Why The Logic Of Obama’s And Democrat Party’s Class Warfare Ultimately Leads To Gulags For The Poor

What is it that Democrats always say?  Republicans are greedy and evil because they don’t believe that the rich shouldn’t pay more than 70% of their income in city, state and federal taxes (and the myriad of taxes the government takes out of damn near everything).  Take a look at the taxes – and the percentage of taxes relative to income – that the average U.S. citizen pays.  A middle-class taxpayer will pay nearly half of his or her income in taxes to the government.  Here’s a partial list of taxes:

• Accounts Receivable Tax
• Building Permit Tax
• Capital Gains Tax
• CDL license Tax
• Cigarette Tax
• Corporate Income Tax
• Court Fines (indirect taxes)
• Deficit spending
• Dog License Tax
• Federal Income Tax
• Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
• Fishing License Tax
• Food License Tax
• Fuel permit tax
• Gasoline Tax
• Hunting License Tax
• Inflation
• Inheritance Tax Interest expense (tax on the money)
• Inventory tax IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax)
• IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)
• Liquor Tax
• Local Income Tax
• Luxury Taxes
• Marriage License Tax
• Medicare Tax
• Property Tax
• Real Estate Tax
• Septic Permit Tax
• Service Charge Taxes
• Social Security Tax
• Road Usage Taxes (Truckers)
• Sales Taxes
• Recreational Vehicle Tax
• Road Toll Booth Taxes
• School Tax
• State Income Tax
• State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)
• Telephone federal excise tax
• Telephone federal universal service fee tax
• Telephone federal, state and local surcharge taxes
• Telephone minimum usage surcharge tax
• Telephone recurring and non-recurring charges tax
• Telephone state and local tax
• Telephone usage charge tax
• Toll Bridge Taxes
• Toll Tunnel Taxes
• Traffic Fines (indirect taxation)
• Trailer Registration Tax
• Utility Taxes
• Vehicle License Registration Tax
• Vehicle Sales Tax
• Watercraft Registration Tax
• Well Permit Tax
• Workers Compensation Tax

But that isn’t enough for Democrats, and them damned rich people who don’t pay enough:

• Taxes paid by highest incomes
• The top 1% [of income-earners] pay 22.7% of taxes.
• The top 10% pay 50% of taxes.
• The top 20% pay 65.3% of taxes
• The top 40% pay 84.3% of taxes.
• Taxes paid by lowest incomes
• The bottom 20% [of income-earners] pay 1.1% of taxes.
• The bottom 40% pay 6.1% of taxes.

I’ve heard conservatives (and way too few journalists) ask liberals and Democrats the following question: how much more should the rich pay in taxes?  At what percentage of their wealth have they “paid enough”?  And I’ve never yet heard the left give an honest answer to that question; because the quintessential essence of the left is abject deceit and abject hypocrisy.

Democrats are the party of lies and Marxist class warfare.  They are the party that says that tries to stir up envy and hate with lies, such as the lie that the rich pay less in taxes than their secretaries.  It doesn’t matter if the claim is a lie to Democrats, because that would mean they valued honesty and integrity and they DON’T; rather, all that matters to them is that fifty percent of the voters plus one believe their lies.

Democrats are pandering liars who say, “I’m going to give you free stuff and I’m going to make that greedy bastard over there pay for it.”

That’s the essence of the left.  And the essence of the left has run into the problem of “reality” every single time it has ever been tried.

Let me put it this way: let’s take the Democrats’ position on higher taxes to help the poor. On the Democrats’ logic, couldn’t we do more for these poor people if we just taxed a little more? And couldn’t we do even MORE if we just taxed a little more than that? And what if we taxed even MORE?  Wouldn’t that help the poor more?  Democrats demonize the rich (like the good Marxists they are) and say we can have more money to help the poor if we just taxed the rich more; but the obvious fact given their own logic is that we could have a LOT more money if the government just took everything from everybody to give to the poor, right?

FACT: 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” – again, because Democrats are communists and literally believe that they own EVERYTHING the people earn, such that such that the government “loses” money if it doesn’t tax people more – $700 billion in revenue if the tax cuts for the top income brackets are extended. And that sounds bad, doesn’t it? But they also conclude in that same study that the Bush tax cuts on the middle class will cost the Treasury $3 TRILLION over the same period. If we can’t afford to “give” the rich$700 billion, then how on earth can we afford to “give” the middle class” $3 damn 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?

And there’s the rub.

That’s exactly the way the old Soviet Union worked, for the record; if you DIDN’T work you were defined by the State as a shirker and then you went to the gulags to be a slave laborer until the system ground you into dirt:

In capitalist economies, firms pay higher wages to motivate workers who fear unemployment. In Soviet Russia, Stalin used the Gulag to discipline workers. The economic rationale of the ‘efficiency wage’ model helps explain the cruel brutality of Stalin’s prison camps. Marcus Miller and Jennifer Smith have a summary of their research looking at the economics of the Gulag at VoxEU.org. The research itself is available as CEPR Discussion Paper 6621: Punishment Without Crime? Prison as a Worker-Discipline Device.

In the 1930s Stalin faced a problem, If the labour discipline needed for creating a Socialist Utopia was not to be the threat of unemployment – as in the West – what else could it be? His answer, the Gulag.

Estimates by Miller and Smith imply that about half of one percent of the civilian labour force was incarcerated each year, and around one fifth of existing prisoners released (or died in custody). These flows average just under 400,000 per year. Under Stalin’s rule the implied equilibrium for the size of the Gulags was about 2 million persons, i.e. almost three percent of the working population in labour camps.

It has been argued that work incentives in capitalist countries are preserved because those caught shirking face the threat of unemployment and loss of income. The ‘No Shirking Condition’ for wages constitutes the effective labour supply curve for the economy.

It’s not just being fired or losing money that hard workers word hard, of course; there’s a very positive side to hard work in a capitalist system: you get rewarded for it.  You earn more money in a free market.  But if the State steps in the way the State STOMPS in in any leftist political system, the incentive is “progressively” taken away.

There is a reason that the more a society embraces the policies of the left, the more “gulags” and slave labor you ultimately have.

You need to understand something about history: the Marxists who took over Russia and “fundamentally transformed it” into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were just like Obama and the Democrats when they took over. They promised the damn world with their “hope and change” Utopia. About the only thing you can say in comparison to the Marxist Soviets is that they weren’t as grandiose in their promises as Obama was; because at least the Soviets never promised they would lower the level of the oceans and heal the damn planet like Obama did. But the rubber met the road, and once the Soviets got their power with their promises of “hope and change” for everybody that the “rich” would pay for and those promises failed, well, things started getting increasingly nasty.

Why did this happen? You need to understand something about economics: if you take away the incentive to work harder and longer and more expertly and intelligently by taking away the reward for working harder, for working longer hours, for risking more, for saving more, for investing more, then the incentive to work invariably diminishes. It is a necessary result of the class warfare that the communists played in Russia and that the Democrats are playing now. And so as measured by participation in the labor force, fewer people are working under Obama than ever.  With more people on food stamps and more people on disability than we’ve ever seen.  And as fewer and fewer people work, and the rich are demonized and taxed more and then demonized and taxed some more after that, you will necessarily get exactly what we are seeing: fewer people working, fewer people paying taxes, more people on welfare and disability. That’s when you get to the “dark side” of what Michelle Obama predicted: “Barack Obama will require you to work… Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.” And Arbeit Macht Frei.

The more a government taxes income, the less incentive there is for workers to seek more income as their marginal tax rates become more and more punitive.  It particularly becomes an issue for investors, for instance – because every time they invest they risk their entire principal.  As capital gains taxes increase, as Obama wants, they can still lose everything if their investment choice goes south, but are allowed to keep less and less if their investment makes a profit.  Punishing investment is counterproductive; if you tax something, you get less of it.  Why would anybody actually want less investment?  For a small business, they not only risk all of the money they invest in their business should that business fail, but they also find themselves having to work longer and longer hours to generate a profit for themselves.  The pressure to shut down becomes increasingly insurmountable.  And if you’ve got a president literally saying, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made it happen,” you should understand that you’re going to end up with fewer people willing to start businesses.

Obama heralded something that the human race had never seen: a trillion dollar annual budget deficit. Not only was Obama the first president or leader to ever do that in human history, but he’s pulled off this insane feat every single year of his presidency. One year – just one year – the reckless Marxist racked up a staggering $1.6 trillion budget deficit making his bullcrap promises. If you vote for Obama, you are voting for insane spending and staggering debt and for the collapse of America.  You simply are.  The day is going to come when Democrats get the power they want, and they will take over to become “the State” just as leftists have taken over every government they have ever truly dominated. And then will ultimately come the gulags. There will just be no other way out, just as there was no other way out for the Russian communists.

The communists didn’t promise gulags for workers when they promised their way into power; the gulags came because their policies were immoral and ultimately suicidal and murderous.

We’re watching the European “socialist lite” system collapse before our very eyes, but even as that system is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy and chaos Democrats are demanding that we too go the same way of the same Dodo  bird.

The far left in America have been dreaming of this day.  Bankruptcy, implosion, collapse and chaos are not things they fear, but rather things that they have actively hoped for and even planned to cause:

The Cloward And Piven Presidency

Contemplate the words spoken by a man who was one of the very top people at the SEIU union that President Obama has most powerfully identified himself with:

We need to figure out in a much more through direct action more concrete way how we are really trying to disrupt and create uncertainty for capital for how corporations operate.

The thing about a boom and bust economy is it is actually incredibly fragile.

There are actually extraordinary things we could do right now to start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.

For example, 10% of homeowners are underwater right their home they are paying more for it then its worth 10% of those people are in strategic default, meaning they are refusing to pay but they are staying in their home that’s totally spontaneous they figured out it takes a year to kick me out of my home because foreclosure is backed up.

