially tries to teach toddlers to read, keep them active, and so forth.”
False. The essence of First 5 is steering money via jobs-in-name-only to community organizers and agents of social change as they await their turn to take a seat in bigger, more powerful government posts. The toddler stuff is only to fool the rubes. Just look around you.
The Democrats first during Clinton and continueing through GWB masterfully took advantage of Republican ignorance of government and propensity for porking and used much of their “share” of the federal budget to set up all sorts of grant and contract programs in the states that exist only to provide sinecures for Democrat activists inside even Republican controlled governments in the states and their political subdivisions. You plant some environmental activist inside a state government who works his/her way up to a hiring manager. You can rest assured that anyone s/he hires will see things the same way. Give that manager a little more power and the Minimum qualification for a job that used to require a degree in Biology or genuine training in Statistic gets changed to a general degree so the “Environmental Studies” graduate qualifies for it. Before long in even a Republican administration, your evironmental quality department is a hotbed of greenie activism. The same thing is done with all the departments designed to serve Democrat constituencies. State departments of Social Sevices, Education, Environment, and Labor are nothing more than money laundries to funnel federal and state funding to Democrat front groups and through them back to the Democrat Party. And, yet, Republican governors can’t bring themselves to stay off the federal grants or to stringently audit the administrators and recipients. I’ll guaran -effin’ – tee you that with a small team of accountants and forensic auditors, I could put ANYBODY that handles public funds in jail, so it would be really easy to perp walk the miscreants that run these Democrat front organizations.
Art, can I commend you for suggesting what should be the first plank in the 2012 Republican Party platform.
“with a small team of accountants and forensic auditors, I could put ANYBODY that handles public funds in jail, so it would be really easy to perp walk the miscreants that run these Democrat front organizations.”
I am so sick of these crooks stealing us blind and then retiring to Florida to live off of our dime. Or worse yet hanging around pontificating like the two Clintons about what a great service they provided by stealing from the public taxpayer.
They’re all not going to Florida … Charlie Rangel opted for the Dominican Republic and before him it was Adam Clayton Powell in Bimini – Wow! No wonder Obama thinks there’s 57 states.
Private charities are now required to report what percentage of their budget goes to actually helping people vs. how much goes to overhead expenses like management and advertising.
Every Government social program should be subject to the same reporting requirements as private charities.
From the few figures we do have, the most efficient Federal social program is Social Security, in which 95% of more of the money gets paid out to retirees.
And Social Security is the first one the “Representatives” want to force us to cut so they can continue to spend us into oblivion. “We have to get serious about “entitlements, like Social Security and Medicare”.
Yeh, how about we start with Government salaries and perks, earmarks and other forms of payollah. We can get to cutting our money we paid in after we take the “inefficencies” out of the bloat.
Social Security is not an entitlement. We all pay into the ponzi scheme. Except for Congress and those in the ministry and I believe, the Postal Service.
I keep hearing this about Social Security. How did it get so efficient? Back in 1980, every dollar spent cost eighty cents to process. What happened?
Or is it just more creative Clintonesque accounting, like claiming there is no inflation by taking everything that inflates out of the equation. If you consider the money being squandered on heating and transportation because President Dopehead wants $8 gas, it’s amazing that there is any economic activity at all. After paying almost $1,000 for a 275 gallon tank of heating oil, who has any money left?
Oh! That’s right! All the “poor” people get subsidized heat. Silly me. Only those who work for it will freeze, thereby reducing the Republican population even more.
Ah! Change you can believe in!
People don’t realize just how infectious Califailure’s profligacy is. The three West Coast states plus Alaska and Hawaii are all highly unionized. Every time CA’s unionized employees get something, guess what we in the other states get to hear about? Most of the public safety employees in the Pacific states have interest arbitration, which means they can’t strike so contract disputes get settled by an arbitrator. Guess what gets thrown up to the arbitrator as comparables for salaries and benefits? Probably the single most powerful organization in CA is the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA), which has wages and benefits beyond the wildest imagination for what is essentially a low-skill job that at most should require a GED or HS Diploma. Frankly, when I did labor relations for Alaska, all our CO union had to do was whisper that they were thinking about affiliating with CCPOA and I reached for the State’s checkbook. The very last thing I wanted was CCPOA goons slithering around our Legislature handing out contributions and issueing threats.
They’ve also corrupted the whole grievance arbitration process. In the deep Blue states, grievance arbitration is used mostly to give the union something it wants but which a Democrat government doesn’t want to take the heat for giving them. They’ll submit union grivances which essentially call for contract reformation, essentially interest arbitration, to an arbitrator and then empower him/her to fashion a remedy. S/he, of course, getting no opposition on substantive inarbitrability grounds from the employer, understands that his/her role is to give the union what it wants but with a little fig leaf for the employer. The union wins, gets what it really wanted, and the arbitrator gets paid handsomely. If you don’t want things done that way, you have to tell them very vociferously and if that doesn’t work, you have to appeal their decision to your SC if necessary, and it usually is, and get the decision reversed. I’ve gone so far as to have my staff in opening statement tell an arbitrator that the only way that the union will ever get the remedy they request is when the State of Alaska runs out of courts to appeal the decision to. I’ve also pitched decisions that require funding beyond current budget or which interpret the contract in a way not reported to the Legislature to the Legislature for additional funding. Unions really don’t like their sweetheart deals and arbitrator awards subject to the cruel lights of a public hearing. I could go on endlessly about the Californication of the rest of the Country but it would probably make some of you ill.
“We judge the level of our compassion in this country by the amount of money we’re willing to waste, failing to solve a problem.”
Ain’t that the truth.
Government of the people, by the people, for the people…has become…government of the special interests, by the bureaucrats for the politicians (paraphrasing Newt Gingrich)
The Professor as usual is spot on. After watching the gutlessness of the current Republican “leadership” in the House of Representatives and their utter refusal to engage the Marxists in the media and in the Democrat Party and their adamant refusal to do ANYTHING about spending, I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that we will need to suffer a financial collapse/debt crisis for this stupidity to stop. The big problem with that of course is the unpredictability of subsequent events. (I like how we in the Tea Party, who are doing everything we can think of to stop that from happening, screaming from every rooftop “Stop!”, are accused of “wanting the economy to fail-to hurt Obama”.)
“wanting the economy to fail-to hurt Obama”……and what about the rest of us? Obama will be just fine but the middle class will not be fine. Obama has hurt himself and why he has so much positive press and admirers shows ‘his personal magnetism’ is still with us. Obama is LBJ and Jimmy Carter on steroids. If we don’t un-elect him in 2012 your prediction will come true. Our financial collapse is imminent. Chaos will rule and Obama will realize his desire of destroying this great country. However, as in the case of George III, arrogance did not carry the day, did it?
From everything I’ve read so far it seems that the current administration wants the economy to fail.
Some of them absolutely; notably Van Jones, a self-admitted Marxist. (You can’t be a Marxist unless you want capitalism to die; it’s an inextricable part of the dogma.)
But most of them, I strongly suspect, believe that our economy is not just “unfair” (and thus deserving of punishment for being so), but also “too big to fail”, and thus can absorb whatever punitive measures they decide to inflict in pursuit of “a more just society”. And still keep producing enough GDP to pay for all their dreams.
Like Wesley Mouch, Tinky Holloway, & Co. believed of Hank Rearden in “Atlas Shrugged”, they believe that our economy will continue to “produce”, even if they leave it nothing to produce with. As Dr. Ferris said to Rearden, “You can’t help it; it’s in your blood”- as though the ability to manufacture actual things were somehow an attribute of the autonomic nervous system, independent of (in Rearden’s case) furnaces, forges, rolling mills, etc.
Personally, I think somebody that far removed from reality is a least functionally insane, if not an out-and-out loony. But reality stopped mattering in “progressive” philosophy a long time ago.
Progressivism has become a philosophy of destruction. Mostly because those who believe in it literally cannot see the world as it actually exists through the miasma of their own delusions.
clear ether
eon
Before making comments like that, you should study the legislation introduced by Republicans in the House. There are many bills to cut spending that have passed the House, but will get nowhere in the Senate and certainly will never become law while Barry Badware is in the WH. Look at Thomas, Opencongress and govtrack for the details.
If you really want to blame someone, blame the American voter for being oblivious to the bad choices made until they come back to bite.
Let’s take the educators off their pedestals, deny them tenure and stop supporting universities that feature Useful Idiocy for Useless Loonies 101.
