Why Liberals Are Quintessential Hypocrites As Illustrated In Three Recent Stories

Okay.  You’d probably better sit down for this because I’ve got a newsflash: liberals are suing to get their way [GASP]:

Federal judge rules California death penalty is unconstitutional
By Maura Dolan
▼ A federal judge has ruled California’s death penalty unconstitutional
▼ Long delays in California executions violate Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, judge rules
July 16, 2014

A federal judge in Orange County ruled Wednesday that California’s death penalty violates the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney, ruled on a petition by death row inmate Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was sentenced to die nearly two decades ago.

————

FOR THE RECORD

July 16, 1:16 p.m.: An earlier version of this post said U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney was a federal judge in Los Angeles. He is a federal judge in Orange County.

————

Carney said the state’s death penalty has created long delays and uncertainty for inmates, most of whom will never be executed.

He noted that more than 900 people have been sentenced to death in California since 1978 but only 13 have been executed.

“For the rest, the dysfunctional administration of California’s death penalty system has resulted, and will continue to result, in an inordinate and unpredictable period of delay preceding their actual execution,” Carney wrote.

Carney’s ruling can be appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of  Appeals.

Carney, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, said the delays have created a “system in which arbitrary factors, rather than legitimate ones like the nature of the crime or the date of the death sentence, determine whether an individual will actually be executed,” Carney said.

In overturning Jones’ death sentence,  Carney noted that the inmate faced “complete uncertainty as to when, or even whether” he will be executed.

The “random few” who will be executed  “will have languished for so long on Death Row that their execution will serve no retributive or deterrent purpose and will be arbitrary,”  Carney said.

“No rational person,” Carney wrote, “can question that the execution of an individual carries with it the solemn obligation of the government to ensure that the punishment is not arbitrarily imposed and that it furthers the interests of society.”

Natasha Minsker, a director of the ACLU of Northern California, said Wednesday’s ruling marked the first time that a federal judge had found  the state’s current system unconstitutional. She said it was also “the first time any judge has ruled systemic delay creates an arbitrary system that serves no legitimate purpose and is therefore unconstitutional.”

A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge in 1995 sentenced Jones to death for the 1992 rape and killing of Julia Miller, his girlfriend’s mother. Jones killed Miller 10 months after being paroled for a previous rape.

A spokesman for Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris said only that her office was reviewing the decision.

Okay, so let’s understand what the liberal judge said to this point: the death penalty is “unconstitutional.”  Why?  Because the delays in jumping through all the “due process” hoops took so long that it amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Okay, so – shocker alert here – liberals don’t like the death penalty so they love to rule that it is “unconstitutional.”  It doesn’t matter that the damn death penalty was being implemented before, during and after the Constitution was written.  It boils down to this: if liberals don’t like something, that thing is “unconstitutional,” because the “Constitution” is a “living, breathing document” that only means whatever the hell a liberal wants it to mean at any given moment.  So the death penalty is “unconstitutional” for the same reason that being opposed to the MURDER of more than fifty-six million innocent babies is “unconstitutional” or being for marriage as it has been defined for all of human history up to now is “unconstitutional.”

But keep in mind that at the center of the liberal judges reasoning is that the lengthy delays in jumping through all the due process hurdles creates “cruel and unusual punishing.”  I mean, like if you could just snuff out these rabid dogs faster, it would be okay.

Okay, this will stun the hell out of you: liberals are suing on a different matter to get their way at the same moment they’re suing here.  Consider their reasoning for this lawsuit:

US sued by immigrant rights groups over expedited deportation process
Coalition says Obama administration policies to deal with influx at border is unfair to women and children who flee to safety
theguardian.com, Friday 22 August 2014 16.48 EDT

A coalition of immigrant rights groups have filed a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s expedited deportation process, claiming that it is unfair to women and children who flee Central America to seek safety in the US.

The groups claim the Obama administration’s new policies have created a “deportation mill” at a new government family detention center in Artesia, New Mexico.

“As the attorneys on the ground in Artesia have told us, the government is implementing a new expedited removal system which presents procedural obstacles that make it incredibly difficult for these women to even articulate their claim,” said Trina Realmuto, staff attorney at the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild.

The National Immigration Project, American Immigration Council, ACLU and National Immigration Law Center filed the suit, MSPC v Johnson, in the US district court for the District of Columbia on Friday. They claim the Obama administration’s policies are unfair and violate the Immigration and Nationality Act and US constitution.

Advocates say women in these facilities do not receive proper counsel or time to file asylum claims, which are known for taking time to process.

[…]

Okay, so liberals – who rabidly hate the death penalty because deep down they KNOW that they frankly deserve it so damn much themselves – claim that it’s “unconstitutional” because of the lengthy time to pursue all the due process hurdles.  I mean, it’s “cruel and unusual” to make somebody go through that many appeals (that liberals themselves turned into a farce that drags on for years and years).  But at the same time, since they are open-borders loons who want to overwhelm and “fundamentally transform” the United States of America using the votes of illegal immigrants to do it, they claim the very opposite thing with immigration.  “It’s taking too long to execute criminals so the death penalty is bad” becomes “it’s not taking long enough to process tens – soon to be hundreds – of thousands of illegal immigrants.

In other words, liberals will literally sue you for zigging and they’ll sue you for sagging.  You can’t win with these hypocrite demoniacs.

Liberalism is circular reasoning that begins with, “I want x” or “I don’t want y” and then plays whatever rhetorical games are needed with the law to get what it wants.

They are not decent people who are driven by any code of ethics.  The ends justify the means for them every bit as much as it did for the Nazis or for the Stalinists.  And they will twist and pervert the system any way that is needed to force it to give them what they want.  Or else they’ll violently riot.  Because in their hearts they are FASCISTS.

We’re seeing it play out in Ferguson, Missouri as we speak: liberals aren’t interested in “justice” or “fairness.”  They want what they want and damn whatever laws or regulations or Constitution that gets in their wicked way.  So the Democrat governor calls for “aggressive prosecution” of a police officer even before a grand jury determines that there should even BE a prosecution:

Missouri governor way out of line
He has made a powder keg situation worse
Posted: Wednesday, August 20, 2014 10:00 pm

The governor of Missouri has become a textbook example of what a politician should not do or say during a crisis that is a racially-explosive powder keg just waiting for the fuse to be lit.

And really that’s being very kind to Jay Nixon. His words in an address on Tuesday night to Missouri residents — and therefore in this case the nation — were incredibly biased and spoken with an almighty know-it-all tone. Those words were outrageous.

Ferguson, Mo., is that powder keg because of the shooting of a young black man by a six-year veteran police officer on Aug. 9.

No one — absolutely no one — at this point can definitively say what happened leading up to the confrontation between 18-year-old Michael Brown, who is black, and officer Darren Wilson, who is white, nor can anyone relate accurately what transpired in the tragic couple minutes of the incident that claimed Brown’s life.

That’s the job of those investigating the situation, including a grand jury that convened on Wednesday.

Nixon on Tuesday night said “a vigorous prosecution must now be pursued” in the case.

That’s not even subtle. He clearly said that there needs to be an aggressive prosecution of Wilson.

Only problem right now, governor, he hasn’t been charged with anything in the case and his side of the story hasn’t even been officially heard yet.

However, the governor of Missouri has charged the police officer with his words and given marching orders to prosecutors to go after him in court with every legal weapon in their arsenal.

The loss of Brown’s life in Ferguson is simply sad and dreadful. But in the name of justice let the process run its course to a conclusion wherever it goes.

As for the governor — what an horrendous abuse of his power

Democrats are people who side with vicious thugs who grab and intimidate business owners and commit strong arm robbery before striding down the middle of the street and punching cops in the face who get in their damn way.

And to quote Eric Holders Department of Injustice, “Never bring a lawsuit against a black.”  It doesn’t matter what “justice” is.  Justice is a totalitarian witch who is only “blind” because rabid hatred and contempt for everything that stands in the way of dictatorial liberalism MAKES her blind.  And bitter and wanting to burn and loot as well.  But don’t you EVER bring a lawsuit against a black in Eric Holder’s Department of Injustice.

The left wants the prosecutor in the Ferguson, Missouri case – whose been in office for 20 years and who was just re-elected only DAYS before the shooting – thrown off the case.  Because they want to jury-rig the outcome and get what they want.  THAT’S “justice” to the left: we get what we want and we destroy all obstacles in the way of getting what we want.  Or else we riot.

They’re claiming that since St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch’s father was gunned down by a black man that he’s biased.

Well, I’ll agree that if the prosecutor had said stuff like, “This is personal to me,” or else if he’d said “I’m here for the police,” or if he’d vowed to protect white people, etc., etc., he should be tossed.

But do you know who DID say crap like that coming from the opposite direction?  Obama’s lawthug Eric Holder.

Oh, yes, this matter is “deeply personal” to Eric Holder.  So let’s throw objectivity out the door and let our biases soar:

[…]

Of Holder’s arrival, USA Today writer Kevin Johnson observes that for the AG the situation in Ferguson is “deeply personal.” Johnson quotes as having told Ferguson residents at a community meeting yesterday:

I am the Attorney General of the United States, but I am also a black man. I can remember being stopped on the New Jersey turnpike on two occasions and accused of speeding. Pulled over. … ‘Let me search your car’ … Go through the trunk of my car, look under the seats and all this kind of stuff. I remember how humiliating that was and how angry I was and the impact it had on me.

This of course is nothing new for Holder, who has made race an issue throughout his tenure as the nation’s top cop. As Jeff Dunetz reminds us, Holder has allowed his own skin color to interfere with his judgment as head of the Department of Justice, so why should his handling of the Freguson investigation proceed any differently?

Johnson has another quote by Holder, made to a group of community leaders assembled at a local community college. (As an aside, the AG certainly did a lot of speechifying on his first day in town). He said:

The eyes of the nation and the world are watching Ferguson right now. The world is watching because the issues raised by the shooting of Michael Brown predate this incident. This is something that has a history to it, and the history simmers beneath the surface in more communities than just Ferguson.

Holder is assuming, like the mobs pillaging the town nightly, that racism is involved here. That is not just premature and reckless. It is blatantly outside the scope of the law. It is reminiscent of the very revealing comment about “empathy” made in 2007 by candidate Barack Obama, who said

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old — and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges. [Emphasis added]

Empathy and compassion are positive traits. But they have no business in a court of law. Judges are supposed to be interpreters of the law and are sworn to render verdicts dispassionately, based on evidence and testimony. That is why justice as wearing a blindfold.
Read more at http://libertyunyielding.com/2014/08/21/holder-personal-thats-problem/#hHJ1v68WGF2fbIQw.99

Imagine the hellstorm had Bob McColloch said the racial equivalent: “I am the Prosecutor of St. Louis County, but I am also a white man.  I can remember when my daddy was murdered by a black thug…”

The NAACP is in this racial stew up to its neck.  Just imagine if “NAACP” stood for “National Association for the Advancement of Caucasian People.”