If you could double that number you would you could put banks at the edge of insolvency again.

Students have a trillion dollar debt

We have an entire economy that is built on debt and banks so the question would be what would happen if we organized homeowners in mass to do a mortgage strike if we get half a million people to agree it would literally cause a new financial crisis for the banks not for us we would be doing quite well we wouldn’t be paying anything.

“We wouldn’t be paying anything.”  Because you wouldn’t have any damn thing LEFT to pay anything.  Whatever money you had would be utterly worthless paper.

That should scare the holy crap out of you.  There is an agenda coming out of the very top of the left that is quite simply evil.

Please read that to understand the nature of the left and therefore the nature of the Obama regime.  These people are INTENTIONALLY trying to implode the United States of America because they believe that through collapse they will be able to step in and use the ensuing panic and fear to get the people to turn to the government for help.  And the moment that happens the socialists will seize totalitarian power just as they did in Soviet Russia, in Maoist China, in Nazi Germany (“Nazi” stood for “National SOCIALIST German WORKERS Party“), etc. etc. etc.  It is simply what they do.  They’ve done in over and over again and they very much want to do it here.

Barack Obama’s Class Warfare Tax Demagoguery On Those Making Over $250,000 Is A Marxist Lie When It Comes To Small Businesses

Barack Obama has a trend going.  He gets a lousy jobs report because his economic policies are wildly failing.  So he trots out and suddenly discovers he was lying when he ran for president in 2008 and he’s really FOR gay marriage.  The next month, Obama gets a lousy jobs report because his economic policies are wildly failing.  So he trots out and decides that as emperor he can ignore the law and arbitrarily decide that more Hispanics will vote for him if he abrogates the law and refuses to detain illegal immigrants.  Obama gets a lousy jobs report because his economic policies are wildly failing, so he announces that he will only support the Bush tax cuts be extended for people who make less than $250,000 a year.

Some might begin to see an incredibly cynical and disgraceful pattern here.

Obama is the most genuinely evil man who has ever held the office of president of the United States.  But I’m not here to talk about his incredibly cynical timing for a policy that many DEMOCRATS have publicly opposed.

As an example, here’s what liberal Sen. Charles Schumer said about people earning $250,000 a year:

“They are not rich, and in large parts of the country, that kind of income does not get you a big home or lots of vacations or anything else that’s associated with wealth in America,” Schumer said in October. “They are firmly in the middle class. Same with small-business owners in that level.”

By the way, one of the Democrats who says that Barack Obama is an idiot who is doing the absolute last thing we ought to be doing is a guy named Barack Hussein Obama:

“The last thing you want to do is raise taxes in the middle of a recession, because that would just suck up, take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole.” — Barack Obama, August 5, 2009.  Obama had repeatedly made that argument, in fact.

The next year, in 2010, during a quarter in which GDP growth was actually four times higher than it is now, Obama said this:

“I am just listening to the consensus among people who know the economy best. And what they will say is that if you either increased taxes or significantly lowered spending when the economy remains somewhat fragile, that that would have a destimulative effect and potentially you’d see a lot of folks losing business, more folks potentially losing jobs. That would be a mistake when the economy has not fully taken off.” — Barack Obama, January 29, 2010

Barack Obama – in an exchange with ABC anchor Charles Gibson – documented that his taxation has nothing to do with economic growth and everything to do with a Marxist notion of “fairness.”  Because as Karl Marx infamously put it, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

That was before the before mentioned lousy jobs report for June 2012 because Obama’s economic policies are wildly failing.

I have on several occasions compared government stimulus – which sucks money out of the productive private sector and doles it out to politically connected boondoggles – to giving a diabetic kid sugar.  Sure that diabetic kid will run around for a little bit and it will look like maybe it’s working.  But it isn’t, because that kid is going to fall down and pass out.  And Obama’s answer is to pump more sugar into that poor kid.  Obama has done the largest stimulus in history ($862 billion that will ultimately cost the American people over $3.27 TRILLION); he did the second largest stimulus in history ($447 billion).  Neither did anything but hurt the economy.  As Ronald Reagan put it, “You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?”  Barack Obama says piss on that.  And now Obama is demanding son of the son of a wildly failed stimulus that is doing nothing more than burdening our children’s children’s children’s children with more debt and guaranteeing the collapse of America in a much shorter timeframe than anyone is talking about.

The economy is going into a diabetic coma because of Obama’s policies.  And Obama wants more sugar.

Obama’s and Democrats’ policies amount to nothing more than a naked government takeover of the private sector.  It has failed miserably, but these people are fools of an astonishing magnitude and after doubling-down and tripling-down they will quadruple-down until this nation collapses.

I’m here to talk about the rape of small businesses under this wicked president.

Please take a look at the US government census information on small businesses.  The latest data they have on file comes from 2008:

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.

So, yeah, the kid who is an “independent contractor” working his paper route won’t be paying more taxes under Obama’s class warfare plan.  That’s great.  But the overwhelming majority of small businesses (defined as businesses employing 499 or fewer workers) are going to get the crap beat out of them.

And why are they going to get the crap beat out of them?  Because the Hussein got yet another crappy jobs report for the month of June because his economic policy is wildly failing.

So when Obama or fill in the name of your Democrat lying weasel says garbage like “97 percent of small businesses won’t be affected,” realize the bait-and-switch that’s going on and point out that 95% of the small businesses that actually hire workers WILL be affected.  The businesses that actually hire workers are going to get clobbered.  And the fact that those businesses that actually hire workers only account for a few percent of the total number of small businesses – most of which don’t do any hiring at ALL – is utterly irrelevant IF YOU CARE ABOUT JOBS.

If you are one of the half of all American workers who work for small businesses, realize that most of you are basically voting to lose your damn job if you vote for Obama in November.

This is largely how class warfare always works.  All you have to do is demonize “the rich” and get people to hate them and want to attack them and punish them and confiscate and redistribute their stuff.  You don’t get to find out until later that those people you just destroyed were the ones who had given you your job.  Until after it’s too late.

As a final point, Obama is rhetorically going back to the Clinton years when his policies are really the rebirth of the Carter years.  And he is trying to frame Romney as another Bush – never mind that Bush’s overall unemployment at 5.26 percent was as good as Clinton’s – when Mitt Romney ought to be comparing his policies to the Ronald Reagan who saved us from the Carter years.  Obama says he wants the top income tax rate to go back to the Clinton levels.  But Bill Clinton himself recently advised Obama to extend ALL the Bush tax cuts including for the upper brackets.  And when Bill Clinton was president, not only did America not have the curse of ObamaCare, but Clinton had numerous tax cuts such as capital gains tax rate that were considerably lower than where Obama wants them.

Barack Hussein Obama wants to hurt the people who create jobs.  He wants a society in which people have to go to government (i.e. liberals who are the high priests of government) if they want to be able to work or if they want to get welfare benefits.  That’s the bottom line.

I Will Be (Holding My Nose And) Voting For Mitt Romney

Well, it’s all but official at this point.  Rick Santorum just bowed out (to my relief) and Newt Gingrich will very likely follow Santorum to the exit.  Ron Paul, of course, will stay in the race and as long as he doesn’t wake up deciding to run as a third-party candidate, that’s fine.

I predicted Mitt Romney would be the nominee back in December – not that that was all that incredibly bold of a prediction.

What happened to the conservative Republican candidate?  Well, let’s put it in terms of a dog fight: the conservative dogs chewed each other up and ate each other’s votes while Romney ploughed ahead as the moderate.  At times, amazingly, Romney was literally untouched in debates as the conservatives bashed each other to shreds trying to position themselves as the “real” conservatives with their rivals being pseudo-conservatives.

What I kept hoping to see was a GOP nomination in which all the candidates took on Obama’s failure of leadership and Obama’s failed policies and let the electorate see who could do a better job taking the fight to Obama.  But such was never to be.  It is for that reason that I am relieved to see a nominee emerge – even if I am anything but happy with that nominee.

Romney could still jazz me up with his VP pick, mind you; that’s what happened when “Maverick” (that’s code for “R.I.N.O.”) John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.  If Romney were to pick a Marco Rubio or a Nikki Haley, it would do much to improve my mood.

I wanted a real conservative to win the nomination.  I was hoping that we would have a Reagan rise up the way we had the last time an abject Democrat failure (that would be Carter) brought the nation to its knees.  It never happened.  It never happened; in fact, in hindsight I believe I can say that such a candidate never even ran to begin with.

So what do I want now?  I want Obama out of office.  I want “God damn America” to be in the Hall of Shame.

It’s not that I believe in my gut that Mitt Romney will be a great president; it’s that I believe in my gut that this nation cannot survive another term of Obama freed from having to worry about re-election and able to impose his “fundamental transformation” as the nation collapses all around him.  If you think that what’s been happening has been bad (88 million Americans simply dropping out of the workforce altogether; real unemployment at 10.9% if measured by the labor participation rate that Bush handed to Obama), you aint seen nothin’ yet.

In the God damn America that Obama has shaped this nation into, you don’t get a terrible president versus a great candidate; you get a terrible president versus a less-terrible candidate.  A line from a book I’m reading points out this dilemma is hardly anything new:

Hitler and Mussolini were rivals for the political affections of different constituencies in Austria, namely the Austrian Nazis and the clerical-authoritarians gathered around Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss.  For many Austrians, the Dollfuss regime presented them with the familiar dilemma of supporting, or tolerating, a lesser evil to forestall something infinitely worse. — Moral Combat by Michael Burleigh, p. 29

And welcome to the hell of choosing between merely mediocre Mitt or genuinely evil Obama.

Which is why as uninspired as I am by Mitt Romney, I am very inspired indeed to replace Barack Obama.

