Ari Fleischer Says It’s Bad for Our Democracy to Exempt Half the Country From Income Taxes – WSJ.com.
Welfare
Mary O’Grady Says Latin America Needs Economic Liberalization and Property Rights, Not Foreign Aid – WSJ.com
Exactly! I am so tired of these bureaucrats who perpetuate poverty, not cure it, because it gives them a job.
Fox: ACORN to Participate in Census, No Seriously
Unbelievable. Obama has no shame, nor does the Census Bureau. Write, call, post, to let it be known this can’t go on. They defrauded the American public by registering thousands of dead or duplicate people on the Democrats ticket. Yes, only one sided as they have been proven repeatedly to be. See my many posts last year on the subject for background. What do you get when you employ a bunch of people who themselves desperately want to keep the hand-outs coming to do political ground work? ACORN.
I feel a coining coming on. I think a clearer outlining of ACORN’s mission could best be defined by a renaming… to The Association to Coordinate Obama Redistricting via NecromancyTM. Just remember you heard it here first.
An article on FoxNews.com outlines the threat and utter incredibility of the concept.
ACORN to Play Role in 2010 Census
The U.S. Census is supposed to be free of politics, but one group with a history of voter fraud, ACORN, is participating in next year’s count, raising concerns about the politicization of the decennial survey.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now signed on as a national partner with the U.S. Census Bureau in February 2009 to assist with the recruitment of the 1.4 million temporary workers needed to go door-to-door to count every person in the United States — currently believed to be more than 306 million people.
A U.S. Census “sell sheet,” an advertisement used to recruit national partners, says partnerships with groups like ACORN “play an important role in making the 2010 Census successful,” including by “help[ing] recruit census workers.”
…
But ACORN’s partnership with the 2010 Census is worrisome to lawmakers who say past allegations of fraud should raise concerns about the organization.
“It’s a concern, especially when you look at all the different charges of voter fraud. And it’s not just the lawmakers’ concern. It should be the concern of every citizen in the country,” Rep. Lynn A. Westmoreland, R-Ga., vice ranking member of the subcommittee for the U.S. Census, told FOXNews.com. “We want an enumeration. We don’t want to have any false numbers.”
ACORN, which claims to be a non-partisan grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people, came under fire in 2007 when Washington State filed felony charges against several paid ACORN employees and supervisors for more than 1,700 fraudulent voter registrations. In March 2008, an ACORN worker in Pennsylvania was sentenced for making 29 phony voter registration forms. The group’s activities were frequently questioned in the 2008 presidential election.
…The census is an official count of the country’s population mandated by the U.S. Constitution. It is used to determine distribution of taxpayer money through grants and appropriations and the apportionment of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. Every U.S. household unit, including those occupied by non-citizens and illegal immigrants, must be counted.
Which is why ACORN wants to be involved since nearly all of their employees not only have, but ARE horses in the race.
Westmoreland and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a member of the House census subcommittee, said the panel has held hearings to make sure the penalties for census takers committing fraud are clearly defined.
“I feel fairly confident that the penalties for an individual manipulating the count are pretty severe,” Chaffetz said. The penalty for any fraudulent activity can be up to five years in jail.
Westmoreland said he hopes the Census Bureau will maintain its measures to ensure an accurate report.
“I feel comfortable right now with the people at the census department that they’re going to put forth their best effort to have a fair count,” he said.
The U.S. Census Bureau has refuted any suggestions that ACORN or any other groups will fraudulently and unduly influence the results of the census.
“The Census (Bureau) is a nonpartisan, non-political agency and we’re very dedicated to an accurate account,” bureau spokesman Stephen Buckner told FOXNews.com. “We have a lot of quality controls in place to keep any kind of systemic error or fraudulent behavior to affect the counts.”
We’ll see. They said that about Obama’s fraudulent state senate race and others. From where I sit, anyone who is or knows anyone who is on the dole must be disallowed from being any part of the count.
WSJ: The Charity Revolt. Liberals oppose a tax hike on rich donors.
You knew it would happen. While I certainly don’t give just to get tax breaks, I certainly don’t want to double it by giving through taxes and then again outside of them. Obama has no clue about charity, after all, he’s never been to Sunday School, or perhaps if he did he was too busy scheming how to game the teacher into giving him special treatment for all of his “struggles”.
