konane's Blog

"The Left and Progressively Higher Taxes

by  J.T. Young
06/06/2010 Source Human Events

"You can learn a lot from what the left says. And even more from what they don’t. Take taxes for instance.

Liberals have a very amorphous definition of fairness, and a very ambiguous definition of who should pay them. That is something that should leave us all very nervous.

How much, for how long, and to what end should taxes be paid? The left can not answer these questions. If they were to be honest, they would admit they have never even considered them. Still they are unshaken in their certitude of “fairness:” a progressive tax system.

According to liberals, a progressive tax system is simply one in which those making more money pay more in taxes. On its face, this would seem an acceptable standard—one few could dispute. Strangely enough though, the left themselves do not accept it.

The problem is that the standard of making more income and paying more in taxes is a very loose definition of a progressive tax system. And it certainly does not define the tax system that the left seeks.

Even under a flat-tax system, those making more in income pay more in taxes. In fact, under a pure flat tax system, people pay taxes in direct proportion to their income.

Take for example a system taxing income at a flat rate of 10%. An individual making $100,000 annually would pay $10,000 in taxes; an individual making $10,000 annually would pay $1,000 in taxes. The ratios of both income earned and taxes paid are 10-1.

This perfectly meets the left’s shorthand definition of a progressive tax system. It should make liberals very happy. However, the left despise the concept of a flat tax, despite its fitting the definition of fairness they profess.

The fact is that simply having those who make more, pay more is not what the left want at all. They want more, a lot more.

Now it is hardly unusual for the left to say other than what they mean. What they really mean is generally unpopular outside their own circles and would sound unfair by too many not of their ilk.

A truly progressive tax system is one in which those making more pay progressively higher rates—not simply paying progressively more in taxes. That’s a very big and important distinction from what the left blithely say about their tax fairness goals.

The results of such a system can be plainly seen in the U.S. tax system. According to Congress’ official and nonpartisan tax estimator, the Joint Committee on Taxation, the top 3.7% of filers earn 27.1% of the nation’s income. Yet they pay 54.8% of the total income taxes—more than double their income share. In contrast, the bottom two-fifths of earners (39.9%) earn 7.7% of the income and pay negative 2.1% of the income tax (due to government spending in the form of refundable credits).

And even this disproportionate burden, is insufficient. Liberals readily admit to wanting both higher taxes and those taxes to be focused on those earning more. Not only is this audacity of mendicancy enough to take one’s breath away, it also should take us back to the left’s fairness equation.

By defining fairness as a relation between earning and paying, it begs the question of the limits to this linkage. Is there a point at which rates, amounts, and total share in taxes could be increased to a level that liberals would deem unfair? What is the optimal point of taxation for the left?

While the left worries much about the fairness of earners not paying enough, they have apparently not given any thought at all about what too much would be.

For liberals, the system evidently just gets progressively fairer the more earners pay. Their definition of fairness is no definition at all; it is a continuum. Fairness in liberals’ terminology is not simply the definition for a progressive tax system. It is a definition for a system that progressively increases the level of taxation on everyone.

Of course, the left will never explicitly say this. Saying so would be too much of a shock—and too much of a threat—to anyone but themselves. And they really do not need to say it, their actions state it all too clearly."

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=37354

Real rowdy bunch, huh?????????????  Douglasville, GA an Atlanta suburb just off I-20 West a couple miles past Six Flags Over Georgia.

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From the article linked below

"........From their government, Americans don't expect perfection. But the system requires that people at least have faith in their political leaders to be competent and accountable......"

We don't have either.

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 "........The public's unconditional faith in national institutions is dying, too.........."

