The Demonic Hypocrisy Of Democrats Who Invoke Reagan With The Words, “Why, Even Ronald Reagan [Fill In The Blank].”

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard “even Reagan” attacks on Republicans from liberals such as, “Even Reagan raised taxes,” or “Even Reagan granted amnesty to illegal immigrants.”

I mean, Reagan cut the damn taxes, okay?  Can we please stop the bullcrap?  The top rate went from 70% to 28% under the Reagan tax cut which ignited the economy like nothing ever has before or since.  You’ve got to be not only a fool but a DAMNFOOL – which unfortunately is a synonym for “Democrat” – to try to argue that Reagan “raised taxes.”  If some taxes went up, while most taxes went down and the overall tax rate went WAY down, it’s pretty pathetic to cling to the couple of times that Reagan raised some minor tax to try to argue against the FACT that Reagan cut taxes.  And yet the left does it all the time.

I googled the phrase (with quotes) “even Reagan” and got 27,700 hits, including the first one from the New York Slimes titled, “ObamaCare and Reagan.”  The author’s thesis is apparently that Reagan was a confused man who didn’t understand socialism (you know, because he only understood it enough to defeat the Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics against the steadfast resistance of the Democrat Party whose mantra had become, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”).  If you search for “Even Ronald Reagan” you get another 33,800 results, with the first one being titled, “Even Ronald Reagan Agrees With Bernie Sanders.”  Oh yes, Ronnie would be a wild-eyed socialist today, wouldn’t he, you deluded liberals?

This actually isn’t about Reagan, although if any group of people on earth would refuse to allow a dead man to rest in peace, it would most assuredly be liberals.  This is about the current conservative view on policy issues and the left’s rhetorical game to take down those conservatives.

First of all, it’s kind of interesting for the left to play the “Even Reagan” game.  If you actually believe that what Reagan believed wasn’t right, why on earth would you ask someone to hold to the views of a guy you say is ignorant?  Isn’t that kind of crazy of you to do?  I mean, do you want to say “Even Hitler…” in a way intended to make one side hold more closely to Adolf Hitler’s policies?  It’s like virtually all other leftist talking points: it’s a word game.  It’s actually a pretty stupid one.

Let me explain what is so desperately wrong with this attack and why the left keeps advancing it by a parallel argument: “Even Jimmy Carter was opposed to abortion.”  As president, Jimmy Carter said, “I am convinced that every abortion is an unplanned tragedy, brought about by a combination of human errors and this has been one of the most difficult moral and political issues I have had to face. As president, I accepted my obligation to enforce the “Roe v. Wade” Supreme Court ruling, and at the same time attempted in every way possible to minimize the number of abortions.”  Hardly a triumphant shout of “women have the right to choose to kill as many of their babies as they want to and let the fathers of those babies rights be damned!” statement; it was a regretful, “This is wrong, but I have no choice” statement.  So even Jimmy Carter believed abortion was a “tragedy.”  And why shouldn’t you be flash-frozen to that view the way you want to flash-freeze me to Regan’s views?

Here’s another one: “Even President Jimmy Carter didn’t believe in same-sex marriage.”

Even Jimmy Carter didn’t believe in …” and you name it, you could certainly advance that thesis if you want to compare Carter’s stated views and policies to Obama’s.

But on the left’s incredibly disingenuous and profoundly hypocritical narrative, only Democrats have the right to have any evolution of their views.  Democrats have “evolved” a damn MILE, but let Republicans evolve an INCH and they are therefore on this incredibly hypocritical narrative without any question a bunch of extremists.

I mean, even REAGAN!

Let’s put aside the fact that EVEN JFK believed that reducing taxes caused increased opportunity and incentivized economic growth.  That is a FACT of history, and anyone who isn’t an idiot knows it.  But hell, Republicans are “extremists” for wanting a little more than what Reagan wanted, whereas Democrats are WHAT for doing a COMPLETE U-TURN AND WANTING SOMETHING FUNDAMENTALLY AND PROFOUNDLY DIFFERENT FROM WHAT THEIR GREATEST PRESIDENT WANTED????

Which party has actually wildly veered into extremism???  It sure couldn’t be the damn party that urinated on the entire history of the human civilization in imposing homosexual marriage, let alone their precious Darwinian evolution and it’s edict of “survival of the fittest” defined as “Survival of the form that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations.”  Good luck fertilizing an egg by all the sodomy in the world, queers.  And if you’re a lesbian, keep licking furiously; but if you’ve got a functioning brain cell in your head, you ought to know naught will come from it beyond the hairballs you cough up.

One party not only utterly abandoned the history of civilization, not only abandoned the history of every major religion, but also abandoned the very pretense of science they claimed they held the mantle of.  But it’s not like they went “extremist” or anything.

I think we should “fundamentally transform” our calendars and start with BS: “Before Sodomy.”  Because one rabidly extremist political party wildly transformed the universe (in a shockingly depraved way).

If you’re a Democrat, you are at this point by definition a hypocrite to the last cell of your vile little cockroach brain, so there is absolutely NOTHING WRONG with MASSIVE SHIFTS in policy; if you are a Republican, however, any change is somehow defined as a “radical” and as an “extremist” shift toward some demagogic monster.

Since Democrats love the mantra “even Ronald Reagan…” let’s punch them in the mouth with a little bit of “Even Bill Clinton…”

Let’s look at what an actual QUESTION would have looked like had the one Democrat debate not been an example of the Democrat Party’s most powerful super PAC rather than legitimate journalism:

Mrs. Clinton, back in the 1990s your husband concluded the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed legislation repealing the Glass-Steagall restrictions on affiliations between banks and securities firms, and embraced welfare reform and cuts in capital gains taxes. In 1996, he famously declared “the era of big government is over.”

Today you are running on a pro-tax, pro-regulation, pro-spending platform that is almost the opposite of your husband’s economic record. If his policies worked so well in the 1990s, why are you running against them today?

I mean, EVEN BILL CLINTON…  not that Democrats give a flying damn about their wild swing into the most extremist policies imaginable even compared to their last Democrat president.

There is a constant, unwavering attempt by the mainstream media and the Democrat Party and in particular the most demagogic president in the entire history of the republic, Obama, to demonize and slander the Republican Party has having become “extremist.”  And their most darling argument to that bogus end is the “even Reagan” mantra.  Reagan was a great president.  But he was last president very nearly thirty years ago.

Ronald Reagan massively changed the social, political and economic landscape with policies that were fundamentally different from what had been done before.  He fought very hard for his core beliefs and was willing to do something that Barack Obama has proven to be pathologically incapable of doing: reaching out to the other side.  Reagan REGULARLY met with his Democrat Party opposites and worked out deals.  You tell me the number of times that Obama ever sought to meet with Republican leaders.  He was either arrogantly stating to them, “Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won” or neither he nor anyone on his damn STAFF even had the Republican leaders’ phone numbers to reach them.

How about this one, “Even Reagan” leftist lecturers: how about “EVEN OBAMA”

On the debt:

Obama: The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic. — July 3, 2008

What’s the damn debt again, you demon-possessed HYPOCRITE???  It’s $18.5 trillion and skyrocketing by the nanosecond.  You’ve added NINE TRILLION by your lonesome and you aint even DONE yet!

Or how about this one:

“I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. For me, as a Christian, it’s also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.”

Oops.  So much for gay marriage.  “Even Obama!”  I mean, holy crap, what about THAT “even Obama” compared to your current precise opposite “even Obama”!!!???!!!???

How about this “even Hillary” from Hillary, who now is actually trying to claim that her installation of a secretive private server giving her sole control over her emails so that she could purge tens of thousands of them without ANYONE being allowed to examine them even after her secret server and all of her emails on it had been lawfully subpoenaed by Congress?   Consider what Hillary said about the Bush White House that did NOT use secretive private servers:

HILLARY CLINTON: You know our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps, about the secret military tribunals, we know about the secret White House email accounts.

So Hillary Clinton needs to be thoroughly investigated and convicted for her shredding the Constitution.  EVEN HILLARY agrees.  At least when she’s not being an abject cockroach hypocrite.

We’re not talking about a party “evolving” over thirty years; we’re talking about a party that swung wildly and radically extremist in ONE CANCEROUS PRESIDENCY that now seeks to further infest and infect America with THE NEXT CANCEROUS PRESIDENCY.

Every single Democrat or “journalist” who has ever used any phrase containing the words “even” and “Reagan” is simply demon-possessed.  There is no other way to explain such massive hypocrisy and such massive dishonesty and such massive depravity.

Barack Obama has just as massively “fundamentally transformed” the political landscape by his tyrannical determination to either get his way exactly the way he wants it or do what he wants through executive order without bothering to deal with the inconveniences of the House and Senate or the Constitution.  And Reagan’s way of doing things won’t work with that level of fascist hate for everything our republic stands for that the Democrat Party has degenerated into since Reagan left office.

This was frankly proven even in Reagan’s own time.  Consider what the Associated Press tried to do to Republicans by invoking Reagan’s “amnesty” for illegal immigrants in a manner that attempted to frame them as hypocrites for opposing Obama’s amnesty.  It’s just another example of “even Reagan..”  Hey, let’s ignore some major differences, such as the fact that Reagan signed a bill into law that had been duly passed by the House and Senate; whereas Obama IMPOSED an amnesty that had been explicitly voted down by Congress by act of sheer executive tyranny.  AFTER having repeatedly stated that he didn’t have the authority to do what he did, that it would violate democracy, that he would be an emperor, etc.  HOW ABOUT THAT EXAMPLE OF “EVEN OBAMA…”???  Let’s also consider the fact that Reagan’s amnesty FAILED by all accounts – so why the hell do more of what already has been proven not to work???  And let’s also consider the flat-out LIAR that Democrats proved to be given a condition for Reagan’s signing that law in the first place:

Rising levels of illegal immigration [led to] the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA).  It provided amnesty for 3 million illegal immigrants, in return for increased border security and penalties for companies “knowingly” hiring illegal immigrants.

Democrats dishonestly proved to be liars who refused to make good on either one of those two conditions.  They proved that they are utterly illegitimate negotiating partners.  And they have been dishonest negotiating partners ever since.