Among those shocked by President Obama’s 2010 budget, the most surprising are the true-blue liberals who run most of America’s nonprofits, universities and charities. How dare he limit tax deductions for charitable giving! They’re afraid they’ll get fewer donations, but they should be more concerned that Mr. Obama’s policies will shove them aside in favor of the New Charity State.
And to keep the record straight. All evidence has made clear that, though the liberals run most of the non-religious charities, and seem to do a lot of very visible charity work (to get praise and honor), the conservatives are by far the biggest charity donors in all aspects, and most of it is done anonymously. Who really cares about people, a visible credit seeker or a private citizen donating quietly and anonymously? But anyway, back to the story.
What did these nonprofit liberals expect, anyway? Mr. Obama is proposing a vast expansion of the entitlement state, and he has to find some way to pay for it. So logically enough, one of his ideas for funding public welfare is to reduce the tax benefit for private charity. His budget proposes to raise the top personal income tax rate to 39.6% in 2011 from 35%, and the 33% rate to 36% while reducing the tax benefit from itemized deductions for the top two brackets to 28% from 35% and 33%, respectively. The White House estimates the deduction reduction will yield $318 billion in revenue over 10 years.
From the Ivy League to the United Jewish Appeal, petitions and manifestos are in the works. The Independent Sector, otherwise eager to praise the Obama budget, worries the tax change “could be a disincentive to some donors.” According to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, total itemized contributions from the highest income households would have dropped 4.8% — or $3.87 billion — in 2006 if the Obama policy had been in place. That year, Americans gave $186.6 billion to charity, more than 40% from those in the highest tax bracket. A back of the envelope calculation by the Tax Policy Center, a left-of-center think tank, estimates the Obama plan will reduce annual giving by 2%, or some $9 billion.
…Mr. Orszag revealed the real agenda at work when he pointed out that the money taken from the “rich” would be used to fund such Obama state-run charities as universal health care. The argument is that any potential declines in private gifts, whether to universities or foundations, will be balanced by increases in government grants paid with higher taxes — redistribution by another means. This is how Europe’s welfare state works: Taxes are so high that private citizens have come to believe it is only the state’s duty to support cultural institutions and public welfare. The ambit for private giving shrinks.
Told you this would happen. My brother once said Obama wants to create a country of human cattle that need to be tended and manipulated without choice, only the state matters. He’s dead on. Obama’s a nightmare to free agency and freedom in general.
America has always operated on a different philosophy, going back to Tocqueville’s discovery of thousands of private associations that sustained communities without a commanding state. We doubt that a tax benefit is what drives most giving even today. The exception may be the confiscatory death tax that drives many of the superrich to form foundations to avoid the tax. But we suspect that without the death tax the wealthy would give even more of their income away.
Americans of all income levels have long given generously, notably in the 1980s as income tax rates fell and the economy boomed. Over the last five decades, American giving overall has hardly deviated from 2% of personal income, according to the Tax Foundation. In an ideal world, the U.S. would eliminate most tax deductions, including the one for charity, in return for a simpler, flatter tax that would help create more wealth to give away. With his many new income-limited tax credits and deduction phase-outs, however, Mr. Obama is sprinting in the opposite direction.
Meanwhile, the White House may have underestimated the power of the liberal nonprofit lobby. The charity deduction cut is the only one of the President’s many tax increases that Democrats on Capitol Hill have publicly criticized. Politics hath no fury like a rich liberal scorned.
Read the full article here.
CNBC: Obama Declares War on Investors, Entrepreneurs, Businesses, And More
Must read on CNBC (I’m surprised too, though to be fair Larry Kudlow often has intelligent things to say)…
Let me be very clear on the economics of President Obama’s State of the Union speech and his budget.
He is declaring war on investors, entrepreneurs, small businesses, large corporations, and private-equity and venture-capital funds.
That is the meaning of his anti-growth tax-hike proposals, which make absolutely no sense at all — either for this recession or from the standpoint of expanding our economy’s long-run potential to grow.
