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.

If Rich People Are Evil Like Obama Says, You’d Better Pray They Don’t Get Their Taxes Raised

Obama routinely demonizes rich.  He tells us they’re not good people, that they don’t care, that they don’t pay their fair share even though they pay MORE than their fair share when you consider the fact that nearly half of Americans pay no federal income tax at all.

There’s just one problem with Obama’s demagoguery.

If you think the rich are evil and greedy, then why do you not think that if they get their taxes raised, they won’t just pass those taxes onto you in the form of higher prices?

Here’s the thing about taxes on the rich: all the rich would have to pay them, and all the rich would have their taxes increased by the same percentage, and they would all have their taxes increased at the same time.

If you raise the taxes of the rich (who own and run all the businesses), you wouldn’t get everyone raising their prices right away, nor would they all raise their prices by the same amount.  But every single owner and chief executive is going to face the same increase of cost in doing business.  And over time – if there is anything in the universe called “equilibrium” – they will raise their prices for their products to compensate for that higher cost of doing business.

And given that the 2nd law of thermodynamics – which is ALL ABOUT a system’s tendency to reach equilibrium – is one of the best attested principles of science, I would argue that voting to raise taxes on the people who run the businesses is pretty much a 100% guarantee that you will be raising taxes on yourself via higher prices.

The only businesses that will suffer, and the only “rich people” who will lose their “riches,” will be the smaller small businesses who don’t have the resources to last through the transition period which will ultimately end with the customers paying the higher prices and thus the higher taxes.  Businesses will pass their higher taxes onto the consumers who buy their products.

Think of automotive tires.  Let’s say you increase the taxes of every single tire producer and dealer by 10%.  Do you seriously not think that, over time, you won’t end up paying the lion’s share of that 10% increase in higher prices for tires?  And it frankly doesn’t matter what product or service we’re talking about.  If you want the lowest prices, keep taxes down and the government off the backs of the producers, distributors and sellers, and allow them to have a fair fight with each other to compete for your business.

Think I’m wrong?  Keep reading.

There’s this other little fact that the leftist demagogues never bother to pay attention to: lower tax rates on the rich actually invariably result in the rich paying a higher percentage of all taxes paid:

In 1980, the top 1 percent of earners paid 19 percent of income taxes, and the bottom half of earners paid 7.1 percent. A decade later, with a lower maximum rate, the top 1 percent paid 25 percent of taxes, while the bottom earners paid just 5.8 percent. By 2008, top earners paid 38 percent of taxes, the bottom half 2.7 percent.

Put another way, when you examine the Treasury Department data in lieu of the Bush tax cuts:

The rich are now paying more than they would have paid, not less, after the Bush investment tax cuts. For example, the Treasury’s estimate was that the top 1 percent of earners would pay 31 percent of taxes if the Bush cuts did not go into effect; with the cuts, they actually paid 37 per­cent. Similarly, the share of the top 10 percent of earners was estimated at 63 percent without the cuts; they actually paid 68 percent.

Which is to say that if I really hated people who weren’t rich, I would show my hate by raising the tax rates of the rich.

It’s a Charlie Brown thing.  As long as that bald fool keeps thinking he’s going to kick the football with Lucy holding it, he’s going to keep ending up flat on his back in pain.

In a war, in a game of strategy, or in many sports, the very best and most ruthless way to win is to make your opponent think that if he does X he will gain an advantage.  But the moment he does X, you seize the advantage and destroy him.  And as long as the poorer classes keep falling for this Marxist demagogic class warfare trick, they’re going to keep screwing themselves.

There are a number of reasons for why keeping low tax rates for the rich results in their paying a higher percentage of taxes paid.  Most basically, if you allow the rich to keep more of their profits, they will invest more and take more risks.  And the result is more opportunity and more jobs for all.  If you demagogue the rich and try to seize more of their profits, they will shelter their money and act in ways that hurt the overall economy and most definitely hurt the poor.

That is the short of a much longer article I wrote entitled, “Tax Cuts Increase Revenues; They Have ALWAYS Increased Revenues.”  And there’s only about a hundred years worth of data (which you will see in the article) that proves the basic statement of that article is true.

So, if you allow Barack Obama to be your Lucy and trick you into trying to kick the rich, all you’re going to end up doing is hurting yourself and hurting the economy.  You’re going to end up flat on your back just like Charlie Brown, and Obama as Lucy will keep playing the same trick on you over and over again.

