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....

Obama Budget Revealed: "Long Way To Go"

"Obviously, the bottom line is frightening," said Rudolph Penner, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "They have a long way to go to show fiscal restraint."




The Obama administration unveiled its FY 2010 budget today, a $3.4 trillion, 1500 page monstrosity.

He followed the release up with a statement that "We can no longer afford to spend as if deficits do not matter and waste is not a problem." Do tell!

John McCain, on Twitter, quickly criticized the budget's proposed cuts of $17 billion as being only 1/2% of the total budget.

The total budget works out to spending an amount equal to approximately $11,000 per person in America for the fiscal year.

Here's an idea. Take out all the money needed to maintain the military and its operations at home and abroad - estimated at about $700 billion - and simply give the American people what is left as a block grant. So figure that every American man, woman, and child gets 80% of $11,000, or $8,800, and the government gets a year-long vacation.

My prediction: With $8,800 returned to every PERSON in America, there would be no more economic meltdown.

My second prediction: Since Obama cares about expanding a Fascist regulatory regime, and not curing the economic problems of the country, it couldn't possibly be on the radar.

But it does make one think. If government simply getting out of the way would solve the economic woes of the nation, why, exactly, are we expanding the role of government right now?

Financial Fun

1) The initial PROPOSED tab for the governmental bailout of the economy, estimated at $4.6165 trillion (don't you love the four-decimal point specificity? rumor has it that the point-one-six-five trillion was to account for low-income Netflix and lunch money programs....), was a higher total than the total cost of the New Deal, the Louisiana Purchase, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the War in Iraq, the Savings and Loan Crisis, and every NASA project in history - including research.

2) The eventual ACTUAL tab (actual meaning "the frivolous figure passed in Congressional bills which will be endlessly quoted in soundbytes," which is not to be confused with the ACTUAL ACTUAL tab, meaning "the actual amount of money spent, discoverable only after various programs for low-income Netflix financing and teapot museum-construction have been renewed innumerable times, which will likely approach $20 trillion, but that is another story for another day) for the economic bailout, estimated at $7.76 trillion, is a higher total than the total cost of the New Deal, the Louisiana Purchase, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the War in Iraq, the Savings and Loan Crisis and every NASA project in history - including research, PLUS the entire cost of the Second World War AND the cost of dry-cleaning Monica Lewinksy's dresses.

3) Susan Collins (RINO - Maine) insisted that the stimulus bill be pared back from $838 billion dollars to a mere $780+ billion. Why? To ensure that Congress and the President were behaving in a "financially responsible" manner. Uh-huh. Shaving off that extra $50 billion sure did help, chickie! I mean, $780 billion is a lot, but $838 billion is SERIOUS money!

4) The Bailout Bill, which was supposed to rescue the homeowners of America, had it merely been applied to mortgages rather than new governmental programs, would have paid off IN THEIR ENTIRETY more than 90% of all outstanding American residential mortgages (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aGq2B3XeGKok ).

5) The Bailout Bill, which was supposed to rescue the homeowners of America, was followed up by TODAY's announcement by Barack Hussein Muhammad bin Obama that we have a NEW $275 billion (as of today) plan to rescue America's homeowners (no, wait, we are serious this time. really. no joking. stop laughing. i'm serious.).

So Now We Know What Hope and Change Means!

What happens when you take a committed socialist with no experience in governance, who has never so much as held a legitimate adult job (and yes, I know he taught law, and having graduated from law school, I utterly deny that being a law professor is an adult job), who is full of style and resentment but utterly lacks substance and wisdom, and make him president?

In March, nearly 750,000 jobs were lost and the government "rescue" of the economy is almost equivalent to the yearly Gross Domestic Product at $12.8 trillion (see http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE5303F820090401 and http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=armOzfkwtCA4&refer=worldwide ).




















Welcome to the nightmare.

Barack Obama is dishonest and incompetent at best. At worst, those folks who maintain that he actually has a strategy to run the nation into the ground in order to do away with Constitutional government may actually be on to something.