Before Obama implodes America with mindboggling debt that is only going to soar even more out of control with ObamaCare and other incredibly foolish policies.

One more thing: what will be Obama’s strategy against Romney?  To demonize him as no candidate has ever been demonized before.

Obama ran on “hope and change”; it was all a lie from hell – the kind of lie of glorious false promises and empty rhetoric that the world will soon see again when Antichrist comes:

Obama has been going from fundraiser to fundraiser in unprecedented fashion to raise a billion dollars that will allow him to demagogue and demonize like this earth has never seen.  Obama knows that he cannot possibly win on his failed record; he knows he has to pour fiery hate on top of the gasoline of pitting races against one another, pitting men against women, and pitting income level against income level ala Karl Marx. 

Here is a tried and true secret to how to run against a R.I.N.O. (that’s “Republican-In-Name-Only”) Republican: deceitfully frame him as an ultra-conservative.  Obama did this to John McCain and he’s already starting to do it to Mitt Romney, and here’s why it works: actual conservatives already know full damn well that it’s a hilarious lie that Mitt Romney is a “dangerous right-wing conservative” and are de-energized to support him, but the far more moderate and far more ignorant masses don’t know that – and Obama can use his giant campaign warchest that dwarfs anything history has ever seen because Obama has sold out America to special interests to turn the Republican nominee into a “right-wing bogeyman.”

A lot of Republicans are WISHING Mitt Romney were anything remotely CLOSE to a right-wing bogeyman.  But the people who still haven’t even yet bothered to tune into the election aren’t going to know anything.  And between an ocean of Obama attack ads and the mainstream media they’ll “know” exactly what they’re told to know.

Obama is going to try to frame Mitt Romney as a candidate who only cares about the rich.  But LOOK AT OBAMA’S TOP DONORS TO SEE THE TRUTH: Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan!?!?!?

How DARE this whore who has grabbed more money from more rich people than ANY political leader in the history of the human race play class warfare.  But the two things that Obama knows are that the mainstream media are his propaganda wing and that the American people are ignorant and willing to believe lies.

So you’re not inspired by Mitt Romney?  Please join the club.  But you’d better vote for him or you’re going to get hell on earth.

 

Recent Developments Continue To Prove The ‘Liberals Are Dishonest Weasels’ Theory

Tell me that Democrats care about the poor while Republicans only care about the rich and I’ll say, “Jon Corzine.”  And that’s all I really need to say, given what Corzine did (where’s that $1.6 billion you “lost,” Jon?) and given this picture of a pair of genuine weasels:

Oh, and all the quotes from Barack Obama and Joe Biden about Jon Corzine that go with that picture:

This is what Barry Hussein recently had to say about this rat bastard:

• “You’ve had an honorable man, a decent man, an honest man, at the helm of this state. … He’s fought for what matters to ordinary folks.”

• “People…say, ‘You know, I was saving up all my life. …. Suddenly, because of this financial crisis, I may have to go back to work.’ “

• “Jon knows these are challenging times. This is why he got into public service. He didn’t do it for the paycheck.”

• “This crisis…came about because of the same theories, the same lax regulation, the same trickle-down economics that the other guy’s party has been peddling for years.”

• “Jon’s got the mop and he’s cleaning up after somebody else’s mess.”

• “One of the things you’ve got in Jon Corzine is somebody who tells it to you straight,” Mr Obama said.

Do you notice how Obama – that vile weasel – used Jon Corzine to demonize Republicans? Obama was actually dishonestly saying that Republicans created a mess, and that this quivering piece of slime Jon Corzine was the guy cleaning up that mess.

Let me just digress for a moment and state that Barack Obama is the most divisive, most dishonest, most hateful, most demonizing, fearmongering LIAR in American history.

Barack Obama credited Jon Corzine as the force behind his $862 billion stimulus:

“Jon’s a leader who’s been called to govern in some extraordinary times,” Obama said while campaigning for Corzine in 2009. “Jon Corzine wasn’t just the first governor to pass an economic recovery plan for his state. He was an ally with the Obama administration in helping us develop a national recovery plan.”

And here’s what Joe Biden – again representing the Obama administration – said about Jon Corzine – while he was pointing out how team Obama repeatedly asked Corzine for advice and trusted him implicitly:

“I literally picked up the phone and called Jon Corzine and said Jon, what do you think we should do,” Biden said. “The reason we called Jon is that we knew that he knew about the economy, about world markets, how we had to respond, unlike almost anyone we knew. It was because he had been in the pit — because he had been in the furnace. And we trusted his judgment.”

Again:

“Way back in the transition period, before we were sworn in, when Barack Obama and I were literally sitting at a desk in a high rise in Chicago, beginning the plan on how we would try to get this economy out of a ditch, literally, the first guy I called was Jon Corzine. It’s not a joke. It’s not a joke. First of all, he’s the smartest guy I know in terms of the economy and on finance, and I really mean that.”

That’s right, Jon Corzine was a trusted adviser to Obama and Biden. That’s why our economy is in such great shape now. And the guy who helped Obama put together the massively failed stimulus also just put together the fourth largest bankruptcy in American history as he put his liberalism to work at MF (which stands for “Managed Futures”) Global and helped himself to other people’s money.

Now the smartest guy Obama and Biden know is saying, “I don’t know where the money went.” You know, even though that was pretty much his whole JOB to know.

It bookends nicely with Obama going to Solyndra and saying – you know, just before Solyndra collapsed with more than half a billion of your money thrown into it:

 “Companies like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future.”

And of course Obama was right: a more “prosperous future” for China because we’re going to keep paying the interest on that $535 million Obama gave to his crony capitalist buddy who raised funds for him.  And I’ll bet that Obama crony George Kaiser will be giving Obama something-something from that $535 billion stash in the form of campaign contributions.  After all, that’s what “fairness” is all about, isn’t it?

Here’s the latest story in the saga of the poster boy for the fact that everything that liberals say about caring about the little people while Republicans only care about the rich load of crap:

Corzine Corzined – Congressional Panel Finds Former MF Global CEO Ordered JPM Fund Transfer
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/23/2012 16:13 -0400

Then only thing that could top today’s epic market insanity and hilarity, would be that Corzine is himself about to be Corzined. And just released from Bloomberg:

• MF GLOBAL’S CORZINE ORDERED FUNDS MOVED TO JPMORGAN, MEMO SAYS
• CORZINE’S `DIRECT INSTRUCTIONS’ CITED BY CONGRESSIONAL PANEL
• MF GLOBAL TRANSFER WAS USED TO COVER OVERDRAFT, PANEL SAYS
• MF GLOBAL FINDINGS CITED IN MEMO OBTAINED BY BLOOMBERG NEWS

And so we can now add perjury to felony embezzlement. Which means we now have to wait to find just which MF’er (and JPM’er) will be given a promise of untold millions if they only get Fab Tourre’d for a few years, and spend 5-7 in minimum security state prison instead of brave Jonny.

From Bloomberg:

Jon S. Corzine, MF Global Holding Ltd.’s chief executive officer, gave “direct instructions” to transfer $200 million from a customer fund account to meet an overdraft in one of the brokerage’s JPMorgan Chase & Co. accounts in London, according to an e-mail sent by a firm executive. 

Edith O’Brien, a treasurer for the firm, said in an e-mail sent the afternoon of Oct. 28, three days before the company collapsed, that the transfer of the funds was “Per JC’s direct instructions,” according to a copy of a memo drafted by congressional investigators and obtained by Bloomberg News.

O’Brien’s internal e-mail came as the New York-based broker found intraday credit lines limited by JPMorgan, the firm’s clearing bank as well as one of its custodian banks for segregated customer funds, according to the memo, which was prepared for a March 28 House Financial Services subcommittee hearing on the firm’s collapse. O’Brien is scheduled to testify after being subpoenaed this week.

“Over the course of that week, MF Global’s financial position deteriorated, but the firm represented to its regulators and self-regulatory organizations that its customers’segregated funds were safe,” said the memo, written by Financial Services Committee staff and sent to lawmakers.

Vinay Mahajan, global treasurer of MF Global Holdings, wrote an e-mail on Oct. 28 that said JPMorgan was “holding up vital business in the U.S. as a result” of the overdrawn account, which had to be “fully funded ASAP,” according to the memo. 

O’Brien Letter

Barry Zubrow, JPMorgan’s chief risk officer, called Corzine to seek assurances that the funds belonged to MF Global and not customers. JPMorgan drafted a letter to be signed by O’Brien to ensure that MF Global was complying with rules requiring customers’ collateral to be segregated. The letter was never returned to JPMorgan, the memo said.

The money transferred came from a segregated customer account, according to congressional investigators. Segregated accounts can include customer money and excess company funds.

Corzine testified that he never intended a misuse of customer funds at MF Global, and that he doesn’t know where client funds went.

“I did not instruct anyone to lend customer funds to anyone,” Corzine told lawmakers in December.

Steven Goldberg, a spokesman for Corzine, declined immediate comment.

Oops. Of course, in Jonny’s defense there was no perjury here. The truth was merely rehypothecated.

Just remember these truths every time a Democrat repeats their tired class warfare lies.  It’s every bit as much of a lie when a Democrat says them as it was when a Stalinist said pretty much the same damn things.

Update 4/23/12: Just to document how incredibly corrupt Obama is, Jon Corzine is STILL bundling campaign money for him.

Busting The 99% Vs. 1% Liberal Lie

Barack Obama, most of the Democrat Party and pretty much all the Occupy Wall Street hooligans are Trotskying I mean trotting out the tired Marxist myth that Republicans only care about the rich and that the rich are a bunch of evil thieves who somehow stole “the people’s” money by somehow forcing them to buy stuff.  The entire movement is based on the servile, mindless philosophy of people who believe that somebody else owes them whatever they think they deserve to have.