ObamaCare Already Rearing Its VERY Ugly Head

You’ve got to be amazed at the Democrats’ arrogance, incompetence, and ignorance.

They are apparently having their version of Casablanca’s Captain Renault moment: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

Only, in this Democrat-retelling, Captain Renault instead says, “Gambling?  There’s no gambling going on here!  It’s just gaming, not GAMBLING!  Why, it’s nothing more than two parties engaging in a predictive enterprise, in which the accurate prediction is rewarded in a monetary transaction.  But gambling?  You’re a violent racist to call that ‘gambling’!!!

Oh, my goodness.  I think you just spat on me!  It’s just the kind of thing you haters who attack us as “gamblers” would do!”

MARCH 27, 2010
The ObamaCare Writedowns
The corporate damage rolls in, and Democrats are shocked!

It’s been a banner week for Democrats: ObamaCare passed Congress in its final form on Thursday night, and the returns are already rolling in. Yesterday AT&T announced that it will be forced to make a $1 billion writedown due solely to the health bill, in what has become a wave of such corporate losses.

This wholesale destruction of wealth and capital came with more than ample warning. Turning over every couch cushion to make their new entitlement look affordable under Beltway accounting rules, Democrats decided to raise taxes on companies that do the public service of offering prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. We and others warned this would lead to AT&T-like results, but like so many other ObamaCare objections Democrats waved them off as self-serving or “political.”

Perhaps that explains why the Administration is now so touchy. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke took to the White House blog to write that while ObamaCare is great for business, “In the last few days, though, we have seen a couple of companies imply that reform will raise costs for them.” In a Thursday interview on CNBC, Mr. Locke said “for them to come out, I think is premature and irresponsible.”

Meanwhile, Henry Waxman and House Democrats announced yesterday that they will haul these companies in for an April 21 hearing because their judgment “appears to conflict with independent analyses, which show that the new law will expand coverage and bring down costs.”

In other words, shoot the messenger. Black-letter financial accounting rules require that corporations immediately restate their earnings to reflect the present value of their long-term health liabilities, including a higher tax burden. Should these companies have played chicken with the Securities and Exchange Commission to avoid this politically inconvenient reality? Democrats don’t like what their bill is doing in the real world, so they now want to intimidate CEOs into keeping quiet.

On top of AT&T’s $1 billion, the writedown wave so far includes Deere & Co., $150 million; Caterpillar, $100 million; AK Steel, $31 million; 3M, $90 million; and Valero Energy, up to $20 million. Verizon has also warned its employees about its new higher health-care costs, and there will be many more in the coming days and weeks.

As Joe Biden might put it, this is a big, er, deal for shareholders and the economy. The consulting firm Towers Watson estimates that the total hit this year will reach nearly $14 billion, unless corporations cut retiree drug benefits when their labor contracts let them.

Meanwhile, John DiStaso of the New Hampshire Union Leader reported this week that ObamaCare could cost the Granite State’s major ski resorts as much as $1 million in fines, because they hire large numbers of seasonal workers without offering health benefits. “The choices are pretty clear, either increase prices or cut costs, which could mean hiring fewer workers next winter,” he wrote.

The Democratic political calculation with ObamaCare is the proverbial boiling frog: Gradually introduce a health-care entitlement by hiding the true costs, hook the middle class on new subsidies until they become unrepealable, but try to delay the adverse consequences and major new tax hikes so voters don’t make the connection between their policy and the economic wreckage. But their bill was such a shoddy, jerry-rigged piece of work that the damage is coming sooner than even some critics expected.

The Democrats passed their totally partisan bill (the only bipartisanship was in the “Hell no!” vote, with 34 Democrats joining every single Republican).

The New York Times reported that Obama’s core promise was his pledge that he would transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars, move beyond the divisive politics of Washington, and build a new governing majority that brought Democrats, independents and Republicans together.  And now we know that his fundamental, core promise was just a total lie, a massive lie of the devil.  Not only did he not try to become a unifying figure, as he cynically and deceitfully promised, but he became the most polarizing president in the history of the nation.  And that broken promise is now erupting into open rage like we have never seen in this country.

Obama is trying to demonize Republicans for the anger, but HE WAS THE ONE WHO PROMISED TO BE A TRANSCENDENT FIGURE.  HE WAS THE ONE WHO LIED.