Raising the marginal tax rate on successful earners, capital, dividends, and all the private funds is a function of Obama’s left-wing social vision, and a repudiation of his economic-recovery statements. Ditto for his sweeping government-planning-and-spending program, which will wind up raising federal outlays as a share of GDP to at least 30 percent, if not more, over the next 10 years.
…
Study after study over the past several decades has shown how countries that spend more produce less, while nations that tax less produce more. Obama is doing it wrong on both counts.
And as far as middle-class tax cuts are concerned, Obama’s cap-and-trade program will be a huge across-the-board tax increase on blue-collar workers, including unionized workers. Industrial production is plunging, but new carbon taxes will prevent production from ever recovering. While the country wants more fuel and power, cap-and-trade will deliver less.
Read the rest here. The closing is worth posting here though…
There is a growing sense of buyer’s remorse. Well then, do conservatives dare say: We told you so?
Obama Pays Back the Unions for their Support
On Friday, February 6 at 4:30 pm, just before the end of the day and start of the weekend, Obama quietly signed an executive order which in effect bans all non-union construction shops from being awarded any federally funded construction projects. This effectively discriminates against the 84% of construction workers who are non-union. Didn’t even wait a month to pay back his union cronies, amazing. See discussion on this subject on the Associated Builders and Contractors, Inc. webpage here. See RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s official statement in response to this shameful example of crooked politics as usual here, also quoted below for easy reference:
WASHINGTON – Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Michael Steele today released the following statement concerning the executive order quietly signed by President Barack Obama on Friday ordering the use of union labor for federal construction projects:
“President Obama’s executive order will drive up the cost of government at a time when we should be doing everything possible to save taxpayer dollars. Federal contracts should go to the businesses that can offer taxpayers the best value – not just the unions who supported the Democrats’ campaigns last year. Quietly signing executive orders to payback campaign backers undermines Obama promise to change Washington. It is a disappointment for Americans hoping for more transparency and less politics as usual in Washington.”
Dishonest Obama Usurps Census Control
Economist: Obama Lost At Sea
The Economist, which has been a respected newspaper by Tickler in the past, but lost much of it when they endorsed the Obamination, if beginning to come its senses. Read the full article here, excerpts follow…
The Obama rescue
Feb 12th 2009
From The Economist print edition
This week marked a huge wasted opportunity in the economic crisis
Illustration by KAL THERE was a chance that this week would mark a turning-point in an ever-deepening global slump, as Barack Obama produced the two main parts of his rescue plan. The first, and most argued-over, was a big fiscal boost. After a lot of bickering in Congress a final compromise stimulus bill, worth $789 billion, seemed to have been agreed on February 11th; it should be only days away from becoming law. The second, and more important, part of the rescue was team Obama’s scheme for fixing the financial mess, laid out in a speech on February 10th by Tim Geithner, the treasury secretary.
America cannot rescue the world economy alone. But this double offensive by its biggest economy could potentially have broken the spiral of uncertainty and gloom that is gripping investors, producers and consumers across the globe.
Alas, that opportunity was squandered. Mr Obama ceded control of the stimulus to the fractious congressional Democrats, allowing a plan that should have had broad support from both parties to become a divisive partisan battle. More serious still was Mr Geithner’s financial-rescue blueprint which, though touted as a bold departure from the incrementalism and uncertainty that had plagued the Bush administration’s Wall Street fixes, in fact looked depressingly like his predecessors’ efforts: timid, incomplete and short on detail. Despite talk of trillion-dollar sums, stockmarkets tumbled. Far from boosting confidence, Mr Obama seems at sea.
The fiscal stimulus plan has some obvious flaws. Too much of the boost to demand is backloaded to 2010 and beyond. The compromise bill is larded with spending determined more by Democrat lawmakers’ pet projects than by the efficiency with which the economy will be boosted. And it contains “Buy American” clauses that, even in their watered-down version, send the wrong signal to trading partners.
For all those shortcomings, the stimulus plan gets one big thing right. Given the pace at which demand is slumping, a big, and sustained, fiscal boost is vital for America’s economy. This package, albeit imperfectly, administers it.
