Tax and Spend

Gerard Depardieu expatriates from France to avoid increased taxes. Good for him. Putin rushes to try and collect taxes from him by offering him citizenship.

Oregon considers taxing fuel efficient cars by the mile. That's a sure way to stop people from buying fuel efficient cars.

This awesome graph shows spending versus revenue pre-deal and post-deal.

What a joke. The article also contains several other informative graphs.

The real negotiation that happened on the fiscal cliff deal was how many exemptions the plutocrats would carve out for themselves while raising taxes on everybody else.

"In praising Congress's huge new tax increase, President Obama said Tuesday that "millionaires and billionaires" will finally "pay their fair share." That is, unless you are a Nascar track owner, a wind-energy company or the owners of StarKist Tuna, among many others who managed to get their taxes reduced in Congress's New Year celebration."

Good for those guys. Bad for the rest of us. And this article provides the proof of my claim that this fiscal cliff deal was actually negotiated long ago, and that all we've been seeing was staged production of political theater.

"The "fiscal cliff" legislation passed this week included $76 billion in special-interest tax credits for the likes of General Electric, Hollywood and even Captain Morgan. But these subsidies weren't the fruit of eleventh-hour lobbying conducted on the cliff's edge -- they were crafted back in August in a Senate committee, and they sat dormant until the White House reportedly insisted on them this week."

There's no measure for how big of creeps politicians are.

The Senate voted on the 154 page fiscal cliff bill three minutes after receiving it. That would be an easy decision for me. I'd never vote for a bill I, or someone on my staff, hadn't read.

The Sandy bill is another porkarama.

In 2011, we spent nearly $1 trillion on means-tested welfare programs.  That is 16 times higher than it was in 1964 when the government began the “War on Poverty.” When government used to be much less oppressive, people who found themselves in poverty worked with others to raise themselves out of it. Today, government isolates them from others and traps them there.