I was glad to come across this editorial byInvestor’s Business Daily:

IBD Editorials
Busting The 1% Vs. 99% Myth
Oct 18, 2011

Inequality: President Obama’s class-envy strategy is built on a false premise — that the rich get richer at the expense of the poor. Amazingly, such zero-sum thinking is influencing public opinion.

Twice as many Americans support the anti-Wall Street protesters as oppose them. And even Rasmussen is polling that nearly half of Americans support proposals to soak the rich.

This is an emotional response to both the hard economic times and dishonest political rhetoric. People are buying into the notion peddled by the left that the rich steal from people. It’s a pernicious myth left over from preindustrial Marxism.

The left says current levels of income inequality echo the late 1920s and the Gilded Age. They’ve zeroed in on the richest 1%, citing Census Bureau data showing these top earners “grabbing” more income than the bottom 90%.

But the census stats are misleading.

For one, they are a snapshot of income distribution at a single point in time. Yet income is not static. It changes over time. Low-paying jobs from early adulthood give way to better-paying jobs later in life.

And income groups in America are not fixed. There’s no caste system here, really no such thing even as a middle “class.” The poor aren’t stuck in poverty. And the rich don’t enjoy lifetime membership in an exclusive club.

A 2007 Treasury Department study bears this out. Nearly 58% of U.S. households in the lowest-income quintile in 1996 moved to a higher level by 2005. The reverse also held true. Of those households that were in the top 1% in income in 1996, more than 57% dropped to a lower-income group by 2005.

Every day in America, the poor join the ranks of the rich, and the rich fall out of comfort.

So even if income equality is increasing, it does not mean income mobility is decreasing. There is still a great deal of movement in and out of the richest and poorest groups in America.

The beauty of our free-market system (what’s left of it), is that even among the thousands of Wall Street protesters thumping, “We are the 99%,” there are those who might not be able to say that a decade or so from now. Some might go on to profit from an Internet start-up. Others might get a rap contract. Anything’s possible in America.

One of those street agitators might even become president, following in the shoes of Obama, who’s now one of the 1-percenters he mocks.

Another problem with the census data is they don’t include the noncash income received by the lowest-income households. Each year, the poor get tens of billions of dollars in subsidies for housing, food and health care. None of these transfer payments, a lot of it paid for by the 1%, is counted as income by the Census Bureau.

One report estimates that the share of total income earned by the lowest-income group would rise roughly 50% if such welfare were considered.

Likewise, the share of total income earned by the top income quintile would drop about 7% if taxes paid to fund welfare were considered.

Census doesn’t take into account the equalizing effects of taxes. Though they earn more than 45% of total income, the top 10% of taxpayers pay over 70% of the total income-tax burden. The top 1%? They shoulder a whopping 40% of the tax load.

Federal Reserve and other data — which include all financial and nonfinancial assets, including bank accounts, investments, houses and cars — give a more complete picture of the gap. When you count all wealth, not just income, inequality has not gotten worse.

The top 1% account for 35% of total wealth, compared with 37% in 1922. In fact, the worst wealth disparity ever was in the 1990s under President Clinton.

That last sentence of the article bears repeating:

“In fact, the worst wealth disparity ever was in the 1990s under President Clinton.”

Democrats love lies.  Their souls swim in lies.  Lies and hypocrisy define Democrats.  Take away the lies and the hypocrisy and Democrats simply dematerialize like the Cheshire cat.

Democrats have fabricated the narrative that the streets were paved with gold under Bill Clinton.  They cite Clinton’s tax hikes as proving that high taxes and a healthy economy go hand in hand.

That it erally isn’t true doesn’t mean a thing to them.

For one thing, Bill Clinton LOWERED the capital gains tax even as he raised the income tax.  That offset is completely off the modern Marxist Democrats’ radar now, but it was an essential offset, a sine qua non without which there would have been no healthy economy.  Because low taxes HELP create a healthy economy.  It is simply a fact.

Another thing that is important to consider is that a primary cause of the economic health of the 1990s had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Bill Clinton.  The presidents who created that condition – the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of many markets that had previously been completely inaccessible to the United States – were Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

In the short-term aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union there was – unsurprisingly – a severe recession.  Why was this not surprising?  Two reasons:  Because 1) investors don’t like uncertainty; and the world was a very uncertain place the first few years after the U.S.S.R. imploded as breakaway republics and unaccounted-for nuclear weapons abounded.  And because 2) Western Europe went into a deep recession due to the fact that suddenly they were inheriting the shambles of the Soviet economy that had resulted from all the liberal socialism of the communist Soviet Union.  Our major trading partners got weaker, which reduced their purchase of American products, which in turn affected the American economy.  Obama has in fact been using that very same argument to try to claim that he wasn’t responsible for the failure of his economy the last three years.

By the time Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, the world was beginning to recover from the collapse of the Soviet Union.  New markets were opening.  We were about to enter boom times.

But that still leaves a third thing to consider about the Clinton years.  They didn’t start out so well: remember 1994?  Remember that historic asskicking of Democrats in the midterm elections?  Things weren’t going well at ALL; and it wasn’t until after the American people wisely elected Republicans to take over both the House of Representatives and the United States Senate that things BEGAN to start going well.

Democrats give Bill Clinton total credit for “balancing the budget.”  But the fact of the matter is that balancing the budget was THE VERY FIRST PLATFORM OF THE FAMOUS REPUBLICAN CONTRACT WITH AMERICA.  Things that were instrumental to balancing the budget – such as welfare reform – were FORCED on Bill Clinton.  Clinton vetoed welfare reform TWICE before signing the same thing he’d vetoed into law.  And then Clinton took credit for the thing he’d twice vetoed that was ultimately shoved down his throat.  And with the help of a completely dishonest media, he managed to sell that lie.

But all in all, the 1990s (under the wise leadership of Republicans who controlled two of the three political branches of government after 1994) were good years.  And they were years in which the wealthy had the largest share of the wealth in America of ALL TIME.

Which simply proves that the demagogic, Marxist, dishonest tirades that Obama, Democrats and liberals are screaming about today about “the rich paying their fair share” is simply a flat-out lie.

After pointing out that Democrats are liars and hypocrites, let me also point out that they are stupid people.  Because believing lies and constantly putting up double-standards doesn’t make one more intelligent; it makes one more stupid.  And the problem with Democrats today is that they are radically committed to a depraved, dishonest and perverted view of the world which cannot possibly be true because everything they believe has been refuted by history time after time.

And so they claim that socialism works when in fact it has failed every single time it has ever been tried.  And they claim that Bill Clinton’s tax policies more fairly distributed wealth when in fact it did the exact opposite.

What we have seen again and again is that when taxes are lowered, the rich have more incentive to invest and risk their money creating jobs.  Why?  BECAUSE THEY ARE REWARDED FOR DOING SO AND THEY ARE ALLOWED TO KEEP MORE OF WHAT THEY EARN.  Conversely, when demagogues demand that “the rich pay their fair share” (when all dishonest lies aside the facts are that they already pay FAR more than their “fair share“), the rich shelter their money and the economy contracts instead of expanding.  The rich aren’t going to risk their wealth with job-creating investments if they are demonized.  And you tell me how many poor people have given you a job and made you rich.

Another way to put it is this: we tax cigarettes to reduce smoking; so why in the HELL do Democrats want to tax investment???

Even Bill Clinton has pointed out that raising taxes won’t work.  Hell, even BARACK OBAMA has said that raising taxes in a recession is bonehead stupid:

“First of all, he’s right. Normally, you don’t raise taxes in a recession, which is why we haven’t and why we’ve instead cut taxes. So I guess what I’d say to Scott is – his economics are right. You don’t raise taxes in a recession. We haven’t raised taxes in a recession.”

And yet here he is, trying to do what he himself said was “the last thing you want to do.”

Which is another way of saying the first thing the American people should want to do is throw this useless bum out of the people’s house.

This is breathtaking stupidity; and yet the stupider I believe Democrats are, the more right I turn out to be. 

Barack Obama understands that Democrats are unbelievably stupid people who live in a world of lies.  And he’s counting on that stupidity to try to lie his way to re-election.  That’s the bottom line.

If you want to see liberal hypocrisy in action, just look at the Occupy Wall Street movement and the liberal media coverage of the movement. These are people who have every single Apple gadget in their hands, but are decrying the very capitalism that Apple so profitably exploited. The fact of the matter is that Apple has a FAR higher profit margin than either the oil companies or the banks that these loathsome hypocrites demonize, but consistency is simply not a virtue they care about. Furthermore, they have nothing to say about the greatest crony capitalist boondoggle ever seen: the Obama-backed Solyndra fiasco. And if that isn’t enough to demonstrate the hypocrisy that the left wallows in, consider the fact that the “whiteness” of the Tea Party demonstrators was brought up by the mainstream media over and over and over again to decry the movement as “racist.” And yet where are all the charges of racism now when the leftwing Occupy Wall Street movement is every scintilla as “white” as the Tea Party was??? Ninety-nine percent of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are WHITE. And they are clearly racist, too as they blame all the problems in their terrible useless lives on the Jews.  But suddenly no one in the mainstream media seems to care about the whiteness of the mob – or this particular mob’s active racism – any more.

Black BET Founder Robert Johnson Says To Obama, ‘Stop Demonizing The Wealthy’

Whenever a wicked leader of any stripe comes to power, the corruption and the despicable policies don’t end until that wicked leader’s own supporters turn on him.

