"Woe to those who scheme iniquity, who work out evil on their beds! When morning comes, they do it, for it is in the power of their hands. They covet fields and then seize them, and houses, and take them away. They rob a man and his house, a man and his inheritance." ~ Micah 2:1-2
Late last week we learned from a USA Today finding that when excluding the military and the self-employed, “The share of the population that is working fell to its lowest level last year since women started entering the workforce in large numbers three decades ago…Only 45.4% of Americans had jobs in 2010, the lowest rate since 1983 and down from a peak of 49.3% in 2000.” Concurrently, we learned that jobless claims are ‘unexpectedly’ on the rise (we expected them, because the administration’s not counting real numbers), while inflation pressures grow. Need I mention the rising energy prices, particular at the pump? Add this to Obama’s dominant theme of 'taxing the rich', and you’ve produced the volatile cocktail that has Standard & Poor’s negative outlook ready to downgrade our credit rating regardless of whether or not the debt ceiling is raised because of Washington’s lack of seriousness when tackling debt reduction. To further illustrate that lack of seriousness, the administration was quick to discredit S&P's downgrade of its U.S. credit outlook as a “a political judgment that should not be taken too seriously,” when what this potential downgrading is really about as Rush so eloquently put it, “This is Standard & Poor's telling Obama he is a disaster. This is Standard & Poor's telling the world Obama is a disaster. This is Standard & Poor's telling the American people Obama is a disaster.” He continued with an important message:
“And this is not about raising the debt ceiling. They want it to be thought of as happening commensurate with that as a way to get people to go along without fighting an increase in the debt ceiling. This is about the debt that Obama created. That's what that rating is all about. If Obama was a CEO with a private company, he would be facing an SEC investigation because of his lies about the nation's financial situation. Folks, what he has done here -- I've gotta be very careful in my choice of words. What he has done here borders on the legal. Now, Obama gets his power from government -- that's from government unions, spending tax dollars -- from voters who benefit from redistribution. There's no way Obama's ever going to do what’s best for society generally. He'd have to abandon who he is to do what's best for society. He has been trained to be what he has been indoctrinated to be: An agent of an ever-expanding government that limits the power and freedom of the individual.”
The latter of which is something Mark Levin has warned us about Obama.
Another toxic component is something else that Rush covered: a media locked in its own narrative when it comes to the Left’s philosophy of taxation, or 'taxing the rich'…from Schieffer...
…to Amanpour…
“The liberal template is set, and the facts don’t matter.”
Now consider all of this information when reading, as most I’m sure already have, Sunday’s WSJ article entitled Where the Tax Money Is, describing precisely how Obama is targeting the middle class while pretending to tax 'the rich':
“Consider the Internal Revenue Service's income tax statistics for 2008, the latest year for which data are available. The top 1% of taxpayers—those with salaries, dividends and capital gains roughly above about $380,000—paid 38% of taxes. But assume that tax policy confiscated all the taxable income of all the "millionaires and billionaires" Mr. Obama singled out. That yields merely about $938 billion, which is sand on the beach amid the $4 trillion White House budget, a $1.65 trillion deficit, and spending at 25% as a share of the economy, a post-World War II record.
Say we take it up to the top 10%, or everyone with income over $114,000, including joint filers. That's five times Mr. Obama's 2% promise. The IRS data are broken down at $100,000, yet taxing all income above that level throws up only $3.4 trillion. And remember, the top 10% already pay 69% of all total income taxes, while the top 5% pay more than all of the other 95%.”
Not to get bogged down in numbers, if you aren’t already, but here’s the gist of it:
“…The rich, in short, aren't nearly rich enough to finance Mr. Obama's entitlement state ambitions—even before his health-care plan kicks in.