Even Reagan can’t be “even Reagan” when he could literally trust the pathologically dishonest Soviet Union more than he could trust the Democrat Party.

Again, this is just another example of “even Reagan,” so if Republicans oppose Obama doing what he did, it’s only because they’re “extremist.”  Because you see, it’s only fascist when Republicans evolve, at least it is if you’ve got enough legions of demons screaming in your insane brain.

To hold one party to a standard that old even as your own party has swung wildly and massively to the left is quite literally clinically insane both in terms of schizophrenic (by believing “facts” that are blatantly false) and sociopathic (by manifesting profound deceit and insincerity and an appalling absence of remorse or shame).

I am so sick of these sneering pseudo-intellectual HYPOCRITES creating “facts” by the despicable manipulation of rhetoric otherwise known as “political correctness.”

We now live in a time when liberals are so hypocritical and frankly so blatantly morally depraved that liberals believe that it is okay for their members to label police as “murderers” and that “law enforcement” is tantamount to “white supremacy” but it is somehow intolerable for a Republican to talk about the ACTUAL MURDERERS and criminals who are flooding into our nation via illegal immigration.

Liberal Hollywood tycoon Quentin Tarantino appeared on liberal MSNBC and doubled-down after calling police murders.  He said (“whined” being a more accurate term):

That’s the way they attack me …  for standing up for the rights of unarmed citizens who have been killed by the police.

They want to demonize me.  They want to slander me and imply that I said things I didn’t say.  And the reason is because they want me to shut up and they want to make sure that no other people like me, prominent citizens, will stand up for that side.

First of all, you turd, WHY ARE THE CITIZENS UNARMED AGAIN???  Oh, that’s right; because of liberals like YOU dedicated to denying us our 2nd Amendment freedom in spite of the fact that basically every single movie you ever made glorified gun violence – because, yeah, to be a damn liberal is to be a damn hypocrite.  And second, what about the left trying to destroy Donald Trump for pointing out the fact that “unarmed citizens” are rather routinely getting MURDERED by illegal immigrants that this administration refuses to deal with?  What about the far MORE fascist tactics that the left routinely uses to demonize any debate???

You can’t reason with or argue with a hypocrite.  Democrats constantly shift in their double-standards.  As I believe I’ve amply demonstrated above, the goal posts move on every single play with them while they demonize us for not PERFECTLY holding to the ideals of a man from three decades ago.

It is literally Satanic for the Democrat Party that has swung further to extremism than any political party has in American history to label the Republican Party as “extremists.”  Just as it is literally Satanic for the mainstream media to act as that extremist party’s most powerful super PAC by backing their demagoguery.

Presidential Legacies: The Man Who Put A Man On The Moon Vs. The Man Who Couldn’t Build A Website Unlike 4 Million Pornographers

The title says it all.

We miss you, JFK.

We also miss your vision – which centered on tax cuts as the key to all future American prosperity versus the slavery of the communism you fought.

Too bad we’ve got such an incompetent lying jerk disgracing your office now.

What Mitt Romney Said Last Night About Tax Cuts And The Deficit Was Absolutely Right. And What Obama Said Was Absolutely Wrong.

Mitt Romney repeatedly said last night that he would not allow tax cuts to add to the deficit.  He repeatedly said it because over and over again Obama blathered the liberal talking point that cutting taxes necessarily increased deficits.

Romney’s exact words: “I want to underline that — no tax cut that adds to the deficit.”

Meanwhile, Obama has promised to cut the deficit in half during his first four years – but instead gave America the highest deficits in the history of the entire human race.

I’ve written about this before.  Let’s replay what has happened every single time we’ve ever cut the income tax rate.

The fact of the matter is that we can go back to Calvin Coolidge who said very nearly THE EXACT SAME THING to his treasury secretary: he too would not allow any tax cuts that added to the debt.  Andrew Mellon – quite possibly the most brilliant economic mind of his day – did a great deal of research and determined what he believed was the best tax rate.  And the Coolidge administration DID cut income taxes and MASSIVELY increased revenues.  Coolidge and Mellon cut the income tax rate 67.12 percent (from 73 to 24 percent); and revenues not only did not go down, but they went UP by at least 42.86 percent (from $700 billion to over $1 billion).

That’s something called a documented fact.  But that wasn’t all that happened: another incredible thing was that the taxes and percentage of taxes paid actually went UP for the rich.  Because as they were allowed to keep more of the profits that they earned by investing in successful business, they significantly increased their investments and therefore paid more in taxes than they otherwise would have had they continued sheltering their money to protect themselves from the higher tax rates.  Liberals ignore reality, but it is simply true.  It is a fact.  It happened.

Then FDR came along and raised the tax rates again and the opposite happened: we collected less and less revenue while the burden of taxation fell increasingly on the poor and middle class again.  Which is exactly what Obama wants to do.

People don’t realize that John F. Kennedy, one of the greatest Democrat presidents, was a TAX CUTTER who believed the conservative economic philosophy that cutting tax rates would in fact increase tax revenues.  He too cut taxes, and he too increased tax revenues.

So we get to Ronald Reagan, who famously cut taxes.  And again, we find that Reagan cut that godawful liberal tax rate during an incredibly godawful liberal-caused economic recession, and he increased tax revenue by 20.71 percent (with revenues increasing from $956 billion to $1.154 trillion).  And again, the taxes were paid primarily by the rich:

“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 we get to George Bush and the Bush tax cuts that liberals and in particular Obama have just demonized up one side and demagogued down the other.  And I can simply quote the New York Times AT the time:

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.

And of course the New York Times, as reliable liberals, use the adjective whenever something good happens under conservative policies and whenever something bad happens under liberal policies: “unexpected.”   But it WASN’T “unexpected.”  It was EXACTLY what Republicans had said would happen and in fact it was exactly what HAD IN FACT HAPPENED every single time we’ve EVER cut income tax rates.

The truth is that conservative tax policy has a perfect track record: every single time it has ever been tried, we have INCREASED tax revenues while not only exploding economic activity and creating more jobs, but encouraging the wealthy to pay more in taxes as well.  And liberals simply dishonestly refuse to acknowledge documented history.

Meanwhile, liberals also have a perfect record … of FAILURE.  They keep raising taxes and keep not understanding why they don’t get the revenues they predicted.

The following is a section from my article, “Tax Cuts INCREASE Revenues; They Have ALWAYS Increased Revenues“, where I document every single thing I said above:

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

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“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”

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“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”

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“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.

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“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).

[To read that article in its entirety, click here].

When Romney said that the small businesses that create jobs was going to be hurt by Obama’s taxes, he was RIGHT.  In a different article available here, I document the facts from official sources and then say:

Out of 27,281,452 total firms, 21,351,320 are listed as “nonemployer firms.”  Which means that 78.23 percent of all small businesses hire ZERO employees.   So when Obama says that 97% of small businesses won’t be affected by his tax hike, please understand that the whopping majority of those businesses that won’t be affected aren’t hiring anybody.  Another 3,617,764 small businesses have no more than four employees.  Those small businesses that hire zero workers plus those small businesses that hire no more than four workers constitute 91.5% of ALL small businesses.

Here’s a more relevant way to look at it.  When you consider the businesses that employ more than four people, you are looking at businesses that hire 94.97 percent of ALL the workers who work for small businesses.  And while not all of the small businesses that hire between 5-9 employees are going to be paying higher taxes as a result of Obama’s class warfare on small businesses, most of them do.  And virtually none of the businesses that hire more than ten employees are going to earn less than $250,000 a year.

Romney pointed out in the debate that half of all jobs created by small business and a quarter of ALL THE JOBS CREATED IN AMERICA would have their income taxes skyrocket under Barack Obama.

When Romney said that Obama’s taxation was going to destroy 700,000 small business jobs, he was RIGHT.

Which is why 85% of small businesses agree with Romney and disagree with Obama that Obama’s policies have led America down the wrong track.

Which is why 64% of small businesses are saying they plan to simply wait Obama out rather than create jobs while he’s trying to ruin them.

Obama deceitfully talks about giving tax cuts to small businesses when in fact he is actually massively taxing them.

Obama IS helping small businesses … into BANKRUPTCY.  And Obama says the recession is behind us while small businesses are going belly up in droves.

Romney absolutely crushed Obama in the debate last night.  Nobody had EVER won a debate by the margin that Romney won by in the history of CNN.  If you have any decency and care about people who need a job and love this country at all, please cast your vote for Mitt Romney.

Why Does Obama Blame Bush For HIS Economy (After FOUR YEARS Of Failure) When Obama Takes Credit For Every Good Bush Achievement?

OSAMA BIN LADEN RAID

Obama takes the credit for getting bin Laden.  Was it Obama who rebuilt  the national security apparatus following 9/11 to reshape it from the Cold War emphasis that had characterized it for the previous sixty years?  Was it Obama who first announced the mission to get bin Laden dead or alive?  Was it Obama who used water boarding to secure the key intelligence breakthroughs that bin Laden was relying on couriers for his communication (rather than phones, computers, etc.) and that he was living in the city of Abbottabad which allowed intelligence to zero in on him?

The key intelligence breakthrough occurred when US intelligence discovered two key facts: 1) that Osama bin Laden was hiding out in the city of Abbottabad in Pakistan; and 2) that bin Laden was relying on a courier who could then be identified and tracked to bin Laden’s specific location in that city.  Both of these key facts were discovered under the Bush presidency by means of waterboarding:

Liberals outrageously lie when they talk about how waterboarding was used.  CIA professionals did NOT ask a terrorist a question and then waterboard him until he gave them whatever answer they wanted.  Rather, they used this incredibly painful – but completely medically safe under supervision – procedure of simulated drowning to “alter the perception” of the terrorist.  The terrorist was confronted with his new reality in a cold, painful way: “We own your ass; we can do whatever the hell we want to you; and we will ultimately break you down.  Get used to the idea that you WILL tell us what we want to know.”  The point of waterboarding was to break their will to resist, not to torture immediate answers out of them but rather to inexorably bring them to the point where they would ultimately crack.  The fact of the matter was that the CIA experts didn’t even bother to ASK terrorists any questions while they waterboarded the three terrorists who ended up singing like canaries.  But it is a simple FACT that waterboarding was the essential background component that led to the breaking of these hard, hateful men: because the terrorists we waterboarded were the very same terrorists who told us about Abbottabad and the courier.