During the campaign, it was a cute (though legitimate) recurring theme for those of us who knew Obama wasn't quite up to the job to ask his brain-dead cultlike following, "What does Hope and/or Change mean exactly?" One may look back in my own blogs here on thoughts and note that numerous times I referenced this question. Of course, no genuine answer ever came. Variations on this theme included asking the zombie left, between the gutteral moans accompanying their Obamagasms, "Exactly which position of Obama's do you agree with?" Well, of course, since Obama never actually took a position (other than the fifth-grade essay variety: "War bad, Peace good!"), no answers were ever forthcoming on that question either.

Well, now we know.

The Change promised by Obama includes the surrender of all fiscal responsiblity. Obama has increased the public debt of the United States by more in his first less-than-hundred-days than any other president in the history of the United States - and more than all of them combined. The cumulative federal deficit for the United States, as accumulated over more than 200 years of history, was $4.4 trillion when Obama took office. In less than 100 days in office, Obama has already proposed $4.8 trillion in deficit spending. Yet he continues to promise that the federal budget deficit will be halved by the end of his first term. Yeah, right. And Gitmo is closing and the soldiers in Iraq are coming home, right?

The Hope promised by Obama, then, certainly involves the ethereal hope that somebody, someday, may be able to pay all this fiat money back.

The Change promised by Obama includes the end of American leadership in the world economy. Again, before Obama's first 100 days had ended, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was reduced to panhandling on the streets of Beijing - showing up at an economic meeting in China and, with hat in hand and trained monkey dancing, begging the Chinese not to stop investing in American government paper. "After all," she crooned, "we really need your money, and if we go down, you guys will lose everything you have already invested!" A stunning argument, sure to go down in the annals of rhetoric as one of the great appeals in all of human history.

The Chinese responded by proposing a new worldwide currency administered by the International Monetary Fund that would relieve them of the need of the American greenback entirely.

So the Hope promised by Obama likely involves the ephemeral wish that perhaps somebody other than the Chinese will start lending us money so that we can fund Obama's federal shopping spree.

The Change promised by Obama includes the end of the private sector's freedom from governmental intervention. Yes, the federal government, the same people who brought you such marvels of efficiency and service as the Post Office, is now going to make the rules for private businesses.

Remember that the very mortgage schemes that firms such as Countrywide mastered to their own detriment were originally dreamed up by Democrats and the Clinton administration in an attempt to get people into houses who could not afford the mortgages for those houses. Who saw a mortgage problem coming when you lent mortgage money to people who could not repay it? (Hint: Democrats) Now, dressed in his Super Socialist red cape, Obama rushes in and says, "The pound of flesh that I exact from the firms who did exactly what we Democrats demanded that they do, and now need governmental rescuing because of it, is that I, Barack Hussein Muhammad bin Obama, the Super Socialist, will now be making decisions on how to run these private companies. I will be making decisions on wage issues (so you guys over there give back those contractual bonuses!) and I will be making hiring decisions (so the head of GM is now summarily fired without Due Process of law).

So apparently the Hope promised by Obama involves the wispy notion that the federal government, who cannot adequately deliver mail or make laws without melting down the mortgage industry, is going to be able to directly run multinational organizations like AIG and GM better than people who actually have money to make or lose based on performance.

And this is killer: because Obama has so royally screwed matters up in less than 100 days in office, now the government has a hyperfemme help-me-emote website that will, I suppose, offer governmental subsidies for facial tissues since I can't stop crying as I look at the whole world collapsing under Obama's gentle and incompetent tutelage. The essence of Obamazombie hope is crystallized in the new Nanny State website, "Getting Through Tough Economic Times" at http://www.samhsa.gov/economy/. Note to self: there is a better way to get through tough economic times, and it is a proven success - ELECT REAGAN.

Finally, the Change promised by Obama includes such a headlong, trainwreck, rush into socialism that even Eurosocialists are frightened by America's descent into Marxism. Who ever thought we would see the day when the Swedes and the French would helpfully offer advice to America: "Perhaps you need to slow down on your socialist scheming?" Who ever thought that the economy of the United States could be so poorly managed - in a mere 100 days or less at that! - that the Chinese Communists would begin to lecture us on fiscal responsibility?

The real Hope? I hope the next two years goes quickly.... Vote Republican in 2010.

And I hope that a law will soon be passed taking the privilege of voting away from the brain-dead buffoons who voted for Barack Hussein Muhammad bin Obama. They've done enough damage already.