Just imagine if our society were actually FAIR and blacks got back the racial bullcrap they’ve been pissing at the rest of America for a change.

I can’t say for sure, but I’ve got a feeling that the black community would very quickly be willing to return to Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” vision.  You know, the one where we’re all equal and nobody gets to be treated any different than anybody else rather than the one we’ve got where blacks get to be as racist as hell is hot while denying they’re capable of racism because they’ve got the most arbitrary and self-serving definition of “racism” in the entire space-time universe.

Eric Holder says he is “here for the community.”  By which he really means the vicious mob that’s been rioting and looting and burning.  He spent HOURS with the Brown family and with the same community rabble-rousers that his boss Obama came from.  But not one nanosecond with the cop who was viciously punched in the face before he was forced to go through a life-or-death struggle for his service weapon while he laid on his back in his own squad car with a giant thug on top of him.

Just imagine how you would feel if you were in a courtroom literally fighting for your life and the judge walked over and hugged your opponent just before taking the bench and calling the court to order.  That’s what’s going on here.

So the same left that demands McCulloch resign, recuse himself, be dismissed, whatever because of the threat of bias LOVES bias.  As long as that rabid bias is distorting legal reality to suit their race agenda.

So if the left can’t get McCulloch forced out, what’s their next move?  Delegitimize the grand jury in advance and threaten to riot if they don’t get their way.

A Democrat State Senator put her call for a race riot in the form of a “prediction”:

“If you should decide not to indict this police officer, the rioting witnessed this past week will seem like a picnic compared to the havoc that will likely occur.”

Well, I mean, yeah, given the fact that you and your race-baiting pal Al Sharpton are going to go out and foment racial violence the way you do whenever you don’t get your way.

I want you to understand what’s going on here: one side – the conservatives – want a government that will basically leave them the hell alone.  They want a LIMITED federal government.  They want a federal government bound by the separation of powers.  They want laissez-faire free market capitalism, rather than liberal crony capitalist regulations that benefit one politically-chosen side and punish the other.  They want individual liberty and individual personal responsibility.  The other side wants more and more and more government.  They want a president who is “sort of God” who will run roughshod over the Constitution to impose his way by raw force.

One side wants life; the other side wants more abortion-murders than were killed on all sides, civilian and military, in the bloodiest war in all of human history combined.  One side wants marriage as all of human history has defined it; the other side wants the perversion of homosexual sodomy.  One side wants individual liberty and individual personal responsibility; the other side wants a totalitarian nanny-state that will redistribute the wealth the way they want to reward their friends and punish their enemies.  One side wants freedom according to the spirit that our founding fathers created America to be; the other side wants totalitarian government slavery in the mode of European socialist leaders like Hitler and Stalin.  And that side that wants all these evil things will break any law, violate any regulation, interfere with justice in any way, to GET their way.

The only way to have a fair fight here is if BOTH sides were out to use the raw power of government and the courts to get their way to crush and to rule over the other.  But only the rabid left is doing that.

Which is why America is doomed and which is why the Antichrist is coming just as the Bible told us the ultimate big-government totalitarian dictator would come.

Just realize that we are dealing with an ideology in the left that defines “justice” as “we get our way no matter what” and “injustice” as if we don’t get our way we’re going to start rioting.”

 

U.S. Now Has Highest Corporate Tax Rate IN THE WORLD (But Emperor Obama Says Business Must Render More Unto Him Instead Of Creating Jobs)

America is NUMBER ONE!!!  But unfortunately, we’re just number one in anti-competitive taxes, pseudo-scientific obstructionism and costly regulations that all guarantee we’ll never be number one in much else ever again.

Let me take those in order:

No Fooling: U.S. Now Has Highest Corporate Tax Rate in the World
Curtis Dubay
March 30, 2012 at 3:46 pm

This April Fool’s Day, the joke is on all of us. That’s because as of April 1, the U.S. now has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world.

Our high corporate tax rate has long made the U.S. an uncompetitive place for new investment. This has driven new jobs to other, more competitive nations and meant fewer jobs and lower wages for all Americans.

Other developed nations have been cutting their rates for over 20 years. The U.S. did nothing.

The U.S. was at least able to stay out of the top spot until now, because Japan had also failed to get its corporate tax rate in line with other more competitive nations. But Japan has finally seen the light and reduced its rate as of April 1.

Japan’s rate was 39.5 percent. That was just barely ahead of the U.S. rate of 39.2 percent (this includes the 35 percent federal rate plus the average rate the states add on). Japan’s rate now stands at 36.8 percent after its recent cut.

The U.S. rate is well above the 25 percent average of other developed nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In fact, the U.S. rate is almost 15 percentage points higher than the OECD average.

This gaping disparity means every other country that we compete with for new investment is better situated to land that new investment and the jobs that come with it, because the after-tax return from that investment promises to be higher in those lower-taxed nations.

Our high rate also makes our businesses prime targets for takeovers by businesses headquartered in foreign countries, because their worldwide profits are no longer subject to the highest-in-the-world U.S. corporate tax rate. Until Congress cuts the rate, more and more iconic U.S. businesses such as Anheuser-Busch (which was bought by its Belgian competitor InBev in 2008) will be bought by their foreign competitors.

To get back in line with international norms, Congress needs to reduce the rate so the combined federal and state rate matches or falls below the OECD average. Some will contend that with deficits north of $1 trillion annually, we simply can’t afford such a large rate reduction. But the actions of the nations we compete with for new investment show that these nations understand that lowering the corporate tax rate is necessary because of the boost to economic growth it provides.

The United Kingdom, for instance, is in as perilous fiscal situation as the U.S. However, the U.K. reduced its rate in 2011 from 28 percent to 26 percent. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne recently announced that the U.K. would further cut its rate to 22 percent by 2014 to increase competitiveness.

Congress needs to cut the corporate tax rate to make the U.S. a more hospitable place for investment. The time for excuses is over. Until it does, every day will be a cruel joke.

An interesting exchange between ABC News anchor Charles Gibson and Barack Obama during a debate shows us where Obama is:

You have however said you would favor an increase in the capital gains tax. As a matter of fact, you said on CNBC, and I quote, “I certainly would not go above what existed under Bill Clinton, which was 28 percent.”
 
It’s now 15 percent. That’s almost a doubling if you went to 28 percent. But actually Bill Clinton in 1997 signed legislation that dropped the capital gains tax to 20 percent.
 
SENATOR OBAMA: Right.

MR. GIBSON: And George Bush has taken it down to 15 percent.

SENATOR OBAMA: Right.

MR. GIBSON: And in each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased. The government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down. So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?
 
SENATOR OBAMA: Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.

You can reward wise practices or you can punish them.  You can reward individual initiative or you can punish it.  Obama is the latter even though the former is far and away the best for society.

Consider the words of Mark Levin as he shreds Obama’s “fairness” meme:

Utopianism also finds a receptive audience among the society’s disenchanted, disaffected, dissatisfied, and maladjusted who are unwilling or unable to assume responsibility for their own real or perceived conditions but instead blame their surroundings, “the system,” and others.  They are lured by the false hope and promises of utopian transformation and the criticisms of the existing society, to which their connection is tentative or nonexistent.  Improving the malcontent’s lot becomes linked to the utopian cause.  Moreover, disparaging and diminishing the successful and accomplished becomes an essential tactic.  No one should be better than anyone else, regardless of the merits or value of his contributions.  By exploiting human frailties, frustrations, jealousies, and inequities, a sense of meaning and self-worth is created in the malcontent’s otherwise unhappy and directionless life.  Simply put, equality in misery – that is, equality of result or conformity – is advanced as a just, fair and virtuous undertaking.  Liberty, therefore, is inherently immoral, expect where it avails equality.

Equality, in this sense, is a form of radical egalitarianism that has long been the subject of grave concern by advocates of liberty.  Tocqueville pointed out that in democracies, the dangers of misapplied equality are not perceived until it is too late.  “The evils that extreme equality may produce are slowly disclosed; they creep gradually into the social frame; they are seen only at intervals; and at the moment at which they become most violent, habit already causes them to be no longer felt.”  Among the leading classical liberal philosophers and free-market economists, Friedrich Hayek wrote, “Equality of the general rules of law and conduct … is the only kind of equality conducive to liberty and the only equality which we can secure without destroying liberty.  Not only has liberty nothing to do with any sort of equality, but it is even bound to produce inequality in many respects.  This is the necessary result and part of the justification of individual liberty: if the result of individual liberty did not demonstrate that some manners of living are more successful than others, much of the case for it would vanish.”  Thus, while radical egalitarianism encompasses economic equality, it more broadly involves prostrating the individual.

Equality, as understood by the American Founders, is the natural right of every individual to live freely under self-government, to acquire and retain the property he creates through his own labor, and to be treated impartially before a just law.  Moreover, equality should not be confused with perfection, for man is also imperfect, making his application of equality, even in the most just society, imperfect.  Otherwise, inequality is the natural state of man in the sense that each individual is born unique in all his human characteristics.  Therefore, equality and inequality, properly comprehended, are both engines of liberty (Mark Levin, Ameritopia, pp. 7-9).

Levin proceeds in the following paragraphs to demonstrate why “equality” is inherently easier to demagogue than “liberty.”  He then points out – in words that obviously could be applied to ObamaCare:

Utopianism’s authority also knows no definable limits.  How could it?  If they exist, what are they?  Radical egalitarianism or the perfectibility of mankind is an ongoing process of individual and societal transformation that must cast off the limits of history, tradition, and experience for that which is said to be necessary, novel, progressive, and inevitable.  Ironically, inconvenient facts and evidence must be rejected or manipulated, as must the very nature of man, for utopianism is a fantasy that evolves into a dogmatic cause, which in turn manifests a holy truth for a false religion.  There is little or not tolerance for the individual’s deviation from orthodoxy lest it threaten the survival of the enterprise (Ibid., p. 10).

Obama isn’t just pushing for more and more taxes to punish more and more job creators to guarantee that there will be fewer and fewer jobs; he’s also targeting the oil that lubricates the entire American economy and way of life:

Yesterday the Obama administration announced a delaying tactic which will put off the possibility of new offshore oil drilling on the Atlantic coast for at least five years:

The announcement by the Interior Department sets into motion what will be at least a five year environmental survey to determine whether and where oil production might occur.

Obama has a documented history of performing endless “studies” and then perverting those studies in profoundly unscientific ways:

Academics, environmentalists and federal investigators have accused the administration since the April spill of downplaying scientific findings, misrepresenting data and most recently misconstruing the opinions of experts it solicited.

[…]

The latest complaint from scientists comes in a report by the Interior Department’s inspector general, which concluded that the White House edited a drilling safety report in a way that made it falsely appear that scientists and experts supported the administration’s six-month ban on new deep-water drilling. The AP obtained the report early Wednesday.