Unfortunately these are just a couple of the things that need to be done, but will take a lot more than talk. In the words of Milton Friedman,
“Fundamental differences in basic values can seldom if ever be resolved at the ballot box; ultimately they can only be decided, though not resolved, by conflict.”
-”Capitalism and Freedom”-
The Democratic Party and their defenders in the media are not Marxists, but social democrats, or, to use their own terms, “moderate conservatives.” I wrote about their ideologies here: http://clarespark.com/2009/12/16/perceptions-of-the-enemy-the-left-looks-at-the-right-and-vice-versa/.
It takes a lot of work to be an informed citizen in a democratic republic, and I commend VDH, indeed look up to him, for his carefully argued essay about taxation.
Or better yet, see http://clarespark.com/2011/10/30/collectivism-in-the-history-establishment/. We are teaching young people to think only in collectivist categories and to hate “the money power.” Jefferson wins over Hamilton.
Sane Conservatism lost it’s ability to keep entitlements to reasonably low levels when it allowed Liberals to define the meaning of such words as “Needy,” “Unequal,” “Fair Share,” and so on.
Sane conservatism lost the argument when it failed to provide alternatives to liberal programs for dealing with poverty and health care. So liberals won the argument for social progress by default.
Advocating that we should just go back to the 19th century’s model of dealing with poverty and illness in old age, just isn’t “sane.” Unlike the 19th century, most elderly folks don’t live with their children and grandchildren in the same big house anymore. And old-age homes and nursing homes and caregivers for the elderly are very expensive.
The solution is to restore the socially moral idea that we are responsible for our parents and grandparents. Instead most people think it is fine to dump the care of their parents on the Collective so that they can have more time and money for themselves. Why is it right to force me to contribute to care for your parents ( or your children, for that matter) if you haven’t done everything in your power to do it yourself? If you simply can’t do so, then charity would be the alternative.
The solution is to restore the socially moral idea that we are responsible for our parents and grandparents.
That is the moral premise underlying the current system. The only difference is that you define the family by immediate relatives, while the Left defines it as society as a whole. The moral cannibalism involved is the same.
What needs to be restored is the idea of individual sovereignty. i.e. that my right to say no takes *moral* primacy over your idea, or anyone else’s idea, of what “ought” to be done with MY wealth.
Mr. Hansen does the cause of liberty no favors by leaving off the one answer which blows the entire game to hell:
0. It’s MY money.
Nice idea… if anyone knew who their parents were anymore.
Too many kids today have a “real dad,” an “adopted dad,” “birth dad” (which is oftentimes a different person than “real dad” – go figure), and then there’s step dad, ex-step dad and mom’s latest boyfriend.
I was out with some friends of mine and the conversation came up “Now which one is actually YOUR kid,” and the mom I was talking to smiled and said, “Yeah, everybody’s got a blended family now.” It’s nothing to smile about, you idiots! You have a blended family because somebody did something selfish and hedonistic to destroy the original family. A blended family is the result of picking up the pieces after a major act of stupidity, not a preferred situation!
After listening to a new employee tell us about his “Father”, his “Daddy”, his “Uncle, but he ain’t really my uncle”, and “Momma’s Husband”, i asked him, “Just who had sex with whom to make you?”.
Answer: “It’s hard to say”.
Let them all live in the bed thay made, and if they turn to crime to support it, let them rot in jail.
Once we realize that the intent is not to merely have higher taxes to promote more entitlements, that the scheme is MUCH larger than that…we can begin to address what is really going on here.
http://nlpc.org/stories/2010/07/09/george-soros-new-plan-globalism-and-crony-capitalism
First, there are no liberals. There are leftist fabulists who pretend to “do gooderism” and have “pod peopled” the liberals, using their shell as a casing for radical transformation of the free market democracies.
Second, there is an intentional …read that, again…intentional overthrow of the free market system underway.
http://kleinonline.wnd.com/2011/09/12/robin-hood-pillaging-wall-street-next/
The entirety of the Occupy movement is a crypto-small c communist, global fabulist, Robin Hood taxation plan to TAKE wealth…and redistribute it.
It is not about “fairness”, it is about transformation.
Occupy This! may be the response from the right, but the masses are not getting the information that ACORN/SEIU and the small c communists are behind a global attempt to shatter the free market and replace it with a global government led by China, Brazil, …and is intentionally attempting to remove America, Israel and Western Europe as leaders.
They want to INTENTIONALLY put America BEHIND others. Read that again…the INTENT…is to weaken America’s influence in the world.
Taxing their brains out…at the top…is part of the effort. It is a piece of the larger whole.
This is why Obama/Soros have strangled energy in the US…not for “ecology” purpose…but to prop up Brazil…and shift the balance of power and influence.
Ripping money from the hands of Americans, stifling job growth, seizing whole industries, is not about “do gooderism” and “entitlements” at home. That’s a cover.
The class warfare rhetoric, the race warfare rhetoric, …are all morale busters in a war on influence in the global marketplace. Soros wants European-style socialism, Obama wants small c communism….as have always his mentors…Bill Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis, Jeremiah Wright, the folks at Cooper Union and at the Midwest Academy….and his father.
While Obama would later have Dreams from his father, his father was having dreams of a marxist redistribution of power and the reduction of influence from free market societies, shifting the power and influence to socialist ones.
http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_eastafrica.html
If one is too busy, tired or lazy to actually go to the links and read what the organized plan is…let me summarize and save the eyeballs from reading and investigating and digging.
Taxes are merely a weapon, a tool…to overthrow capitalism. To downgrade America into a follwer, lead from behind (read, “trail”) in power, influence and control in the world.
The nations that really, really, really don’t want to see America as a hyperpower (Iran, North Korea, Russia, China …France) love this “reset” button.
The assault on America, Israel…the West…on MORAL grounds…has all been a head fake. Global warming is a head fake. Taxation on “fairness” grounds is a head fake.
For those who do bother to read the links, you will begin to see the plan unfolding in everything that is happening here…and begin to understand why.
I am replying to myself…to a post that had three links to very specific articles on point…but my post is STILL “awaiting moderation”.
So, I pressed “reply” to that post..to see what would happen.
Frustrating.
Seems that some of the spam filters at play were written by disciples of the PC ideology with a poor understanding of English words in the dictionary.
Try your own “filtering” by using *** and — for any possible conflict.
cynic…it happens when I copy links as part of my comment.
In this particular comment to VDH, I linked to three articles.
1)A George Soros article on how and why to knock capitalism down a peg, how he wants to institute socialism and his belief that the free market should be overthrown
2)Barack Obama Sr.’s article on “Our Socialism” in which he believes that capitalism is a threat and should be overthrown
Throughout Obama’s entire life he has surrounded himself with people who believe the free market should be overthrown. The Midwest Academy, Cooper Union, Frank Marshall Davis, James L Cone’s philosophy, Bill Ayers, UNO, the New Party, …in fact, he has hardly spent any portion of his lifetime NOT trying to do that very thing. ACORN/SEIU are merely small c communist fronts…Workers Party operatives.
They outlined how they should do it…including gutting the military. Seizing the real estate, mortgage and banking industries. Seizing the healthcare industry.
They would hide behind “populism” and “do-gooderism” so that they could blame their opponents in a class warfare “messaging” war…and use the media in their pockets, (their propaganda machine), Hollywood (which has always been filled with small c communists) and academia…where small c communists run rampant…indoctrinating our youth.
The plan is there…in writing…you just have to search for it.
I found pieces of it…linked it here…and got blocked by the spam filter for some reason. It happens whenever I post multiple links, however.
Not just on this comment.
My fellow commenters will have to search for the articles themselves. They are out there. You can read the blueprint for the revolution. Obviously, I don’t have the technical skill to bring it to you myself, or else I would try again.
Cfbleachers. Good man.
This Ohio November day is as bleak as the message you lay before us.
What lies ahead I fear we know, even without your failed links.
Another log on the fire, then . . . to push back the gloom, enjoy the light – a bit longer.
You don’t want to pay higher taxes because they will only lead to ——higher taxes. The cannibals never have enough. Regardless, one must suffer from massive retardation to think any raise in taxes would actually be applied to deficits, rather than spent outright. The money comes in as on a conveyer belt and goes right out again on, yes, “vitally needed federal programs”.
We did it once before.
In the 1990s, a GOP-led Congress held down spending after the Dem President Clinton raised taxes. The combination balanced the Federal budget for the first time in decades.
