President Barack Obama's tax proposal -- which promises to increase taxes for those families with incomes of $250,000 or more -- has some Americans brainstorming ways to decrease their pay in an attempt to avoid paying higher taxes on every dollar they earn over the quarter million dollar mark.
Obama is making people less productive. That means Americans will have less wealth, a lower standard of living, and our country will be weaker. That's the goal of the Obama administration in order to satisfy his desire for Marxist social justice.
Spreadsheet breaks down senate earmarks in the $410 billion spending bill. I don't even know what this spending bill is for. I bet its the spending Democrats were supposed to pass last year but refused to so they could push it to this year because Bush wouldn't grow government fast enough for them. Specter has his hands in 265 earmarks, 134 personal, the highest number of any senator for both categories, Cochran has his hand in $470 million worth , the most money of any senator, and Byrd spent the most money on individual earmarks at $122 million.
The stock market is down another 150 so far today. Make that 263. It finished down 281. Yesterday must have been profit taking for short sellers. Obama says buy stocks now. Right. Apparently Obama's figured out he's killing the stock market, so he's begging for taxpayers to bail him out. With energy prices due to rise significantly, our health care system under attack by government and banks in danger of being nationalized, I don't think so. It doesn't make sense to buy stocks when the president and both houses of Congress are waging war on prosperity.
Capital investors have no confidence in Obama. I disagree. I think they're confident Obama is driven by Marxist goals, he intends to harm the country, and he's been dangerously successful at harming it so far.
We may be in for a double-dip recession. It's interesting to see a liberal news agency finally mention this, even though they have it backwards. It's not government pulling out that's the problem - it's government getting in that's the problem. These guys are making the argument that government should never pull back to where it was a year ago. I've written about the secondary and tertiary damage caused by government's attempts to fix the recession, and they will likely be far worse than the original recession. Just like Hoover's and FDR's New Deal turned a recession in to the Great Depression.
Supreme Court hearing case with huge consequences for independent political speech.
GM may go bankrupt. Shouldn't we have just let it go bankrupt before dumping billions of taxdollars into a black hole?
NATO and Russia resume contacts. NATO is hoping for support in Afghanistan. Russia has played NATO and the US like a fiddle. Russia lost nothing despite its aggression in Georgia, and its agitation over missile defense and its pressure on the countries surrounding Afghanistan made the US look like fools.
But the greater lesson is the US is irresponsibly overextended. We're not going to war over Georgia, anywhere in the Balkans or anywhere in Eastern Europe, and we shouldn't pretend we will. We haven't got the clout in southeast Asia to support a decade of nation building. These were foolish policies to begin with, and we have to accept the limits on US power. NATO is an irresponsible welfare organization that increases tensions between Europe and Russia. Our military welfare to South Korea is irresponsible and it increases tensions between North and South Korea. Protecting Europe and South Korea from communists made sense 50 or 60 years ago. Not today. Our attempt to build a nation in Afghanistan is doomed to failure and never made sense.
North Korea lunatics threaten civil aircraft. We should get our troops out of South Korea and just keep a couple of submarines in the area for deterrence. South Korea has 40 times the GDP of North Korea. It can deal with its insane brother without welfare from us.
Muslim Americans tend to look more like other Americans than Muslims elsewhere. The melting pot is working. We still need more help from mainstream American Muslims in isolating the radical Muslims in America.
Pat Buchanan analyzes Obama's dangerous agenda.
Thomas Sowell explains the power of rhetoric using Hitler, Churchill, Reagan, and Obama as examples. I'm sure Sowell will get brutally attacked for this, but at least nobody will call him a racist.
Madoff is fighting to keep his $7 million Manhattan penthouse and $62 million in assets because they are in his wife's name. So Madoff thinks because he hid all that money he stole from investors in his wife's name, he should get to keep it. At least he's consistent. Kind of like the supporters of social security.
CEO of Freddie Mac resigning after 6 months. He probably already bilked taxpayers out of $300 million like Obama advisor Raines when he ran one of those GSAs.
It's possible Republicans could lose more seats in Congress. Republicans are doing nothing to win the favor of the people. They're the same big government, corrupt Republicans they were during the Bush administration. They're counting on Obama to fail so badly that Americans forget how badly they failed first. Republicans are trailing Democrats in the race to destroy America, but not by much, and it's unlikely that no matter how bad Democrats are in the next 2 years, they'll destroy the Democrat brand to the level Republicans have destroyed theirs.