And Obama has used frankly Stalinist tactics to then pressure the experts to fabricate their numbers in his political favor:

The Obama administration pressured analysts to change an environmental review to reflect fewer job losses from a proposed regulation, the contractors who worked on the review testified Friday.

The dispute revolves around proposed changes to a rule regulating coal mining near streams and other waterways. The experts contracted to analyze the impact of the rule initially found that it would cost 7,000 coal jobs.

But the contractors claim they were subsequently pressured to not only keep the findings under wraps but “revisit” the study in order to show less of an impact on jobs.

Steve Gardner, president of Kentucky consulting firm ECSI, claimed that after the project team refused to “soften” the numbers, the firms working on the study were told the contract would not be renewed. ECSI was a subcontractor on the project.

The government “‘suggested’ that the … members revisit the production impacts and associated job loss numbers, with different assumptions that obviously would then lead to a lesser impact,” Gardner testified before a House Natural Resources subcommittee. “The … team unanimously refused to use a ‘fabricated’ baseline scenario to soften the production loss numbers.”

So when Obama says he’s going to do a study, what he means is that he’s going to delay and stall and finally use manipulation and pressure-tactics and deception to fabricate a bogus “legitimacy” for his ideology and his cronyism.

To add to the injury Obama is doing to the economy there is the “hidden tax” of regulation:

A new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) titled “Ten Thousand Commandments” reveals the vast amount of private-sector capital drowned in the sea of government regulations.

The report’s conclusion is mind-boggling.  The cost of complying with federal regulations has hit the $1.7 trillion dollar mark.

That’s trillion, with a T.

To put that number in perspective, it’s larger than the President’s own anticipated 2011 budget deficit of $1.6 trillion.  In fact, the current regulatory burden imposed on businesses across America now amounts to 50% of total government spending in one year alone.

That’s nuts!

But guess what?  We can top it.

As the CEI report underscores, the compliance cost of regulation is larger than all corporate pretax profits in 2008 and dwarfs the estimated 2010 individual income tax receipts by nearly 50%.

That last point is worth repeating:  The cost of abiding by all the government regulations tallies up to $1.7 trillion, which towers over the revenue brought in by all income taxes, in every bracket.

Putting it all together puts America out of business.

The Pathological Stupidity Of Obama’s ‘Fairness’ Meme Of Taxing The Rich

We need to balance our insane budget deficit, Democrats say.  And it’s time the rich paid their fair share.

All the top 10% of earners paid is 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.  That’s nothing.  It’s those poor poor who suffer the most.  The bottom 50% have to pay a whole bunch of nothing.  It’s just brutal for them every April.  They want to write a check to the government, but only the rich get to do stuff like that.  And the bottom 40% are so screwed by our federal income tax system that they actually are forced to accept free money in addition to paying a whole bunch of nothing.  Unless the Associated Press is lying about it.

Nothing makes me more annoyed than the phrase “give the rich tax cuts.”  Because it presumes that the government owns us and graciously allows us to keep some of what we earn.  The way liberals understand things, they own all the means of production.  They own my labor and whatever I earn from my labor.  And I am lucky if the commissars allow me to keep enough to feed myself.  It derives from a tenant of Marxism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  At the core is central planning; government stands above us, it stands above God (which is why consistent Marxists deny God exists and religion is merely an opiate of the masses), and government should redistribute everything according to its divine power.

That is the intrinsic logic of their view that allowing the rich or anyone else to keep more of their own money is considered a cost to the government.  But it ISN’T a cost to the government to allow me to keep more of my own money; anymore than it is a cost to me to allow my next door neighbor to keep more of his own tools.

Obama gave an address in which he paid lip service to reducing spending – even though his budget that he released only TWO MONTHS AGO didn’t reduce any spending at all – and in fact stated that it would be dangerous to do so.  Obama has no plans to cut spending; in fact, the deficit in just the first six months of this year shot up another 15.7%.  Obama is going to do what he’s been doing since he started running for president; he’s going to offer meaningless rhetorical platitudes about cutting spending and reducing costs, while demonizing the rich and demanding that the ONLY people who pay REALLY START TO PAY.

Obama is going to talk about “fairness.”

The ‘fairness’ meme
April 12, 2011 – 4:47 am – by Roger Kimball

We don’t know exactly what Barack Obama is going to say when he fires up his teleprompters at George Washington University tomorrow. The color, we do know, however: it’s red, as in “red ink,” what Mitch Daniels at his speech at CPAC earlier this year called “the new red menace.” (I like to think that the invocation of the old “red menace,” the Communist, socialist one, was deliberate: it is, I would argue, apt.)

The substance of the speech, as ABC notes, is “closely held.” Everybody thinks that there will be at least pro forma acknowledgement that spending on such programs as Medicare and Social Security needs to be reined in. But the big O will also return to one of his favorite themes, a by-word from his 2008 campaign: “increased taxes on the wealthy” (that’s according to “White House officials”).

Here’s my bet: the operative word in Obama’s speech tomorrow night, the mantra that will be repeated endlessly not only by O but also by the left-wing commentariat, is “fairness.” You remember his campaign shtick: the Saddleback Church event, for example, when Rick Warren asked candidates John McCain and B.O. about taxes. “Define rich,” he asked. McCain tossed out an income of $5 million, which elicited derision. But the gravamen of his response came in the elaboration: “I don’t want to take any money from the rich. I want everybody to get rich.”

How different was B.O.’s response: What he was looking for, he said, was “a sense of balance, and fairness in our tax code. It is time for folks like me who make more than $250,000 to pay our fair share.”

“Our fair share.” That, as I noted at the time, is B.O.’s refrain. “[W]e will save Social Security for future generations by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share.” It’s a small step from the invocation of “our fair share” to Obama’s call for a tax on “the windfall profits of oil companies,” a tax increase on capitals gains, elimination of the tax on Social Security tax, etc., etc.

The crucial point here is that what Obama is interested in is not increasing revenue but in promulgating redistributionist policies that make it harder for people to prosper economically. William McGurn, writing in The Wall Street Journal back then, recalled Obama’s response to ABC’s Charlie Gibson when Gibson observed that raising taxes led to decreased revenues: “Well, Charlie,” Obama replied, “what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”

“For purposes of fairness”: that means, “for purposes of economic egalitarianism.”

McGurn observed:

[I]t doesn’t really matter whether a tax increase actually brings in more revenue. It’s not about robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Robbing from the rich will do, especially if it’s done in the name of fairness.

Now there are good reasons Mr. Obama is not likely to pursue the revenue side of the fairness question. As this newspaper noted in a recent editorial, the latest data from the Internal Revenue Service does not show to Mr. Obama’s advantage. As we come to the end of the Bush administration, the top 1% of American taxpayers already pay 40% of all income taxes — the highest level in 40 years. The top 10% of income earners pay 71% of the taxes.

The bottom line is that when Obama invokes “fairness,” he wants us to feel guilty about economic success. This is the secret of his appeal to the socialistically inclined.

It worked in 2008. Let’s see how it goes down tomorrow. Over the last two years, Barack Obama has presided over an economic Armageddon. Everyone knows about that $14 trillion that is the federal debt. Few people, I suspect, really appreciate what that unimaginable figure represents. And the kicker is, $14 trillion is only a tithe of the trouble. As Kevin Williamson and others have pointed out, the country’s real debt, when you facotr in state indebtedness and unfunded so-called “entitlement” liabilities, is closer to $130 trillion. That horror-movie figure is just too awful to contemplate, so I will draw a veil.

[…]

For the record, I wrote an article entitled, “Tax Cuts Increase Revenues; They Have ALWAYS Increased Revenues,” in which I documented that every single time the United States has reduced the income tax rate, federal revenues have gone up.  I go back to Warren Harding to document that.  I include John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush – who increased federal revenues by lowering tax rates.

But this recurring documented fact of U.S. history is tantamount to rocket science to liberals.  Because they adhere to the entirely unrealistic premise that if I were to double your taxes, I would collect double the revenue, because people wouldn’t react to the tax increase by altering their behavior.

Recent developments give me a crystal clear example of why liberals couldn’t be more wrong:

Gas Price Rise, Americans Drive Less
By Rachel Smith
Posted: Apr 12, 2011 10:30 a.m.

Americans are taking rising gas prices seriously. They’re already driving less, “reversing what had been a steady increase in demand for fuel,” the Associated Press writes. “For five weeks in a row, they have bought less gas than they did a year ago.”

The average price of gas is an obvious indicator of why national fuel consumption is dropping. At the end of March, AAA reported that gas reached an average of $3.60 nationally. Today, AAA says the national average is $3.79 for regular grade, a 29 cent jump in about two weeks. Business Week reports that many analysts forecast that these numbers will worsen, and expect that consumers could pay as much as $5 a gallon this year due to political unrest in North Africa and the Middle East, which supply much of the United States’ oil. The $5 per gallon speculation has been floating around the industry for some time, but last year, CNN stated that former president of Shell Oil, John Hofmeister predicted that Americans could pay $5 a gallon by 2012. Analysts have bumped that date up.

“Drivers are already reacting to the change,” writes Kicking Tires. “In the first week of April, consumption was down 3.6%, or 2.4 million gallons of gasoline,” based on data from MasterCard Spending Pulse.

One of the best ways to combat rising gas prices is to drive less, but there are other simple things you can do. […]

Even uneducated, ignorant and frankly stupid people understand this incredibly basic concept: cost goes up, activity goes down.  And yet you have liberals with PhDs staffing agencies such as the Congressional Budget Office utterly fail to understand that if they make taxes go up, they will end up with reactions that will invariably produce less revenue for the government.

If even high-school dropouts understand that if the price of gasoline goes up, they need to drive less, how is it that brilliant businessmen won’t realize that if their tax rates go up, they need to protect their money?

Here’s another analogy that might be spot on the money.  Suppose your going to work and a mugger jumps you and takes all your money.  As he’s walking off, counting your (well, his now) cash, he says, “I hope you’ve got as much dough tomorrow, because I’m going to mug you again.”  Now, if you’re smart, you won’t be happening by that way at all the next day.  But if you’ve absolutely got to go that way to get to work, will you have as much money that next day?  Not if you’ve got a single functioning brain cell.  On my analogy, if you figure out some other way to get to work, that’s tax avoidance.  If you stash your cash somewhere so you don’t have it for the robber to take, that’s tax sheltering.  And if you’re too stupid to understand that this is what people do when their taxes go up, that’s liberalism.

The more taxes increase, the more activities that were previously not worth doing – such as sheltering assets, moving assets overseas, investing in collectibles, purchasing tax-exempt investment vehicles, or just dodging taxes – become worth doing.