I’ve always believed that “Only a win-win deal endures.” The GOP’s stance to cut spending and not raise taxes by a single dollar either won’t be implemented thanks to Dem opposition, or else it will last only until the Dems get back into power in a future election cycle and trash it.
Activists in both the Dem and Repub parties always act under the delusion that their party–once it wins the next election–will be in power forever from then on. Hence the desire is to ram their own agenda down the country’s throat over their political opponents’ dead bodies, without anticipating any possible backlash.
That’s poor planning.
sinz54, short answer, and only one time around for me, we are running $1.3 trillion deficts. In no way or manner does our current situation bear even the loosest comparison to 1998, where the GOP helped hold a line to spending in the run up to that balanced budget. We are looking at future, care to bet your life on that, cuts, over years, equaling about one months current spending, and against increased spending increases. Got the picture, spend $10, reduce $1. The wolves are already fighting for tax hikes, I would suggest you not be to optimistic that they will hit only the hated rich.
Again and out, this isn’t even close to 1998, it was designed for that, literaly that it would be so bad there couldn’t be a roll back.
I must move on, this is so obvious it’s painful.
Even then, the federl budget has nver, ever decreased. Not one cent. Not even one whole department, from year to year. The liberals all spin their BS where they just redefine words, making a cut a cut in growth rates a “cut”. They are just liars. Unfortunately, they are aided by misguided and greedy Republicans, too.
We are screwed.
You forgot to mention that these programs are vital because they are for the “children”!
But they are for the children! Their children.
I called the office of every Republican member of my congressional delegation and said, “I’ve examined the Department of Agriculture’s budget and it appears to me that about ninety percent of it can be eliminated. Can someone on your staff please get in touch with me and educate me why this isn’t so.” The number of returned calls? zero.
I don’t know what to make of this. Most likely the answer is that no one in my congressional delegation’s staff has a clue about Ag’s budget either. If no one understands it then it is by nature going to grow.
you want us to pay higher taxes…ok, then reduce spending across the board by 40%. No IF’s, AND’s or BUT’s…then we can talk about increasing taxes to pay down the debt (NOT THE DEFICIT DAMN YOU!!!), but the national debt.
If Congress were to do that, then I’d not complain about raising taxes, but the Democrats have no desire to reduce spending, they want to increase both spending and taxes which is a non-starter. Also, we need serious tax reform. The system, as it currently exists, allows 47% of the population to avoid taxes altogether. That’s not right at all.
You want to increase revenues? Eliminate all loopholes, excepting only charity giving. Eliminate the loophole for political donations…but most of all, bind Congress to exactly the same laws that are foisted off on the general public. No more exemptions for Congress, they MUST be held accountable in the same way that the rest of the country is. Congress routinely exempts itself from the laws that they pass…this must end now.
It’s the last line in the next-to-last paragraph that distills the danger posed by Obama, Pelosi and Reid. There is often talk about guaranteeing a minimum income, regardless of whether any labor is tethered to it. The UN (and no doubt Obama would agree) has declared that internet access is a human right. No doubt a CRT television, or a cell phone with no camera, are now lumped into the same category as the Joad’s old Hudson. It is indeed not what I have, and whether or not it meets a minimum level of nourishment, shelter, and clothing, but what the next person has that I don’t. I never see comparisons of poor white Appalachia with South Central LA in terms of what comprises “poverty”. I guess those hillbillies simply can’t claim “victimhood”.
That’s because those po’ white fokes in Appalachia understand SELF-SUFFICIENCY. If they need something, they make it. If they need food, they go out and shoot it. They care for their families and live close by or even together. The fornication level is usually pretty low because if Jimmy-Joe catches Billy Ray with his wife, he will cut off his balls and hang him upside from the nearest tree to bleed to death as a warning to others…and everyone will nod their head and say “Yup…ol’ Billy Ray shudda knowed better’n do that.”They don’t much like government (Federal government anyway) in Appalachia. They’re church goers. They believe in God. They don’t tolerate queers’n the like. And they’re one HELL of a lot smarter than anyone gives them credit for. They learned the lesson in the early part of the 1900s about getting into debt to the people who allegedly run things when the coal barons ran the show down there. When the mine owners finally pissed em off, they fought for their rights. Read King Coal by Stan Cohen sometime about the war that no one knows about in Appalachia. A coal miner makes a decent living now, but the government eats him up in taxes and regulations on his line of work.
Occupy Wall Street my ass. Occupy DC and throw out the scumbags in charge until only the decent people are left.
It’s sad that we have to have this conversation; one reason is that the conversation is being forced upon us and it’s founded on a lie. The lie: Every dime confiscated by the government is supposed to help out some poor saps that can’t help themselves. But the truth is that a certain class of the corrupt is fleecing the sheep for their own personal gain and their personal kingdoms. (How rich have the Clinton’s become, the Obama’s and their friends? This list is practically endless)
This is true for local, state, federal governments and corporations who think they have to pay to play even though that would be illegal if justice were to be done. Just because this thievery has been going for a hundred years does not make it right or even necessary. Honest wealth is achieved by trading value for value, with men value comes from work, both intellectual and physical. Work comes with the just rewards, some lesser and some greater. What we need now is true justice and the man that robs the farmer or the business man on his way home from the market ought to go to jail no matter what “office” they may hold or who their friends are.
Higher taxes do not fuel bigger government, lower taxes do. We should have learned that from Reagan’s terms. Greater revenues fuel government. Heads they win, tails we lose.
“Add in property taxes on homes and businesses, and it is not hard to envision a theoretical 50% + rate, or over half one’s income. So, the conservative asks, at what total rate would local, state, and federal governments be happy — 60%-70%-80% of annual income?”
Also, don’t forget local sales state sales taxes, which in New York are quite high. That aside, what would liberals be happy with? If you ask one, “How much money should the government take from “rich” people,” they never give you a straight answer. If the “rich,” and that now seems to be anybody making over $200,000, can be taxed at 80%, why not then the middle class too? Because you could take 100% of “rich” people’s money and that still wouldn’t even put a dent into our national debt of $15 trillion. And THAT is the dirty little secret of class warfare. You could kill all the rich people and take all their money, land, and property away, just like they did in the Soviet Union, but it still would not pay for all of the national debt, let alone all of the new debts that the Democrats want to pile on (like Obamacare).
That is why liberals are such hideous creatures. They will lie to get what they want and, once they are proved wrong (as in Greece right now), they will always need more. That is why we need to get rid of Obama and all of his minions in 2012. Time to end this now.
You forgot to mention excise taxes like those on tires or tobacco (remember the new tax almost immediately after Bozo got elected and sworn into office) and excise taxes are those that federal state or local governments impose on certain products and can really be anything, don’t be surprised to see the FCC come up with one for Ipods or Ipads, it is all just to take more money away from you so the government can have more power and at the same time make you more of a dependent since you have no money left after all the new taxes they come up with.
I watch as our income is taxed and fee….d away by State, Fed. and local governments. We figured out long ago that over half of our income went to taxes/fees of one sort or another. Add to this one of our sons is at UCLA the other is at UofA that takes another $80,000 dollars of our income. We watch as we pay full tuition at UCLA and out of stated tuition at UofA, while other more deserving get either a free ride or greatly reduced tuition because of their social status. Illegals in California are entitled to in state tuition which rarely happens because they can claim minority status and get reduced tuition, grants and scholarships. Our children must pay out of state tuition if they go to another state; however, an illegal can get instate tuition almost anywhere in this country. Our sons are not entitled to reduced tuition, grants or scholarships because we are classified WHITE. And, yes we pay our taxes
Once again, Hanson expertly articulates what many of us are thinking. People who have never had to meet a payroll are running our lives and telling us they know better how to spend OUR money. Meanwhile, billions and billions (think McDonald’s – except Obama’s hamburgers are ‘free’) are squandered, wasted, stolen, and spent inefficiently. We can never be taxed ‘enough’ – Congress will always, always, always dream up another ‘project’ or ‘program’ which will of course be replete with high-salaried bureaucrats, because, you know, “we have to pay competitive salaries to attract top candidates” for those jobs.
The Private HHS Department paragraph is dead-on. Go to practically any court across our fruited plain and you’ll likely see family members or spouses sitting on the front row – money in hand – waiting to bail Johnny out of the scrape he’s gotten himself in, because, you know, Johnny’s really a good boy and it was just bad luck that he got caught. If they only bail him out, he’ll change.