Democrats talk about “torture.”  I say if we catch a monster like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed we waterboard him until he grows gills and then we take the water away so he’ll flop around like a dying fish.  And repeat it over and over again until the same man who tried to destroy us becomes the very man who tells us how to destroy his hateful organization.

I recently watched a 2 hour documentary about the 2006 terrorist attempt to use passenger jets as bombs titled “Stopping the Second 9/11” on the National Geographic Channel.  The thing that most struck me was the fact that British intelligence recorded the terrorists talking to each other on phones.  The terrorists planned to bring their own wives and their own BABIES on the flights that they planned to destroy in order to reduce the likelihood that they would tip off law enforcement by boarding the planes as “family men.”  That ought to scream about the determination of these men to kill and destroy.  You simply are not going to get men like this to open up with courtesy and niceness.  Islamic terrorists by their culture, their religion, and their brutal nature as mass murdering killers respect only superior force, not peaceful overtures, which they see as a sign of weakness. Anyone who thinks you can “nice” a terrorist into betraying his worldview, his ideology, literally his religion, and his movement is simply a naive fool.

The question then becomes this: Why would anybody but a radical leftist ideologue give Obama credit for the intelligence breakthroughs that led to killing bin Laden when Obama was the very guy who most viciously demonized the very procedures that led to those breakthroughs?

There is a fascinating analogy that comes out of the talk about the moon landing that happened as a result of the discussion about the passing of Neil Armstrong (who by the way went on the record criticizing Obama before his death).  The anology begins with this: We give John F. Kennedy complete credit for putting a man on the moon:

Nixon gets ZERO credit even though he was the president sitting in the White House when the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon.  You will not read an article written by a liberal giving Nixon any credit for landing a man on the moon and bringing that man safely back to earth.  Why?  Kennedy had been DEAD for six years prior to that moon landing.  Why isn’t Nixon “the president who put a man on the moon”?  Because it was JFKs vision and the fulfillment of that vision just as getting bin Laden was the fulfillment of George W. Bush’s vision:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush pledged anew Friday that Osama bin Laden will be taken “dead or alive,” no matter how long it takes, amid indications that the suspected terrorist may be bottled up in a rugged Afghan canyon. The president, in an Oval Office meeting with Thailand’s prime minister, would not predict the timing of bin Laden’s capture but said he doesn’t care how the suspect is brought to justice. “I don’t care, dead or alive — either way,” Bush said. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

But again, that meme about the first man on the moon merely reinforces the pathology of the left to take full credit for every good thing and avoid any blame whatsoever for any bad thing.  The media gives John F. Kennedy complete credit for putting a man on the moon because JFK was a Democrat; the media gives George W. Bush ZERO credit for getting Osama bin Laden because GWB was a Republican.  It’s really that simple.

Was Obama’s decision to send the SEALs into Pakistan to kill bin Laden really that amazing?  Let me ask you this: what would have happened to Obama’s political fortunes if he had refused to kill bin Laden and a bunch of pissed off CIA and military professionals leaked Obama’s abject refusal to kill the world’s worst terrorist monster?  How many people think Obama could have been reelected as “the man who refused to kill bin Laden”???

Bottom damn line: if Obama had tried to kill bin Laden and failed, he would have been criticized for that failure.  And to insulate himself from that possibility, he set up Admiral McRaven as the fall guy by giving McRaven responsibility.  It was ultimately McRaven who made the “courageous call,” not Obama.  That said, if Obama had refused to even try to kill bin Laden, HE WOULD HAVE BEEN DONE POLITICALLY.  Does anybody seriously think for one second that the men who had devoted YEARS to getting bin Laden would have just rolled over if Obama had refused to issue the order to get him?  In fact, I will bet you that Republicans would have brought up and article of impeachment due to Obama’s refusal to protect the citizens of the United States, and Democrats would have voted for it.  Because otherwise, this election would have been the worst disaster in the history of politics for the Democrat Party as the weakling coward treasonous bin Laden Party.

So spare me about Obama’s “incredibly courageous decision” to kill bin Laden as George W. Bush had promised the world that the United States would do.  Spare me the idiotic rhetoric that if George W. Bush had still been president he never would have had the guts to kill bin Laden.  Just spare me all your blathering idiocy, liberal.

IRAQ WAR

Let’s talk about the Iraq War.  Let’s talk about the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.  Do you know which president won that war?  Do you know which president negotiated that withdrawal of American troops?  I do.  In answer to both questions, the name is George W. Bush.

But who claims credit for the success of Iraq?  Listen to Vice President Joe Biden, speaking on behalf of the Obama administration:

“I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”

Two words come to mind: they are “evil” and “hypocrite.”  Obama demonized the Iraq War again and again while Bush was trying to fight and win there.  Obama demonized the incredibly successful surge strategy that allowed us to break the back of the insurgency.  But now that same Obama claims credit for what he opposed.

AFGHANISTAN WAR

That same Obama dragged America FAR deeper into the quagmire of Afghanistan than anybody could ever dream blame on Bush.  Because Obama and the Democrat Party didn’t want to appear weak on national security.  So they created a contrast between Iraq (which Bush won) as the “bad war” and Afghanistan (which Obama massively expanded) as the “good war.”

You wait and see: when Obama cuts and runs from Afghanistan, he’s going to frame it as his courageously getting us out of the last of “Bush’s wars.” When Obama massively expanded America’s involvement in Afghanistan and very obviously used Afghanistan as a political device to give Obama a cover from charges that he was a cut and run coward:

As I pointed out before, Charles Krauthammer pointed out the sheer cynical depravity of Barack Obama and the Democrat Party as regards Iraq and Afghanistan by pointing to what the Democrats themselves said:

Bob Shrum, who was a high political operative who worked on the Kerry campaign in ’04, wrote a very interesting article in December of last year in which he talked about that campaign, and he said, at the time, the Democrats raised the issue of Afghanistan — and they made it into “the right war” and “the good war” as a way to attack Bush on Iraq. In retrospect, he writes, that it was, perhaps, he said, misleading. Certainly it was not very wise.

What he really meant to say — or at least I would interpret it — it was utterly cynical. In other words, he’s confessing, in a way, that the Democrats never really supported the Afghan war. It was simply a club with which to bash the [Bush] administration on the Iraq war and pretend that Democrats aren’t anti-war in general, just against the wrong war.

Well, now they are in power, and they are trapped in a box as a result of that, pretending [when] in opposition that Afghanistan is the good war, the war you have to win, the central war in the war on terror. And obviously [they are] now not terribly interested in it, but stuck.

And that’s why Obama has this dilemma. He said explicitly on ABC a few weeks ago that he wouldn’t even use the word “victory” in conjunction with Afghanistan.

And Democrats in Congress have said: If you don’t win this in one year, we’re out of here. He can’t win the war in a year. Everybody knows that, which means he [Obama] has no way out.

Afghanistan was just a way to demagogue Bush in Iraq by describing Afghanistan – where Obama is failing so badly – as “the good war” and Iraq – where Bush won so triumphantly – as “the bad war.” It was beyond cynical; it was flat-out treasonous.

There’s more about how the Democrats – including Democrat voters – did a “cut and run” on their “good war” here.

The thing is that Obama’s “good war” aint going so good.  The thing is that if you examine the casualties of Obama’s “good war” since Obama took it over, Obama is responsible for more than 70 percent of the casualties for the entire war (i.e., compare Obama’s 1,477 casualties in less than four years to Bush’s 630 casualties over eight years of fighting.

Bush limited the Afghanistan War.  Obama radically expanded it.  And now the man who radically expanded the Afghanistan War is trying to A) walk away from the mess that HE created and 2) blame the mess that HE created on Bush just as he’s blamed ALL his failures on Bush.

We are NOT winning in Afghanistan.  We are not GOING to win in Afghanistan – particularly after Obama declared a “timetable for withdrawal” that told the enemy all they have to do is hang on until we crawl out with our tails between our legs and the country will be theirs.  There IS no winning in that hellhole.  As I have pointed out in the past echoing other conservatives, Afghanistan was a terrible place for the U.S. military to fight and be able to exploit our overwhelming air and ground power whereas the flat plains of Iraq was a GREAT place for America to fight and win.

I’ve said that before (just to show you I’m not boasting with 20/20 hindsight):

Bush was rightly resistant to putting too many troops into Afghanistan because he knew enough about history to understand that Afghanistan is a hell-hole. Bush understood that while Iraq – with its flat, mostly open terrain – was perfect for American equipment and tactics, and that mountainous and cave-ridden Afghanistan was most certainly NOT well-suited for American equipment and tactics. Bush knew that the fairly well-educated Iraqi people were capable of some semblance of democracy; and Bush knew that the ignorant, basically stone-age Afghani people were NOT capable of anything resembling self-governance.

Because Bush – however stupid the left wants to say he is – wasn’t 1/20th as massively moronic as Barack Obama is.

Afghanistan is also the place where Obama ignored and overruled his generals.  He was the one who declared that we needed to have a huge surge there (after demonizing Bush’s successful surge in Iraq, fwiw); and then he was the one who refused to listen to his own generals’ recommendations when they said we’d need at least 40,000 troops to do it right – and then after endless indecision finally decided to basically give them too many not to lose but not nearly enough to ever win.

Afghanistan is as much Obama’s war as Iraq was “Bush’s war.”  The difference was that Bush owned his war and accepted responsibility for how it went and how it was fought and Obama will NEVER own ANY of his massive failures.  So as I said above, when Obama cuts and runs from Afghanistan, he’ll deceitfully depict it as getting America out of the last of “Bush’s wars.”  Because that’s the kind of slandering liar that weasel is.

I was wrong about one thing in my past predictions: I thought that Obama would crawl out of Afghanistan before the election in November and make the immediately above claim.  But I submit at this point that Obama can’t do that: because Afghanistan is frankly going so badly with new cases of Afghan soldiers fragging their American partners practically every day that to cut and run NOW would only serve to draw attention to just how catastrophically Obama has truly failed over there.