Hopefully that is beginning to happen now to Marxist ideologue Barack Obama:

Posted on October 2, 2011
BET’s Robert Johnson To Obama: Stop Attacking The Wealthy

BET founder Robert Johnson on the “FOX News Sunday” program: “Well, I think the president has to recalibrate his message. You don’t get people to like you by attacking them or demeaning their success. You know, I grew up in a family of 10 kids, first one to go to college, and I’ve earned my success. I’ve earned my right to fly private if I choose to do so.

“And by attacking me it is not going to convince me that I should take a bigger hit because I happen to be wealthy. You know, it is the old — I think Ted and Fred and I we both sort of take the old Ethel Merman approach to life. I’ve tried poor and I tried rich and I like rich better. It doesn’t mean that I am a bad guy.

“I didn’t go in to business to create a public policy success for either party, Republican or Democrat. I went in business to create jobs and opportunity, create opportunity, create value for myself and my investors. And that’s what the president should be praising, not demagoguing us simply because Warren Buffet says he pays more than his secretary. He should pay the secretary more and she will pay more.”

I really like the way Robert Johnson said that.  Because Warren Buffet has literally been held up as a moral hero for stating that he pays less in taxes than his secretary.  Apparently, it is a morally good thing to oppress and actually continue to oppress your personal secretary as long as you go out in public and say what you are doing and have been doing and are continuing to do is wrong.

Then you add to that that Warren Buffet is slime.  And the actual claim that the rich aren’t paying their fair share is both demagogic, Marxist and false all at once.

Barack Obama is a Marxist.  Think of the central defining economic statement of Marxism as described by Karl Marx himself: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Now, you go back over the “spread the wealth” statements of Obama, and I dare you to explain and demonstrate how Barack Obama and Karl Marx are somehow not saying the same damn thing.

The words of two of the greatest modern British leaders put Obama’s Marxism into perspective:

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” — Winston Churchill

“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money” — Margaret Thatcher

Please turn against this Marxist fool and his failed socialist class-warfare policies, Democrats.

Because when there’s a rightwing backlash, and the hard-core rightwing takes over and imposes policies on America with the very same reckless disregard as did Barack Obama before them, it will be YOUR FAULT.  It will have been your support for this incredibly far leftist socialist ideologue that inspired the coming backlash.  And don’t you forget that.  You still have a chance to turn against Obama and demand a spirit of moderation that could yet shape the debate.

It’s up to you.  But there isn’t much time left.

AP-Reported FACT: U.S. Economy The Worst Since The LAST Time We Let A Socialist Run It

The Los Angeles Times print edition ran this story on July 2 under the considerably more Marxist headline, “Wealthy benefit from recovery as workers struggle“:

U.S. Recovery’s 2-Year Anniversary Arrives With Little To Celebrate
First Posted: 07/ 1/11 05:33 PM ET Updated: 07/ 1/11 05:33 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — This is one anniversary few feel like celebrating.

Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.

After previous recessions, people in all income groups tended to benefit. This time, ordinary Americans are struggling with job insecurity, too much debt and pay raises that haven’t kept up with prices at the grocery store and gas station. The economy’s meager gains are going mostly to the wealthiest.

Workers’ wages and benefits make up 57.5 percent of the economy, an all-time low. Until the mid-2000s, that figure had been remarkably stable — about 64 percent through boom and bust alike.

[…]

But if the Great Recession is long gone from Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, it lingers on Main Street:

— Unemployment has never been so high — 9.1 percent — this long after any recession since World War II. At the same point after the previous three recessions, unemployment averaged just 6.8 percent.

— The average worker’s hourly wages, after accounting for inflation, were 1.6 percent lower in May than a year earlier. Rising gasoline and food prices have devoured any pay raises for most Americans.

— The jobs that are being created pay less than the ones that vanished in the recession. Higher-paying jobs in the private sector, the ones that pay roughly $19 to $31 an hour, made up 40 percent of the jobs lost from January 2008 to February 2010 but only 27 percent of the jobs created since then.

[…]

Hard times have made Americans more dependent than ever on social programs, which accounted for a record 18 percent of personal income in the last three months of 2010 before coming down a bit this year. Almost 45 million Americans are on food stamps, another record.

[…]

Because the labor market remains so weak, most workers can’t demand bigger raises or look for better jobs.

“In an economic cycle that is turning up, a labor market that is healthy and vibrant, you’d see a large number of people quitting their jobs,” says Gluskin Sheff economist Rosenberg. “They quit because the grass is greener somewhere else.”

Instead, workers are toughing it out, thankful they have jobs at all. Just 1.7 million workers have quit their job each month this year, down from 2.8 million a month in 2007.

The toll of all this shows in consumer confidence, a measure of how good people feel about the economy. According to the Conference Board’s index, it’s at 58.5. Healthy is more like 90. By this point after the past three recessions, it was an average of 87.

How gloomy are Americans? A USA Today/Gallup poll eight weeks ago found that 55 percent think the recession continues, even if the experts say it’s been over for two years. That includes the 29 percent who go even further — they say it feels more like a depression.

Allow me to start with the second paragraph in the story:

“Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.”

The weakest and most lopsided of any recovery since the 1930s, you say???

WHO WAS PRESIDENT IN THE 1930s?  WHICH PARTY DOMINATED BOTH THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE IN THE 1930s?

And next let me ask you, “Are there any similarities between socialist Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and socialist Democrat Barack Hussein Obama???  And the answer is, “HELL YES THERE ARE!!!”:

Which is to say, “This is the worst the U.S. economy has ever been since the LAST time we had a socialist just like FDR – and the mainstream media proudly hailed Obama as FDR and Obama’s as a NEW “New Deal.”

But here’s the truth:

FDR prolonged — not ended — great depression

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

”Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. ”We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

[…]

”The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. ”Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”

And of course all the “experts” the mainstream media love to trot out have all bought hook, line and sinker the notion that capitalism is something to be loathed and feared.  So they demand that America pursue asinine government stimulus policies that fail even by the “experts'” own standards, and then these same “experts” proceed to argue that the economy failing to recover somehow is proof that more of the same thing that already failed is necessary.

These “experts” whom the mainstream media give a loud microphone to to espouse their socialist views are pathologically incapable of seeing this connection between socialist policies and an economy in the doldrums.  Every bit of negative economic news is invariably “unexpected” (liberals favorite adjective to wave a hand at bad economic developments whenever a Democrat president is in charge), because these “experts” cannot separate the inevitable results of their ideology from their terribly failed ideology.  There has to be a disconnect, or more commonly, a scapegoat.

I can simply re-cite my conclusion from a previous article to find a particularly laughable example of this phenomena:

I think of the Soviet Union, which literally blamed the total failure of their entire political philosophy and the ruinous policies that philosophy entailed by claiming that their agricultural output had been adversely affected due to 72 years of bad weather.  And the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Dodo bird for that very reason.

Is America under Obama the next Dodo bird to fall apart while we’re assured that everything is fine while some suitable scapegoat bears the blame for every failure that can’t be ignored???

It couldn’t be the fact that socialism is nothing more than state-planned economic failure.  It had to be something else, ANYTHING else.

The Big Brother from the novel 1984 had Emmanuel Goldstein.  The Big Brother who is now occupying our White House has George W. Bush.

The next obvious question to ask and answer is, “Why are the wealthy benefitting while the workers struggle?”

The answer is twofold: 1) because when you attack the employers, the first thing to go is the employees and 2) because that’s exactly how crony capitalism works.

There is a magnificent book entitled, New Deal Or Raw Deal?  How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, which should be required reading.  Burton Folsom Jr. points out that when FDR structured his many policies and regulations that strangled economic growth, he did so in such a way that favored the big crony capitalist corporations at the expense of the smaller businesses that could no longer compete given the costly regulatory requirements.  The smaller businesses were forced out of the market while the big businesses protected themselves with insider deals based on access to and influence with the government that only they could afford.  And there is no question whatsoever that – even as FDR employed the class warfare of socialism – the rich got richer while the poor got poorer.  Income tax revenues plunged as the wealthy sheltered their wealth from the high tax rates and the poor paid an increasingly high overall percentage of tax revenues via excise taxes.  Regulations mandating higher pay for workers priced those workers right out of their jobs.  Folsom provides the official data to back it up.

Check out this fact from page 127 of New Deal or Raw Deal?:

In 1929, prior to FDR demonizing the rich, income taxes accounted for 38% of total revenue collected, and corporate income taxes accounted for 43%.  Excise taxes which burdened the poor only counted for 19% of revenues.  By 1938, the rich and the corporations had protected themselves from FDR’s demagogic tax policies (but the poor couldn’t), such that the only 24% was collected in income taxes (versus 38%) and only 29% from corporate income taxes (versus 43%).  Meanwhile the poor-punishing excise taxes (e.g. gasoline tax) soared from 19% to 47% of the total taxes collected.  Meanwhile, when income taxes were kept low, the wealthy invariably paid FAR MORE in the total tax revenue as they put their money out to invest in and expand the economy in pursuit of the profits.  And they created millions of jobs in doing so.

And guess what?  Regulations mandating higher wages are STILL killing jobs now that Obama is doing it.

And the exact same mindset is yielding the exact same results ALL OVER AGAIN.  Obama has put the fear of God (actually the fear of the Soviet-style STATE) into the wealthy and the corporations.  They keep hearing Obama demagogue them, and they keep sheltering their money.  And they will CONTINUE to keep doing that until the threat of Obama is gone.  Just like they did with FDR.

Here we are today, with “the New FDR,” Barack Obama.  Who is the top dog on Obama’s economic team?  Why lo and behold, it is none other than GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, crony capitalist extraordinaire whose big corporation has REPEATEDLY benefitted from a cozy insider relationship with big government.  And consider how Obama literally took big auto makers GM and Chrysler away from their legitimate shareholders and gave them to big unions.