Eric Holder unconditionally rules out waterboarding of terror suspects. I hope he volunteers to be a victim instead of other Americans in the next attack that could have been prevented by waterboarding.
Democrats cutting off vouchersthat enable D.C. children to attend the same private school as Obama's children and Biden's grandchildren. So instead of the government paying $7,500 for vouchers to ensure these children get a quality education, the government will spend $26,000 (that's how much D.C. spend per child) to force them to attend a failing government school. That's how our government rolls. Imagine what's going to happen to us when this same government has a monopoly on our health care.
Philip Morris is going to get the cigarette regulation legislation it bought and paid for. More power to the corporations!
President Obama's escalates his war on charity, started by removing the tax breaks on charitable contributions for rich people, by advocating forcing charities to spend money according to political whims. Giving federal money to private charities gives the government power to determine how the charities spend their money. This is how the federal government has extended it's corrosive and coercive power into all aspects of our lives.
Senator Specter to support union card check. Why do the Republicans allow this guy to claim he's a Republican? Voters expected to kick him out. About 28 years too late.
Good for the people who wonder if Obama is a native born American for not letting this drop. If Obama is native born, he has it in his power to make this go away - produce the documents. Since he won't, we know he's hiding something significant. We just don't know what. I think this article is inaccurate because Obama never released a certified copy of his birth certificate. He posted a non-certified copy on the web so it couldn't be verified.
In typical government fashion, the workers at the new Capitol Visitors Center are using their power to make it harder for Americans wanting to tour the Capitol.
Democrats in Michigan and Detroit have done so much damage to their state and city that the median home price in Detroit is $7,500. This is what Obama and Democrats are trying to do to the entire country.
It doesn't get any more clear than this. Study of personal and economic freedom of US states shows that the more Democrat a state is, the less economic and personal freedom in that state. You might notice that basket case states are all dominated by Democrats. The proof is clearly visible - Democrat policies destroy freedom and prosperity faster than Republican policies, and the most prosperous states are the most libertarian. As if we didn't already know that. Pretty graphs and charts. Michigan sticks out like sore thumb, though. As poor as it is, and as dominated by Democrats as it is, for some reason it ranks high in both economic and personal freedom. It's the only obvious outlier I noticed, and I wonder if that data point is wrong.
Mises scholar uses the failure and hypocrisy over management of tickets to Obama's inauguration as an object lesson in the failure of government versus free markets to manage scare resources.
Firefox continues its domination in browser technology.
Mises scholar points out the costs of the patent system. 17 years seems crazy to me. That might have made sense a century ago, when product development times were significantly longer and economic development was significantly slower, but it seems long even for then. But Mises still hasn't convinced me to get rid of IP altogether. In the modern world patents and copyrights shouldn't last more than 2 years, imo. That's more than enough time to make a huge profit off an idea, but it would dramatically reduce the costs of the IP monopoly and dramatically increase innovation.
Daniel Henniger from the WSJ suggests a bold, new, alien strategy for Republicans - champion private enterprise, freedom and free markets instead of big government. What a novel idea. We haven't had a president do that since the '80s. It worked pretty well back then, but we can do it even better. He suggests that Republicans read Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately, the dirty little secret of Republican aristocrats is they dislike the private sector almost as much as Democrats aristocrats.
This is what happens when politicians take over the economy - human weaknesses like revenge dominate the economy:
Bear had been the only big firm that refused to help out Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that came close to the brink in 1998. Some wondered if this was the reason Hank Paulson, then treasury secretary and a former boss of Goldman Sachs, insisted on Bear being sold for a mere $2 per share (though this was later quintupled after shareholders revolted). There were certainly many on Wall Street, including a fair few at the firm itself, who felt Bear had it coming.
Obviously regular people have the same human weaknesses, but in a free market, no one person has the power to harm so many by giving in to those weaknesses, and there are repercussions for giving in to those weaknesses, deterring them. Paulson didn't face any repercussions for his decision on Bear Stearns or any other decisions.