IRAN

Obama is the president who was mocked by Hillary Clinton for his naive stupidity in assuming he could talk Iran out of its rogue regime intent on acquiring nuclear weapons status.  He is the same naive fool today that he was when Hillarly Clinton mocked him.

And Iran has doubled its centrifuges and made it all but impossible for observers to monitor Iran’s nuclear program while Obama has dithered.

Just as Iran has successfully propped up the Syrian dictatorship while Obama has done nothing.

And I have documented that when craziest nation in world history Iran gets its nukes – which it will – you can COMPLETELY lay the blame for the Armageddon that will surely ensue on Barack Obama and the Democrat Party.

Not that Obama will accept responsibility for his failure of leadership.

OIL

Barack Obama has also been constantly taking complete credit for being the president who has produced more oil than any other president.  Is that true?  No.  The reason that we are producing virtually ANY domestic oil at all right now is because of the Bush administration’s granting the leases that have produced so much American oil. 

“According to EIA’s short-term 2011 outlook, released last week, oil production was significantly higher in 2009 than in the years prior. Obama may have been in office for most of that year, but the oil production numbers are due to action taken before he became president. In 2010, most if not all of the production increase recorded is likely due to action that predates Obama, since Obama didn’t take any major action expanding offshore drilling his first year in office.”

But the Obama administration has taken action since then, as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell pointed out on Wednesday. “Over the past two years, the Obama administration has delayed, revoked, suspended, or canceled an enormous range of development opportunities. One month after the President took office, his administration cancelled 77 oil and gas leases in Utah — once the review was complete the administration refused to reinstate a single one. . . . Last January, it announced new restrictions for onshore oil and gas exploration in the Mountain West. Last February, it denied a permit to build a bridge needed to access an oil producing field in Alaska, after the Environmental Protection Agency designated a nearby river an aquatic resource of national importance. Last April, the Administration suspended 61 oil and gas leases in Montana that were issued in 2008 — then announced that all oil and gas leases in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota would be delayed indefinitely. Last May, the President announced a 6-month moratorium on deepwater drilling — a moratorium that’s been repeatedly struck down in the courts.”

Bush was the president who signed the leases that Obama is taking credit for.  Obama is the president who has shut down oil production.  And yet Obama is the president who is taking credit for Bush’s success even as he refuses to stand behind his failure.  Something to consider as we face the highest gasoline prices in the history of the republic on this Memorial Day.

HEALTH CARE

ObamaCare was an unpopular fiasco the entire time Obama and Democrats were forcing it down the throats of the American people.  Obama demagogued health care costs – which were actually going DOWN before his ObamaCare boondoggle placed another one-sixth of the economy under government bureaucratic control – to pass his socialist takeover of the health care system.

Health care will be more expensive thanks to Obama and his socialism.  We’re talking $1.76 trillion more than Obama promised.  In fact, it’s already three times as expensive as Obama said it would be and we aint seen nothin’ yet.  That is a fact.

College students are seeing their health care costs skyrocket or be completely removed altogether as insurance companies decide they don’t want to pay for all the “free stuff” that ObamaCare forces them to pay for.

ObamaCare disingenuously imposes all the burden on the doctors and insurers while claiming to give all kinds of benefits.  Which is why 74% of doctors say they will quit, retire early, or see fewer patients if ObamaCare stands.  ObamaCare shennanigans, higher costs and fewer doctors mean that you will have LESS chance of actually seeing a doctor under this incredibly failed program.

Obama also swore up one side and down the other that he would NEVER raise taxes on the middle class.  And yet ObamaCare is a massive tax hike on ordinary people.  Because 75% of the 21 new tax hikes will fall on the middle class.

And where’s Obama to accept responsibility for his failed program???

ECONOMY

Question: Which president left his successor with a bubble collapse that vaporized $7.1 trillion in American wealth and wiped out 78% of the Nasdaq portolio?  Answer: William Jefferson Clinton.  But we don’t tend to remember the terrible Dotcom bubble recession that Bill Clinton left for George Bush to inherit because of three reasons: 1) the sheer unmitigated bias of the mainstream media; 2) the disasterous 9/11 attack (that can likewise be laid almost entirely at Clinton’s feet as he gutted the military and intelligence community and left America both weak and blind such that Osama bin Laden declared America to be a “paper tiger” and began to plot his devastating attack); and 3) because unlike Barack Obama, George Bush wasn’t a pitiful whiner and accepted responsibility for the economy.

The fact of the matter is that George Bush began his presidency with a huge double whammy.  Not that the media will ever assign responsibility for it to Clinton the way they were determined to assign responsibility to Bush.  Because there is a longstanding propaganda meme according to which the mainstream media will NEVER blame a Democrat for a failure and will ALWAYS find a way to blame a Republican.

Barack Obama has demonized Bush for the “Great Recession,” literally refuses to cite statistics that consider the first year of his presidency to create the rhetorical statistical illusion that his presidency has been better than it actally was, demonized Republicans for “obstructionism“, and taken credit for his “recovery”.  The truth is that none of these things is true.

Let’s take the “Great Recession” first.  Obama has demonized Republicans over and over again for “lack of regulation” and “failed policies” causing that recession.  Bullcrap.  The single entity that resulted in this collapse was Government Sponsored Enterprise Fannie Mae and its twin Freddie Mac.  I’ve documented that fact over and over again on this blog:

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/aei-article-how-fannie-and-freddie-blew-up-the-economy/

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/barney-frank-and-democrat-party-most-responsible-for-2008-economic-collapse/

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/2009/08/03/who-really-exploded-your-economy-liberals-or-conservatives/

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/democrats-set-up-america-for-2008-collapse-and-barack-obama-became-their-king/

http://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/2009/12/31/with-eyes-finally-wide-open-reconsider-why-the-economy-collapsed-in-the-first-place/

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/democrat-lies-about-their-key-role-in-2008-economic-collapse-reaches-laughable-proportions/

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/2009/07/08/biden-we-misread-the-economy-and-its-all-the-republicans-fault/

http://digitalartpress.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/video-proof-democrat-party-warned-responsible-for-fannie-mae-freddie-mac-economic-crisis-repost/

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/barney-frank-video-proves-democrats-at-core-of-2008-economic-collapse/

And since Democrats took over and issued regulations up the yin yang and then up the whazoo of aforementioned yin yang, we’ve continued to have clear examples of the very things Democrats demonized Republicans over.  And Obama is setting up America and the world for an ultimate $600 trillion collapse that will make the one in 2008 look like a warm, sunny day compared to Armageddon.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed FIRST before ANY private sector entity to initiate the collapse – just as conservative economists had predicted a full decade before the collapse occurred:

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980′s.

”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”

And in fact the private sector entities such as Lehman Brothers that collapsed did so because they suddenly found themselves holding BILLIONS of dollars in sub-prime mortgage backed securities that had been issued by the GSEs that the Democrats created and ran into the ground and protected – and refused to allow Republicans to regulate (Bush tried SEVENTEEN TIMES to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac prior to its collapse and was stopped by Democrats every single time).  In fact Bush was trying to regulate Fannie and Freddie all the way back to 2003 when we still had time to prevent the coming collapse.  Democrats used Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to force the market to sell homes to people who couldn’t afford those homes; and when the bubble burst and Lehman Bros. and others found themselves holding “toxic assets” that they had purchased from Fannie and Freddie, they couldn’t cover their Democrat-caused losses and collapsed.

Nixon was president during the moon landing, but Democrats and liberals have never and will never give him credit because they wanted to give one of their own credit for the success.  Bush was president during the 2008 collapse, and that was all liberals needed to say to blame him for the entire fiasco regardless of how many Democrat shennanigans had gone into that collapse.

And here we are, nearly four years later, and all of Obama’s promises based on his anti-Bush demagoguery to: 1) not increase the debt ceiling; to 2) cut the deficit in half during his first term; to 3) cut the debt after demonizing Bush for his debt.  Obama imposed the most massive one-time spending binge in the history of planet earth and promised that unemployment would be 5.5% by now.  Instead not only has unemployment been over 8% longer than ANY time in history since the Great Depression, but in fact unemployment has actually been worse than had Obama’s own experts said it would be had we NOT wasted and pissed away $862 billion that we can never get back.

Obamanomics has been one catastrophic failure after another.  Here we are, with median household income under Obama nearly TWICE as bad than they were during the Great Recession – whether you want to blame Bush for that recession or not.  Here we are, with more poor people devastated by Obama’s economy than at any time in history.  And that didn’t happen under Bush’s watch, you liberal liars.  Somehow, it wasn’t Bush who put more people into poverty than ever before; it wasn’t Bush who devastated median household incomes as people move in with parents and relatives because the economy has failed them; it has been Obama.  It was OBAMA who made one out of every six Americans poor.

And Obama’s stimulus cost Americans an incredible and frankly insane $278,000 per job.  We can’t afford any more damn Obama jobs!!!

Obama is a liar and his “success” is based on lies – as you will see for yourself if you just try to match his rhetoric to painful American reality under his presidency:

But it’s Bush’s fault that Obama did it.  Because no president in history has ever abrogated his responsibilities or refused to claim responsibility for his failure to live up to his responsibilities than has Obama.

Obama has been the president for the last four years, people, not Bush.

I began talking about the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong.  The only “man on the moon” now – thanks to Obama’s policies – is none other than Barack Obama: because this disgraced leader will surely assume no responsibility for anything that happens on the earth that lies so far below his lofty but meaningless rhetoric.

It’s past time to hold him responsible and fire his ass.

(Hypocrite Alert): Why Is The Democrat Party Of FDR, JFK And John Kerry Attacking Mitt Romney Over His Wealth?

I have said it many times – and the reason I keep saying it is because it keeps proving true – that hypocrisy is the quintessential ingredient of a Democrat.  If you took all of the hypocrisy out of a Democrat, he or she would simply cease to exist.