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/06/07/1667390_p3/ap-essay-govt-fails-latest-test.html

http://www.politico.com/blogs/onmedia/0610/Helen_Thomas_retires.html

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/05/026297.php

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/05/026301.php

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/05/026395.php

June 5, 2010 Posted by Scott at 12:47 PM

"......I would also like to repeat this footnote. Even Churchill had his doubts about the outcome of the Battle of Britain. While he was driving home from Buckingham Palace on May 10, 1940, after having received the King's appointment as prime minister, Churchill said to an aide: "I hope that it is not too late. I am very much afraid that it is. We can only do our best."

In the decisive Cabinet meeting of May 28, Churchill addressed members of the government who were considerably less resolute than he was: "I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man.... And I am convinced that every one of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground." The effect on his colleagues was electrifying.

Commenting on this episode in Churchill on Leadership, Steven Hayward writes: "[F]rom time to time, and especially in a crisis, the genuine leader must simply exert his personal force and summon up his willfulness." Watching the video of Governor Christie in Robbinsville discussing his battle with the teachers' union, one senses that he has absorbed this particular Churchillian lesson........."

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/06/026467.php

"........But Obama will be endlessly second-guessed for allowing more offshore drilling before he made sure that his regulators were up to the task and then taking so long to jump in after it was clear they weren't..........."
https://www.lotterypost.com/blogentry/41986/viewcomments

Obama can rail all he wants but one fact remains Obama was holding it when it broke.

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June 5, 2010 Posted by John at 11:14 AM

"President Obama was in the Gulf region yesterday, trying, somehow, to get ahead of the environmental/political disaster that is the oil spill there. The Associated Press   http://www.startribune.com/business/95681104.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUac8HEaDiaMDCinchO7DU

covers his visit, no longer treating Obama as untouchable.

As a practical matter, Obama has been reduced to railing against British Petroleum and vowing that the oil company someday will pay. There are several problems with this approach. First, "railing" is never the image that a President wants to project. Second, as the oil begins to wash ashore in Alabama and Florida, and the spill goes on and on--what is this, day 46? Something like that--the inadequacy of money damages years down the road is painfully obvious. Obama risks looking impotent, as he and his aides can't keep their story straight: is BP just a puppet that has been taking orders from the feds from the first day of the spill, or are the federal agencies so constrained as to be virtually powerless to do anything about the crisis?

Further, Obama demanded yesterday that BP not pay its shareholders a dividend. This is beyond impotent, it's silly. If there were some legitimate concern about BP's solvency and its ultimate ability to pay cleanup costs and damages, such a demand might make some kind of sense. But there isn't. Once again, Obama just looks petulant.

Likewise with his ban on exploratory drilling in the Gulf, a classic case of shutting the barn door long after the cows are gone. A study by the Louisiana Mid-continent Oil and Gas Association concludes that Obama's moratorium will cost Gulf Coast workers $330 million per month in lost wages--exactly what the hard-hit Gulf economy doesn't need.

The AP story linked above includes this vignette:

On Obama's trip to the Grand Isle on the Louisiana coast, his motorcade passed a building adorned with his portrait reminiscent of posters of him during his presidential campaign. Instead of "hope" or "change," the words "what now?" were on his forehead.

Here is a photo of the building; the AP didn't mention the Jindal for President sign:

PHOTO

"What now?" is unfortunately a question to which the Obama administration has no apparent answer."

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/06/026465.php

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/06/026478.php

 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/4/ftc-floats-drudge-tax/

Such a noble, thoughtful and heartfelt gesture .... I'm so impressed NOT!

You can bet the farm if the same bunch is elected .... business as usual hurling us deeper into a bottomless pit of debt and restrictions.

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"Election spooks lawmakers, curbs Congress spending

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100607/D9G6D6NO0.html

  Former Weather Underground leaders William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, as well as Code Pink founder Jodie Evans, helped organize the Free Gaza Movement, which launched the six-ship flotilla from Turkey to Israel that ended in a violent clash with Israeli Defense Forces, BigGovernment.com............."

reported.............."http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/06/ayers_dorhn_helped_organize_pe.html

Like or hate him President Bush could speak far better from the heart than from a teleprompter.  However, ability to speak eloquently and level of intelligence are two entirely different aspects of a person with one NOT flowing into the other by defalult.  George Bush was smart like a fox but not a BSer like Clinton or Obama. 