Obama's tax cheat Treasury Sec. lectures us that Obama's budget is changing the tax code out of fairness. Our tax code is unfair - it's unfair that some people have to pay higher tax rates than others, but that isn't what Geithner is talking about. He's talking about making the successful Americans pay even more taxes to subsidize the least successful Americans. He actually pulls out the term "just", signaling that Obama is driven by the Marxist philosophy of social justice, not fairness or what's good for the country. If Obama was interested in fairness and what's good for the country, he would support the FairTax.
Remember when Democrats were up in arms because McCain wanted to tax employer provided health insurance and provide a tax deduction to cover the cost for those who carried insurance? It was a great idea for still being mired in big government, but Democrats and Republicans both attacked him on the bogus charge of raising taxes, and McCain was inept at explaining his policy. Now one of Obama's congressional henchmen has proposed taxing employer provided health insurance, but with no deduction to offset the costs, to pay for government provided health insurance. These aristocrats are a farce. The American people have to stop voting for them. Note this liberal article neglects to mention McCain's plan had a tax deduction to cover the costs as it tries to convince people this Democrats' idea is the same as McCain's.
The government won't release Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because it would take them a 100 years to pay off their debt to taxpayers. Thanks for making them so corrupt, Democrats. Thanks for taking taxpayer money and dumping it into these black holes, Republicans and Democrats. This is a warning to banks that have sold shares to the government, willing or not. We should starting selling off the profitable pieces of Fannie and Freddie today, put those government sponsored monstrosities out of our misery, cut our losses, vow never to repeat the asinine mistake of allowing government to interfere in our economy again, and never look back.
$700 billion isn't enough to stabilize the banks. Geithner wants more. I have a better idea. Let the bad banks fail. The rest will pick up the pieces, and the economy will be stronger for it. If raising taxes is a bad idea in a recession because it hurts the economy, why isn't raising taxes always a bad idea? Trick question.
It's ironic that tax cheat Geithner is making rules to keep overseas companies from avoiding federal taxes.
Note to Harry Reid: It's not just Republicans who want Obama to fail. I want America to succeed, so I want Obama to fail.
Irresponsible government pension plans, fraudulently accounted (what else would you expect from government - government is the only entity that can commit accounting fraud and get away with it, and every level of government does it every day), may demand the next $1 trillion bailout. In the private sector, frauds get prosecuted. In government, they get rewarded with more power. Anybody who surrenders responsibility for their own retirement to somebody else deserves what they (don't) get. Just say no to another bailout.
House passes mortgage cramdown bill.
Good article compares Obama's tax hikes to Hoover's. Fortunately Obama's aren't quite as high as Hoover's (made worse by FDR), but they're plenty bad enough.
Obama lied; the economy died. Funny but accurate.
Jim Cramer says, "This is the greatest wealth destruction I've seen by a president." No doubt.
Check these Obama votive candles of the Messiah. Obama supporters are a healthy, rational bunch.
Potential aids for Obama cabinet members withdrawing their names like crazy. I bet they've either been busted for cheating on their taxes or they don't want to be associated with the most destructive presidency since the Great Depression. Or both.
Cato uses the TVA as an example of how big government infrastructure projects can be a drain on taxpayers and consumers for decades.
Cato agrees with me that the US needs a humbler foreign policy and that Republicans show no signs of recognizing their mistakes of the past.
Michael Tanner of Cato explains why universal health care is not the best option. What an absurd understatement. If it's not the worst option, I don't know what's worse. It sounds like Tanner is suggesting a different fertilizer for your lawn. This essay is drier than Jack Webb from Dragnet. This essay minces words and like the guy is afraid to offend anybody - "may not be exactly" and "does not necessarily mean". It's hard to tell if this essay advocates implementing a system like France or a free market health care system. Where are the analogies? Where are the historic parallels? Self-censorship and the lack of context and passion in many Cato's essays weakens them in the political debate. I wish Cato allowed comments after its articles.
The mainstream media attacks Democrats for attempting to end school vouchers in D.C. Interesting after what I posted above that the Cato writer points out how passionate the example editorial writer is. Cato should learn that lesson.
Cato study proves that free market education outperforms government education. This is so obvious that I doubt anybody but zealots of the church of government uber alles (like George Bush and Barack Obama) thinks otherwise, so this study won't change any minds. It's still valuable to have the scholarly work to reference though.
Cato celebrates 3 powerful women libertarians.
Obama opens the door to compromise on health care. He played this same game on the stimulus bill, and we see how well that worked out for us.
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