Democrats have obfuscated every fact with spin and lies, and every single truth teller they could not bribe or intimidate they have tried to destroy.

Democrats can pass a pile of stinking lies on a 100% partisan ideological vote, but what they can’t do is make that pile of stinking lies that comprise ObamaCare actually work.  The Democrats health care law is already an open disaster, and it will continue to grow into a bigger and bigger disaster no matter how many congressional kangaroo courts they hold to demonize businesses who reported that their costs will skyrocket under this evil bill.

Obama said if you liked your health care you could keep it.  ABC was reporting that that promise was questionable back in July of last year.  Now it is a proven lie.  It was just another whopping lie of the devil all along.  Businesses are taking hits in the millions and even in the billions of dollars.  And one of them after another is going to start dumping their retirees into Medicare as the cost of offering private insurance plans soar under ObamaCare.

Obama’s reckeless spending is simply staggering.  The CBO is reporting that it is a gigantic $1.2 TRILLION more than Obama said it would be.  And they are reporting the terrifying news that the federal debt will soar to 90% of Gross Domestic Product.

Business costs are soaring.  AT & T will take a billion dollar hit because of ObamaCare.

As bad as that is in dollars, the bigger hit may well be the one taken by Caterpillar, because it shows the abject hypocrisy and fraud of ObamaCare.  Last year Obama said that “you can measure America’s bottom line by looking at Caterpillar’s bottom line.” And now that same Caterpillar is taking a $100 million hit due to ObamaCare.  Now that same Caterpillar is saying, “From our point of view, a tax increase like this cannot come at a worse time.”

That means fewer jobs for Americans.  A LOT fewer jobs.  And no denials by our Democrat version of Captain Renault can change that with his sputtering denials.

And there are other hidden provisions that are starting to leap out of this bill that Democrats passed, but apparently never bothered to read.

Now we’re finding that Americans are going to take a hit as high as $2,000 under another dark tunnel provision in ObamaCare.

“The damage is coming sooner than expected.”

That’s the nutshell summary of ObamaCare.

Why Barack Obama and Democrats Are Wrong On The Economy

Let me ask you a question: when did a poor person ever give you your job?

Let me be even more precise: when did a poor person ever give you a high paying job with excellent benefits?

Hello? Is this thing on? Do I hear crickets chirping?

The fact of the matter is this: all the Marxist-style class-warfare demagoguery of the Democrats aside, we desperately need the rich and the jobs they create by means of their education, expertise, inspiration, hard work, and investment.

How many times have you heard the phrase, “the rich need to pay their fair share of taxes?” from Barack Obama and from Democrats?

Do you have any idea how much the rich are paying in taxes?

In 2005, the top 1% paid 39.4% of the federal income tax burden. The wealthiest Americans have been increasingly paying more and more of the total tax burden. In 2000, the wealthiest 1% paid 37.4%.

According to the Treasury Department, perhaps for the first time ever, the richest 1% of taxpayers will have paid more than 40% of the income tax burden. The top 5% will pay just under 60% of the total taxes. The richest 10% will pay 70% of taxes.

The top 50% of income earners will pay 97% of the tax burden. The bottom 50% of income earners will pay only 3% of taxes. And the the bottom 45% of income earners will actually pay 0% of the federal tax burden. Americans in the bottom quintile who have jobs get reimbursed for some or all of their 15 percent payroll tax through the earned-income tax credit (EITC), a fairly efficient poverty-abatement program.

The richest 1.3 million tax-filers — those Americans with adjusted gross incomes of more than $365,000 in 2005 — paid more income tax than all of the 66 million American tax filers below the median in income. Ten times more.

If that isn’t “a fair share,” I don’t know what would be.  It is simply a fact that the rich are most definitely paying their “fair share” and then a whole bunch more.

The Democrat Party today consists of demagoguing liars, ideologically-brainwashed fools, the hopelessly naive, and the inexcusably ignorant.

Unfortunately, we have more liars, fools, and naively deluded, and ignorant people in this country today than we’ve ever had before. And, given the fruits of the liberal-dominated education system, we will continue to have more and more of all four of these classes of people. Liars, fools, the naive, and the ignorant constitute a powerful voter block indeed.

What is fascinating is that the tax plan that Demcocrats falsely claim “favors the rich” actually end up requiring the rich to pay the overwhelming majority of the tax burden.

