Monday, June 29, 2009

Grim Truths

The words of Thomas Sowell:

"Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their grand-daughters to live under sharia law.

The glib pieties in Barack Obama's televised sermonettes will not stop Iran from becoming a nuclear terrorist nation."

Monday, June 22, 2009

The Real Cost of High Taxes


"I don't know if I can live on my income or not - the government won't let me try it."
Bob Thaves of "Frank and Ernest"


The Obama administration can barely keep the drool from dripping out the sides of its collective mouth at the thought of seizing yet more of the Amercan economy and raising taxes higher, and higher, and yet higher.

The Center for Fiscal Accountability, however, recently placed ads in magazines showing how much we are paying in taxes already. If all taxes that you currently pay (income tax, sales tax, corporate income tax, property tax, capital gains tax, unemployment insurance tax, workman's compensation tax, licensing taxes, regulatory fines... you get the idea) were published like the Surgeon General's Warning on every item that you purchased, what exactly are you already paying in taxes even before Obama has his way and raises your taxes again?

* 37.6% of a can of soda is tax.

* 44.8% of a meal dining out is tax.

*45.6% of the price of a firearm is tax.

*46.3% of your cable TV bill is tax.

* 46.4% of your cell phone and its contract is tax.

* 50% of your nightly hotel bill is tax.

* 51.2% of the price of gasoline is tax.

* 51.8% of your landline phone is tax.

* 55% of domestic airfare is tax.

* 56.2% of each bottle of domestic beer is tax.

* 60.6% of the cost of a car rental is tax.

* 79.6% of the cost of liquor is tax.

* 81.3% of the cost of a cigarette is tax.

Paying enough yet? How much MORE money would you have in your pocket if, for each item above, you could pay the cost that it actually takes to manufacture and distribute the item, along with a hefty profit, minus all that tax?

Could you send your kids to college without a second mortgage?

Pay off your credit cards?

Repair your home? Or maybe even pay it off?

And Barack Hussein Muhammad bin Obama wants to raise taxes in this country?

Really?

Maybe the real solution is to stop spending so much....

Friday, June 19, 2009

Democrats Incapable of Fixing Economy

Seeing the pirouetting of the Obama Administration while the American people scratch their collective noggin and ask, "Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?", it is compelling to think of a time when a modern member of the Democrat party has made reasonable adjustments that led to long-term economic prosperity.

Well, besides when Kennedy acted like a Republican and slashed taxes, that is.

And one engaged in such an intellectual mission is simply bound to come up dry.

"But wait!" gasps the fair reader, who believes that truth sometimes, somehow emanates from the CBS Evening News, Oprah, and The Daily Show, "what about the highly-vaunted Clinton economy?"

Ah, yes, the myth of the Clinton economy. But one who accepted the belief system of The Daily Show would believe in such tales, which inevitably involve princesses, dragons, and begin with "Once upon a time in a land far away..." wouldn't one?

Futures Magazine first made the point in early 2001 (by my recollection) that the "Clinton economy" was a myth of the same magnitude as the much-harassed Yeti and alien abductions, though thankfully without the latter's uncomfortable probes (the myth, not the economy!). I still have in my files the magazine's chart showing the buildup of the stock market throughout the Clinton years. The below is a reasonable reproduction of that chart, for the sake of argument.



And the discerning reader will of course, note that in the initial years of the Clinton administration the economy was less than robust. In fact, let's be clear, there were times it was in slight decline, and at best it was barely holding its own until....

Until what? Well, look at the chart! Elections take place in November, do they not? And those elected are installed in office in the following January, are they not?

And you will note that the steep run-up in the Dow Jones Industrial Average took place following the 1994 election, which replaced a decrepit, corrupt, and high-taxing band of liberals with tax-slashing, welfare-busting, and otherwise swashbuckling Republicans who had vowed to push a pre-defined "Contract with America."