Regarding “crony capitalism,” I made a sweeping statement in a previous article:

That said, there is also a deliberate and fundamental misunderstanding of fascism by the left.  If you read leftists, you come away thinking that somehow “fascism” is the takeover of a state by corporations. But stop and think: Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Hess and all the other key Nazis WEREN’T corporate CEOs who took over the state; THEY WERE SOCIALIST POLITICIANS WHO TOOK OVER THE CORPORATIONS.  They usurped the corporations and FORCED them to perform THEIR agenda.  They either performed the Nazis’ will or they were simply taken away from their rightful owners and nationalized.

And to the degree that German crony capitalist corporations helped Hitler in his rise to power, THEY WERE JUST MORE USEFUL IDIOTS.

The same sort of takeover of German corporations by socialists is building in America.  Take Maxine Waters, a liberal Democrat, as the perfect example.  What did she say of the oil companies?

“This liberal will be all about socializing … uh uh … would be about … basically … taking over … and the government running all of your companies.”

THAT’S what Hitler did, too.  Hitler got this power through regulations that required corporations to do his bidding, just like Obama has now REPEATEDLY done.

And then consider how willing Maxine Waters used “crony capitalism” (which is the essence of developing fascism) to directly personally benefit even as she shaped the banking industry.

The Democrat party is the party of socialism.  It is the party of Marxism.  It is the party of fascism.

I stand by that sweeping statement.  People need to realize that “Nazi” stood for “National SOCIALIST German Workers Party,” and that both Nazi socialism and Soviet socialism were big government socialist tyrannies that failed their people.  As to our own experiment with socialism here in the USA, I point out in an article that explains how “Government Sponsored Enterprises” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac policies led us into economic implosion in spite of warnings for YEARS prior to the 2008 economic collapse:

But rigid opposition from Democrats – especially Democrats like Senator Barack Obama – who took more campaign money from Fannie and Freddie and dirty crony capitalism outfits like corrupt Lehman Bros. than ANYONE in his short Senate stint – prevented any “hope and change” of necessary reform from saving the US economy.

The timeline is clear: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were giant behemoths that began to stagger under their own corrupt weight, as even the New York Times pointed out:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so big — they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market — that the thought that they might falter once seemed unimaginable. But now a trickle of worries about the companies, which has been slowly building for years, has suddenly become a torrent.

And it was FANNIE and FREDDIE that collapsed FIRST before ANY of the private investment banks, which collapsed as a result of having purchased the very mortgaged backed securities that the Government Sponsored Enterprises SOLD THEM.  It wasn’t until Fannie and Freddie collapsed that investors began to look with horror at all the junk that these GSE boondoggles had been pimping.

The man who predicted the collapse in 1999 wrote a follow-up article titled, “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.”  It really should have read, “Blame DEMOCRATS.”  Because they were crawling all over these GSEs that they had themselves created like the cockroaches they are.  But Wallison is nonpartisan

Barack and Michelle Obama have a documented personal history of crony capitalism:

The Chicago way is a very, very ugly way.  And Obama has been in it up to his eyeballs.  Chicago is a dirty place filled with dirty politicians – and Obama was perfectly at home with all the dirt.

That Chicago corruption extends right into Obama’s home, by way of his wife Michelle.  This is a woman who sat on high-paying boards in direct quid-pro-quo consequences of Obama advancing in public office.  And in some of those boards, she participated in the worst kind of hospital patient-dumping.

Here’s a video of Michelle Obama you ought to watch – if you can stand the revelations:

Too bad we voted to nationalize the Chicago Way.

I also pointed out that when you attacked employers, the ones who would be hit the most and the hardest would be EMPLOYEES.

Take a look at what’s happening to small businesses, which create at least half of all the jobs in America, under Obama.  How about the fewest new business startups since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it:

Through the 12 months ended in March of last year, 505,473 new businesses started up in the U.S., according to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the weakest growth since the bureau started tracking the data in the early 1990s. It’s down sharply from the record 667,341 new businesses added in the 12 months that ended in March 2006.

And we can tie this right back to crony capitalism, as Obama has created a system in which larger businesses are protected against the threat of competition from smaller businesses:

Many times large corporations will even lobby for more regulations  for their  own industry because they know that they can handle all of the  rules and  paperwork far easier than their smaller competitors can.   After all, a  large corporation with an accounting department can easily  handle filling out a  few thousand more forms, but for a small business  with only a handful  of employees that kind of paperwork is a major  logistical nightmare.

When it comes to hiring new employees, the federal government has  made the  process so complicated and so expensive for small businesses  that it is  hardly worth it anymore.  Things have gotten so bad that more  small  businesses than ever are only hiring part-time workers or  independent  contractors.

So what we actually have now is a situation where small businesses  have lots of incentives not to hire more workers, and if they really do need some extra help the rules make it much more profitable to do  whatever you can to keep from bringing people on as full-time   employees.

And who do all these rules and regulations hurt the most but the very people Democrats cynically and deceitfully claim they are trying to help?  Meanwhile, who does it help the most but the crony capitalist corporations who DON’T do most of the hiring in America who can profit from Obama’s war on business that results in the destruction of their small business competition.

A recent report by the National Federation of Independent Business points out that small businesses are planning to SHRINK rather than EXPAND their payrolls under Obama.  From the New York Times:

A Slowdown for Small Businesses
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: June 14, 2011

In the latest sign that the economic recovery may have lost whatever modest oomph it had, more small businesses say that they are planning to shrink their payrolls than say they want to expand them.

That is according to a new report released Tuesday by the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group that regularly surveys its membership of small businesses across America.

The federation’s report for May showed the worst hiring prospects in eight months. The finding provides a glimpse into the pessimism of the nation’s small firms as they put together their budgets for the coming season, and depicts a more gloomy outlook than other recent (if equally lackluster) economic indicators because this one is forward-looking.

While big companies are buoyed by record profits, many small businesses, which employ half of the country’s private sector workers, are still struggling to break even. And if the nation’s small companies plan to further delay hiring — or, worse, return to laying off workers, as they now hint they might — there is little hope that the nation’s 14 million idle workers will find gainful employment soon.

“Never in the 37-year history of our company have we seen anything at all like this,” said Frank W. Goodnight, president of Diversified Graphics, a publishing company in Salisbury, N.C. He says there is “no chance” he will hire more workers in the months ahead.

“We’re being squeezed on all sides,” he says.

So let me ask again the question that the Los Angeles Times phrased: “Why are the wealthy benefitting from the ‘recovery’ as workers struggle?

And the answer is simple: because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are socialist who have destroyed the engine that creates the jobs that workers depend upon to flourish.

An interesting fact is that businesses are now forced to spend $1.7 TRILLION a year in regulatory compliance costs.  That is a massive hidden tax on their viability; it exceeds the overt income taxes businesses have to pay, and it most certainly exceeds their profits.  And right now Obama is attacking them via the Dodd-Frank regulatory legislation, via the EPA, via OSHA, via ObamaCare and via the ridiculous actions of the NLRB in addition to their tax burden.  Just to name a few.  The result is businesses terrified to expand and further place their necks under Obama’s axe blade.

Meanwhile, Obama’s socialist policies have not only devastated the worker by destroying his jobs, but they’ve ruined America on numerous other levels, too.  Take the housing crisis – which was THE cause of the economic implosion of 2008.  Did Obama make it better?  Well, here’s a headline for you from CNBC: “US Housing Crisis Is Now Worse Than Great Depression.”  Which is to say that Democrats – who first created the housing crisis by refusing to allow the regulation of their pet socialist wealth redistribution agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – took something awful and turned it into an American Dream-massacring nightmare.

The latest job figures simply further document my point: Obama is destroying America job by job.  Not only did the unemployment rate go up to 9.2% (Obama promised the American people that the unemployment rate would be 7.1% by now if he got his massive government-spending stimulus); not only were the previous two month figures adjusted DOWNWARD by some 45,000 jobs; not only have a third of the unemployed been unemployed for at least a YEAR with fully half of the unemployed having been unemployed for over six months (which is unprecedented); not only did the economy create an incredibly dismal 18,000 jobs (versus the 100,000 the economists naively expected); but a quarter million more people simply walked away from the workforce entirely – abandoning any hope that Obama will do anything more than crush their hopes of finding a job.

Obama Maims Tax Cut Extension: When Will Democrats Realize They Have A Failed President On Their Hands?

So Barack Obama decides to cave in to Republicans, thinking if he keeps using his demagogic rhetoric his base won’t realize he’s abandoning them for his own political future.

Obama gave a televised session (you know, to go along with the million billion other televised sessions the media whore has done by now), and likened Republicans to terrorist-hostage-takers for voting according to their basic principles.

Only Democrats should be able to vote according to their principles; anyone else doing it is evil.

Republican leaders have largely ignored the fact that, if they are “hostage takers” for “holding tax cuts for the middle class hostage” to tax cuts for the rich, then Democrats are every single iota as much “hostage takers” for “holding tax cuts for the middle class hostage” to Marxist class warfare ideology.  Republicans seem to think that that fact is so obvious only a moron wouldn’t understand it.

What they don’t realize is that approximately half the country are morons.

But Obama’s “Rhetoric for Dummies” didn’t work for him; because while Obama was demonizing the Republicans who were willing to strike a deal (that they also weren’t particularly thrilled with), Democrats were screaming themselves into the mother of all hissy fits.

So Obama – ever the demagogue – went back to demagogy in yet a second media session.  This time against his very own party as he labeled them as “sanctimonious.”  Which I don’t doubt drove the sanctimonious Democrats absolutely crazy (well, beyond crazy, anyway; they were already crazy).

So Obama demonized the people in the rival party who were willing to accept his deal; and then he demonized the people in his own party who weren’t willing to accept his deal.

You’d think that kind of approach would work every time, wouldn’t you?