That makes the inadequacy of the financial rescue all the more regrettable. Fiscal stimulus, indispensable as it is, cannot create a lasting economic recovery in a country with a broken financial system. The lesson of big banking busts, such as Japan’s in the 1990s, is that debt-laden balance-sheets must be restructured and troubled banks fixed before real recoveries can take off. History also suggests that countries which address their banking crises quickly and creatively (as Sweden did in the early 1990s) do better than those that dither. This is expensive and painful, but cautious, penny-pinching governments end up paying more than those that tread boldly.
By any recent historical standards America’s banking bust is big (see article). The scale of troubled loans and the estimates of likely losses—which are now routinely put at over $2 trillion—suggest many of the country’s biggest banks may be insolvent. Their balance-sheets are clogged by hundreds of billions of dollars of “toxic” assets—the illiquid, complex and hard-to-price detritus of the mortgage bust, as well as growing numbers of non-housing loans that are souring thanks to the failing economy. Worse, banks’ balance-sheets are only one component of the credit bust. Most of the tightness of credit is owing to the collapse of “securitisation”, the packaging and selling of bundles of debts from credit cards to mortgages.
Fixing this mess will require guts, imagination and a lot of taxpayers’ money. Mr Geithner claims he knows this. “We believe that the policy response has to be comprehensive and forceful,” he declared in his speech, adding that “there is more risk and greater cost in gradualism than aggressive action.”
But his deeds did not live up to his words. His to-do list was dispiritingly inadequate on some of the thorniest problems, such as nationalising insolvent banks, dealing with toxic assets and failing mortgages. Mr Geithner promised to “stress-test” the big banks to see if they were adequately capitalised and offer “contingent” capital if they were not. But he offered few details about the terms of public-cash infusions or whether they would, eventually, imply government control. His plan for a “public-private investment fund” to buy toxic assets was vague and its logic—that a nudge from government, in the form of cheap financing, would enliven a moribund market—was heroic. Banks’ balance-sheets are clogged with toxic junk precisely because they are unwilling to sell the stuff at prices hedge funds and other private investors are willing to pay. Vagueness, in turn, led to incoherence. How can you stress-test banks if you do not know how their troubled assets will be dealt with and at what price? Amid these shortcomings were some good ideas, such as a fivefold expansion of a $200 billion fledgling Fed facility to boost securitisation. But for nervous investors and worried politicians, desperate for details and prices, the “plan” was a grave disappointment.
How serious is this setback? One interpretation is that Mr Obama’s crew mismanaged expectations—that they promised a plan and came up with a concept. If so, that is a big mistake. Managing expectations is part of building confidence and when so much about these rescues is superhumanly complex, it is unforgivable to bungle the easy bit.
More worrying still is the chance that Mr Geithner’s vagueness comes from doubt about what to do, a reluctance to take tough decisions, and a timidity about asking Congress for enough cash. That is an alarming prospect. “Banksters” may be loathed everywhere (see article), but more money will surely be needed to clean up America’s banks and administer the financial fix the economy needs. That, as this newspaper has argued before, means both some form of “bad bank” for toxic loans (with temporary nationalisation part of that cleansing process, if necessary) and guarantees to cover catastrophic losses in the “good” banks that remain. Mr Obama’s team must recognise this or they, like their predecessors, will come to be seen as part of the problem, not the solution.
Spectator on Obama: “America, What Have you Done?”
I was referred to a very concisely and well written article by Melanie Phillips, in the Spectator, recently on Obama’s utter lack of bringing hope or change to Washington. Take the time to read it and click through…
President Obama has had, by general consent, a torrid First Fortnight. To put it another way, it has taken precisely two weeks for the illusion that brought him to power to be exposed for the nonsense that it so obviously was. The transformational candidate who was going to sweep away pork-barrel politics, lobbyists and corruption has been up to his neck in sleaze, as eviscerated here by Charles Krauthammer. Despite the fact that he came to power promising to ‘ban all earmarks’, his ‘stimulus’ bill represents billions of dollars of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections — which have nothing to do with kick-starting the economy and everything to do with favouring pet Democrat causes.