And so,what happens every single time happens yet again.  Raise taxes expecting more revenue, get less revenue, and hurt the economy in the process by penalizing productivity and investment risk and thereby restricting growth.  And when you encourage growth by reducing the tax burden and allowing people to keep what they earn, lo and behold, cetaris parabis, there is a surge in activity, an increase in economic growth and a corresponding increase in federal tax revenue.

I say “cetaris parabis” because if you throw in a socialist Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that undermine something as vital as our housing mortgage market by imposing morally and fiscally insane policies until the system comes crashing down, such as what occurred leading up the crash in 2008, the best tax rates in the world can’t save the system.

Here are just a few articles I wrote on that subject, in order of date written with the earliest listed first:

Biden: ‘We Misread The Economy, And It’s All Republicans’ Fault

AEI Article: How Fannie And Freddie Blew Up The Economy

Barney Frank And Democrat Party Most Responsible For 2008 Economic Collapse

More Proof Democrats Destroyed The Economy In 2008: The Ongoing Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac Disaster

We need to have intelligent economic policies.  If we don’t have such policies, we’re going to struggle regardless of our tax rates.

Quickly, another liberal policy that will not even possibly work is the Federal Reserve QE2 (that’s the second shot at quantitative easing) that artificially reduces interest rates by artificially increasing the money supply in order to increase lending.

Here’s the problem with that.  Short term, it might seem to work.  The stock market looks at the apparent backstopping of our economy and follows the leader (Uncle Sam) up until the ship starts to sink.  After which they will sell, sell, sell.  But the ship ALWAYS sinks.  Why?  Because you have a lot more dollars chasing after the same supply of finite goods and services (if anything, in the last few years, we have a LOWER supply of finite goods and services).  So what happens?  More dollars chasing less stuff.  That’s inflation.  It will INVARIABLY require more devalued dollars to buy the same things.  The more you inflate the money supply, the worse that inflation gets.  And we have massively increased our money supply.

Let me go back to what I wrote going on a year ago now:

An increase in the money supply is rather like an overdose of drugs.  And in this case the effect of the overdose will be hyperinflation.  Basically, the moment we have any kind of genuine recovery, our staggering deficit is going to begin to create an ultimately gigantic inflation rate.  Why?  Because we have massively artificially increased our money supply beyond our ability to actually produce real wealth, and that means that money will ultimately be devalued.  There’s simply no way it can’t be.  If simply printing money solved financial problems, the government could just mail everyone several million dollars, and we could all retire.  The problem is that more money chasing a limited supply of goods simply pushes up prices higher and higher without doing anything to solve the underlying economic problems.  If we have a recovery, with increased economic activity, there will be increased demand on the money supply, forcing an upward climb in interest rates as a means of controlling the currency.  And then we’ll begin to seriously pay for Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s sins.  Paradoxically, the only thing preventing hyperinflation now is the recession, because people aren’t buying anything and therefore aren’t competing for those limited goods.

And let me point out that we’re looking at huge inflation now – even as Obama declares victory over the recession – in insanely rising gas prices, food prices, clothes prices, all prices:

Hope ‘n Change Coming To Fruition: Cost Of EVERYTHING About To Go Up

Instability, Food Riots And A Heaping Dose Of ‘I Told You So’

Just like I said would happen.  And just like the long list of economists said would happen when they begged Obama not to do the $3.27 trillion stimulus.

This phenomenon is going on all over the world because most of the world is tied to the U.S. dollar – the currency that Obama has been poisoning hoping for short-term political gains.

And, again, a temporary extension of the Bush tax cuts (which doesn’t help businesses and individuals who are desperately searching for consistency so they can predict their costs) is not going to help us out of this kind of moral and fiscal insanity.

But what we are going to see is Obama now demagoguing all the massive economic failure that his own policies are responsible for creating in the first place to demand that the rich “pay their fair share.”

UN Global Warmers Admit ‘Climate Change’ About Wealth Redistribution; Invoke Demonic ‘Goddesses’

If you didn’t think that the global warming alarmist movement was out of control; you’re already an idiot in my estimation.

But what was bad is now worse.

First, there’s the frank admission that conservatives have been proclaiming from every rooftop all along; that global warming (relabeled ‘climate change’ when ‘global warming’ became another ‘inconvenient truth’ for them) is and always has been about the socialist redistribution of wealth, rather than any kind of legitimate science:

IPCC Official: “Climate Policy Is Redistributing The World’s Wealth”
Thursday, 18 November 2010 13:16 Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 14 November 2010

Interview: Bernard Potter

NZZ am Sonntag: Mr. Edenhofer, everybody concerned with climate protection demands emissions reductions. You now speak of “dangerous emissions reduction.” What do you mean?

Ottmar Edenhofer: So far economic growth has gone hand in hand with the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. One percent growth means one percent more emissions. The historic memory of mankind remembers: In order to get rich one has to burn coal, oil or gas. And therefore, the emerging economies fear CO2 emission limits.

[…]

That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.

That does not sound anymore like the climate policy that we know.

Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War. Why? Because we have 11,000 gigatons of carbon in the coal reserves in the soil under our feet – and we must emit only 400 gigatons in the atmosphere if we want to keep the 2-degree target. 11 000 to 400 – there is no getting around the fact that most of the fossil reserves must remain in the soil.

De facto, this means an expropriation of the countries with natural resources. This leads to a very different development from that which has been triggered by development policy.

First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.

And just who the heck is this Ottmar Edenhofer guy?  He’s the man who was appointed as joint chair of Working Group 3 at the Twenty-Ninth Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Switzerland. He’s the the deputy director and chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Professor of the Economics of Climate Change at the Berlin Institute of Technology.

In other words, he is hardly a global warming nobody.  He’s a global warming alarmist bigwig who clearly understands the global warming alarmist agenda.  If he made a mistake, it was that he was honest (something very few leftists can be accused of).

And he’s telling you – as the new generation of global warming alarmists who are now calling themselves “climate change” alarmists – want to do.  It’s something that the OLD generation of global warming alarmists for the most part refused to tell you: that this whole “climate change” malarkey is ultimately merely a guise to take what little wealth Obama will leave your children with, and redistributing it to all the impoverished nations such as Africa.

If you’re living in a country blessed with natural resources – and formerly blessed with capitalist free market economies – your children be damned.

Because Africa has for the most part ALWAYS embraced socialism (or what Dinesh D’Souza accurately calls “anticolonialism“), they should finally get their reward for their faithful embrace of such socialism.  Their bounty should be seized by international fiat from your children’s mouths and given to socialist Africa’s children.  And socialist Latin America’s.  And socialist Asia’s children.

It’s the same “social justice” crap that liberals have been talking about.  And when they need to recruit scientists to help legitimize their propaganda – offering enormous government-funded research grants as carrots – their will be plenty of “scientists” willing to make their “science” say whatever they want it to say.

And what goes on in these people’s minds, these neo-global-warming alarmists who want to accomplish all this?

This movement isn’t just bizarre.  And it isn’t just flagrantly anti-Christ.  It’s a “let the facts be damned in the face of our agenda” approach to reality and to science.

Posted at 12:11 PM ET, 11/29/2010
Cancun talks start with a call to the gods
By Juliet Eilperin

With United Nations climate negotiators facing an uphill battle to advance their goal of reducing emissions linked to global warming, it’s no surprise that the woman steering the talks appealed to a Mayan goddess Monday.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also “the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving. May she inspire you — because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools.”

She called for “a balanced outcome” which would marry financial and emissions commitments from industrialized countries aimed at combating climate change with “the understanding of fairness that will guide long-term mitigation efforts.”

“Excellencies, the goddess Ixchel would probably tell you that a tapestry is the result of the skillful interlacing of many threads,” said Figueres, who hails from Costa Rica and started her greetings in Spanish before switching to English. “I am convinced that 20 years from now, we will admire the policy tapestry that you have woven together and think back fondly to Cancun and the inspiration of Ixchel.”

Delegates from 193 countries are gathered in Cancun for the two-week meeting, which kicked off today at 10:20 a.m. local time, or 11:20 a.m. Eastern. Mexican President Felipe Calderon, a major proponent of action on climate change, attended the opening.

Two weeks from now, we’ll have a sense of whether Ixchel — and the delegates — were listening to Figueres’s appeal.

And, of course, these jet-setting “delegates ” hypocritically sent massive tonnages of carbon into the air as they met in the very kind of nice, warm climate that they want to tell us that we need to be so terrified of.

This isn’t the science of Bacon’s scientific method; it’s the “science” of pagan goddesses.  It’s “socialism as science.”  It’s the science of wealth redistributionism.

It’s a giant load of crap.

When I first heard about global warming and the potential destruction of the planet, I was open to the idea.  There is nothing in my worldview that would be opposed to such a concept.

But, almost right from the start, I found out what it really was.

The infamous 1997 Kyoto Accord, embraced by Bill Clinton but roundly rejected by the US Senate on a unanimous and bi-partisan 99-0 vote, would have massively restricted developed Western countries from economic development, but would have given waivers to Russia, China, India and the entire developing world.  That was when I knew that this wasn’t about “science,” but rather that it was all about socialism.

Nothing has emerged from that day to do anything other than confirm that fact – especially the Climategate emails that revealed that “respected climate researchers” had destroyed, fabricated and altered data to “prove” the “consensus” of global warming.

Now we know that man-caused global warming is not only a socialist lie, but a demonic lie straight from hell.

Tax Cuts INCREASE Revenues; They Have ALWAYS Increased Revenues

We keep seeing the same liberal argument being played over and over again.  As the mainstream media seek to make their case to the American people that the Bush tax cuts should expire, one of the primary strategies being employed is to claim that Republicans are refusing to “pay for” their extension of the tax cuts.  And that therefore the Republicans will hike the deficit.  The problem is that it’s a false premise, based on a static conception of human behavior that refuses to take into account the fact that people’s behavior changes depending upon how much of their money they are allowed to keep, and how much of their money is seized from them in taxation.

As bizarre as it might seem, it is seen as perverse these days to suggest that allowing someone to keep more of the money he or she invests would stimulate people to take more risks by investing in businesses and products, and that such increased investment in business and products would in turn stimulate more economic growth.  Common sense has become akin to rocket science these days.

Then again, liberals aren’t doing much for rocket science, either.

Let’s take a look at the current facts, and then examine the history of our greatest tax-cutting presidents.

The Falsehood That Democrats Are ‘Cutting’ Taxes

Democrats say they are cutting taxes on “95% of Americans, but argue that giving the same tax cut benefits to the remaining 5% would hike the deficit and be fiscally irresponsible.

Well, for one thing, the Democrats are flat-out lying when they say they are cutting taxes for 95% of Americans.  That can’t possibly be true, because as a matter of simple fact a whopping 47% of American households pay no federal income taxes whatsoever.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Tax Day is a dreaded deadline for millions, but for nearly half of U.S. households it’s simply somebody else’s problem.