The increase in economic health during the Clinton administration was, of course, due to the fact that Clinton wasn't getting his way for the last six years of it! His strategy of "triangulation," recommended by Republican strategist Dick Morris (brought in expressly to breathe fresh life into his faltering administration, if condom-covered Christmas trees and otherwise juicy Gap dresses and cigars can be dignified with the term administration). whereby Clinton agreed to do his best impression of Republicans (remember "the era of big government is over" and "the end of welfare as we know it"?) while cooperating - but to a lesser degree - with the GOP, leaves us with the lesson: when Democrats have free rein (reign?), prepare for misery.

Which is precisely the finding of Yale economist Ray Fair. Fair, in attempting to discern the relative effectiveness of the two American parties' general economic policies (and eschewing the Democratic penchant for determining said effect by examining the entrails of a chicken or by happily guessing, as Joe Biden recently confessed was the Obama administration's [sic] strategy, but I digress....), he found that the more reliably and long-term a state votes Democratic, the higher was their unemployment rate in this most recent April.




Where a state has reliably voted for a Democratic candidate since the 1980s (and one assumes, where the socialist policies of the Democratic party find most general acceptance at state and local levels as well) are now experiencing unemployment levels approaching double digits. States that have been solidly Democratic since the 1990s are slightly lower, and states which turned "blue" since 2000 slightly exceed 8 per cent. States that have been GOP strongholds since 2000 have the next highest unemployment, followed by states that are reliably GOP since the 1990s. Of course, that group of states which are most solidly GOP, and which have voted for Republican candidates most reliably since the 1980s, have the lowest unemployment levels of all.

Moral of the Story One: Voting has very real consequences.

Moral of the Story Two: Obama's high-tax, increasing-regulation, spend-like-flowing-water, fascistic-takeover-of-business, let's nationalize the whole country approach is not likely to make things better.

But, like Clinton, he has to face midterm elections.

The solution will be to vote a straight Republican ticket come 2010.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Biden: Stimulus Failed

Over at Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, our fellow bloggers are making much (justified) hay over Joe Biden's continually running mouth. Now he may have let it run just a bit too much, and Obama may be contemplating a knife-sharpening session, either for Biden's back or Obama's own throat. Poor Obama. As a liberal, he can't be bound by the lessons of history, but that Joe Biden runs his mouth first and thinks about what he has said several days later is one historical truth he should have meditated upon.

Nevertheless, as Sherri makes clear, when you have somebody like Biden dropping verbal explosives thither and yon, every once in a while you will get a little nugget of truth that you hadn't counted on....

Sherri writes:

According to an AP article yesterday, Joe Biden admits to the failure of Obama’s Stimulus Package, saying:

“everyone guessed wrong” on the impact of the economic stimulus, but he defended the administration’s spending designed to combat rising joblessness.

He went on to add that inaccuracies in unemployment predictions shouldn’t undercut the White House’s support of the $787 billion economic revival plan that has not met the expectations of President Obama’s team.

{snip}

Sheesh! That is what we’ve been trying to say since before the stimulus package was passed! Any idiot with any economic experience knew what would happen; but Obama and his crew of advisers know what is best for us, don’t they?

Now, Biden’s economic advisor is admitting that their projections were based on flawed research. And Biden is admitting that this flawed data was used to fasttrack passage of this massive economic travesty.

Biden said the White House is keenly aware of the gap between the rhetoric used to sell fast passage of the legislation and the reality that has 14.5 million people unemployed. The administration had predicted that the stimulus bill would create or save as many as 3.5 million jobs.

“No one realized how bad the economy was. The projections, in fact, turned out to be worse. But we took the mainstream model as to what we thought — and everyone else thought — the unemployment rate would be,” Biden said.

I love this approach - "nobody realized how bad the economy was." This of course is straight from the Billy Bob Clinton playbook as a justification for breaking campaign promises and explaining away the obvious consequences of incompetence.

All this is really just too precious. Obama's administration is run by guesswork ("everybody guessed wrong") and has admitted to what they spent years calling George W. Bush (a man with more character in his eyelid than this administration has in its totality) a "liar" for: "using rhetoric to sell" a legislative position when the facts were actually much different than the "guessing" would have indicated.

You can't make this stuff up.