Unfortunately, for those who don’t live in plastic bubbles, it didn’t:

House, Senate on Collision Course After Dems Reject Tax Cut Bill
Published December 09, 2010

The House and Senate appear to be on a collision course over President Obama’s controversial tax plan, after House Democrats voted to block the package from coming to the floor in its current form.

Though the vote was not binding, the House Democratic caucus on Thursday approved a measure by Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., effectively rejecting the GOP-negotiated deal unless and until a majority of Democrats support it. One Democratic leadership aide said the vote “shows how much the White House screwed this up.”

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, meanwhile, told Fox News he expects the Senate to take up the bill anyway without any substantive changes Thursday afternoon. He predicted the measure would pass, a belief echoed by a number of Senate Democratic aides interviewed by Fox News. But that would send the bill straight to the House, where some members are mounting a rebellion.

“If it’s take it or leave it, we’ll leave it,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, after the caucus vote Thursday, adding that he thinks House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will take her cue from the caucus.

Pelosi, releasing a statement shortly after the vote, said only that the party would “continue discussions” with Republicans and the president to “improve the proposal” before a floor vote.

“Democratic priorities remain clear: to provide a tax cut for working families, to create jobs and economic growth, to assist millions of our fellow Americans who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, and to do this in a fiscally sound way,” she said. The White House said that Congress was working through the “normal process” of debating legislation.

The Democrats’ resolution specifically stated that the tax package in its current form “should not come to the House floor for consideration.”

Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., said “it’s a pretty clear message. We don’t like the bill.”

The vote came after 54 Democrats, led by Rep. Peter Welch of Vermont, signed a letter in opposition to the tax cut deal. The 54 Democrats, by themselves, would not be enough to block the package in the House, depending on how much support it gets from Republicans. But the caucus vote could shake things up.

Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the House’s No. 3 Democrat, said when asked what comes next, “I don’t know. We’ll wait and see.”

The White House continues to face an uphill climb in convincing his party to get on board with the package. The administration appeared to be breaking through after Vice President Biden visited the Hill on Wednesday, and some Democrats left acknowledging that the package could have enough support to pass.

As of Thursday, Democrats were all over the map. Most Republicans seemed to be standing by the negotiated package, but a few prominent conservatives were peeling off and criticizing it as too expensive.

Speaking Thursday at a White House event promoting American exports, President Obama said the vote will determine whether the economy “moves forward or backward.”

The president again pressed Congress to pass the agreement, saying it has the potential to create millions of jobs. He said if it fails, Americans would see smaller paychecks and would result in fewer jobs.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

So, let’s sum up: Republicans, who are willing to support the bill by giving some of what they don’t want to get some of what they want, are “hostage takers.”  And Obama is vilifying the party who in his own words are trying to create millions of jobs and prevent Americans from seeing smaller paychecks and fewer jobs.  Because that’s just the kind of turd he is.  Meanwhile, Democrats, who refuse to support the bill unless they get everything they want, are NOT hostage takers.

And that’s the operating narrative, because, yes, half the country is actually that stupid.

But let’s take a moment to consider something else: just how shockingly terribly the guy who has refused to show us his birth certificate has butchered this negotiation.

And the beauty of it is that you don’t have to listen to conservatives like me to hear that anymore; just pay a little attention to what DEMOCRATS are now saying about Obama.

How about this little gem of class?  From ABC:

An unidentified Democratic lawmaker let slip his frustration at President Obama’s proposed tax compromise, apparently muttering “f**k the president,” during a heated debate this morning.

I don’t know, maybe they’re pissed off because Obama basically didn’t even bother to consult them before undermining their agenda.  Because Obama is an abject failure as a leader and as a president.  He’s already “led” the Democrat Party to it’s worst “shellacking” since 1938, and now he hasn’t even gotten out of the lame duck session before he’s warming up to lead them to an even BIGGER shellacking in 2012.

What’s great about this is that it is shaping up to be a win-win for Republicans.  By being the first to agree to Obama’s offer, they have the upper hand if Democrats refuse it.  I mean, idiotic morons I mean Democrats aside, WHO’S responsible for making every American pay more in taxes if this deal falls through???  And then add to that the fact that if the deal doesn’t go through now, Republicans will be in an even STRONGER position when they take over the House of Representatives in January.

It’s shaping up to be funny, it its own twisted way: as terrible as Obama is for America, he’s even worse for the Democrat Party.

 

 

 

Tax Hikes On Rich Proven Moron-Stupid; Just Ask Maryland

When I was a kid we had two dogs – a cagey wire-hair dachshund, and a typically elitist poodle.

Every single feeding was exactly the same. The dachshund would gobble down her food while the poodle stared at her bowl in haughty disdain.

Then, at some point right about the time when the dachshund had finished eating all the food in her bowl, the poodle would decide that surely the dachshund’s food must be better, and that she’d rather eat it.

So she would go over to the dachshund’s bowl, only alas, there was nothing in it.

Meanwhile, the dachshund would circle over to the poodle’s bowl, and glomb down that food, too.

We had to feed the dogs separately, or that poodle would have literally starved to death. Because as smart as that dog could be in some ways, she was dumb as a box of rocks when it came to common sense. And she just never learned.

Read the following and tell me if you don’t see a similarity between that poodle and the Democrat Party:

MARCH 12, 2010
Maryland’s Mobile Millionaires
Income tax rates go up, rich taxpayers vanish.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn is the latest Democrat to demand a tax increase, this week proposing to raise the state’s top marginal individual income tax rate to 4% from 3%. He’d better hope this works out better than it has for Maryland.

We reported in May that after passing a millionaire surtax nearly one-third of Maryland’s millionaires had gone missing, thus contributing to a decline in state revenues. The politicians in Annapolis had said they’d collect $106 million by raising its income tax rate on millionaire households to 6.25% from 4.75%. In cities like Baltimore and Bethesda, which apply add-on income taxes, the top tax rate with the surcharge now reaches as high as 9.3%—fifth highest in the nation. Liberals said this was based on incomplete data and that rich Marylanders hadn’t fled the state.

Well, the state comptroller’s office now has the final tax return data for 2008, the first year that the higher tax rates applied. The number of millionaire tax returns fell sharply to 5,529 from 7,898 in 2007, a 30% tumble. The taxes paid by rich filers fell by 22%, and instead of their payments increasing by $106 million, they fell by some $257 million. […]

A Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysis of federal tax return data on people who migrated from one state to another found that Maryland lost $1 billion of its net tax base in 2008 by residents moving to other states. That’s income that’s now being taxed and is financing services in Virginia, South Carolina and elsewhere. […]

Thanks in part to its soak-the-rich theology, Maryland still has a $2 billion deficit and Montgomery County is $760 million in the red. Governor Martin O’Malley’s office tells us he wants the higher rates to expire “as scheduled at the end of 2010.” But there are bills in both chambers of the legislature to extend the surcharge. The state’s best hope is that politicians in other states are as self-destructive as those in Annapolis.

I swear, you’d be better off putting my poodle in charge of food collection than you would be putting Democrats in charge of anything.

We’ve seen this fundamental, profound ignorance of the plan simple fact that rich people are not stupid, and that they change their behavior when they are hit with taxes in a manner that enormously refutes the most basic Democrat presuppositions:

Starting in 1991, Washington levied a 10% luxury tax on cars valued above $30,000, boats above $100,000, jewelry and furs above $10,000 and private planes above $250,000. Democrats like Ted Kennedy and then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell crowed publicly about how the rich would finally be paying their fair share and privately about convincing President George H.W. Bush to renounce his “no new taxes” pledge.

But it wasn’t long before even these die-hard class warriors noticed they’d badly missed their mark. The taxes took in $97 million less in their first year than had been projected — for the simple reason that people were buying a lot fewer of these goods. Boat building, a key industry in Messrs. Mitchell and Kennedy’s home states of Maine and Massachusetts, was particularly hard hit. Yacht retailers reported a 77% drop in sales that year, while boat builders estimated layoffs at 25,000. With bipartisan support, all but the car tax was repealed in 1993, and in 1996 Congress voted to phase that out too. January 1 was disappearance day.

Over and over again, Democrats keep making the same mistake. They are continually amazed that they keep getting the same results. And then they fiercely insist that those results won’t apply the next time.

The Maryland “tax the rich” example has been demonstrated again and again.

Take New York. Please, as the comic says:

Oct. 5 (Bloomberg) — New York State’s income tax revenue has dropped 36 percent from the same period in 2008, Governor David Paterson said, “frustrating” his attempt to close a projected $2.1 billion budget deficit.

“We added personal income tax, which we thought would make the falloff 10 percent to 15 percent,” Paterson, a Democrat, said on CNBC today, referring to $5.2 billion in new or increased taxes. “This is what is so frustrating. It’s still 36 percent, meaning our revenues fell more in 2009 than they did in 2008.”

Surprise. You’re a dumbass, in a state filled with dumbasses.

Did you confuse New York state with New York City? Fine, let’s talk about New York City:

Charging that it’s “easy to rile against the rich,” Mayor Bloomberg warned yesterday that the income-tax increases being considered for the wealthiest New Yorkers would drive them from the city.

“One percent of the households that file in this city pay something like 50 percent of the taxes. In the city, that’s something like 40,000 people. If a handful left, any raise would make it revenue neutral,” the billionaire mayor said on his weekly radio show.

“The question is what’s fair. If 1 percent are paying 50 percent of the taxes, you want to make it even more? Anybody below that 1 percent, no taxes?”

Legislators in Albany are considering state income-tax hikes for households earning from $250,000 to $1 million to close a budget gap next year of at least $13 billion.