About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That’s according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization. […]

The result is a tax system that exempts almost half the country from paying for programs that benefit everyone, including national defense, public safety, infrastructure and education. It is a system in which the top 10 percent of earners — households making an average of $366,400 in 2006 — paid about 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.

What Democrats are doing – deceitful liars that they are – is giving Americans “tax credits” and calling them “tax cuts.”

A  tax cut is a reduction in the percentage or amount of taxes that is being imposed on a citizen.  The government is cutting the amount it had been collecting from taxpayers.  A government cannot “cut” a citizen’s taxes unless that citizen had been paying taxes in the first place.

A tax credit is when you give someone money that has been collected from another taxpayer.  It is redistribution of wealth.  It is what Karl Marx described as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  Do you notice that “to” in the middle?  It means, “transferring the wealth from one government-penalized group of people TO another government-privileged group of people.”  It is what Obama described as “spreading the wealth around.”

What Obama and the Democrats in Congress propose is NOT a “tax cut.”  And it is nothing but a lie to call it that.  And every single journalist who has suggested that it is a tax cut is as much of a liar as the Democrats are.

That’s the first point.  Democrats are advancing a central tenet of Marxism and deceitfully and even demagogically relabeling it as “capitalism.”  And the media helps them get away with it.

The Falsehood That Cutting Taxes For the Rich – But NOT The Other Classes – Contributes To the Deficit

Next comes the idea Democrats argue that tax cuts for the rich contribute to the deficit.

Let’s say for the sake of argument (just for the moment; I’ll prove it’s wrong below) that tax cuts for the rich raise the deficit.  Let me ask you one question: how then do tax cuts for the rest of us not ALSO raise the deficit???

Why wouldn’t raising taxes on the middle class and the poor not correspondingly lower the deficit?  So why aren’t Democrats going after them?

Are Democrats too stupid to realize that there just aren’t enough rich people to pay off our deficit, especially when this president and this Congress have raised said deficit tenfold over the last Republican-passed budget deficit?  The last budget produced by congressional Republicans was in 2007.  That year, the deficit was approximately $160 billion; now under Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid it is $1.6 TRILLION a year as far as the eye can see.

Wouldn’t ANY tax cuts raise the deficit?  And shouldn’t we therefore tax the bejeezus out of EVERYBODY to lower the deficit?  Wouldn’t every single dollar collected reduce the deficit correspondingly?

Let me put it concretely: say I took a $100 bill out of the wallet of a millionaire.  And then say I took a $100 bill out of the wallet of a poor person.  If I took both bills to a Democrat, would he or she be able to tell the difference?  Would he say, “Ah, THIS bill will lower the deficit because it comes from a rich person; but THIS one clearly won’t because it clearly came from a poor person.”

Update, Sep. 10: A study by the Joint Tax Committee, using the same static methodology that I refer to in my opening paragraph, calculate that the government will lose $700 billion in revenue if the tax cuts for the top income brackets are extended.  And that sounds bad.  But they also conclude that the Bush tax cuts on the middle class will cost the Treasury $3 TRILLION over the same period.  If we can’t afford $700 billion, then how on earth can we afford $3 trillion?  And then you’ve got to ask how much the Treasury is losing by not taxing the poor first into the poorhouse, and then into the street?  And how much more revenue could we collect if we then imposed a “street” tax? [end update].

Hopefully you get the point: if tax cuts for the rich are bad because they increase the deficit, then they are equally bad for everyone else for the same exact reason.  And so we should either tax the hell out of everyone, or cut taxes for everyone.  And a consistent Democrat opposed to “deficit-hiking tax cuts for the rich” should be for raising YOUR taxes as much as possible.

Republicans don’t fall into this fundamental contradiction (see below), because they don’t believe that tax cuts create deficits.  Democrats do.  Which means they are perfectly content with shockingly supermassive deficits – as long as its 95% of Americans who are creating those deficits, rather than 100%.

Joe Biden said it was a patriotic duty to pay higher taxes.  And yet Democrats are trying to make 95% of Americans unpatriotic traitors who don’t care about their country?

Now, Democrats will at this point repudiate logic and punt to the issue of “fairness.”  But “fairness” is a very subjective thing, when one group of people decide it’s “fair” for another group of people to hand over their money while the first group pays nothing.  Even George Bernard Shaw – a socialist, mind you – understood this.  He pointed out the fact that “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

Which is to say it’s NOT fair at all.  Paul may think it’s fair, but poor Peter gets screwed year after year.

And it is a fundamental act of hypocrisy – not to mention advancing yet ANOTHER central tenet of Marxist class warfare – to claim to oppose tax cuts for the rich in the name of the deficit, but not to oppose tax cuts for everyone else.

And for the record, I despise both hypocrisy AND central tenets of Marxism.  Which is why I despise the Democrat Party, which is both hypocritical and basically Marxist.

[Update, September 20] Brit Hume demolished the Obama-Democrat argument regarding the Bush tax cuts being a “cost” to the government, saying:

“But the very language used in discussing these issues tells you something as well. In Washington, letting people keep more of their own money is considered a cost. As if all the money really belongs to the government in the first place in which what you get to keep is an expenditure.”

And, again, that mindset about government control and in fact government ownership over people’s wealth represents a profoundly Marxist view of the world. [End update].

For what it’s worth, Democrats will only maintain the massive contradiction of “tax cuts for the rich raising the deficit” for so long.  Obama already admitted he was willing to go back on his promise to raise taxes on the middle class.  And his people are already looking to tee off on middle class tax hikes.  In addition, if you have any private retirement funds, they may well be coming after you soon.

The Falsehood That Tax Cuts Increase The Deficit

Now let’s take a look at the utterly fallacious view that tax cuts in general create higher deficits.

Let’s take a trip back in time, starting with the 1920s.  From Burton Folsom’s book, New Deal or Raw Deal?:

In 1921, President Harding asked the sixty-five-year-old [Andrew] Mellon to be secretary of the treasury; the national debt [resulting from WWI] had surpassed $20 billion and unemployment had reached 11.7 percent, one of the highest rates in U.S. history.  Harding invited Mellon to tinker with tax rates to encourage investment without incurring more debt. Mellon studied the problem carefully; his solution was what is today called “supply side economics,” the idea of cutting taxes to stimulate investment.  High income tax rates, Mellon argued, “inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw this capital from productive business and invest it in tax-exempt securities. . . . The result is that the sources of taxation are drying up, wealth is failing to carry its share of the tax burden; and capital is being diverted into channels which yield neither revenue to the Government nor profit to the people” (page 128).

Mellon wrote, “It seems difficult for some to understand that high rates of taxation do not necessarily mean large revenue to the Government, and that more revenue may often be obtained by lower taxes.”  And he compared the government setting tax rates on incomes to a businessman setting prices on products: “If a price is fixed too high, sales drop off and with them profits.”

And what happened?

“As secretary of the treasury, Mellon promoted, and Harding and Coolidge backed, a plan that eventually cut taxes on large incomes from 73 to 24 percent and on smaller incomes from 4 to 1/2 of 1 percent.  These tax cuts helped produce an outpouring of economic development – from air conditioning to refrigerators to zippers, Scotch tape to radios and talking movies.  Investors took more risks when they were allowed to keep more of their gains.  President Coolidge, during his six years in office, averaged only 3.3 percent unemployment and 1 percent inflation – the lowest misery index of any president in the twentieth century.

Furthermore, Mellon was also vindicated in his astonishing predictions that cutting taxes across the board would generate more revenue.  In the early 1920s, when the highest tax rate was 73 percent, the total income tax revenue to the U.S. government was a little over $700 million.  In 1928 and 1929, when the top tax rate was slashed to 25 and 24 percent, the total revenue topped the $1 billion mark.  Also remarkable, as Table 3 indicates, is that the burden of paying these taxes fell increasingly upon the wealthy” (page 129-130).

Now, that is incredible upon its face, but it becomes even more incredible when contrasted with FDR’s antibusiness and confiscatory tax policies, which both dramatically shrunk in terms of actual income tax revenues (from $1.096 billion in 1929 to $527 million in 1935), and dramatically shifted the tax burden to the backs of the poor by imposing huge new excise taxes (from $540 million in 1929 to $1.364 billion in 1935).  See Table 1 on page 125 of New Deal or Raw Deal for that information.

FDR both collected far less taxes from the rich, while imposing a far more onerous tax burden upon the poor.

It is simply a matter of empirical fact that tax cuts create increased revenue, and that those [Democrats] who have refused to pay attention to that fact have ended up reducing government revenues even as they increased the burdens on the poorest whom they falsely claim to help.

Let’s move on to John F. Kennedy, one of the most popular Democrat presidents ever.  Few realize that he was also a supply-side tax cutter.

Kennedy said:

“It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now … Cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.”

– John F. Kennedy, Nov. 20, 1962, president’s news conference

---

“Lower rates of taxation will stimulate economic activity and so raise the levels of personal and corporate income as to yield within a few years an increased – not a reduced – flow of revenues to the federal government.”

– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 17, 1963, annual budget message to the Congress, fiscal year 1964

“In today’s economy, fiscal prudence and responsibility call for tax reduction even if it temporarily enlarges the federal deficit – why reducing taxes is the best way open to us to increase revenues.”

– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 21, 1963, annual message to the Congress: “The Economic Report Of The President”

---

“It is no contradiction – the most important single thing we can do to stimulate investment in today’s economy is to raise consumption by major reduction of individual income tax rates.”

– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 21, 1963, annual message to the Congress: “The Economic Report Of The President”

---

“Our tax system still siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power and reduces the incentive for risk, investment and effort – thereby aborting our recoveries and stifling our national growth rate.”

– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 24, 1963, message to Congress on tax reduction and reform, House Doc. 43, 88th Congress, 1st Session.

---

“A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget. Every taxpayer and his family will have more money left over after taxes for a new car, a new home, new conveniences, education and investment. Every businessman can keep a higher percentage of his profits in his cash register or put it to work expanding or improving his business, and as the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenues.”

– John F. Kennedy, Sept. 18, 1963, radio and television address to the nation on tax-reduction bill

Which is to say that modern Democrats are essentially calling one of their greatest presidents a liar when they demonize tax cuts as a means of increasing government revenues.

So let’s move on to Ronald Reagan.  Reagan had two major tax cutting policies implemented: the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA) of 1981, which was retroactive to 1981, and the Tax Reform Act of 1986.

Did Reagan’s tax cuts decrease federal revenues?  Hardly:

We find that 8 of the following 10 years there was a surplus of revenue from 1980, prior to the Reagan tax cuts.  And, following the Tax Reform Act of 1986, there was a MASSIVE INCREASE of revenue.