The only way Congress will ever balance the budget is if the people force them to, period. A state-by-state people’s initiative Balanced Budget Amendment, along with a provision to make Congress abide by the rules the rest of us have to, is the only way to put a stop to their self-serving, corrupt, vote-buying, pandering ways. Our founding fathers would be aghast if they could see how Congress operates today.
My question is if Congress can force us to buy health insurance (so that doctors, hospitals, et al can have six figure salaries), then why can’t they force us to buy legal insurance so that all lawyers can have six figure salaries, too? (Believe it or not, they don’t.) After all, people have legal needs, just as they have medical needs. People need legal help with divorces, contracts, deeds, wills and more. What’s the difference between needing medical and legal help, from a constitutional standpoint? None, that I can see. For that matter, how about mandating optometric, dental, podiatry and veterinary insurance, too?
In your last paragraph you have it right. Obama’s solution is like putting a band-aid on 50-caliber bullet wound. We need to completely elimate greed from the health care system and start a system based exclusively on compassion. Profit from the illness of others is a moral abomination. By eliminating profit from the system we could provide unlimited care for everybody relatively cheaply since no money would be stuffed into the pockets of corporate droogs in Armani suits.
By establishing a compassionate society across the board we could ultimately do away with the need for lawyers and judges becuase we could replace threats and punishment with caring and love.
Excellent column. I would add a couple more points.
1. Liberals never define “fair share”, and much study of their writings on the topic leads me to believe the term simply means “more”.
2. Liberals feel rich people should pay higher taxes. Yet few people pay the top rate. Obama admitted as much in a debate during the campaign when McCain said he wanted lower capital gains tax and Obama responded that nobody paid the top rate anyway. Broadening the base by reducing deductions while lowering the top rate would, in fact, cause more rich people to pay higher taxes – and it would be arguably fairer. Yet liberals ignore this point, harping on their desire to raise the top rate.
3. I saw a recent study that found, over the past 80 years, inflation-adjusted cost of government has risen from $600 per person to $12000 per person. When is enough enough?
Prof. Hanson has said it all (almost). Writers above have cited instances nearly unbelievable of taxpayer (and borrowed) millions just p….d away on worthless bureaucrats. The worst thing is: This profligacy is probably deliberate, and designed to bankrupt the country, cause panic and disorder, making it possible for a “strong man” to grab power with the aid and support of many of those who brought on the crisis in the first place. Don’t forget Lenin and Hitler and the crises they took advantage of……
As usual, Dr. Hanson is impressively on-target and firing for effect.
I am reluctently coming to the conslusion that all of this over-spending/over-taxing/over-regulating is not being done for the advertised “saintly, liberal,loving” reasons but for the purpose of creating havoc. Was it Lenin or was it Stalin who said that you can’t make an omlet without breaking eggs? This time it’s my nest-egg (what’s left of it) and yours.
This may get censored out but, if you haven’t already done so, it’s time to be prepared and able to exercise your Second Amendment rights.
Ulyanov and Dzugashvili (Lenin and Stalin’s real monickers) both used that line, and it’s usually attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte’.
But it was apparently first used by Maximilien Robespierre’, to justify the number of people whom he personally introduced to Madame Guillotine, to “make the Revolution secure”.
Needless to say, autocrats and sociopaths have loved that rejoinder ever since.
cheers
eon
HES – I do firmly believe it is coming.
It was called Der Kristallnacht. The Night of Broken Glass.
Ours is coming.
You missed the biggest one, doc.
Taxes are the primary way the grandee class exercises their power. And power is what it’s all about. They take from one and give to the other.
Resistribution, entitlements, safety nets, earmarks, government jobs, union pensions….all ways to exercise power and all funded with taxes. It’s all about power, all the time.
I think they already have more power than it’s smart to give them, seeing as 90% of them are basically white-collar criminals. So I see no need to give the a penney more.
Mystical references to “society” and its programs to “help” may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.
~Thomas Sowell
It is just.fricking.surreal when this President talks about necessary measures to cut our deficits while under his tutelage we have amassed more than $4 trillion in additional debt, far surpassing any of his predecessors, even his reportedly profligate immediate predecessor.
How do you do that, in the theater of the absurd ?
This constant pumping for new taxes on the wealthy is also surreal, you could confiscate whole fortunes and barely scrape the surface of this administration’s debt alone.
Obama even harps on this stuff abroad, in Europe, on his other recent trip to points east for yet another meaningless gathering. It must really be about the only “hope” this current national crowd has left in its toolbox, engendering class warfare.
Democrats don’t want to slow down, let alone reverse, the spending, regardless of the fiscal consequences.
That is exactly what mystifies me.
If I was a Republican politician, I would start every sentence with:
“You are aware, aren’t you, that the current regime has impoverished generations of Americans by piling up 5 trillion in debt to payoff it’s political supporters. Rather than agreeing to a single thing they want, what we should be doing is rolling back everything they have done to a least 2007. That will at least save us from the impending cataclysm. Then we can begin making choices about how to reduce the government from a rational starting point.”
The argument the Left makes is that this is an investment in the “the people.” A certain amount of this is OK. For example, the military is there for the defense of all. The roads are there to facilitate transportation of us all.
The problem is that they have extended this idea all the way out to things that are bottomless, such as healthcare, medical insurance, and –what next? An Ipad for everyone? Free broadband? Oh wait…
Obama has been schooled in what “the opiate of the masses” is, and he’s using it for the full effect. When that’s all you know, you have to use it.
I agree with every reason and rationale, but how about one singular argument about why we should not pay more taxes? It is OUR money and it is (or shouldn’t be) up to government to decide that we get to keep a little bit of it to pay to support our own lives and interests. All of the reasons given by Victor are great, truthful and all of the things that we say all of the time, but the more often we say things like “it’s mine – hands off Congress” the better.
How far we’ve sunk, sank, slunk…
“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”
~James Madison
I was introduced to VDH by a flag officer in the Utah Army National Guard back in 2008. We were at an “officer professional development” (OPD) dinner and the General Officer was talking to about 50 officers. In an off the hip remark, he mentioned an article that VDH wrote on Memorial Day back in 07 or 06. He said, “It doesn’t matter what your politics are, this was a great description of where we are in the country.” Had to do with such a small minority of Americans willing to wear a uniform etc. Since then, VDH is on my favorites for my phone, and any computer I use. It is like having a small, well-informed lecture on the state of the union/culture/economy/ every other day. Love it.
My favorite VDH article is called ‘the depression among us’ back in spring of 09. You can find it here: http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson032209.html
The quote that nearly floored me was, “…Americans thirst for the unapologetic doer…” A Howard Roark. A Hank Reardan. A John Galt.
My fear as I read everyone’s posts is how to change belief? Confirmation bias holds that we seek out information to confirm our own beliefs. This information is sticky, and facts that do not support our beliefs fade & are not sticky.
So, how do we get a couple of generations away from the belief that they are either entitled or that life should be fair? Beliefs can be shaken by ‘come to Jesus’ moments, or slowly modified like a constant drip of water over stone. Bottom line is that here on PJ Media, we’re simply confirming our own beliefs. It feels good. It feels like family-a tribe, we’re home among others with like ideas.
I don’t think that is enough. The entitled crowd is together in OWS, MSNBC, or the Daily KOS confirming their own beliefs as well. It does not bode well for changing the hearts and minds. We need an insurgency against the left.
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
bsn
So let me get this straight: life isn’t fair, therefore we should do everything in our power to prove life isn’t fair? That’s just sad. It’s defeatist and sad.
So your argument is: life is not fair, therefore we should do everything in our power to prove it is not fair? That’s sad.
Dear bsn;
Spit in the ocean; Stir vigorously and wait for several tide changes; Sample to test for any remnants of your DNA.
Good Luck.
But, maybe if you and all your relatives spit over an extended period of time, one of your particles may show up. Then you would be imprisoned and fined by the EPA.
I tend to agree with Jim Pethokoukos of the American Enterprise Institute who suggests that the Middle Class is dead. He doesn’t explicitly state that, but it’s what the logical conclusion of what he asserts. The Dems have not come up with any long-term financial plan–short-term, yes–and the reason they have not is because it would reveal that all of this socialist financial disaster can only be paid for by immense tax hikes on the Middle Class. There aren’t enough ‘rich’ in the world to pay for our debts; so this feature is baked into the cake. Like the bank robber in the old joke, the Left will tax the middle class out of existence because ‘that’s where the money is.’