Here’s an interesting headline:

Romney: Said he expected attacks on his wealth from Democrats. ‘.. will not apologize for being successful’

It brings back a flood of memories of the abject hypocrisy of Democrats.

Remember four years ago when Democrats attacked John McCain for not knowing how many houses he owned?  The mainstream media played that “gaffe” all over the airwaves to ensure you would think that John McCain was as out of touch as possible.

It didn’t matter that McCain didn’t actually own ANY houses (his wife owned them, with some of them being in a trust); it was just an opportunity for the media to dishonestly pile on top of a Republican and do what they do best – propaganda to demonize their ideological enemies.

Fast forward back four years prior to that, when John Kerry, the wealthiest man who ever ran for president, was campaigning.  How many damn houses did HE own?  Ooops.  Somehow the media never dredged that up.

The issue of personal wealth never came up with the mainstream media, in spite of the fact that John Kerry was worth $240 million – very nearly as much as Romney.  Ooops again.

Notice that John McCain is nowhere on the list of the ten wealthiest candidates for president.  John Edwards is.  Bill Clinton is.  Hillary Clinton is.  Al Gore is.  And John Kerry – the 2004 Democrat candidate for president – most assuredly is.  But the issue of their wealth and how they got it doesn’t matter; only Mitt Romney’s does.

The Democrat Party and their mainstream media allies are crawling all over Mitt Romney’s tax returns to demagogue his tax rate.  The figure 13.9% is raging; that’s the percentage the media claims Romney paid.  They intentionally omit the fact that if you remove Romney’s charitable donations, he’s actually paying a rate of 42%.

What rate did John Kerry pay at?  Oh, that doesn’t matter and never did because he’s a Democrat and therefore was immune to such inconvenient questions from the media propaganda?  I’m oh-so very sorry for asking. 

The fact that Obama gave less than 1% of his wealth to charity versus the fact that Romney gave 15% of his wealth to charity is also not on the mainstream media radar.  That’s not the kind of discussion the Democrat Party or their media allies want you to have around the water cooler or the coffee pot.

Two of the names that most Democrats would readily say were the greatest American presidents were filthy rich: John F. Kennedy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  But none of that matters.

Here’s what great Democrat President John F. Kennedy said about taxes:

“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

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“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”

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“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”

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 “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.

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“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

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 “I have asked the secretary of the treasury to report by April 1 on whether present tax laws may be stimulating in undue amounts the flow of American capital to the industrial countries abroad through special preferential treatment.”

– John F. Kennedy, Feb. 6, 1961, message to Congress on gold and the balalnce of payments deficit

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“In those countries where income taxes are lower than in the United States, the ability to defer the payment of U.S. tax by retaining income in the subsidiary companies provides a tax advantage for companies operating through overseas subsidiaries that is not available to companies operating solely in the United States. Many American investors properly made use of this deferral in the conduct of their foreign investment.”

– John F. Kennedy, April 20, 1961, message to Congress on taxation

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“Our present tax system … exerts too heavy a drag on growth … It reduces the financial incentives for personal effort, investment, and risk-taking … The present tax load … distorts economic judgments and channels an undue amount of energy into efforts to avoid tax liabilities.”

– John F. Kennedy, Nov. 20, 1962, press conference

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“The present tax codes … inhibit the mobility and formation of capital, add complexities and inequities which undermine the morale of the taxpayer, and make tax avoidance rather than market factors a prime consideration in too many economic decisions.”

– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 23, 1963, special message to Congress on tax reduction and reform

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“In short, it is a paradoxical truth that … the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now. The experience of a number of European countries and Japan have borne this out. This country’s own experience with tax reduction in 1954 has borne this out. And the reason is that only full employment can balance the budget, and tax reduction can pave the way to that employment. The purpose of 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, news conference

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“The largest single barrier to full employment of our manpower and resources and to a higher rate of economic growth is the unrealistically heavy drag of federal income taxes on private purchasing power, initiative and incentive.”

– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 24, 1963, special message to Congress on tax reduction and reform

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“Expansion and modernization of the nation’s productive plant is essential to accelerate economic growth and to improve the international competitive position of American industry … An early stimulus to business investment will promote recovery and increase employment.”

– John F. Kennedy, Feb. 2, 1961, message on economic recovery

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 “We must start now to provide additional stimulus to the modernization of American industrial plants … I shall propose to the Congress a new tax incentive for businesses to expand their normal investment in plant and equipment.”

– John F. Kennedy, Feb. 13, 1961, National Industrial Conference Board

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 “A bill will be presented to the Congress for action next year. It will include an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in both corporate and personal income taxes. It will include long-needed tax reform that logic and equity demand … The billions of dollars this bill will place in the hands of the consumer and our businessmen will have both immediate and permanent benefits to our economy. Every dollar released from taxation that is spent or invested will help create a new job and a new salary. And these new jobs and new salaries can create other jobs and other salaries and more customers and more growth for an expanding American economy.”

– John F. Kennedy, Aug. 13, 1962, radio and television report on the state of the national economy

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“This administration pledged itself last summer to an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes … Next year’s tax bill should reduce personal as well as corporate income taxes, for those in the lower brackets, who are certain to spend their additional take-home pay, and for those in the middle and upper brackets, who can thereby be encouraged to undertake additional efforts and enabled to invest more capital … I am confident that the enactment of the right bill next year will in due course increase our gross national product by several times the amount of taxes actually cut.”

– John F. Kennedy, Nov. 20, 1962, news conference

But none of that matters to the media or to the modern Democrat Party – which embraced the communism that JFJK spent his presidency fighting – either.

Our mainstream media that gets to decide what stories get reported and fixated upon are the propaganda wing of the Democrat Party.  And they WILL NOT report fairly or add proper context to their stories to communicate the truth.

The beast is coming, and the mainstream media will ignore his personal wealth, too, as he rules over the human race as the man who will fulfill all of liberals and Democrats big government dreams.

Obama, The Anti-Kennedy, Anti-Reagan, Anti-Exceptionalism President

“On the hope of our free nation rests the hope of all free nations.” — John F. Kennedy

“Can we doubt that only a divine providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people on the world who yearn to breathe free?” — Ronald Wilson Reagan

“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”  — Barack Hussein Obama

“We’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades.” — Barack Hussein Obama

Kind of helps you understand why if you attend an Independence Parade on July Fourth or take a moment to contemplate your American flag, you are a Republican these days.

Mind you, the United States of America is an exceptional nation without peer; but it’s closes second is it’s magnificent historic ally, Great Britain.  Unless you talk to somebody associated with the Obama administration:

The real views of many in Obama administration were laid bare by a State Department official involved in planning the Brown visit, who reacted with fury when questioned by The Sunday Telegraph about why the event was so low-key.

The official dismissed any notion of the special relationship, saying: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”

Britain – the faithful ally and friend that alongside America prevailed over evil in two world wars – gets tossed into the same boat that Obama tosses America into.

But what else should you expect from these people?

SEPTEMBER 1, 2011
Obama and the Burden of Exceptionalism
Post-’60s liberals, with the president as their standard bearer, seek to make a virtue of decline.
By SHELBY STEELE

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama’s character, today’s left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.

Yet there is something more than inexperience or lack of character that defines this presidency: Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-’60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America’s exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil—an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America’s greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.

Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.

Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his “leading from behind” profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. Once in office his “hope and change” campaign slogan came to look like the “hope” of overcoming American exceptionalism and “change” away from it.

So, in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.

 

Chad Crowe

But then again, the American people did elect him. Clearly Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him (a black president would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility). But were they also looking for—in Mr. Obama—an assault on America’s bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence?

American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.

Yet today America is fighting in a number of Muslim countries, and that number is as likely to rise as to fall. Our exceptionalism saddles us with overwhelming burdens. The entire world comes to our door when there is real trouble, and every day we spill blood and treasure in foreign lands—even as anti-Americanism plays around the world like a hit record.

At home the values that made us exceptional have been smeared with derision. Individual initiative and individual responsibility—the very engines of our exceptionalism—now carry a stigma of hypocrisy. For centuries America made sure that no amount of initiative would lift minorities and women. So in liberal quarters today—where historical shames are made to define the present—these values are seen as little more than the cynical remnants of a bygone era. Talk of “merit” or “a competition of excellence” in the admissions office of any Ivy League university today, and then stand by for the howls of incredulous laughter.

Our national exceptionalism both burdens and defames us, yet it remains our fate. We make others anxious, envious, resentful, admiring and sometimes hate-driven. There’s a reason al Qaeda operatives targeted the U.S. on 9/11 and not, say, Buenos Aires. They wanted to enrich their act of evil with the gravitas of American exceptionalism. They wanted to steal our thunder.

So we Americans cannot help but feel some ambivalence toward our singularity in the world—with its draining entanglements abroad, the selfless demands it makes on both our military and our taxpayers, and all the false charges of imperial hubris it incurs. Therefore it is not surprising that America developed a liberalism—a political left—that took issue with our exceptionalism. It is a left that has no more fervent mission than to recast our greatness as the product of racism, imperialism and unbridled capitalism.

But this leaves the left mired in an absurdity: It seeks to trade the burdens of greatness for the relief of mediocrity. When greatness fades, when a nation contracts to a middling place in the world, then the world in fact no longer knocks on its door. (Think of England or France after empire.) To civilize America, to redeem the nation from its supposed avarice and hubris, the American left effectively makes a virtue of decline—as if we can redeem America only by making her indistinguishable from lesser nations.

Since the ’60s we have enfeebled our public education system even as our wealth has expanded. Moral and cultural relativism now obscure individual responsibility. We are uninspired in the wars we fight, calculating our withdrawal even before we begin—and then we fight with a self-conscious, almost bureaucratic minimalism that makes the wars interminable.

America seems to be facing a pivotal moment: Do we move ahead by advancing or by receding—by reaffirming the values that made us exceptional or by letting go of those values, so that a creeping mediocrity begins to spare us the burdens of greatness?

As a president, Barack Obama has been a force for mediocrity. He has banked more on the hopeless interventions of government than on the exceptionalism of the people. His greatest weakness as a president is a limp confidence in his countrymen. He is afraid to ask difficult things of them.