So Reagan’s tax cuts increased revenue.  But who paid the increased tax revenue?  The poor?  Opponents of the Reagan tax cuts argued that his policy was a giveaway to the rich (ever heard that one before?) because their tax payments would fall.  But that was exactly wrong.  In reality:

“The share of the income tax burden borne by the top 10 percent of taxpayers increased from 48.0 percent in 1981 to 57.2 percent in 1988. Meanwhile, the share of income taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers dropped from 7.5 percent in 1981 to 5.7 percent in 1988.”

So Ronald Reagan a) collected more total revenue, b) collected more revenue from the rich, while c) reducing revenue collected by the bottom half of taxpayers, and d) generated an economic powerhouse that lasted – with only minor hiccups – for nearly three decades.  Pretty good achievement considering that his predecessor was forced to describe his own economy as a “malaise,” suffering due to a “crisis of confidence.” Pretty good considering that President Jimmy Carter responded to a reporter’s question as to what he would do about the problem of inflation by answering, “It would be misleading for me to tell any of you that there is a solution to it.”

Reagan whipped inflation.  Just as he whipped that malaise and that crisis of confidence.

This might explain why a Gallup poll showed that Ronald Reagan is regarded as our greatest president, while fellow tax-cutting great John F. Kennedy is tied for second with Abraham Lincoln.  Because, in proving Democrat policies are completely wrongheaded, he helped people.  Including poorer people who benefited from the strong economy he built with his tax policies.

Let’s move on to George Bush and the infamous (to Democrats) Bush tax cuts.  And let me quote none other than the New York Times:

Sharp Rise in Tax Revenue to Pare U.S. Deficit
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Published: July 13, 2005

WASHINGTON, July 12 – For the first time since President Bush took office, an unexpected leap in tax revenue is about to shrink the federal budget deficit this year, by nearly $100 billion.

A Jump in Corporate Payments On Wednesday, White House officials plan to announce that the deficit for the 2005 fiscal year, which ends in September, will be far smaller than the $427 billion they estimated in February.

Mr. Bush plans to hail the improvement at a cabinet meeting and to cite it as validation of his argument that tax cuts would stimulate the economy and ultimately help pay for themselves.

Based on revenue and spending data through June, the budget deficit for the first nine months of the fiscal year was $251 billion, $76 billion lower than the $327 billion gap recorded at the corresponding point a year earlier.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated last week that the deficit for the full fiscal year, which reached $412 billion in 2004, could be “significantly less than $350 billion, perhaps below $325 billion.”

The big surprise has been in tax revenue, which is running nearly 15 percent higher than in 2004. Corporate tax revenue has soared about 40 percent, after languishing for four years, and individual tax revenue is up as well.

[Update, September 20: The above NY Times link was scrubbed; the same article, edited differently, appears here.]

Note the newspaper’s use of liberals favorite adjective: “unexpected.” They never expect Republican and conservative polices to work, but they always do if they’re given the chance.  They never expect Democrat and liberal policies to fail, but they always seem to fail every single time they’re tried.

For the record, President George Bush’s 2003 tax cuts:

raised federal tax receipts by $785 billion, the largest four-year revenue increase in U.S. history. In fiscal 2007, which ended last month, the government took in 6.7% more tax revenues than in 2006.

These increases in tax revenue have substantially reduced the federal budget deficits. In 2004 the deficit was $413 billion, or 3.5% of gross domestic product. It narrowed to $318 billion in 2005, $248 billion in 2006 and $163 billion in 2007. That last figure is just 1.2% of GDP, which is half of the average of the past 50 years.

Lower tax rates have be so successful in spurring growth that the percentage of federal income taxes paid by the very wealthy has increased. According to the Treasury Department, the top 1% of income tax filers paid just 19% of income taxes in 1980 (when the top tax rate was 70%), and 36% in 2003, the year the Bush tax cuts took effect (when the top rate became 35%). The top 5% of income taxpayers went from 37% of taxes paid to 56%, and the top 10% from 49% to 68% of taxes paid. And the amount of taxes paid by those earning more than $1 million a year rose to $236 billion in 2005 from $132 billion in 2003, a 78% increase.

Budget deficits are not merely a matter of tax policy; it is a matter of tax policy AND spending policy.  Imagine you have a minimum wage job, but live within your means.  Then you get a job that pays a million dollars a year.  And you go a little nuts, buy a mansion, a yacht, a fancy car, and other assorted big ticket items such that you go into debt.  Are you really so asinine as to argue that you made more money when you earned minimum wage?  But that’s literally the Democrats’ argument when they criticize Reagan (who defeated the Soviet Union and won the Cold War in the aftermath of a recession he inherited from President Carter) and George Bush (who won the Iraq War after suffering the greatest attack on US soil in the midst of a recession he inherited from President Clinton).

As a result of the Clinton-era Dot-com bubble bursting, the Nasdaq lost a whopping 78% of its value, and $6 trillion dollars of wealth was simply vaporized.  We don’t tend to remember how bad that economic disaster was, because the 9/11 attack was such a huge experience, and because instead of endlessly blaming his predecessor, George Bush simply took responsibility for the economy, cut taxes, and fixed the problem.  The result, besides the above tax revenue gains, was an incredible and unprecedented 52 consecutive months of job growth.

Update September 12: Did somebody say something about “jobs”?  Another fact to recognize is the horrendous damage that will be done to small businesses and the jobs they create if the tax cuts for the “rich” aren’t continued.  As found in the Wall Street Journal, “According to IRS data, fully 48% of the net income of sole proprietorships, partnerships, and S corporations reported on tax returns went to households with incomes above $200,000 in 2007.” Further, the Tax Policy Center found that basically a third of taxpayers who are expected to be in the top tax bracket in 2011 generate more than half their income from a business ownership.  And while Democrats love to point out that their tax hikes on the so-called rich only impact 3% of small businesses, the National Federation of Independent Business reports that that three percent employs about 25 percent of the nation’s total workforce.  “Small businesses that employ 20 to 250 workers are the most likely to be hit by an increase in the top two tax rates, according to NFIB research. Businesses of this size employ more than 25 percent of the U.S. workforce.”  So if you want jobs and an economic recovery, you simply don’t pile more punishing taxes on those “rich” people.  Especially during a recession [End update].

We’re not arguing theories here; we’re talking about the actual, empirical numbers, literally dollars and cents, which confirms Andrew Mellon’s thesis, and Warren Harding’s and Calvin Coolidge’s, John F. Kennedy’s, Ronald Reagan’s, and George W. Bush’s, economic policies.

Harding and Coolidge, Reagan and Bush, with Democrat JFK right smack in the middle: great tax cutters all.

The notion that small- and limited-government conservatives who want ALL Americans to pay less to a freedom-encroaching government are somehow “beholden to the rich” for doing so is just a lie.  And a Marxist-based lie at that.

[Update, 12/15/10]: Check out these numbers as to how the Reagan tax cuts INCREASED the taxes paid by the wealthy, and REDUCED the taxes paid by the middle class and the bottom 50% of tax payers:

Income tax burdens (from the Joint Economic Committee for the US Congress report, 1996):
1981: top 1% of earners paid 17.6% of all personal income taxes
1988: top 1% of earners paid 27.5% of all personal income taxes (+ 10%).

1981: top 10% of earners paid 48% of all personal income taxes
1988: top 10% of earners paid 57.2% of all personal income taxes (+ 9%).

So rich clearly paid MORE of the tax burden when their tax rates were LOWERED.

For the middle class:
1981: middle class paid 57.5% of all personal income taxes
1988: middle class paid 48.7% of all personal income taxes (- 9%).

The middle class’ tax burden went DOWN by 9%.  They paid almost 10% LESS than what they had been paying before the Reagan cuts.

For the bottom 50%:
1981: bottom 50% paid 7.5% of all personal income taxes
1988: bottom 50% paid 5.7% of all personal income taxes (- 2%).

So the Joint Economic Economic Committee concludes that if you lower the tax rates on the rich, the rich wind up paying MORE of the tax burden and the poor end up paying LESS.  When you enact confiscatory taxation policies, the people who can afford it invariably end up protecting their money.  They do everything they can to NOT pay taxes because they are getting screwed.  When the rates drop to reasonable rates, they don’t shelter their money; rather, they take advantage of their ability to earn more – and improve the economy by doing so – by investing.  If you take away their profit, you take away their incentive to improve the economy and create jobs.

Some articles to read:

The Reagan Tax Cuts: Lessons for Tax Reform

The Historical Lessons of Lower Tax Rates

Income Tax Cuts Increase Revenues and Help Low Income Families

[End Update, 12/15/10]

Obama’s Backdoor Taxation And The Coming Consequences Of Obamanomics

Remember Obama’s ubiquitous campaign pledge that 95% of Americans wouldn’t see their taxes go up one single dime? Oops.

Reuters ran a story that they titled, “Backdoor Taxes To Hit Middle Class.”  The Obama administration whined, pleaded, threatened, and intimidated Reuters to the point that Reuters took the story down.

Fortunately, the International Business Times is running pretty much the story under the same title:

Backdoor taxes to hit middle class

By Terri Cullen
01 February 2010 @ 06:16 pm ET
Next Politics & Policy Article

NEW YORK – The Obama administration’s plan to cut more than $1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade relies heavily on so-called backdoor tax increases that will result in a bigger tax bill for middle-class families.

In the 2010 budget tabled by President Barack Obama on Monday, the White House wants to let billions of dollars in tax breaks expire by the end of the year — effectively a tax hike by stealth.

While the administration is focusing its proposal on eliminating tax breaks for individuals who earn $250,000 a year or more, middle-class families will face a slew of these backdoor increases.

The targeted tax provisions were enacted under the Bush administration’s Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001. Among other things, the law lowered individual tax rates, slashed taxes on capital gains and dividends, and steadily scaled back the estate tax to zero in 2010.

If the provisions are allowed to expire on December 31, the top-tier personal income tax rate will rise to 39.6 percent from 35 percent. But lower-income families will pay more as well: the 25 percent tax bracket will revert back to 28 percent; the 28 percent bracket will increase to 31 percent; and the 33 percent bracket will increase to 36 percent. The special 10 percent bracket is eliminated.

Investors will pay more on their earnings next year as well, with the tax on dividends jumping to 39.6 percent from 15 percent and the capital-gains tax increasing to 20 percent from 15 percent. The estate tax is eliminated this year, but it will return in 2011 — though there has been talk about reinstating the death tax sooner.

Millions of middle-class households already may be facing higher taxes in 2010 because Congress has failed to extend tax breaks that expired on January 1, most notably a “patch” that limited the impact of the alternative minimum tax. The AMT, initially designed to prevent the very rich from avoiding income taxes, was never indexed for inflation. Now the tax is affecting millions of middle-income households, but lawmakers have been reluctant to repeal it because it has become a key source of revenue.

Without annual legislation to renew the patch this year, the AMT could affect an estimated 25 million taxpayers with incomes as low as $33,750 (or $45,000 for joint filers). Even if the patch is extended to last year’s levels, the tax will hit American families that can hardly be considered wealthy — the AMT exemption for 2009 was $46,700 for singles and $70,950 for married couples filing jointly.