He has been appointing one tax dodger, lobbyist and wheeler-dealer after another. After appointing one official,Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who had unaccountably forgotten to pay his taxes, he then watched his designated Health Secretary Tom Daschle fall on his sword because he too had taken a tax holiday. Daschle was furthermore a prominent actor in the world of lobbying and influence-peddling. Leon Panetta, Obama’s nominee for Director of the CIA has also, according to the Wall Street Journal, consulted for prominent companies and sat on the board of a public affairs firm that lobbies Congress. The Weekly Standard reports that Secretary of Labour nominee Hilda Solis was not only involved with a private organization lobbying her fellow legislators on a bill that she helped sponsor, but she apparently kept her involvement secret and failed to reveal a clear conflict of interest.
In foreign policy, Obama has started by trashing his own country through grossly misrepresenting its history and grovelling to America’s enemies such as Iran, which has flicked him aside with undiluted contempt. He has gratuitously upset America’s ally India by suggesting that America should muscle in and resolve the Kashmir question.
His right hand doesn’t seem to know what his left hand is doing. He reportedly asked retired Marine General Anthony Zinni to be US ambassador to Iraq, but then abruptly withdrew the appointment without explanation after it had been confirmed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And the precise role he is offering Dennis Ross – special envoy to Iran? Special adviser to Hillary? Special adviser to other special advisers? – remains mired in confusion.
I have argued before however that, given Obama’s radical roots in the neo-Marxist, nihilist politics of Saul Alinsky, it is the undermining of America’s fundamental values that is likely to be this President’s most strategically important goal. I have also suggested that, since this agenda is promoted through stealth politics which gull the credulous middle-classes while destroying the ground upon which they are standing, his second-tier appointments should be closely scrutinised.
And here’s a humdinger. Obama has picked a man called David Ogden to be deputy Attorney-General. Ogden has made his legal career from representing pornographers, trying to defeat child protection legislation and undermining family values. As FoxNews reported this week, he once represented a group of library directors arguing against the Children’s Internet Protection Act, which ordered libraries and schools receiving funding for the Internet to restrict access to obscene sites. And on behalf of several media groups, he successfully argued against a child pornography law that required publishers to verify and document the age of their models, which would have ensured these models were at least 18.
The Family Research Council has more examples of his contribution to upholding American and western values. In one such case, he expressed the view that abortion was less damaging to a woman than having children:
In sum, it is grossly misleading to tell a woman that abortion imposes possible detrimental psychological effects when the risks are negligible in most cases, when the evidence shows that she is more likely to experience feelings of relief and happiness, and when child-birth and child-rearing or adoption may pose concomitant (if not greater) risks or adverse psychological effects …
In another, co-authored brief, he argued that it was an unconstitutional burden on 14-year old girls seeking an abortion for their parents to be notified — because there was no difference between adults and mid-teens in their ability to grasp all the implications of such a decision:
There is no question that the right to secure an abortion is fundamental. By any objective standard, therefore, the decision to abort is one that a reasonable person, including a reasonable adolescent, could make. [E]mpirical studies have found few differences between minors aged 14-18 and adults in their understanding of information and their ability to think of options and consequences when asked to consider treatment-related decisions. These unvarying and highly significant findings indicate that with respect to the capacity to understand and reason logically, there is no qualitative or quantitative difference between minors in mid-adolescence, i.e., about 14-15 years of age, and adults.
And how did the 44th President react to the growing public dismay over the mess he was making? He threw his toys out of the pram — or perhaps that should read, he got into the pram. For he fled the scene of the disaster and sought the company of seven year-olds instead. As the Telegraph reported:
‘We were just tired of being in the White House,’ he told a group of excited seven-year-olds before discussing Batman and reading them a book.
Tired of being President – after two weeks!
Tax cheats, pork-barrel politics, ancillary child abuse, incompetence, chaos, treachery and infantilism. America – what have you done?!
Amen.
How is Murtha not in jail?!?
Seriously, blood started to spurt out of my eyes as I read this article.
My favorite part:
Good government groups have long criticized Murtha’s cozy relationship with a handful of lobbyists and defense firms, ties that see millions of dollars in government spending go out from Murtha’s office, and hundreds of thousands in campaign donations come in. Murtha has said his earmarking has helped revive his economically depressed district.
He does the Democrats proud.