Like me, he is black, and it was the government that in part saved us from the ignorances of the people. So the concept of the exceptionalism—the genius for freedom—of the American people may still be a stretch for him. But in fact he was elected to make that stretch. It should be held against him that he has failed to do so.

Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Among his books is “White Guilt” (Harper/Collins, 2007).

Regarding the quote about Obama, that he seeks “the ‘hope’ of overcoming American exceptionalism and ‘change’ away from it,” I’m reminded of a comment by Jules Crittendon: “The Obama administration doesn’t study history. It reimagines it.”

‘Unexpected’ Increase In Tax Revenues: More Confirmation That Lower Taxes Increases Growth/Revenue

I just finished responding to a pair of enjoyable comments from Robbie (here and here).  And Robbie posts an excellent 5:46 minute video of the great economist Thomas Sowell:

As Robbie points out, I say much the same things as Sowell.  What he says about tax rate cuts and increased investment and growth having been proven by four presidents over nearly a century (Calvin Coolidge, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and George Bush) is exactly what I pointed out in my article “Tax Cuts Increase Revenues; They Have ALWAYS Increased Revenues.”

We just had more confirmation of the effectiveness of tax cuts in INCREASING tax revenues (which means that when the government has lower tax rates, it actually collects MORE in tax revenue than it would were it to have higher tax rates):

WASHINGTON – Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner now is saying that, contrary to his recent dire warnings of “catastrophic economic consequences” should Congress fail to increase the nation’ debt limit, there has been an apparent unexpected increase in projected tax revenue, and the deadline for possible default has been benched until mid-spring.

Allow me to define “unexpected” for you: it is an adjective in Democratese for, ‘We’re too stupid to understand why, and too dishonest to admit it, but conservative economic policies are working.'”

A little more information as to why we had this “unexpected” increase in tax revenue comes out of an interview:

CHIOTAKIS: So how did the Treasury Secretary do this? I mean, I thought the old deadline of July 8th was pretty firm.

GENZER: Yeah, that’s what everybody thought. But Geithner actually got a little help from you and me, Steve — the taxpayers. It seems the IRS actually took in more tax revenue than expected last month.

There was an expectation that was building for the entire second half of 2010 that Republicans would win big in November, which greatly stimulated the stock market:

“More than 85 percent of institutional investors see the GOP taking the House next month. While political polls suggest that changes are likely in Washington, a staggering number of professional investors think that the Republicans will win back the House of Representatives in November and that may be adding to their sense of a better business environment going forward. Since government policy error remains the biggest fear of investors, according to the poll, the view of DC trends matters.”

The unemployment rate – which had been steadily going UP, has gone down every month since Republicans were overwhelmingly elected and took over the House.  As I have pointed out in the past:

Here’s an interesting factoid that doesn’t seem to get any mention in the mainstream media: Unless I’m seriously mistaken, the unemployment rate has gone down every month since Republicans took control of The House in January:

Unemployment was if anything going UP.  And then Republicans took over, and whammo.  It started going down.  But Republicans didn’t receive so much as a scintilla of credit from the mainstream media.  It’s just amazing.

One of the things that investors and businesses were looking for from Republicans was their central promise that they would not budge in demanding that the Bush tax cuts be extended.  And as confidence grew that the Republicans would win in November and force Obama to reverse his repeatedly stated intention of pursuing Marxist class warfare and punishing investment, production and growth, people who actually produce in this nation began to act accordingly.

Hence the “unexpected” increase in tax revenue.

Democrats invariably point to the Clinton years as “proof” that the century proving that tax rate cuts increase revenues was just a ninety year fluke.

But the Clinton years actually prove the opposite: conservative policies were right during the Clinton years, too.

First, Clinton and Democrats increased taxes on the top marginal income rates in 1993.  Did wonderful things happen after that?  Well, if you’re a Republican, yes, they most certainly did: as a result of the complete failure of Clinton’s economic policy, 1994 marked the biggest takeover by Republicans in history, with Republicans slaughtering Democrats and taking over both the House and the Senate.

It wasn’t until Clinton reduced the capital gains rates that we really saw the kind of growth that Democrats love to point to.  It wasn’t until AFTER Clinton announced “the era of big government is over.”  And yet the actual reasons for that growth prove that their policies are totally wrong.

With the help of mainstream media propaganda, the American people have largely forgotten that Bill Clinton was forced to say, “The era of big government is over.”  With the help of mainstream media propaganda, the American people have largely forgotten that the “good” Clinton years came as a direct result of Republicans dominating both the House of Represenatives and the United States Senate.  With the help of mainstream media propaganda, the American people have largely forgotten that the “Clinton surplus” was the direct result of the Contract with America and its pledge for a balanced budget – literally over Clinton’s constant attempts to prevent it.

The mainstream media – like the Democrat Party whose propaganda whores they are – WILL NOT tell the truth about such matters.

But here we are again.  Republicans pass tax cuts, and then there’s an “unexpected” increase in revenue.  Just like every single other time.

After George W. Bush passed his tax cuts, we had dishonest and confused liberals reacting as the New York Times did:

“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.”

And 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.

It boils down to this: the more you hate America; the more you hate American economic power; the more you want to see the American people suffer; the more you should vote Democrat.

Now, I mentioned two comments to Robbie.  The other comment was about QE2 and its impact.

QE2 is the economic equivalent of sugar in nutrition.  Will it provide quick energy?  Sure it will.  Will that quick energy come at the expense of future health?  You bet it will.

Right now, as a result of the Obam Federal Reserve’s policy of increasing the monetary supply by buying debt from itself (literally creating money out of thin air), there is more economic activity.  Right now, as a result of this policy, credit rates are lower.  Fewer banks and corporations are going under because of the ready access to cheap money.  Investors see the stability and invest.

We should all feed our children tons of sugar, so we can enjoy the short term bonanza of frenetic activity.

Unless you worry about all the cavities, the weight gains, the diabetes, and of course that huge depressing crash with all of those catastrophic health consequences that necessarily come later..

The first time we ended QE1, the stock market lost 16% of its value in two weeks.  Which is to say it didn’t work the first time for the same reason it won’t work this second time.  Or a necessary third time, etcetera.

One of the more sinister effects of quantitative easing is that it essentially becomes a tax on saving.  You were busy at work putting away as much as you could during a period when your money was worth more.  But now, as a result of artificially increasing the money supply, all that money you accumulated in saving is worth less.  Why is this?  Because you can increase the money supply all you want, but you’ve still got the same finite amount of goods and services.  And when you’ve got twice as many dollars in the money supply as you had before, over time those same goods and services will cost twice as much as before, and so on.

Right now, prices are going up dramatically on virtually everything that matters.  And yet the only ones who refuse to admit it are the federal government and its stauchest mainstream media propagandists who think and report what the Obama regime wants them to think and report.

Meanwhile, the key factor that led to the economic crash in 2008 – the housing market – just had its worst quarter since the darkest depths of that crash.  And as bad as that is, the experts are saying that we are STILL  a ways off from hitting bottom.  Obama hasn’t solved anything.  And economists are described as being in the fetal position over this “unexpected” – (there’s that word again) – development.

It’s just like feeding that little kid sugar: frenetic activity that actually accomplishes nothing, followed shortly afterward by a nasty crash.

Why FDR Would Have Denounced The Modern Democrat Party As Un-American

Democrats and the Democrat Party they form have become truly despicable.

I can cite former Democrats such as Dennis Prager who has frequently called himself “a Kennedy liberal.”  He has pointed out, “I didn’t leave the Democrat Party; the Democrat Party left me.”

I can cite Ronald Reagan himself as such a man:

Reagan began his political career as a liberal Democrat, admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and active supporter of New Deal policies, but in the early 1950s he shifted to the right and, while remaining a Democrat, endorsed the presidential candidacies of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 as well as Richard Nixon in 1960.[54] His many GE speeches—which he wrote himself—were non-partisan but carried a conservative, pro-business message; he was influenced by Lemuel Boulware, a senior GE executive. Boulware, known for his tough stance against unions and his innovative strategies to win over workers, championed the core tenets of modern American conservatism: free markets, anticommunism, lower taxes, and limited government.[55] Eventually, the ratings for Reagan’s show fell off and GE dropped Reagan in 1962.[56]  That year Reagan formally switched to the Republican Party, stating, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.”[57]

One of the things that undoubtedly resulted in these two brilliant political thinkers’ sense of abandonment was the fact that they clearly HAD BEEN abandoned by the Democrat Party as it continued to “evolve” (liberals love that word, worshiping it in place of a God who stays the same) into a degenerate spiral.  And it was that profound abandonment of key Democrat liberal views – the abandonment of classical liberalism into something that can only be described today as a hybrid of Marxism and fascism – that then led these men to question their entire political presuppositions that had resulted in their being Democrats in the first place.

Yes, I know, liberals always confidently assure us that Nazism and fascism are right wing.  But how, exactly?  If they say militarism, then how was it that the Soviet Union had the largest and most powerful military machine in the world?  If they say racism, then – apart from their own bigotry – how do they escape their own racism?  If you want to talk about anti-Semitism of the Nazis, it turns out that Democrats are actually far more anti-Semitic than Republicans.  And, again, the genocide of the leftwing Soviet Union dwarfs even that of the Nazis.

So, what exactly is it that makes Nazism “right wing”?  Well, maybe the left would say that the Nazis were “Christian” and left wing ideologies are secular.  But that is hardly true, either.  I document in a previous article (“Hitler Wasn’t ‘Right Wing’, Wasn’t ‘Christian’; And Nazism Was Applied Darwinism“) that Nazism and Christianity had virtually nothing to do with one another, and that in fact Hitler was an acknowledged atheist.

I did not know at the writing of that article that in fact Hitler actually wanted to kidnap Pope Pius XII, and that the SS officer placed in charge of the operation understood that Hitler would have murdered him following his capture.  I don’t see how that doesn’t do anything more than strengthen my case that Hitler was hardly a “Catholic.”