Middle-class families also will find fewer tax breaks available to them in 2010 if other popular tax provisions are allowed to expire. Among them:

* Taxpayers who itemize will lose the option to deduct state sales-tax payments instead of state and local income taxes;

* The $250 teacher tax credit for classroom supplies;

* The tax deduction for up to $4,000 of college tuition and expenses;

* Individuals who don’t itemize will no longer be able to increase their standard deduction by up to $1,000 for property taxes paid;

* The first $2,400 of unemployment benefits are taxable, in 2009 that amount was tax-free.

Notwithstanding that punishing the rich actually punishes the poor by punishing economic growth (the poor get their jobs because the rich create them, rather than vice versa), it was always a lie that Obama was only going to tax the rich.  People like me were pointing that out throughout the 2008 election campaign.

A couple examples:

Obama-Biden Will Come After Middle Class With Taxes

Obama WILL Raise Your Taxes And Your Living Costs

That Obama’s promise to tax only the rich was such a transparent lie that even the biased leftist New York Times reported on it.  The final paragraph in their article entitled, “Obama’s Pledge to Tax Only the Rich Can’t Pay for Everything, Analysts Say” reads as follows:

“There is no way we can pay for health care and the rest of the Obama agenda, plus get our long-term deficits under control, simply by raising taxes on the wealthy,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, a former Clinton administration budget official. “The middle class is going to have to contribute as well.”

The Wall Street Journal expressed the same point better (as usual) in analyzing Obama’s tax and spend demagoguery:

This is going to be some trick. Even the most basic inspection of the IRS income tax statistics shows that raising taxes on the salaries, dividends and capital gains of those making more than $250,000 can’t possibly raise enough revenue to fund Mr. Obama’s new spending ambitions.

The WSJ goes on to say:

as a thought experiment, let’s go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That’s less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable “dime” of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.

We voted for a liar based on the huge pack of lies he offered us.

If you actually believed Obama’s “hope and change” that you would be able to get a free ride as Someone Else picked up your tab forever, you are a genuine fool.

Joe Biden summed up the Obama populist demagoguery by suggesting that paying excessively high taxes was the “patriotic duty” of the rich – which basically means that the middle classes and the poor either aren’t patriots or that they have no patriotic duties.

Liberals talk about “fairness,” as though its somehow “fair” that nearly half the country pay should pay no federal income taxes at all, while 1% of the American people should be compelled to pay 40% of all federal income tax.  They think it’s “fair” that the top 1% of earners pay more in taxes than the bottom 95% of Americans COMBINED.

This is America, where you have the right to sit on your fat ass while someone else works for the bon bons you stuff in your face while you vegetate in front of the boob tube.  Why SHOULD you work when you can saddle that burden on Someone Else?

Rich people study harder in their formative years.  They postpone prosperity longer to pursue more college education.  They work longer hours.  They save more.  They pursue jobs that are more demanding and more stressful. They invest when others consume, and then consume some more, and then some more.  And when they finally start to achieve, Mr. or Ms. bon bon feels entitled to confiscate their prosperity and redistribute it to the do nots.

And that’s “fair.”

Well, under Obama, your “fairness” is going to come home to roost.

Obama is considered “anti-business” by a whopping 77% of investors. whose investments stimulate economic growth.  Obama has gone to war with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce whose businesses create jobs.  Obama has gone to war with the banks that lend money to businesses.

Many businesses simply afraid to hire new workers because of Obama’s new taxes and rules, and the sheer atmosphere of doubt that he’s created.

We  are descending into a command-and-control economy with the government pulling the strings, according to a study.  And that is going to have severe consequences.

On top of Obama’s approach of punishing and discouraging businesses and investment, Obama took the Democrat Marxist-based economic philosophy of redistributionism and ran with it so far down the field that we could never hope to pay for it by taxing the rich even if we sucked them all dry.

Obama is spending vastly more money as a percentage of GDP than FDR ever did.  All of this spending is doing little to stimulate the economy (and what little it IS doing is both artificial and temporary), and the American people are going to have to pay dearly for all this never-before-seen-in-the-history-of-the-human-race spending very shortly down the road.

Now Mr. Middle Class and even Mr. Minimum Wage is going to have to pay for Obama’s massive government excesses, too.  Or else the whole Ponzi scheme we call our federal government will fall apart.

This hearkens to the words of Michelle Obama:

“Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

I see those words, “Barack Obama will require you to work,” and I see a bunch of communist proletariats in a mandatory labor pool squatting over their forced labor.

I came across an article entitled, “A New Slavery: Forced Labor, the Communist Betrayal of Human Rights.”  Oh oh.  Barack Obama isn’t the first Marxist who ever decided to “require you to work.”

Obama has created such gigantic deficits through his gigantic “government as God” approach that we will have unsustainable trillion dollar deficits through 2020.

“Barack Obama will require you to work,” Michelle Obama assured us.  “Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

That means no more boob tube and bon bons for you, Obama voters.  Get off your fat, lazy, worthless asses and work off your Dear Leader’s deficits.

Don’t wait for Obama to start a forced labor camp in your neighborhood.  “Move out of your comfort zones” and start one of your own.  Maybe you cold begin by collecting your family’s feces to produce Toebee (compost) like the other Dear Leader requires his people to do in North Korea.

Why Obama’s Supreme Court Selection Will Be A Disgrace To The Constitution

Does the Constitution mean anything specific, or is it just a “living, breathing” document that means whatever the reader wants it to mean?

And what does it mean if the Constitution is essentially meaningless?  What does it mean if the rule of leftwing “empathy” trumps the rule of law?

Depending on your answer to the first question, and what you think about the second, you are either about to be very angry, or very happy.

Justice David Souter just announced his resignation from the Supreme Court, and Barack Obama had this to say:

“I will seek someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book, it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives, whether they can make a living, and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes, and welcome in their own nation. I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with peoples hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.”

Back in November, when asked what kind of Supreme Court Justice he wanted, Obama said:

I taught constitutional law for 10 years, and . . . when you look at what makes a great Supreme Court justice, it’s not just the particular issue and how they rule, but it’s their conception of the Court. And part of the role of the Court is that it is going to protect people who may be vulnerable in the political process, the outsider, the minority, those who are vulnerable, those who don’t have a lot of clout.

. . . [S]ometimes we’re only looking at academics or people who’ve been in the [lower] court. If we can find people who have life experience and they understand what it means to be on the outside, what it means to have the system not work for them, that’s the kind of person I want on the Supreme Court.

Obama has said:

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.

Is that what being a Supreme Court Justice should mean?  Taking the little guy’s side against the big guy?  Taking the outsider’s side, such that we use the power of law to bring the outsiders inside?  Having “empathy” toward liberal voting blocs?  Why should it even matter if the law is on the rich and powerful guy’s side?

Kelly Long, of the Judicial Confirmation Network, said in response to Obama’s statement today:

“What he means is, he wants empathy for one side, and what’s wrong with that is it is being partial rather than impartial.

And she’s right: I didn’t hear Obama mentioning the need to have any empathy toward any traditional or conservative people or groups.  As an example of this highly partial and politicized and partisan “empathy,” a hate crimes bill just passed the House that could target pastors who argue that homosexuality is a sin.  Where’s the “empathy” for them?

Empathy is recast as a political weapon of the left.  And when a judge makes rulings on such feelings, his “empathy” for one group translates into naked contempt for another group.

Contrast Obama’s view with the view of Chief Justice John Roberts:

“I had someone ask me in this process — I don’t remember who it was, but somebody asked me, you know, ‘Are you going to be on the side of the little guy?’ And you obviously want to give an immediate answer, but as you reflect on it, if the Constitution says that the little guy should win, the little guy is going to win in court before me. But if the Constitution says that the big guy should win, well, then, the big guy is going to win, because my obligation is to the Constitution.  That’s the oath.”

In other words, Roberts 100% disagrees with Obama: being a Supreme Court Justice is not at all about having “empathy” or taking the little guy’s side; it is about following the Constitution and ruling in accordance to what the founders who wrote it intended.  Something has to ground our laws.  And the purely subjective opinions of nine unelected lawyers should not be what anchors this nation.

We find out something: as much as liberals want to argue that Bush trounced the Constitution, it is THEY who frankly could care less about the Constitution.

Rasmussen found out that:

While 82% of voters who support McCain believe the justices should rule on what is in the Constitution, just 29% of Barack Obama’s supporters agree. Just 11% of McCain supporters say judges should rule based on the judge’s sense of fairness, while nearly half (49%) of Obama supporters agree.

Only 29% of Obama supporters agree that justices should rule on what is in the Constitution.  That is absolutely terrifying.

It is conservatives who care about the Constitution.  Liberals only care about what they want, and whatever ends justify whatever means.  And if the Constitution doesn’t support what they want, so much the worse for the Constitution.

That’s why liberal judges can mysteriously find penumbras and emanations supporting the “Constitutional” right to abortion, and simultaneously deny the clear and obvious meaning of the 2nd Amendment’s right of the people to keep and bear arms.

Justice Thurgood Marshall, who is the prototype of the liberal justice, said, “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up” (see Deborah L. Rhode, “A Tribute to Justice Thurgood Marshall: Letting the Law Catch Up,” in the 44 Stanford Law Review 1259 (1992).

The problem with this view is that one can literally do whatever one wants as a Justice without any guide but one’s own desires or convictions.  And yet that is the essence of Obama’s philosophy.  All kinds of horrors have resulted from this approach.

In the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, likely the worst decision ever, the Supreme Court ignored the overwhelmingly clear mandate of the Constitution in favor of a desired outcome. In writing his dissent to this despicable example of judicial tyranny, Justice Benjamin R. Curtis wrote, “When a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we no longer have a Constitution; we are under the government of individual men, who for the time being have power to declare what the Constitution is according to their own views of what it ought to mean” (Dred Scott 60 U.S. 621 (Curtis, J., dissenting)).

Similarly, in the 1944 Korematsu v. United States decision, the activist Supreme Court upheld the executive orders of FDR requiring forced internment of some 110,000 American citizens of Japanese descent in clear violation of the plain sense of the 5th Amendments prohibitions against deprivation of life liberty, or property without due process.

Activist judges have repeatedly throughout history justified slavery, segregation, and racism, abandoning the plain sense of the Constitution in order to impose their views upon the text.  Let’s not forget that it was Democrats who fought to impose slavery, and it was judicial activists who bound the country up with laws that took the bloodiest war in American history to overcome.

What did Thomas Jefferson say about the threat of Supreme Court Justices imposing their own will upon the Constitution and imposing laws on the nation based on nothing but their own wills?