Like the Titanic, our ship of state is large and slow: it would have to travel many miles to turn 180 degrees; notwithstanding, it is already doomed. By the time the Middle Class understands what the Left has done, it will be too late. It is too late.
We knew they were going to do it and they did it.
By adding 5 trillion to the debt in less than three years, and increasing the budget by a trillion a year, they think they have made it impossible to ever return to fiscal sanity. They think it is now inevitable that taxes will have to be raised, and hence that it is inevitable that their coup of the United States will be completed when the middle class is turned into tax slaves of the government.
Don’t let them get away with it.
If every single one of them have to be run out of town, and strung up from the nearest tree, we have to do it.
The fact that this isn’t the ONLY THING the Republicans talk about is a scandal all by itself.
It isn’t about the taxes, it’s about the spending and the spending and the spending and the spending and the spending and the spending and the spending.
Nobody who votes Democrat will believe a single discouraging word about the left or Comrade Obama. Never underestimate the Left’s capacity for denial and fantastical thinking. In their world nobody works for money; they steal it, screw the working man out of it, or inherit it. All opposition political figures are evil. Everyone who disagrees with them is evil and stupid. Their definition of intellectual, smart, informed is being posessed of leftist opinion anyone who isn’t possessed of leftist opinion is stupid and uninformed.
I dealt with Meany School, Alinsky disciple union reps for the last fifteen or so years of my career in labor relations. They were NEVER really prepared for an arbitration. I compiled a formidable win/loss record against them in arbitration but now that I’m retired I’ll say that record is more a tribute to how bad they were than how good I was. How many cases I made of cross-examination of their witnesses because they hadn’t even bother to prepare, often to even interview, their witness. They were just convinced they were right and would prevail no matter. And when they lost, it was because the arbitrator was stupid or because s/he’d been bought off by the employer.
In contract negotiations, if they made real proposals at all, they were wild-a$$ totally unrealistic, wildly uneconomic, and crafted to pander to the most discontented and maladjusted members of their unit. They rarely even provided written proposals, usually just a pie in the sky press release and a threat to disrupt some vital service with some jab about how evil and parsimonious the employer was. Of course, that always put you to bargaining with yourself because political principals are always so sensitive to bad press. What Obama did with both the debt ceiling and the “jobs bill” is typical; a proposal he had no intention of passing, calculated to be forcefully rejected, a threat, a cacaphony from the leftist media about how awful the opposition is, then they fold and and start bargaining with themselves to try to get something the lefties will buy. Which, of course, can’t be done because they don’t want a solution, they want conflict. The very last thing a union wants is happy employees and likewise the Democrats have to keep their constituents constantly unhappy and resentful.
They can be beaten, but not by public opinion, which is almost always predominantly on their side. You have to keep them at the bargaining table, in front of judges and arbitrators, and you have to make sure nobody can have any fun. And you have to be prepared to be very unpopular.
Interesting, as usual.
I’m convinced that the reason rational people never seem to make headway against this brand of scum is that we are too busy leading lives to dedicate 24×7 to cleaning out the sewers; whereas they are dedicated 24×7 squared to getting in our pockets.
Hearing how easy it is to defeat them when one makes a dedicated effort is comforting, but of course, it was your job when you did it. Most of the guys on our side who do it full time aren’t much better than the scum in the first place; they are pretty much marxists lite.
Well, first, there aren’t a lot like me; Alaska is one of only a handful of states that is unionized and which has a Republican government most of the time. There are three or four others that from time to time have a Republican governor or a Republican legislature, but we’ve consistently had one, the other, or both since the ’70s. Even when we’ve had Democrats in charge, they’ve been restrained by either lack of money or by a Republican controlled Legislature that wouldn’t give them money. I quit the Democrat Knowles Administration in the mid-’90s and went to work for the Republican Legislature; we killed every labor agreement the Knowles Administration negotiated with its union friends except the last one, a nothing agreement, and it got so bad for the Administration they came to me and said, “What will it take?” So, I got them some peace with their union friends and set things up for a Republican Administration. In those days, the guy in CA and I were the only Republican political appointees doing labor relations in the Country. I had the advantage of a Republican AG, and he didn’t – ugly thing that.
In reality, the hardest thing for me was getting my principals to let me do what needed to be done. They are so sensitive to and afraid of the media that the slightest discourageing word puts them in fetal position. I carried a lot of water for Republicans in my state but I’ll guarantee you that if I showed up at some Republican grip ‘n Grin, within five minutes I’d hear, “here comes trouble.”
“here comes trouble.”
You haven’t changed. I have the same reaction whenever I see one of your posts, here. :P
@Marc
If one doesn’t provoke, one can’t inspire.
“I’m convinced that the reason rational people never seem to make headway against this brand of scum is that we are too busy leading lives to dedicate 24×7 to cleaning out the sewers; whereas they are dedicated 24×7 squared to getting in our pockets.”
Most of the Alinskyite tactics are designed to get perfectly rational people to go nuts and do something stupid; they want you to lose it.
My great fear with the OWS crowd and their tactics is if they move out from the big Blue cities. The Blue cities have learned to split the baby and nominally protect public safety and private and public property while not antagonizing their lefty friends too much with rough tactics. A Seattle or NYC cop knows how to pick up a female demonstrator who has gone limp while he keeps his white or blue gloved hands always visible to his fellow officer with the video camera so the b*(ch can’t claim he fondled her breasts or groped her, don’t know that cops in medium sized cities have much of that sort of training. The Red States and cities don’t have the experience in dealing with this stuff nor do they have a populace either sympathetic to or blase about this sort of stuff, so there’ll be an immediate impulse to go kick Hell out of the dirty hippie communists and get them out of the park or away from city hall, and that’s going to look really, really ugly on 24/7 news; think Selma, dogs, and fire hoses in Color and HD. Great lead up to the ’12 election. Only thing that could be better is if the EBTs didn’t get charged or the checks didn’t get delivered and the people who were expecting them head to the ‘burbs to steal a car and a plasma since their babies are starving. Helter-Skelter.
In the fantasy world that occasionally invades my head I would love to see a citizen’s group – call it the AVG, American Vigilante Group – clean out these OWS infestations once and for all. Similar to the mantra about illegal aliens, they would be ‘doing those jobs that the police won’t do’. Heh.
LGoPs:
Trouble is, that’s what they want to happen; they need their Kent State Moment. We on the right have kept our crazies, and we do have them, in check thus far and big Blue cities aren’t our normal habitat. Part of me thinks this year’s OWS shenanigans is just a run up, a trial run for next year. If they start this stuff on our turf, the small cities and towns, the ‘burbs, in the run up to the election and there is violence, even astroturfed violence, they have an excuse to impose martial law or postpone the election. Remember, these are people who were PLANTING US gunstore guns in MX as a prop for an attempt to restrict lawful ownership. Not much really restrains their behavior.
I am becoming more and more convinced that the corruption and rot has become so deeply embedded in this country that the electoral process, even an unlikely conservative win of biblical proportions, will not undo it. They used to say that the pendulum swung both ways but it is apparent to me that it is now irrevocably stuck/jammed in the far left position. And it will take extraordinary measures to unstick it and return it to some form of balance.
I agree and it’s a dilemma.
At the moment, I’m opting for just trying to get somebody who isn’t a marxist in the white house. Maybe we can build on that.
Lefty economic obtuseness will be with us forever for the simple reason that these people can’t do without their big government religion. The doubts that people of conventional religious beliefs must overcome in order to maintain their faith are nothing compared to the doubts engendered by the failures of socialism and redistribution that its believers must ignore.
not sure why…but, I didn’t make it through the spam filter?
Moi!
Must have been a rookie at the switch. I suggest he or she be flogged. Note to the rookie: cfbleachers is practically an institution on these message boards. Shape up!
*Flog. Flog. Flog.* (Floggee passes out from the pain.)
Hmm, they do not make floggees like they used to.
UcfN: Unleash cfbleachers Now!!!
We demand it.
:)
Once we realize that the intent is not to merely have higher taxes to promote more entitlements, that the scheme is MUCH larger than that…we can begin to address what is really going on here.
(here I cited a link to george soros wanting to overthrow capitalism)
First, there are no liberals. There are leftist fabulists who pretend to “do gooderism” and have “pod peopled” the liberals, using their shell as a casing for radical transformation of the free market democracies.
Second, there is an intentional …read that, again…intentional overthrow of the free market system underway.