So who else is there to tax? Well, in 2008, there was about $5.65 trillion in total taxable income from all individual taxpayers, and most of that came from middle income earners…
This is politically risky, however, so Mr. Obama's game has always been to pretend not to increase taxes for middle class voters while looking for sneaky ways to do it. His first budget in 2009 included a "climate revenues" section from the indirect carbon tax of cap and trade, which of course would be passed down to all consumers. Such Democratic luminaries as Nancy Pelosi have often chattered about a European-style value-added tax, or VAT, which from a liberal perspective has the virtue of applying to every level of production or service and therefore is largely hidden from the people who pay it.
Now that those two ideas have failed politically, Mr. Obama is turning as he did last week to limiting tax deductions and other "loopholes," such as for mortgage interest payments. We support doing away with these distortions too, and so does Mr. Ryan, but in return for lower tax rates. Mr. Obama just wants the extra money, which he says will reduce the deficit but in practice will merely enable more spending.”
And the conclusion:
“…Mr. Obama's speech was disgraceful for its demagoguery but also because it contained nothing remotely commensurate to the scale of the problem. If the President had come out for a large tax on the middle class, like a VAT, then at least the country could have debated the choice of paying for the government we have or modernizing it a la Mr. Ryan so it is affordable.
Instead the President will continue targeting the middle class for tax increases to pay for an entitlement state on autopilot, while claiming he only wants to tax the rich.”
So, where is this conversation going? Right here: When the top 1% of American earners are paying 40% of the taxes, while the bottom 40% of earners, on average, are making a profit from federal income taxes (getting more money back from tax credits than they pay in), then the last bogus conversation should be the class envy rhetoric of 'taxing the rich', particularly when these so-called 'rich' include “those with salaries, dividends and capital gains roughly above about $380,000”…lumped in with the millionaires and billionaires, but hardly 'rich'. There are a LOT of small businesses that are in this category, so in affect, this administration is at war with small business, and by default, real economic growth and prosperity. This is nothing new from the Democrat’s doctrine of statism, but it is a message that seems to get all too lost with a one-sided media, a deflective administration, and a weak Republican leadership that won’t hit back hard enough against the ensuing class warfare waged by the Obama administration, starting with the man himself.
Then leave it to Rush to take this to the next level:
“If you get $938 billion from the rich, and basically $2,000 billion from everybody else, that gives you $3 trillion (a little bit less than that, actually) and then you're talking about a budget deficit of one to $1.4 trillion, where is the money coming from? The point is you wouldn't even close the deficit if you confiscated everybody's money. If you confiscated every dime of income in this country, you would still -- we would still -- have a trillion-dollar or a half a trillion-dollar deficit every year -- and, by the way, you could do it one time. So next what do you have to do?
Well, next you have to start taxing their children (which is what we've been doing) and then you have to tax their grandchildren. People who are not born yet are paying taxes, in just blunt economic terms. The money at some point has to come from somewhere. We're going out and we're taking money from people not even in the womb yet. That's what we're doing. All the while, this is being blamed on George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and the rich, and our problem is not that we don't have enough money -- well, it is now. It's not just a spending problem. Our problem is a redistribution problem. We're spending money in ways that depress the creation of wealth throughout our society.”
Progressing redistribution, creating economic stress and depressing the markets not only furthers dependency on the State, but helps entrench Democrat power and secure votes, which of course is arguably, but ultimately, their priority. Nevertheless, among a multitude of problems with statism, there is one that of course reflects the same sentiment that Margaret Thatcher pointed out: “eventually you run out of other people's money." And in Obama’s case, he not only can’t find enough to pay towards the debt, but one would first have to accept that this is what he seeks, when manipulating the American People with subversive tax schemes that only prop up more spending seems more likely to fit the bill. Obama’s ‘hope’ is that Americans on whole, and in the hole, won’t ‘change’ their minds about the obfuscations that Big Government sells our civil society, no matter what abyss that will inevitably lead us down. Whereas, conservatives seek a different path, as Margaret Thatcher also described a ‘moral society’: "We want a society where people are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate…not a society where the state is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the state." This debate is ultimately up to which direction the middle class desires: statism’s false security through class envy and numeric manipulation or liberty’s tough but rewarding road to prosperity.
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free." ~ Ronald Reagan