And you can't make liberals see it.

Left-Wing Comic: Obama Should Resign

Ted Rall, a left-wing syndicated cartoonist, has become so frustrated with the Obama administration that he is calling for Barack Hussein Muhammad bin Obama's immediate resignation.

We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through.

From health care to torture to the economy to war, Obama has reneged on pledges real and implied....

Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now — before he drags us further into the abyss.

I'm going out on a limb and predicting 1) Obama never had any patriotism from which to have any left, 2) He won't be stepping down willingly, 3) His purpose is to drag us further into the abyss.

But nevertheless, Mr. Rall, we accept your apology for voting for this train-wreck of a man. And by the way, if you recognize a gap in a man's character that is so obvious that you can honestly say "We expected broken promises," perhaps don't vote for such a man in the future, huh?

If they will lie a little, they will lie a lot, my granddad always said....

These Trillions are Starting to Add Up!

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) yesterday released its initial evaluation of the Democrat-sponsored "Affordable Health Choices Act." This analysis did not factor in the entire cost of the legislation, a point that the CBO director is at pains to make, as only the major provisions of the bill were evaluated.



As if the trillions of dollars already introduced into the federal deficit by Barack Hussein Muhammad bin Obama were not enough, the initial, and incomplete estimate of the CBO for this preliminary Democrat-Socialist health care legislation confirms two major points that skeptics of Obama's fantasyland health plans have been making.

* The U.S. cannot afford a major restructuring of the health care system, as the (again, preliminary) estimate is that the cost of the Democrat plan would add more than $1 trillion to existing deficits.

* That any plan such as the nationalization of health care favored by Democrats and Obama would effectively function as a disincentive for private insurance.

In other words, those who now are paying for private insurance would drop their own coverage in preference for the subsidized or free health care offered by the government. This last point undeniably indicates that the socialization of health care has very little to do with the uninsured, and rather has to do with inflicting a command-and-control economy on the United States.

The CBO director wrote on the CBO blog:

According to our preliminary assessment, enacting the proposal would result in a net increase in federal budget deficits of about $1.0 trillion over the 2010-2019 period. When fully implemented, about 39 million individuals would obtain coverage through the new insurance exchanges. At the same time, the number of people who had coverage through an employer would decline by about 15 million (or roughly 10 percent), and coverage from other sources would fall by about 8 million, so the net decrease in the number of people uninsured would be about 16 million or 17 million.

In addition, the CBO frets that the total cost for social welfare/socialized health care spending is not likely encompassed even by the outrageous Democrat proposal at issue, since Democrats are also proposing an expansion of Medicaid, the fiscal consequences of which will not be known until the extent of the expansion is decided.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

PRAVDA Warns Obamazombies to Avoid Communism!

An opinion piece that appeared on April 27 in the English edition of Pravda, long the propaganda mouthpiece of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, laments that American is descending into Marxism "like the breaking of a great dam."

Understand, now. Pravda is whining that the U.S. is becoming a Socialist state.

This, of course, follows closely on the heels of the U.S. being passively lectured by both the Chinese and the French about becoming too socialist, too quickly.

Karl Marx is right now distributing cigars bearing the slogan, "It's an Obama," in hell.

And the Russian writer refers to the Obamazombies as "hapless, passive sheeple."

Yes, that was not Limbaugh or Hannity that wrote that. That was a former Communist.

How did it happen, according to our intrepid writer? Reading his explanation is like reading a list of "The Top Ten Things That Make Neal Boortz Apoplectic."

* A dumbed-down education system ("dumbed down" are his words).

* Americans "care more about their 'right' to choke down a McDonald's hamburger... than they care about their constitutional rights."

* Loss of faith in God, loss of integrity in religious practice, and a consequent flight to Marxist politicians who promise to remake the world.

* And I quote, the "The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama."

The Democrat Party, complains our former hobnail-booted Commie, "make our [Russian] oligarchs look like little more than street thugs.... Yes, the Americans have beaten our own thieves by [the] shear volume [of their corruption]."

How is that whole hopey-changey thingy working out for you people?