Prior to the Reagan Revolution in 1981, the top marginal federal income tax rate was 70% (it is currently 35% under President Bush). At the 70% rate, the top 1% paid only 19% of the federal income tax burden, and the top 5% paid 37%. With the tax rate cut in half, the top 1% are paying more than twice as much of the total tax burden – nearly 40% – and the top 5% are paying nearly 60%.

And not only do the rich pay a higher percentage of their wealth in taxes under the lower taxes of the Bush plan, but they pay a higher ratio of their wealth in taxes than they did when the rates were higher:

for the top 5 percent and 10 percent of earners, the ratio of taxes paid compared with income earned has risen. For example, in 1980, the top 10 percent earned 32 percent of the income and paid 44 percent of the taxes—a ratio of 1.4. In 2004, this group earned more of the income (44 percent) but paid a lot more of the taxes (68 percent)—a ratio of 1.6. In other words, progressivity—in terms of share of total taxes paid—has risen. On the other hand, for the top 1 percent of earners, progressivity has declined from a ratio of 2.2 in 1980 to 1.9 in 2004.

There are several reasons for this relationship between lower tax rates for the rich and the rich actually ending up paying more taxes:

First, when one punishes hard work, creativity, and investment, the result will invariably be less hard work, creativity, and investment. Let me put it this way: I need some yard work done, liberals. How about you come over and break your back working for me, and when your finished, I’ll give you 30% of your wages, and give the other 70% to all those “poor” who didn’t do anything? Don’t like that deal. Guess what? Nobody else does either.

Another reason lowering taxes actually results in the rich paying more taxes is the reduction in sheltering assets:

Keep in mind as well that the IRS only records the income that taxpayers report. Its data don’t include income that the rich hide in tax shelters or otherwise defer. And there is evidence that lower tax rates since 1981 have caused the rich to declare more of what they earn. In 1980, when the top income tax rate was 70%, the richest 1% paid only 19% of all income taxes; now, with a top rate of 35%, they pay more than double that share. With lower rates and fewer tax loopholes after the 1986 reform, there is less incentive to shelter income to avoid tax.

With high taxes, there is a greater incentive to pay accountants to move assets around to conceal them or bury them in non-taxable locations. As long as there are taxes, there will always be tax shelters, of course, (I still remember my outrage in 2004 over learning that George Bush – who called for lower taxes – was paying the maximum tax rate of 35% while John Kerry – who called for everyone else to pay higher taxes – was sheltering his own wealth and paying less than 18% in taxes). But lowering taxes reduces sheltering, and makes it more worthwhile to invest.

A third reason that lower taxes for the rich result in the rich paying more taxes is due to the incentive to increase their investment. Stephen Moore, the senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal editorial board, points out that the capital gains tax is essentially a voluntary tax because asset owners can avoid it by simply holding onto their stocks, homes, or businesses. This “lock-in” effect can be economically inefficient, because owners have a tax incentive to hold on to poor investments rather than drawing out the cash and putting it into assets that would be more productive. When the capital gains tax is cut, people unlock their assets and reinvest in other enterprises.

The 1997 tax reform, passed by a Republican Congress under President Clinton, reduced the capital gains tax rate from 28 percent to 20 percent, and taxable capital gains nearly doubled over the next three years. The 2003 reform brought the rate down to 15 percent, and between 2002 and 2005 there was a 154 percent increase in capital gains reported as income.

Democrats cry that gains by the rich have come at the expense of the declining living standard for the middle class. But that is simply stupid. Think of Bill Gates, the wealthiest man in America. Has Bill Gates made your life better, or worse (periodic aggravation over some stupid computer glitch aside)? Bill Gates has made the work of millions of businesses and individuals more easy and more productive. And if Bill Gates suddenly took his tens of billions of dollars and moved to France, the income distribution in America would all of a sudden appear far more equitable, but no one would be better off (except in France, which would all-of-a-sudden become tens of billions of dollars richer).

Barack Obama has come out and stated that he would raise the capital gains tax. He falsely believes that only the rich pay them, but he is simply wrong. The latest polls show that 52 percent of Americans own stock and thus benefit directly from lower capital gains and dividend taxes. Reduced tax rates on dividends also triggered a huge jump in the number of companies paying out dividends. As the National Bureau of Economic Research put it, “The surge in regular dividend payments after the 2003 reform is unprecedented in recent years.” Dividend income is up nearly 50 percent since the 2003 tax cut. And money market funds, pension funds, and various other vehicles which are very invested in the rewards of lowered capital gains benefit the overwhelming majority of Americans.