(here I cited a link to klein on line, on the overthrow of capitalism)
The entirety of the Occupy movement is a crypto-small c communist, global fabulist, Robin Hood taxation plan to TAKE wealth…and redistribute it.
It is not about “fairness”, it is about transformation.
Occupy This! may be the response from the right, but the masses are not getting the information that ACORN/SEIU and the small c communists are behind a global attempt to shatter the free market and replace it with a global government led by China, Brazil, …and is intentionally attempting to remove America, Israel and Western Europe as leaders.
They want to INTENTIONALLY put America BEHIND others. Read that again…the INTENT…is to weaken America’s influence in the world.
Taxing their brains out…at the top…is part of the effort. It is a piece of the larger whole.
This is why Obama/Soros have strangled energy in the US…not for “ecology” purpose…but to prop up Brazil…and shift the balance of power and influence.
Ripping money from the hands of Americans, stifling job growth, seizing whole industries, is not about “do gooderism” and “entitlements” at home. That’s a cover.
The class warfare rhetoric, the race warfare rhetoric, …are all morale busters in a war on influence in the global marketplace. Soros wants European-style socialism, Obama wants small c communism……as have always his mentors…Bill Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis, Jeremiah Wright, the folks at Cooper Union and at the Midwest Academy….and his father.
While Obama would later have Dreams from his father, his father was having dreams of a marxist redistribution of power and the reduction of influence from free market societies, shifting the power and influence to socialist ones.
(here I cited a link to the article written on socialism and removal of capitalism)
If one is too busy, tired or lazy to actually go to the links and read what the organized plan is…let me summarize and save the eyeballs from reading and investigating and digging.
Taxes are merely a weapon, a tool…to overthrow capitalism. To downgrade America into a follwer, lead from behind (read, “trail”) in power, influence and control in the world.
The nations that really, really, really don’t want to see America as a hyperpower (Iran, North Korea, Russia, China …France) love this “reset” button.
The assault on America, Israel…the West…on MORAL grounds…has all been a head fake. Global warming is a head fake. Taxation on “fairness” grounds is a head fake.
For those who do bother to read the links, you will begin to see the plan unfolding in everything that is happening here…and begin to understand why.
the links can be found by searching since I can’t seem to get my comment published and past the moderator with the links in them
This just underlines my point that I don’t think this silent overthrow will be solved by normal electoral means. Even if we win overwhelmingly in ’12, I think the cancer runs too deep. I find it ironic that just as we defeated the Soviet Union, we had already been infected by their disease and I fear that it might be a mortal wound.
Most jobs in america are created by businesses of 10 million – 1 Billion, where the average Pay for CEO is below 500,000 per year. This sector of the economy should receive far more support.
The problem is not taxes for 200,000 and up bracket. The problem is taxes paid by the 20 million and up bracket. This is where the issue is.
The proper approach is to leave the tax rate as is for all brackets except for the 20 Million and up. That is where taxes require upward adjustment, as that bracket pays very little tax, or in some cases simply sends it offshore and hides their money.
“The problem is taxes paid by the 20 million and up bracket. This is where the issue is.”
And what “problem” or “issue” is that? Who should decide what the “problem” is? If a private enterprise wants to pay someone $10MM, $20MM or $30MM, who am I to care? I don’t spend sleepless nights thinking about Johnny Depp and the $50MM he made last year. That’s between him and his fans. Why should someone get punished at a higher tax rate for making obscene amounts of money? Why not punish the businesses that employ and pay them instead, and make them pay higher taxes? That would put a stop to those kind of salaries real quick. Who should decide what is “fair”? Certainly not the government, because the following year, I may become a “fair” target based on some bureaucrat’s decision.
why spend on the least likely in society to ever show a return? If we invested in education for the educable rather than food and entertainment for the non-educable, at least we might be able to scam ourselves into thinking ‘it’s an investment’ rather than ‘the fracking government is stealing all my money and just tossing it on the streets’.
So forget welfare. forget medicaid. forget medicare. it’s not like they are in the constitution anyway. burn your mmoney – it’s faster, and the effect is the same.
Leave me my money. if I want to waste it, i’ll buy a lottery ticket for me, not send it to uncle who will send it to a layabout useless person who will use it to buy a lottery ticket.
I’m tired of investing in crap. Includes EPA, DOE, DOE, USG, DOJ – damn near everybody but the military – which is, BTW, in the constitution.
Seems education has gone off like old milk before i get to have my cereal. I tell my many kids that you can figure anything out with those vast unused areas of the brain whenever you need to tap into them. Many degrees can be compared to the dog license around your loyal pets neck!
Here’s how I feel about it. I’m a milk cow for the politicians. An increasingly abused milk cow. Why should I respect those politicians or my government anymore?
Okay, I get it. Our side says we should not increase taxes. Their side says we should. While I am on our side, I agree with the lefties.
If we increase the taxes on the wealthy those over $200k to Clinton levels that would not be so bad. (In fact I would institute a wealth tax for those whose wealth is over $1 million and make it progressive. How come nobody has suggested this?) But for every tax dollar increase on the over $200k crowd we should raise the taxes on the 47% who pay no federal taxes by one dollar. Equality, right?
Why do we protect the wealthy when we all know they vote Dem? I say stick it to them and when they whine and see their money going down the cesspool that is D.C. they will convert.
How come we do not tax union dues? Why not an entertainment tax on Hollyweird and NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL athletes? Tax political contributions and contributions to political activities like 527s.
Theft is theft and what you propose is Grand Larceny! Taxes should be collected for the good of the country not to buy votes and allow breast feeding for grownups! Whats the difference between demanding more taxes for others and jealousy?…ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!
Thou shalt not covet…
Thou shalt not steal…
A liberal friend emails me all the time, carping about “those rich CEOs.” I used to drill down a little for a debate. Now I just tell him, “It’s not illegal [to get a fat paycheck], and it’s not your money.” That’s really what it boils down to: covetousness.
Come on. You don’t really have a liberal friend.
I see your point. Is he really a friend?
Blotto, I don’t see how becoming a tool for the Democrats to achieve their objective can be one for “our side.” We should stick to our values.
Professor Hansen, you are a gift, no doubt about it. Thank you for this piece.
Great review, Dr. Hanson. It amazes me how concisely you cover so much ground in your little blogs. A few things other of my real peeves with taxation/redistribution theology:
1. It actually hurts it’s supposed benefactors by fostering dependency and undercutting traditional values and institutions that really help people.
2. It’s really just a power ploy for politicians that gain more power using taxpayer’s money to fund organizations, institutions and bureaucracies that overtly and covertly work to disenfranchise taxpayers.
3. Lumping people that make more than 200K with millionaires and billionaires is effective politically, but many people enter that tax category struggling to invest in their business and live a frugal lifestyle while older people with exponentially higher net worth often have lower incomes.
4. How much savings would a private-sector employee require to retire at 52 with guaranteed income at 60-90% of their salary for the next 32+ years? They would have to be a millionaire, so why don’t we just admit that public employee retirees are effectively millionaires and move to raise their taxes too.
As a disappointed Sarah Palin supporter, I have to now chose who I will vote for to lead us in what from the above article and comments will likely be our last hurrah as a free nation should we not change the course of our country once and for all.
We are too far gone to withstand another Democratic/Communist regime in power for even four more years both now or in another four years.
Who are each of you willing to support to lead this fight? I will be very interested in who you chose. My choice now is for Newt. Any other suggestions?
And so the great divide begins. A House divided can not stand. We have a segment in this country who want something for nothing and feel entitled to take what they want/need from those who have worked/earned it. And then have the balls to call the producers greedy. My guess – this will come to an end soon. Will it be bloody? Probably. How many more will go John Galt as taxes go up. And how long for areas of the country start to separate?..
Not soon enough…..
Well said! Count me in! In the old Soviet Union they had a joke when 95% of their wages were taken by the govt; they pretend to pay us so we pretend to work!
This coin has two sides;#1 allow govt to grab handfuls of cash out of your budget to spend on the interest on old debt as they contemplate NEW DEBT! Also they feel they must pay people who won*t work! (where did that come from)? Let me quote Roy Masters who said “those who don*t work,won*t know how to work” On the other hand let us spend our own money for worthwhile purposes and then most money will be spent on thing that are WORTHWHILE !