Rush Limbaugh moved from New York to Florida because of the tax burden. That move alone will cost New York $50 million. And you probably can add the loss of LeBron James to that fiasco. And how many average Joes is it going to take to make up for the loss of just those two men’s tax revenues? For no other reason than that New York was so greedy and so stupid that they demanded everything and therefore got nothing.

Take California versus Texas, with California’s punitive liberal-devised tax rates losing big time compared with Texas pro-conservative taxes:

Don’t look now, but there’s a new War Between the States under way, and the south is winning. The most dramatic winner is Texas. The cover story of a recent (July 9) issue of The Economist compared California with Texas and implied that the Golden State is falling apart, while the Lone Star State is leading the nation out of the recession. Then, in a mid-July issue of National Review, Kevin D. Williamson said the nation is “Going Alamo,” with new jobs and businesses tipping southward, draining California, the Midwest, and Northeast of their former economic glory.

One indicator of the trend, according to Williamson, is the cost of renting a U-Haul truck for a one-way move. From Austin, Texas to San Francisco, California, the cost is $900, while a one-way rental from San Francisco to Austin is $3,000, due to the exodus of trucks from California.

All this makes sense. We are a mobile nation. People can move easily enough (especially if they rent), and capital can move even faster. Capital, jobs, and businesses will go where they are most welcome, while capital leaves places where it is punished by higher taxes and over-regulation.

And lo and behold, Texas, with its low taxes, has created 70% of all US jobs since 2008. But liberals don’t want job creation, for all their bogus rhetoric; they want Marxism. They want class warfare. They want redistributionism. They want to “spread the wealth around.” No matter how ruinous it is. And no matter how badly it hurts the little people, who keep falling for class warfare demagoguery the way Charlie Brown keeps falling for Lucy’s promise to hold the football for him.

I wrote the following nearly a year ago:

Americans in high tax states are voting with their feet and leaving. And the states with the highest income taxes such as New York, California, and Hawaii, are facing the biggest revenue shortfalls.

In spite of being warned that liberal class-warfare tax-the-rich-to-extinction policies would lead to Dodo-bird results, New York attacked the rich with a 31% income tax hike. And all they have to show for their eat-the-rich tax policies is record revenue shortfalls.

And how do Democrats react? Do they acknowledge proven, factual, repeatedly-documented reality? They don’t have it in them, anymore than my idiot poodle had it in her. Rather, they insist on performing the same failed experiment again in Illinois. And all that’s going to happen is that the rich will move or shelter their money, such that an even bigger tax burden ends up falling on the working class whom Democrats fallaciously claim to be helping.

And as foolish, as idiotic, as suicidal as putting Democrats in charge of a state is, the only thing worse is to put them in charge of the federal government.

Democrats have been baying to increase the taxes of the rich across the nation even though the plain, simple fact is that tax CUTS raise revenues; they have ALWAYS raised revenues every single time they’ve been tried.

Democrats were so determined to impose tax hikes on the rich that they are willing to ensure that NOBODY gets any tax cuts. The bi-partisan compromise vote was all on the Republicans’ side. And Democrats were afraid to allow a straight up-or-down vote on allowing tax cuts for all Americans. They preferred huge tax hikes for Americans, instead.

You can paint string yellow and sell it to these people as gold. And then you can do it again, and again, and again.

Obama Demoagogues Boehner While Mainstream Media Misrepresents Him

I’ve already written (and still more here) about increasing numbers of Democrats doing a tacit “credit Bush” move – as opposed to the mindless failure of responsibility inherent in the “blame Bush” garbage – by demanding that ALL of the Bush tax cuts be extended at least temporarily.

So you’ll have to forgive me for changing the emphasis of the following excellent article, even as I preserve its substance.

Yes, Democrats are increasingly starting to change their tune on the Bush tax cuts.  Previously, they were blaming Bush’s tax cuts for the economic collapse; now growing numbers of them are saying they should be extended.  But let’s not forget to examine the classless, tasteless, and clueless demagoguery that is daily spit out of the Obama White House.

From HotAir:

Rank and file Dems to Pelosi: extend all the Bush tax cuts
posted at 2:13 pm on September 13, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

After John Boehner reiterated his call to extend all of the Bush-era tax cuts expiring at the end of the year, the White House once again tried hammering him as an extremist looking to protect the rich at the expense of the middle class.  House Democrats will undercut that messaging with their own call to put off tax hikes for the next couple of years.  In a letter circulating on Capitol Hill and reviewed by Politico, Blue Dogs and other Democrats tell Nancy Pelosi that this is no time to raise taxes or to extend the uncertainty:

POLITICO has obtained a draft of a letter from rank-and-file lawmakers to Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer urging them not to let tax rates rise for Americans at the highest income levels.

“We believe in times of economic recovery it makes good sense to maintain things as they are in the short term, to provide families and businesses the certainty required to plan and make sound budget decisions,” the House members write in a letter that was being circulated for signatures on Friday and is expected to be delivered today or Tuesday.

Reps. Jim Matheson (Utah), Glenn Nye (Virginia), Melissa Bean (Ill.) and Gary Peters (Mich.) drafted the letter and are working to gather support, mostly from the moderate Blue Dog and New Democrat coalitions, for at least a temporary extension of the rates for top income earners as well as those in the lower brackets.

This comes at the same time that Boehner’s remarks have stirred controversy — although largely from the absence of context.  The media originally reported them as a retreat back to the White House petition.  Instead, Boehner said that he would vote to approve a bill that only extended the middle-class portion of the tax cuts if that was all that was offered.  Boehner scoffed at the notion that he was holding those tax-cuts extensions hostage, which a moment’s thought would prove correct.  Pelosi has a 77-seat majority in the House, and can pass anything Democrats want.

Clearly, some Democrats are now wondering if they want a class war right before the election.  That kind of strategy plays well in districts like Pelosi’s, but is falling flat in the rest of the country.  Democrats played that card in 2006 and 2008, and after four years of control in Congress, it’s no longer a trump card.  Democrats need to find a way to generate growth, and the only way to do that is to get people with capital to put it to work — which the coming tax hikes will prevent.

The Obama administration is doing its best to portray Boehner as an extremist.  Unfortunately for Obama, his own party shows that it’s the White House on the extreme, pushing tax hikes in the middle of an economic stall.  It also points to a bigger problem with the strategy, which is that punching down below one’s weight is never a good idea.  Instead of marginalizing Boehner, the White House is practically lending him the bully pulpit by putting Boehner at the same level as the President.  That helps the GOP, because most of the electorate understands that tax hikes will be disastrous for the economy — and Obama doesn’t exactly have a track record of success that gives him the benefit of the doubt.

So Chris Boehner is saying that, as a principled conservative who believes in the radical premises that Americans actually deserve to keep more of the money that they earned, he wants tax cuts for everyone.  But if he can’t get tax cuts for everyone, he’ll vote to give tax cuts to as many people as he possibly can.

Versus Obama (i.e., Obama Akbar!!!), whose position is that he will screw every single American and screw the entire economy unless his Marxist class warfare system prevails.  Because, dammit, he wants to have all the centralized commissar power to “spread that wealth around.”

And Obama calls Boehner the “extremist.”

Meanwhile, the mainstream media is deceitfully misrepresenting Boehner’s principled position into some kind of retreat.

But here’s what Boehner said:

Boehner told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “If the only option I have is to vote for those at $250,000 and below, of course I’m going to do that.”

But, he said, “I’m going to do everything I can to fight to make sure that we extend the current tax rates for all Americans.”

And, he said, “I’ve been making the point now for months that we need to extend all the current rates for all Americans if we want to get our economy going again and we want to get jobs in America.”

I know, I know, what an “extremist.”  And, of course, Obama – who will blow up the entire country if he doesn’t get absolutely everything he wants – what a “moderate.”

And, of course, the media is clearly accurately representing Boehner’s view as a “retreat.”  Because, as any fool (and only fools, fwiw) knows, no conservative wants tax cuts for the middle class.  They just want tax cuts for the rich.  Because conservatives are evil and they hate the middle class.

When Mark Twain said, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get it’s boots on,” he could have been talking about the American mainstream media.  Because that seems to be their standard operating procedure.  It is most certainly Barry Hussein’s.

I have written about the fact that tax cuts for “the rich” are the best way to increase both jobs and government revenues.  The arguments are on our side.  And in fact rather than being “extremist,” the position of favoring lower taxes for ALL Americans is the reasonable one we can take.  I hope you take time to read that.

The American people are now recognizing that Obama was fundamentally wrong about his stimulus; he was profoundly wrong about his ObamaCare; he was flagrantly wrong about his cap-and-trade system; he was terribly wrong with his green jobs nonsense; he was terrible wrong about immigration issues and the Ground Zero mosque; he endangered America by being completely wrong on Iran; and now he couldn’t be more wrong about his tax policy.

Where has this clown been right about anything?

Obama has said in his usual demagogic way, “If I said the sky was blue, they’d say no.”  The problem with Obama’s analogy is that if he said the sky was blue, it would probably be nighttime and the sky would actually be black.  Look at the sky at 2 AM and tell me it looks blue to you.  Obama began his presidency with a lie, PROMISING he wouldn’t run in 2008.  And not only has he never told the truth since, but he has proven that he is disastrously incompetent, as well.  The other problem with Obama is he’s not saying things like “the sky is blue” that everyone can reasonably agree to; he’s saying extremist, radical things that will implode this country.  If Obama would only pursue semi-reasonable policies, he’d get support from Republicans.

Let’s realize that Obama is a demagogue, a liar, an incompetent, and unfit to be president.  Let’s do an even better job ignoring him.  Let’s realize that if the mainstream media reports something, it is very likely at least mostly untrue.  Let’s realize that cutting taxes for everyone – especially the people who actually create jobs in this country – is far and away the best path to prosperity.  And let’s realize that we need conservative policies if we’re going to get out of this hole and move forward