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"Obama pays price for thinking Bush was a dunce

By: Chris Stirewalt
Political Editor
June 3, 2010
Source Washington Examiner

"President Obama went from the triumph of passing his national health plan to the tragedy of the BP oil spill in just two months.

It was only March 28 when Obama pronounced that getting Congress to pass a bill strenuously disliked by the American people was proof that government could "still do big things." By May 28, Americans were watching oil belch up from the briny deep and wondering whether government could do anything at all.

Blame over what Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano might call a "man-caused disaster" in the Gulf of Mexico will be traded until long after the last pelican has been wiped down and the final check has been cut to an out-of-work shrimper.

BP will get most of the blame, and there's reason to wonder whether a company that saw its stock described as having "the smell of death" will survive billions of dollars in fines, lawsuits and cleanup fees.

But Obama will be endlessly second-guessed for allowing more offshore drilling before he made sure that his regulators were up to the task and then taking so long to jump in after it was clear they weren't.

Some of the blame will be unfair, and some will be well placed. But a good bit from both categories will adhere to the president, who once was seen as spotless.

But Obama needn't wonder why the wreck of the Deepwater Horizon will have done so much damage to his political fortunes.

By raising expectations for what government can do and for campaigning irresponsibly against the failures of his predecessor, Obama made his own eventual fall all the more precipitous.

When Obama was running for president in 2008 he was still bashing George W. Bush for his handling of Hurricane Katrina, scoffing at Bush's promise to "do whatever it takes" to help New Orleans residents rebuild.

"Those words have been caught in a tangle of half-measures, half-hearted leadership and red tape," Obama said on a campaign swing through New Orleans.

Obama can hardly be surprised to now hear Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal giving him a taste of his own medicine for the administration's slow response to local requests for permission to act against the disaster when the feds weren't offering better ideas of their own.

Obama knew perfectly well that there were problems in New Orleans that predated Katrina that could never be fixed by the federal government, no matter how long the Bush administration carpet-bombed the city with free money. But he was not going to give up any of his rhetorical flourishes because of a fear that he might raise expectations too high in NOLA.

Obama believed his own hype and figured that he could succeed where Bush failed.

Now, two more years down the road, Obama has been unable to solve the problems that he accused Bush of leaving behind through "half-hearted leadership." And now the city faces another disaster, in part because Obama's administration was so bad at regulating the oil industry.

Obama, who railed against the oil industry and wrapped himself in the suffering of the poor people of New Orleans, surely was attuned to the risks at play in deepwater offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

But even he could not fly in like Superman and save the day.

Of all the fictions that Democrats embraced during the Bush presidency, perhaps the most dangerous was that Bush was an idiot.

John Kerry's bitter joke to a college class about poor students getting "stuck in Iraq" and Obama's famous line about being opposed to "dumb wars" reveal the view among liberal intellectuals that the country's problems arose because Bush was a dunce.

It played well to the liberal base that sees Bush as Will Ferrell's impersonation of him: a dope who was led around by Dick Cheney and a cabal of war-mongering oil barons. And as the Iraq war bogged down, New Orleans moldered under floodwaters and the Panic of 2008 wiped out retirement accounts, the idea that it could all be blamed on Bush's incompetence was appealing.

It was certainly more appealing than a more "nuanced" (as Kerry would say) view that America, in the third decade of its third century, faced some nearly impossible challenges.

Agree with him or not, George W. Bush was no dummy. But assuming that he was one allowed Obama to believe the job of being president was easier than it is.

Obama's misapprehension will pay bitter dividends for his presidency for years to come."

Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Obama-pays-price-for-thinking-Bush-was-a-dunce-95435324.html

Came in email .... easy listen.

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http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=174362