When it comes to Nazi ideology and Nazi policies (not the least of which was the sort of abortion and Darwinian eugenics that liberal progressive and modern-day Democrat Icon Margaret Sanger engaged in), Nazism was far more in line with liberal progressivism than anything remotely conservative.  A couple quick statements by Margaret Sanger, the patron saint of Hillary Clinton:

In Pivot of Civilization, Sanger referred to immigrants and poor folks as “human weeds,” “reckless breeders,” “spawning  … human beings who never should have been born.”

“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” she said, “if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” (Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, by Linda Gordon)

In her “Plan for Peace,” Sanger outlined her strategy for eradication of those she deemed “feebleminded.” Among the steps included in her evil scheme were immigration restrictions; compulsory sterilization; segregation to a lifetime of farm work; etc. (Birth Control Review, April 1932, p. 107)

And I also show in a comment to that article that Nazism was far, FAR more in line with Democrat Party liberalism than it ever could be Republican Party conservatism when it came to big government and big government policies.

Jonah Goldberg points out that Nazism was in fact “far right.”  But only in the sense that the Nazi Party, i.e. the National Socialist German Workers Party, was the far right of the extreme left.

A good article I recently found on the subject of socialism and fascism is available here.  Basically, the latter is simply a particular species of the former.

American conservatism calls for a strong military defense, yes.  But as we shall see, so also did FDR.  And in every other aspect, consistent conservatism calls for limited and small national government.  Which was the diametric opposite of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi project, which controlled every sphere of life the same way the Democrat Party tried to do during the last two years when they had power.

If you think for so much as an instant that Adolf Hitler wanted less centralized power for himself and more control in the hands of the states/districts and the individual people – as Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and conservatives constantly talk about – you simply couldn’t be any more ignorant.

That said, just what are the two fundamental issues I claim in my title that FDR would have denounced in the Democrat Party of today?

They are military power and the willingness to use it (i.e., the heart of any foreign policy) and government or public employee unions (i.e., the heart of Democrat’s domestic agenda).

These are no small matters: the former is central to any rational foreign policy and the latter has become central to Democrat domestic policy.

I describe FDR’s fundamental opposition to government unions and the reasons he was opposed to them here.  And I provide FDR’s very own words and his very own reasoning.  Suffice it to say that as pro-union as FDR was, he was profoundly opposed to government/public sector employees having the very sort of collective bargaining rights that Democrats today routinely demand for the public sector unions which constitute the bulk of union power today, and which massively contributes almost exclusively to the Democrat Party machine.  FDR realized that these employees were employees not of some unfair private company, but of the American people.  He also recognized that the government becomes a monopoly unto itself, and that government unions striking 1) exploited that monopoly power in an unfair and un-American way, and 2) was a defacto attack against the American people.

Please read the article above for more.

That leaves the other issue, the foreign policy issue of military power and the willingness to use it to deal with threats to the nation.

A speech by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill could have been given today to expose the American liberal views of Democrats basically since Lyndon Baines Johnson refused to seek re-election after liberals turned on him.  It certainly powerfully applies to the Democrat positions in the war on terror – that Obama once refused to even acknowledge – of today.  Churchill began:

I have but a short time to deal with this enormous subject and I beg you therefore to weigh my words with the attention and thought which I have given to them.

As we go to and fro in this peaceful country with its decent, orderly people going about their business under free institutions and with so much tolerance and fair play in their laws and customs, it is startling and fearful to realize that we are no longer safe in our island home.

For nearly a thousand years England has not seen the campfires of an invader. The stormy sea and our royal navy have been our sure defense. Not only have we preserved our life and freedom through the centuries, but gradually we have come to be the heart and center of an empire which surrounds the globe.

It is indeed with a pang of stabbing pain that we see all this in mortal danger. A thousand years has served to form a state; an hour may lay it in dust.

What shall we do? Many people think that the best way to escape war is to dwell upon its horrors and to imprint them vividly upon the minds of the younger generation. They flaunt the grisly photograph before their eyes. They fill their ears with tales of carnage. They dilate upon the ineptitude of generals and admirals. They denounce the crime as insensate folly of human strife. Now, all this teaching ought to be very useful in preventing us from attacking or invading any other country, if anyone outside a madhouse wished to do so, but how would it help us if we were attacked or invaded ourselves that is the question we have to ask.

Would the invaders consent to hear Lord Beaverbrook’s exposition, or listen to the impassioned appeals of Mr. Lloyd George? Would they agree to meet that famous South African, General Smuts, and have their inferiority complex removed in friendly, reasonable debate? I doubt it. I have borne responsibility for the safety of this country in grievous times. I gravely doubt it.

But even if they did, I am not so sure we should convince them, and persuade them to go back quietly home. They might say, it seems to me, “you are rich; we are poor. You seem well fed; we are hungry. You have been victorious; we have been defeated. You have valuable colonies; we have none. You have your navy; where is ours? You have had the past; let us have the future.” Above all, I fear they would say, “you are weak and we are strong.”

Churchill gave that speech back in 1934.  Just imagine how much unparalleled human suffering would never have happened if only the weak and appeasing policies of the leftist bleeding hearts had not triumphed!  The left wrongly claim to stand for peace and compassion and every good thing.  But the exact opposite is true, as they have in fact murdered millions and millions of innocent human beings with their naive and morally stupid policies.  And to whatever extent liberals have good intentions, the road to hell is paved with liberal intentions.

Think back to Obama’s positions as a candidate in which he demonized Bush’s war in Iraq and his surge strategy.  Think of Obama’s incredibly naive and incredibly failed policy of talking to Iran without preconditions.

I could go on all day about Democrats taking on the views that Churchill condemned; that our enemies really aren’t that evil and how we can talk to them and reach some kind of accord short of fighting them.  It is as naive and morally idiotic today as it was in the era of Churchill and – yes – Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I did not realize this until I watched a program I viewed on the Military History Channel called “Decisions That Shook the World.”  But FDR rapidly became what we would today call a neo-conservative.

In the late 1930s, FDR began to watch with growing horror as the Nazis began to take over Europe.  In secret letters to Winston Churchill, he offered his moral support to the Allies.  FDR knew that if the people – who did NOT want to become entangled in what they saw as a European war – were to find out about these letters, they would turn against him in outrage.  The American people in the 1930s and early 1940s were crystal clear that they did not want to become involved in another world war in Europe.  As it was, at the very time that the American people were the most worried about FDR secretly getting involved in the war behind their backs, FDR was in fact secretly corresponding with Churchill to do that very thing.  FDR also – again secretly – ordered his military commanders to devise a secret military plan with Great Britain for when FDR was able to involve America in the war against Hitler in Europe.

Now, today, it would be very easy to condemn FDR as duplicitous.  And he WAS incredibly duplicitous.  FDR was a man – we find out in the words of the historians who narrated the “Decisions” program – who had no problem saying and doing things in private that he very much did not want to be known in public.  As an example, FDR, in direct defiance of the United States Supreme Court – directed his Attorney General to wiretap suspected spies.  That was literally an impeachable offense.  FDR was breaking the law to deal with what he saw as a growing threat against America.

Rep. Wendell Wilkie, the Republican candidate for president in the 1940 election – warned the American people, “If you elect FDR, he will get you into a war you don’t want.”  And FDR, deceitfully, in a speech, said, “That charge is contrary to every fact, every purpose of the past eight years.”  It was, as history documents, a complete lie.

Another lie FDR told the people came on the eve of the 1940 election.  FDR told mothers, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”  And it is hard to imagine a more dishonest promise, given that he was at the moment he said those words doing everything he knew how to get America into the war in Europe.

One of the points the historians made clear is that, “If all of Roosevelt’s acts were publicly known, he likely would have been impeached.”  He most certainly would NOT have been re-elected in 1940.

FDR was reelected on the promise that he would not do what in fact he was determined to do.

In 1940, the “anti-war” candidate was the Republican, Wendell Wilkie.  He had the virtue of being honest, but likely on the wrong side of history (we can’t know for sure what would have happened had the United States not become involved in World War II, but it doesn’t look pretty).  Democrat FDR may have had the virtue of being right, but he was certainly profoundly dishonest.

Now, I could write how FDR was quite constant with other modern liberal presidents who say one thing and do the exact opposite (I’m speaking directly about Barack Obama, the examples of which are now already legion).  But that isn’t my project here.  My project is to point out that, when it came to being prepared for war and then fighting that war, FDR was fundamentally in opposition to the modern Democrat Party agenda.

That briefly stated, it was the Republican Party which ultimately came to realize that FDR was correct in his views of the military and the need to vigorously defend American national security.  And it was the Democrats who came to turn on FDR’s realization and abandon his views.

They didn’t do so all at once, or right away.  As much as modern liberals tried to attack Ronald Reagan as putting the world on the brink of nuclear war in his Cold War stand against the powerful Soviet Union, one President John F. Kennedy was every bit the cold warrior that Reagan ever was.  And, again, any liberal who doubts this is simply a fundamentally ignorant human being.  That said, it was during the Kennedy presidency that JFK cynically – and by executive fiat rather than any vote by Congress – allowed the government unions that came to own the Democrat Party lock, stock and barrel to collectively bargain as a means to help the Democrat Party.  And the moral collapse of the Democrat Party was incredibly precipitous after that.

At this point in time, anyone who doubts that radical Islam is easily capable of not only destabilizing the world, but plunging it into economic depression and global war is delusional.  The mere prospect of a collapse of the Libyan government alone could spell enormous problems in the likely event of a civil war in that country.  Oil prices could literally more than double, which would simply obliterate any potential global economic recovery.  If Iran is able to obtain the bomb – which is most assuredly will if it hasn’t already – we will see a rise in Islamic fundamentalism, jihadism and terrorism such that the world has never seen as the Iranian regime rightly sees itself as impervious to any meaningful international action against it.  If that isn’t bad enough, we would also see a nuclear arms race quickly escalate in the craziest region in the history of the planet as Sunni Muslim regimes tried to protect themselves against the Shiite Iranian threat.

For what it’s worth, even as mainstream liberals celebrate and rejoice in the overthrow of one Arab leader after another, it is IRAN which is most benefitting from the chaos.  From the New York Times:

MANAMA, Bahrain — The popular revolts shaking the Arab world have begun to shift the balance of power in the region, bolstering Iran’s position while weakening and unnerving its rival, Saudi Arabia, regional experts said.