Barack Obama also claims that he will lower taxes for most Americans, but the reality is that most Americans pay very little in taxes. Again, the bottom 50% are paying only an infinitesimal percentage of the taxes, so you can’t give them much of a tax cut by definition. Yet these are the people to whom the Democrats claim to want to give tax cuts. Just how much should the rich be expected to pay? How will penalizing their productivity not undermine that productivity? At the same time, Obama is committing himself to spending nearly two trillion dollars in new spending. And when the rich begin to reduce their investments, shelter their money, and conceal their assets in tax-free vehicles, where do you think he will go to get the money to fund his programs?

The simple fact of the matter is that the richest Americans are paying far more than their fair share of taxes. As Stephen Moore notes:

But Barack Obama has decided the rich still don’t pay enough. He would redistribute the tax burden even more heavily on small business owners and the entrepreneurial class (two-thirds of the tax filers in the highest income tax bracket are small-business owners.) The nonpartisan Tax Foundation’s Scott Hodge has just crunched the numbers on the Obama plan and concludes that “more than $131 billion would be redistributed from the top 1 percent of taxpayers to all other taxpayers.”

Sounds fair, no? Only 1.13 million taxpayers, out of some 128 million, would end up paying higher taxes, according to the Obama camp.

But in the real world, who ends up paying a tax is not just the person on whose tax return it falls. History has demonstrated time and again that raising tax rates on the wealthy in the name of “redistribution” leads to so much income shifting, reduced work and investment, and redeployment of money into tax shelters, that the rich usually pay less, not more taxes, at higher rates. The burden of paying for government shifts to others, including some who may not file an income tax return at all – because they no longer have jobs or no longer earn enough to pay income tax…

Somebody needs to give the Obama campaign a refresher on all this. The Tax Foundation’s Mr. Hodge wonders: “Can a tax system so focused on redistribution be compatible with economic growth?” Probably not but the Obama brain trust wants to give it a try anyway.

The Tax Foundation had this to say about the Obama plan:

“Under the Obama plan for 2009,” explains Hodge, “more than $131 billion would be redistributed from the top 1 percent of taxpayers to all other taxpayers.”

As a result, the top 1 percent of households would pay more federal taxes of all kinds than the bottom 80 percent of households. That lopsided distribution under Obama does include payroll taxes and other federal taxes, but it excludes the new payroll tax hike that Obama plans to levy on people making more than $250,000 because details about that plan are currently unclear.

“In other words,” says Hodge, “it is at this point a cautious estimate to say that in 2009, under Obama’s plan, 1.13 million Americans would pay more in all federal taxes than 128 million of their fellow citizens combined.”

This is outright confiscation. It is Democrats urging their voters to seize the assets of a minority of voters. It is “the tyranny of the masses” that our founders so rightly feared. And it is wrong.

Lower taxes for the rich result in more investment, a stronger stock market, more hiring, and more products and services that benefit people’s lives. The redistributionism favored by Democrats, on the other hand, result in counterproductive policies that hurt the very people that they propose to help.

In a Foreign Affairs article titled, “An Empty Revolution: The Unfulfilled Promises of Hugo Chávez,” Francisco Rodríguez points out that:

Even critics of Hugo Chávez tend to concede that he has made helping the poor his top priority. But in fact, Chávez’s government has not done any more to fight poverty than past Venezuelan governments, and his much-heralded social programs have had little effect. A close look at the evidence reveals just how much Chávez’s “revolution” has hurt Venezuela’s economy — and that the poor are hurting most of all.

You’ve heard that proverb: “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”? Whoever coined it probably had liberals in mind.

When President Bill Clinton took office, he initially veered to the left with the help of a Democrat House and Senate. The result was so disasterous that the largest political landslide in U.S. history occurred under his watch, with Republicans and their “Contract With America” sweeping in. And the economic strength of the mid 1990s was due far more to the resurgence of Republican ideas than it was to the wisdom of Democratic economic stratgies.

As we consider the prospect of the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate becoming president with a filibuster proof Democratic Congress, we should soberly consider the disaterous lessons of redistributionism and socialist style governments and learn from those mistakes rather than repeat them.