Under “7) Psychological,” Victor Davis Hanson describes the “1%” — actually, the top 5% of taxpayers — as “tired of being demonized.” If they are anything like me, we are far more than merely “tired” of the vitriol and epithets of “greed” and “unfairness” — disgused as “fair share” — being heaped on us. We are enraged and wish there were a way of dishing it out in kind. Perhaps we need a cant retort of “greedy ne’er do wells,” “lazy thieves” and “incompetent pick pockets.” Forget “redistributionists” and “socialists.” They are immune to economic analysis. One businessman recently displayed his gut rage in a way the 1-5%ers can relate to: He put up a sign stating that hiring is frozen until Obama is out of office. It is his one-man “Atlas(t) Shrugged.” It is a fantasy I’ve often indulged but cannot as federal regulations require that I hire more and more bureaucracy fulfillers. Never mind what I — and undoubtedly the man with the sign — went through for so many years to earn the epithets of greedy and unfair. Never mind the risk, late hours, brutal sacrifice and years of vicious, gratuitous litigation at the hands of the same crowd of self-annointed-self-entitled leeches. (The trial lawyers may be the ultimate crony “capitalists” of the Democrats. It is galling, however, to characterize these parasites as any sort of “capitalists”.)
The higher — and higher and higher — tax crowd are nothing less than highwaymen. At the same time they seek greater engorgement on the weal of others, they not only refuse to disclose any cuts they might make, worse they even refuse to disavow any further expeditures. They are the flesh eating bacteria devouring the body politic and the productive class of this once-productive nation.
We are doubly afflicted: First by the symbiotic relationship between (il)liberal politicians looting the work ethical in order to feather the nests of non-productive bureaucrats and feed their ever-burgeoning horde of psychophants, an open-mouthed aviary of angry, carnivorous nestlings, who vote en masse to ensure the next morsel stolen from the early birds. Second, by the effete, over-privileged corporate crony class who are subsidized and bailed out at the expense of the rest of us.
The Napoleon Obama Pigs and the sty needs to be cleaned out! At the same time, the enfants terrible of OWS should lose their subsidies and starved into working for a (taxable) dollar, even if it means pushing a broom at theiir favorite demonstration site.
Poor guy.
Screw the flat tax. It is fundamentally unfair because higher earners pay more taxes than lower earners. Why can’t we live in a world where everyone pays the same damn tax? Period.
True tax fairness goes like this: Take the total amount of money the government wants to force the citizenry to pay, divide by the number of tax payers, there’s your tax bill.
I’m in. Are you?
Twice a month I receive a salary check cut by the bookkeeper and never have to even think about it. My daughter opened her own law office, uses her apt and Starbucks to work and depends on her clients paying her to get by. At present, clients owe her 6000 dollars. So her income isn’t income she can count on without suing her own clients. Another difference for those who run their own show.
Her clients only owe her $6K? I know lawyers with accounts receivable far exceeding that. The problem for your daughter is that instead of focusing on current clients, she must spend part of her time (& money) trying to collect from previous clients.
If Obama & a Democrat Congress can force us to buy health insurance, why couldn’t they also force us to buy legal insurance? That way, instead of your daughter having to chase deadbeat clients to get paid, she can simply bill the insurance company. She can also refuse to represent clients who aren’t insured. You know . . . the same way the medical system works.
Dr. Hanson, you have a great sense of humor.
It does appear these demonstrators, that are demanding the “rich” be taxed more, believe the tax form used to submit your income tax to the IRS is a form that simply says, “Enter how much you made last year; Now go to the tax table and find your tax for that amount.” (I’m curious as to how many of them have actually filed any income taxes?)
The main problem is that D.C has determined they will tax “income” and not the “rich” or “wealth”. (Did you know that D.C. stands for Democrat Circus, or Democrat Corruption; Take your pick.) If they taxed the wealth of individuals in America, many Occupiers of Wall Street would be taxed, and taxed large. Taxing wealth or the “rich”, would snare Buffet, Pelosi, John Kerry who served in Viet Nam, Michael Moore, Hollywood, the New York Times, ABC, CBS, etc, etc. There would be much blood spilled over taxing wealth. The tax structure increasing taxes on income would create a situation worse than they could ever expect, since, raising taxes still would only address the “income”, and leave the wealthy untouched to further multiply their riches. These demonstrators would be prohibited from becoming “rich” since their tax rate would be so repressive. The dichotomy between rich and poor would grow exponentially.
And as for “Inequality”? Haven’t the Republicans laid down so the poor, disadvantaged, specimen we now have could assume office?
Never forget that any redistribution takes one dollar in five for administration, at a minimum. The figure comes from the insurance industry. For the government, it costs one dollar to administer one dollar of air travel.
I saw a lot of policy wonks and wonkettes at SAIS, and all they are is just a bunch of squirrels looking for a nut.
I apologize for arriving late to this party. My anger boils over when I contemplate the federal con job we know as the income tax! The SCOUSA has consistently held that the income tax is an indirect tax, as such it must be uniform throughout the US. Pollock v Farmers Loan and Trust Co. (1895), Flint v Stone Tracy (1911), Brushaber v Union Pacific RR Co (1916), Stanton v Baltic Mining (1916). These cases all show how we have been deceived by our public servants into becoming slaves to ourselves.
The only way to prevent our federal, nay, national government from destroying us all is to force our country to return to its founding as a republic, not a democracy. Bind them with the chains of our Constitution as our forefathers declared. I dare anyone to make a serious study of the matter and not become enraged over the betrayal we have suffered.
http://www.tax-freedom.com/ is a great place to start. God bless you all and our troubled nation.
I don’t make anywhere near $200K, yet I know it is morally wrong to siphon off another’s success and, even worse, squander it. The Democrat position is appalling.
On a side note… But what choice will we have next election? I don’t believe the presidential spot can ever attract the real leaders we need. The unflappable sharp mind that will labor to restore our founding principles and intelligently denounce “collectivism” in public. Who in his right mind, with an ounce of talent, would want to spend decades working among the civic illiterates in office today? Who would subject his (or her) family to the media’s anal exam? Will we whine if the media doesn’t love him, and then abandon him because we really want a candidate that the media will love? If such a candidate did exist, would we embrace him if his CV didn’t include an ivy league, his face wasn’t handsome, his voice was irritating, his waistband too large, or if he went to a boisterous church or just stayed home on Sundays? Our bar is set high for all the wrong things.
Did the Great Society and it’s legacy programs really help millions of people? Can you claim to help someone if you make them a dependent? I would say no. I would say that is has done far more harm than good.
A more insidious reason for the current predicament is the politically-correct notion of “compromise” that is pushed at every opportunity by Democrats and their media allies. Nominal Republicans/conservatives have been demagogued about the “vast middle’s desire for ‘compromise’” for decades, with the result being that the Democrats get their half-a-loaf which leaves conservatives with their half, which is compromised to a quarter, an eighth, and a sixteenth as socialists continue their tax-and-spend wrecking ball policies. The only thing that gets compromised by conservatives is constitutional principle. The Democrats/Left need to be resisted and defeated without compromise, and it’s long past time we used the bully pulpit to make the case!
I know this sounds childishly naive but what I really want is an audit of my government. The IRS has the power to audit any one of us – mercilessly. We, the purportedly consenting citizens of this Republic, should have the right to demand no less of those we have elected to represent us. And I think that, truth be told, if we were to see the results of that audit, the protests seen at the current OWS circuses would seem like child’s play. Ya wanna see some real protest with real pitchforks and real torches? Just go ahead and audit the government and find out where our money – that same money there never seems to be enough of – really goes. Cowboy Poetry my f***ing ass!
This is a bit off topic from Professor Hanson’s essay today but I find myself getting despondent at watching my country being brazenly stolen out from under us, in full view of everyone. I fully understand that a ‘Kent State’ moment is precisely what the left is looking for and I fear that if we don’t oblige them they very well may create one regardless. Certainly they wouldn’t be restrained by the immorality or just plain wrongness of doing something underhanded like that, would they? And with a subserviant, compliant and abetting media, they’d have a damned good chance of getting away with it. Who would give voice to our outrage and our denials? The media? The very same media that would misreport it in the first place. I am at a loss on how to fight this kind of ruthless, single mindedness in pushing an agenda that is the antithesis of everything that America stands for. How much is the deceit and propaganda of the media worth? How many votes does it garner? Every poll shows that this is a center right country yet our elections yield more and more radically leftist governance and policies. How does one undo this media influence that is robbing us of our country. I don’t have the answer but I do know that continuing down the road we are on will lead to a grim conclusion. Al Capone was a murderous thug, yet he wasn’t ever tried or convicted for murderous acts. On the contrary he was nailed for tax evasion, of all things. Isn’t there some way to pursue the media for a similar fraud? The fraud of claiming to be the objective presenters of the ‘truth’ while doing the exact opposite. And by doing the exact opposite, in a demonstrably consistent manner benefiting only one party…in effect making unreported contributions to one of the two political parties…to the tune of countless sums of money? The whole reason political campaigns are so beholden to money is the tremendous cost of media advertising – in the hundreds of millions of dollars. How much the value then of unlimited ‘advertising’ thru barely concealed advocacy by these same ‘news’ organizations. I know I’m probably just rambling foolishly. I honestly don’t see how my country survives under such an underhanded and unethical assault by the all powerful media. And we sit helpless watching it. God help America.