I have been warning and warning about this.  But the world listens to Obama, not me.

But in light of Obama’s policy of appeasement, of asking for meetings of minds with no preconditions, allow me to rephrase Churchill’s words to suit our modern-day situation:

Would the invaders consent to hear Barack Obama’s exposition, or listen to the impassioned appeals of Hillary Clinton? Would they agree to meet that famous African, Kofi Annan, and have their inferiority complex removed in friendly, reasonable debate? I doubt it.

Allow me to share with you the consensus view of liberalism today at one of its elite headquarters of Columbia University:

Columbia University is holding a series of public hearings on whether or not to allow ROTC back on campus now that DADT has been repealed. A wounded Iraq veteran who recently enrolled at Columbia took to the microphone and asked fellow students to support ROTC. He was booed, jeered, and called a racist.

Columbia University students heckled a war hero during a town-hall meeting on whether ROTC should be allowed back on campus.

“Racist!” some students yelled at Anthony Maschek, a Columbia freshman and former Army staff sergeant awarded the Purple Heart after being shot 11 times in a firefight in northern Iraq in February 2008. Others hissed and booed the veteran.

The former soldier responded to the jeers with this awesome statement:

“It doesn’t matter how you feel about the war. It doesn’t matter how you feel about fighting,” said Maschek. “There are bad men out there plotting to kill you.”

The despicable so-called “Americans” in the audience only laughed and jeered more.

Anthony Maschek was a staff sergeant with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. He was shot 11 times and spent two years recovering at Walter Reed. He’s an American hero and those thugs at Columbia are a disgrace. This is no different than those pieces of crap who spit on veterans coming back from Vietnam. It’s disgusting that in 2011 our veterans should have to be heckled by cowards.

Read more: http://www.thehotjoints.com/2011/02/21/wounded-veteran-booed-and-jeered-at-columbia-university/#ixzz1Evn0A8qL

FDR would have turned his back on this Democrat Party as a bunch of contemptible and despicable traitors to the United States of America.  He would have looked at the government unions that today are the sine qua non – the “that without which” – of the Democrat Party machine.  And he would have been disgusted that the entire Democrat Party rests today upon an inherently un-American foundation.  Then this president who risked so much to keep America and the world safe from tyranny would have looked upon the modern Democrat Party and its repeated denunciation of those who would fight America’s most terrifying enemies even as those enemies grew stronger and stronger while we have grown weaker and weaker, and he would have vomited in contempt for the party that he had such a profound role in shaping.

By the very standards of the figures that you cite as your greatest heroes, I denounce you as the pathetic, vile, un-American fools that you truly are, Democrats.

I would say that you should be ashamed of yourselves, but I doubt that you are capable of that virtue in this house-of-card world that you are building now.  And the problem with houses of cards is not merely that they fall; it is also that they tend to burn furiously when a match is struck.

And when the Antichrist warned of by the Scriptures for more than 2,600 years comes (as described in the Books of Daniel and Revelation), it will be Democrats, the quintessential fools, who welcome him with cheers and adoration.

Need Proof Democrats Are Un-American? Just Look At Wisconsin And Count The Ways

You should be calling them “fascists”; but you probably always hear them described as “Democrats.”

These Democrats and the big unions that dwarf any other special interests (most definitely including the “evil” Republican special interests you always hear about in the news) are as un-American as Marxist pie.  But you won’t ever hear how or why unless you go outside the mainstream media propaganda.

Let’s count the ways.  Just in Wisconsin, and just over the last few days:

1) Even liberal FDR said that the public-sector labor unions that now dominate the Democrat Party are essentially un-American.  Why?  Because – and this according to FDR – the very actions that unionized public employees are right now performing in Wisconsin are “unthinkable and intolerable.”

Government unions should not exist.  It is immoral and un-American.  When someone takes government employment, they have – and this again according to FDR – “the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities.”  What are these liberal Democrat public sector union employees doing instead?  Again, allow me to quote FDR:  they seek ” to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied.”  Which FDR said, again, was “unthinkable and intolerable.”

The employer of the government employee, again according to FDR, is “the whole people.”

But liberals don’t give a damn about the whole people.  They have split America apart one racial group at another’s throats, one income level at another’s throats, and privileged union employees at the throats of fed-up taxpayers.  Unions have been feeding off taxpayers – who get a fraction of the wages and benefits the privileged union pigs get – for decades.  Government employees earn TWICE the wages and benefits of their counterparts in the private sector.  But Democrats don’t care: they view the private sector and everyone who works in it as evil cash cows who are to be exploited and impoverished.

The eyeball-deep-in-red-ink state of Wisconsin is trying to get public union pigs to accept a benefit system that is still TWICE as good as virtually any privat sector employee.  And at the same time begin to brind under control the out-of-control collective bargaining agreement to bring it more in line with other state government and federal government workers’ bargaining powers.

Labor unions are an inherently socialist project.  Consider the words of the Marxist author who makes the one identical to the other:

“The object of the labor movement is to increase the strength of the proletariat to the point at which it can conquer the organized force of the bourgeoisie and thus establish its own supremacy.”

And, of course, that is EXACTLY the object of the labor movement.  Which is EXACTLY un-American.

Obama has come out and made a statement about how wonderful government unionized workers are.  But he’s a liberal ideologue and an evil man.  If you asked Democrats like FDR or John F. Kennedy – who famously said the opposite of what these rabid government unions are doing: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” – and you learn the truth.

The Democrat Party of today is a depraved and un-American entity.  And if you support it and/or vote for it, you are un-American.

2) Consider the people who are out on the streets rioting against the representatives of the people instead of at their jobs serving the people:

February 17, 2011
Thousands of Union Protesters Storm WI State Capitol; Target Homes of GOP Lawmakers

As four game wardens awkwardly stood guard, protesters, scores deep, crushed into a corridor leading to the governor’s office here on Wednesday, their screams echoing through the Capitol: “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

Behind closed doors, Scott Walker, the Republican who has been governor for about six weeks, calmly described his intent to forge ahead with the plans that had set off the uprising: He wants to require public workers to pay more for their health insurance and pensions, effectively cutting the take-home pay of many by around 7 percent.

“Target homes”???  How would you like it if me and a few thousand of my thuggish rightwing friends “targeted” your home?  You know, while the people who were supposed to protect you stood by and did nothing because they happened to be rightwingers too?

This kind of vile crap happens more often than you’d think, and it is nearly always vile leftwing slime doing it.  Here’s the story of 14 busloads of “AstroTurf” SEIU mobsters screaming around the home of a bank officer while his terrorized son locks himself in a bathroom and calls his helpless father in tears of terror.  Good old unions.

Don’t forget this fact for a nanosecond: there is a century of genuine evil in the labor union movement.  These are truly bad people with a truly bad agenda.

I’m looking at the screaming mobs of liberal Democrats in Wisconsin and it is impossible to tell them apart from the screaming mobs in Egypt and Yemen and Tunisia.  You know, the “peaceful,” “democracy-loving” Muslims who have repeatedly beaten reporters and in fact gang-raped a CBS correspondent while shouting “Jew!  Jew!”

Oh, are you a liberal who wants to argue with me that there’s no connection between this gang rape and liberals?  Think again.  And don’t tell me that nothing would make you happier than hearing that Sarah Palin got the same treatment.  Because that’s just the kind of moral filth you people are.

3) Consider the activities of elected Democrats.  Suffice it to say by way of introduction that Democrats are fine with the Amerian political process, as long as they can win by any means possible:

Wis. lawmakers flee state to block anti-union bill
By SCOTT BAUER Associated Press © 2011 The Associated Press
Feb. 17, 2011, 9:48PM

MADISON, Wis. — Faced with a near-certain Republican victory that would end a half-century of collective bargaining for public workers, Wisconsin Democrats retaliated with the only weapon they had left: They fled.

Fourteen Democratic lawmakers disappeared from the Capitol on Thursday, just as the Senate was about to begin debating the measure aimed at easing the state’s budget crunch.

By refusing to show up for a vote, the group brought the debate to a swift halt and hoped to pressure Republicans to the negotiating table.

“The plan is to try and slow this down because it’s an extreme piece of legislation that’s tearing this state apart,” Sen. Jon Erpenbach said.

[…]

With 19 seats, Republicans hold a majority in the 33-member Senate, but they are one vote short of the number necessary to conduct business. So the GOP needs at least one Democrat to be present before any voting can take place. Once the measure is brought to the floor, it needs 17 votes to pass.

[…]

The sergeant-at-arms immediately began looking for the missing lawmakers. If authorized, he can seek help from police.

Senate rules and the state constitution say absent members can be compelled to appear, but it does not say how.

“Today they checked out, and I’m not sure where they’re at,” Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald said. “This is the ultimate shutdown, what we’re seeing today.”

And, yes, the police are looking for these criminals – which is an excellent way to describe “Democrats.”  But these un-American cowards who want to warp the democratic process are likely in another state.  Because they don’t give a damn about the state they were foolishly elected to serve.

There may have been a time when one could have been an honorable Democrat.  But those days are just long gone.

There was an election in November.  The citizens of Wisconsin voted for a Republican governor and a Republican legislature precisely to protect them against vile union pigs.  Unions have despicably taken advantage of their “collective bargaining” to give themselves wages and benefits that are bankrupting most of the states in the union.  There is a democratic process; it involves showing up, saying your piece and voting.  Democrats – like the Nazi fascists of the past and the Islamofascists of today – love democracy as long as they win.  Islamists who want to impose a big-government sharia state say of democracy, “You ride it to your destination, and then you step off.”  And that’s exactly what Democrats have done here.  There’s no place in American democracy for elected officials to flee the state so that the state can’t pass legislation that the people elected them to at least vote on.  There’s no place in American democracy for employees of the government, the public teachers and the state prison guards as just a couple of examples, to refuse to show up for work.  Democrats have jumped off the democracy bus and now they are riding on the fascist train.

If you are a Democrat, you are on the wrong side.  It’s a failure of moral reasoning that you can reverse at any time.

Dare I say it?  Please start thinking right.

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]