“This member of the Government was at first considered as the most harmless and helpless of all its organs. But it has proved that the power of declaring what the law is, ad libitum, by sapping and mining slyly and without alarm the foundations of the Constitution, can do what open force would not dare to attempt.”
—Thomas Jefferson to Edward Livingston, 1825. ME 16:114

“The Constitution . . . meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other.  But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.”
—Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 1804. ME 11:51

“To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.  Their maxim is boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem [good justice is broad jurisdiction], and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.”
—Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820. ME 15:277

I don’t hear Jefferson praising “empathy” as the defining quality of of our Supreme Court Justices.  In fact, I hear him turning in his grave over the abomination that Barack Obama’s philosophy is inflicting upon the nation.

Not that Obama cares one bit about what Jefferson realized about the stupidity and folly of judicial activism two centuries ago.  That would be honoring the original intent of our incredibly wise founding fathers, and liberals like  Obama won’t have any of that.

Antonin Scalia and Nadine Strossen debated over the strict constructivist approach, which honors the founding fathers’ view of the Constitution; versus the “living document” approach, which enables justices to impose their will on the Constitution.  A partial transcript of their debate is available.

Toward the end of the transcript, Scalia said this:

Someday, Nadine, you’re going to get a very conservative Supreme Court… And you’re going to regret what you’ve done.

Imagine if “rightwing” justices bought into the “living document” view of liberals, abandoned their historical interpretation of the Constitution, and began to start seeking “penumbras and emanations” justifying whatever laws they wanted to impose upon society.  Liberals, just imagine for a moment what they would do to society by basing their decisions not upon the Constitution and the law but upon whatever they felt like doing based upon their ideology.

Liberal activist judges love to turn to foreign law to “inform” their rulings.  So let’s see a hardcore rightwing justice start referring to sharia to “inform” his rulings against women and homosexuals.  Let’s see how the left feels if the right uses their own “legal reasoning” against them to impose a rabid moral view in the name of and with the force of law.  One thing is sure: no matter how far such a rightwing judge might go, it is yet unlikely he would go as far as the left did against babies.

The farther Obama pushes the envelope toward liberal judicial activism, the greater the ultimate backlash will be when the worm turns.  And if the economy tanks or we are hit by terrorists, the worm WILL turn to the right.

We don’t know who Obama will appoint to fill the Souter vacancy, but the one thing we DO know is that his pick will be a disgrace to the Constitution.

Schumer Compares Conservative Speech To Porn In Fairness Doctrine Ploy

I came across this from an email and said, “No way.”

I fact checked it, both because I always try to be honest and because I don’t like looking like an idiot.

It sounded too preposterous, too disturbingly fascist, to possibly be true.  No way Senator Chuck Schumer said that, right?

Wrong.  (and at this point I’d do a Sarah Palin impression and ask, “You don’t mind if I call you ‘Schmuck,’ do you?”

In an interview that occurred on November 4 – you know, election day, when people ostensibly get to celebrate one of their precious rights to free speech in the form of voting for whom they choose – Sen. Schmuck Schumer (D-NY) had this little bit to say:

As The Hill reported:

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday defended the so-called Fairness Doctrine in an interview on Fox News, saying, “I think we should all be fair and balanced, don’t you?”

Schumer’s comments echo other Democrats’ views on reviving the Fairness Doctrine, which would require radio stations to balance conservative hosts with liberal ones.Asked if he is a supporter of telling radio stations what content they should have, Schumer used the fair and balanced line, claiming that critics of the Fairness Doctrine are being inconsistent.

“The very same people who don’t want the Fairness Doctrine want the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to limit pornography on the air. I am for that… But you can’t say government hands off in one area to a commercial enterprise but you are allowed to intervene in another. That’s not consistent.”

In 2007, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a close ally of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) told The Hill, “It’s time to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine. I have this old-fashioned attitude that when Americans hear both sides of the story, they’re in a better position to make a decision.”

Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) last year said, “I believe very strongly that the airwaves are public and people use these airwaves for profit. But there is a responsibility to see that both sides and not just one side of the big public questions of debate of the day are aired and are aired with some modicum of fairness.”

Conservatives fear that forcing stations to make equal time for liberal talk radio would cut into profits so significantly that radio executives would opt to scale back on conservative radio programming to avoid escalating costs and interference from the FCC.

They also note that conservative radio shows has been far more successful than liberal ones.

Let’s try to take this fascist idiocy in order, shall we?

1) Sen. Schumer defended the Fairness Doctrine  saying, “I think we should all be fair and balanced, don’t you?”

Well, yes I do, Schmuck.  That’s why I demand that every television program likewise be forced to embrace the fairness doctrine.  That means that conservatives have a voice during the broadcasts of ABC‘s Charles Gibson, CBS‘ Katie Couric, and NBC‘s Brian Williams.  Remember how all three anchors accompanied Barack Obama on his foreign trip, but refused to accompany John McCain on any of his three foreign trips?  That sort of “unfairness” will be ended by law.  “Fairness” means equal time for both candidates.

It also means equal POSITIVE and NEGATIVE time for both candidates, doesn’t it?  DOESN’T IT???

The Center for Media and Public Affairs demonstrated that the “Big 3 networks [are] still fixated on ‘first love’ Obama“:

The “big three” broadcast networks – NBC, ABC and CBS – remain captivated with Sen. Barack Obama, according to a study of campaign coverage released Tuesday by the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University.

Numbers tell all: 61 percent of the stories that appeared on the networks between Aug. 23 and Sept. 30 were positive toward the Democratic Party. In contrast, just 39 percent of the stories covering Republicans were favorable.

That doesn’t seem “fair,” does it, Schmuck?  The Media Research Center adds to that sad state of affairs for the mainstream media:

A comprehensive analysis of every evening news report by the NBC, ABC and CBS television networks on Barack Obama since he came to national prominence concludes coverage of the Illinois senator has “bordered on giddy celebration of a political ‘rock star’ rather than objective newsgathering.”

The new study by the Media Research Center, which tracks bias in the media, is summarized on the organization’s website, where the full report also has been published. It reveals that positive stories about Obama over that time outnumbered negative stories 7-1, and significant controversies such as Obama’s relationship with a convicted Chicago man have been largely ignored.

And the most recent survey from the Project for Excellence in Journalism,  “Winning the Media Campaign: How the Press Reported the 2008 Presidential General Election” – Sep 6 – Oct 16, tells us that:

In short, Obama got nearly 3 times more positive coverage than McCain, while McCain got nearly twice as much negative coverage as Obama.  Does that sound “fair” to you?  How was McCain supposed to run against that kind of media onslaught?

Why not take a look at the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Schmuck?  “Winning the Media Campaign: How the Press Reported the 2008 General Election.” That study found that in the media overall—a sample of 43 outlets studied in the six weeks following the conventions through the last debate—Barack Obama’s coverage was somewhat more positive than negative (36% vs. 29%), while John McCain’s, in contrast, was substantially negative (57% vs. 14% positive). The report concluded that this, in significant part, reflected and magnified the horse race and direction of the polls.

And there was outright deception going on.  Remember that reporter who literally invented “hate speech” allegedly by a McCain supporter against Barack Obama?  It took a Secret Service investigation to prove that the reporter was lying.  And the media consistently portrayed the McCain campaign as being “more negative” than the Obama campaign, when a study revealed that the exact opposite was the case.  Does THAT seem “fair” to you, Schmuck?

And did ABC journalist Michael Malone’s damning description of a dangerous liberal bias that literally threatens the Constitution serve to prove to you that the “Fairness Doctrine” needs to be applied to liberal media, or was it just one more expression of formerly-free speech that you’d like to stamp out, Schmuck?

If none of that sunk in, just let me say two more words: Chris Matthews.

Nothing would be better for conservatives if a “Fairness Doctrine” were actually applied consistently across the media spectrum.  But that isn’t what you want, is it, Schmuck?  No – you want to stifle the ONE media outlet of radio that has a larger conservative presence while utterly ignoring the vastly larger television media presence that totally caters to liberals?

It’s too bad we don’t force the Fairness Doctrine on you, Schmuck.  Because you’d be gone.

2) Then we come to Schmuck Schumer’s simply staggeringly fascist statement: “The very same people who don’t want the Fairness Doctrine want the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to limit pornography on the air. I am for that… But you can’t say government hands off in one area to a commercial enterprise but you are allowed to intervene in another. That’s not consistent.”

Let us consider the man’s progression of thought.  Schmuck is in favor of limiting pornography on the air.  And conservative thought is analogous to pornography.  Therefore he is in favor of limiting conservative thought on the air.

So we have a moral equivalence between pornography and conservative viewpoints.  Cover your child’s ears, because I’m going to say the word “Republican!”

This is the kind of reasoning the Taliban and the most fanatic totalitarian Muslim thugs use to kill and imprison Christians for making mention of their Christianity.  They simply declare it evil, and ban it.  This is a totalitarian tactic.  It is a giant step toward the ugliest political philosophies that the human mind has ever envisioned.

Schmuck is something of a fascist, plain and simple.  He wants to crush his opposition by declaring anything that opposes his political ideology as “pornography” and “limiting” it right off the airwaves.

I’ve had a couple people upset that I use the word “Nazi.”  Let me tell you something: if liberals would only stop acting like Nazis, I’d gladly quit using the term.

When Republicans were in charge, do you remember them using their political power to attempt to crush their opposition?  Do you remember a “Fairness Doctrine” that was geared to pin ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, PBS, and other mainstream media outlets like bugs to the wall, while simultarnously protecting racio advocates such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham?  Republicans would never even conceive of something so fundamentally unconstitutional, undemocratic, or so blatantly totalitarian.  So why are so many Democrats doing it?

There is something terribly wrong, here.

I remember encountering a crazy person on the sidewalk.  She just went off on me and started ranting in my face.  I immediately realized that she was mentally unhinged, and that there was no point attempting to reason with her.  I simply stood there and waited for her to finish her tirade and move off.

That’s what it’s like trying to reason with too many liberals nowadays.

Anyone who thinks like Schmuck Schumer is morally insane, pure and simple.

Russians And Liberals Have Always Been Like Peas In A Pod

Looking at the Russians as they tear the democracy out of a previously Democratic nation, it’s kind of hard to tell them apart from our liberals back home.

– They both love big governments.

– They are both the happiest amidst totalitarianism and socialism.

– They both pretty much want the government to either manage or benefit from everything.

– They both offer ostentatious and grandiose pretensions for whatever they are doing.

– They both lie like crazy the whole time they’re doing whatever they’re doing.

– They both want total control of the media under the guise of “fairness.”

– They both don’t think very highly of allowing things to be voted on.

I think they would come rolling in with tanks (after all, both communism and fascism derive from the left) if it weren’t for the fact that Barack Obama would look like a total dweeb in a helmet, and Nancy Pelosi would muss up her hair-do. American liberals probably decided to avoid tanks after the Dukakis fiasco.