“LGoPs” I think your insight about the nature of the undeclared dollar value of the media bias is very valuable. I had never thought of the media bias as a dollar value contribution but it is of course. It also explains why the bidding war for Networks and other communication licenses is always so intense.
You should clarify this point and present it again when there are more readers on one of the next threads dealing with this issue.
It’s amusing and at the same time amazing how the larger point is missed by so many. Some smart person at some time in the past declared that the first step to solving a problem is to define it. Our problem is not tax rates, leftists, right wingers, atheists or born agains.
Many of the comments are amusing because until more people are willing to face the fact that this nation along with most others around the globe are controlled by a criminal conspiracy, nothing is going to change here or anywhere else to any great degree. Dare I say United Nations?
Politics is now the largest and most profitible growth industry known to man and neither the U.S. Government, nor state and local governments are any longer in the business of taking care of the public’s business. They are designed to take from those who have a little and give it to those who would like some of it, after taking a big slice of the pie for themselves. Plainly and simply, that’s what it’s all about. Retired multi-millionaire public servants.
And you don’t fix that problem with a different cast of corrupt characters driving the train.
As for Newt Gingrich, please do some research on that half baked flake before starting to drum up more anybody but Romney hysteria. His flirtation with communism and almost any other subject you can name is well documented, as is his ability to come down on both sides of almost any issue and for his effort, suck millions of dollars from the teat of big government.
As for all the non-starters, that is one for the books.
Beautiful column as always, Dr. Hanson. I particularly like this part:
Had Obama been, even for a year, an electrical contractor or Starbucks manager rather than spent a lifetime in academia, community organizing, or comfortably employed by some sort of government, he would have had a different view of taxes and expenses.
That’s why I’d like to see not only term limits (for legislator and bureaucrat alike), but a requirement of at least that one year in the private sector as a prerequisite for employment by the government. Nobody gets to live in the fantasy world until they’ve first experienced the real world.
is the name of the game.
First thing, a drastic cut in the number of handmaidens currently powdering the First Lady’s ass.
“11) Politics” strikes me as central.
Western Europe’s current as well as inevitable socialist failures lay a golden teaching moment at the feet of American conservatives. Help thinkers appreciate why expecting prosperity from a Take philosophy, with its expanding pyramid of dependency that discourages making, is both illusory and disastrous. This dependency agenda, as George Will refers to it, is crucial for the left, as a source of votes and power under the guise of compassion—at our and our children’s expense.
What failures?
Western Europes compassionate social structures are doing just fine and serving their people well. Only to the extent Europeans have been cowed by the imperialistic US into importing the greed-based neoliberal model have things gone wrong.
Just AUDIT the Federal Reserve for the entire system is just Make Believe anyway. Heck the Federal Reserve just gave away 7.77 Trillion with no Congressional approval or voter approval. I am just amazed that this Paper Ponzi System is still working if that’s what you call it. I do love trading this worthless paper for REAL Stuff!
Stock UP while you still can.
“Anyone who chooses a surrogate in place of Yahweh is liable for that god’s taxes. All Americans, non-Christians and ‘Christians’ alike, whose primary god is WE THE PEOPLE have no legal grounds to grumble or rebel against whatever taxes their god demands. Because they have chosen WE THE PEOPLE as their god, they are required to pay whatever tribute WE THE PEOPLE stipulates. This is precisely what Jesus declared in Matthew 22:21: ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.’ Having perceived the craftiness of the Pharisees and Herodians, Jesus put the ball back in their court by informing them that if Yahweh was their God, they needed to render to Him His dues, but if Caesar (Baal, Allah, Buddha, Krishna, or WE THE PEOPLE) was their god, they needed to render to him his dues. If someone thinks he’s being overtaxed, the only permanent solution is to exchange WE THE PEOPLE for a god who does not require as much in taxes.”
For more, see “Amendment 16: Graduated Income Tax vs. Flat Increase Tax” at http://www.missiontoisrael.org/biblelaw-constitutionalism-pt25.php.
Find out how much you really know about the Constitution as compared to Yahweh’s moral law (His commandments, statutes, and judgments). Take our Constitution Survey (http://www.missiontoisrael.org/constitutionsurvey/constitutionsurvey.php) and receive a free copy of the “Primer” (an 85 page book, normally $7 plus shipping) of “Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective.”
well if my salary went up as fast as a congress rep , possibly wouldnt complain about giving more. BUt when is it fair to ask those that are recieving the money to justly use it and not support corruption , when is it time to ask the elitist we have in our government to think of the people as a whole and not by party lines before spending. When is it fair to ask our government to stay out of wars. When is it fair to ask our government to worry about the american interest here in america , before our interest overseas.
you want more from me………i expect more from you!!!!
I could live with more taxes if it was coupled with real, permanent, spending cuts, so the taxes would all be applied to the debt. But we know that isn’t happening. If I saw a real plan that would cut spending to 18% of GDP by a definite date, I could live with some tax hikes, to bring revenue up to 18% to match. But now, with gov being over 24% of GDP, any “balanced” approach will have the lines meeting at a much too high 22%, if they meet at all, since the taxes are real and permanent, but the cuts often phony and temporary.
I think our government wants the economy to crash as well….Why not then Obama and his Friends will make a new currency and what ever you have managed to save will be worth half! You will see Obama’s face on all the coins and dollars!!!
Till we treat the services that a government provides more like a business instead of a sacrosanct budget that only bureaucratic professionals can manage properly, we will always be in a world of trouble. The bureaucracy does not manage effectiveness through any performance metrics. Instead it is measured through the amount of money that is put into it.
Look at the stimulus package from 2009. It apparently saved or funded 700,000 jobs, at the cost of almost half a million dollars per job. Where did all the money go? If I had a job for one year that gave me half a million, I would never have to work again. The fact is though that more money was put into the bureaucracy of the program rather than getting the dollars to where it will be most effective. Look at the cost of welfare and entitlement programs. The problem does not come that there are more recipients. The problem is that the bureaucracy costs more money to operate.
This is because of ineffective management, bloated salaries, and ineffective human resources. To fire someone from a bureaucratic job requires nearly a year of paperwork. It is easier to shuffle them or transfer them, and never hold them accountable for their poor performance. The same thing happens in the military as well, except a little worse in the bureaucracy side because you can’t smoke them for hours upon hours for being dumb and demoting them.
The bigger the government, the bigger the vote will be for statists.
“Preposed”?
ALL IT TAKES IS JUST A LITTLE TIME TO FIGURE THESE THINGS OUT BUT TRY TO CONVINCE CONGRESS !!
The U.S. Congress sets a federal budget every year in the trillions of dollars. Few people know how much money that is, so we created a breakdown of federal spending in simple terms. Let’s put the 2011 federal budget into perspective:”
“”"”• U.S. income: $2,170,000,000,000″”
“”"”• Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000″”
“”"”• New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000″”
“”"”• National debt: $14,271,000,000,000″”
“”"”• Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000 (about 1 percent of the budget)”"
“”"” “”
“”"”It helps to think about these numbers in terms that we can relate to.”"
“”"”Therefore, let’s “”remove eight zeros from these numbers”" and pretend this is the household budget for the fictitious Jones family.”"
“”"”• Total annual income for the Jones family: $21,700″”
“”"”• Amount of money the Jones family spent: $38,200″”
“”"”• Amount of new debt added to the credit card: $16,500″”
“”"”• Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710″”
“”"”Amount cut from the budget: $385″” “
What We’re Financing With All Those Interest Payments on Obama’s Debt
Unfortunately the ChiCom military won’t always be this easy on the eyes when it’s on the march:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAGjv-L2GYM