Obama Relying on the 50% Who Don’t Pay Federal Income Tax to Back His Marxist Agenda

 Obama’s class warfare initiative

  I was taught to be a lefty even back in the 1950s before the  upheavals  of the cultural revolution which introduced America to  drugs, public and deviant sex,  rock,  violence, new brands of stupidity,  Marxism and Marxism’ s god atheism.       I was  introduced to  the stench of that era as a faithful, devoted Democrat.     I was repelled by  the treason exhibited on television by  John F. Kerry spreading his vile poisons coast to coast via CBS television to launch a career for himself.    The Democrat Party has never been an American political force since.   It broadened its base to dream of the world, Cuba and all, as a much better place,  and such dreamings  found  their America  wanting.   Spoiled children ravaged the culture.   They raped, pillaged and burned.   These folks didn’t die and fade away.   They didn’t even bother to grow up.   They returned to college to solidify their thirst for dictatorships of the equal….and godlessness and basked in American wealth others provided for them.

Barack Hussein Obama is one of their  creations

Even then as a Democrat I accepted  a degree or two of class envy and dislike, NOT  from my parents, but at university.   Even before the waves of know-nothing TAs many from foreign lands who spoke  no  English and thought  unAmerican with great PRIDE,  Marxist airs were in the breeze.    One was to hate people who lived in the suburbs and mowed their own lawns.   There were more interesting things to do in life…..Bombing fellow Americans for starters.   

The first Republican I ever  voted for was Ronald Reagan…..but still as a Democrat.    My epiphany to conservatism came several years later when I started my own landscaping business.    I had been a ‘government’  employee all of my post paperboy life.   After all I went to university and amassed  700 plus quarter credits of learning including two graduate degrees.   I had loved school learnings from adult professors in both social and the natural sciences.   

I taught social problems, history, and Russian in public high schools for 13 years.    One is taught to resent private enterprise when working among people not interested in enterprise.

Lightning struck me during payroll one day around 1992 crowding my 60th birthday,  three or four years into my own private enterprise, a  landscape company I had begun and for which I was well suited   from experience and learning, if not in business skill.   

Employees get paid first.   Small business owners are at the end of the payroll line., and there was no money for my pockets for an entire month.   Feeding workers’ families came first, or one has no business at all.     And our business depended upon folks who paid their bills and  might be interested in improving the beauty of their home and business grounds.   They are a moody group.

I, at last, grew up politically.   I was NEVER a Marxist, but I was too close to Marxism to recognize that the path of the Democrat Party is from Progressivism to Marxism.   It is the inevitable Lefty goal …..to attain enough power to run citizen lives. 

Taxing those who earn to  buy the votes who receive their handouts has been the basic Democrat platform since and including Lyndon Baines Johnson, on of the sleeziest presidents in the American presidential closet.

Today Marxist Barack Hussein has plans for America.   Freedom of expression and private enterprises is not among his concerns.   He needs dollars to buy votes for the upcoming American presidential election this November, 2012:

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS FROM THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR POLICY ANALYSIS:

How Taxing the Rich Harms the Middle Class

President Obama has continued a campaign for economic fairness throughout his last several major speaking engagements, including the State of the Union and his budget speech.  To this end, the Obama administration seems content to force American corporations to continue to abide by one of the most abusive corporate tax rates in the world, as this is a tax on the “rich,” says Aparna Mathurm, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Yet, the corporate income tax has just the opposite effect.  Its burdensome effects are passed in full onto American workers, who pay the true price for the tax.

• With its 35 percent corporate tax rate, the United States is second only to Japan in the tax burden it places on domestic companies (and Japan plans to reduce its rate later this year).
• When combined with various corporation taxes at the state level, this tax rate rises to 39 percent.
• The Obama administration has responded that it is the effective rate, not the statutory, that matters in assessing the burden on American businesses, but it bears mention that even the effective rate is one of the highest in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

With such a relatively high corporate tax rate, domestic businesses struggle to attract investment and are implicitly encouraged to move activities offshore.  Specifically, studies show that in a world of globally mobile capital, investment will quickly flow to areas that have lower rates of taxation.

Therefore, the high corporate tax rate reduces American business’ ability to compete with international market participants, as they fail to attract adequate capital investment.  This reduces the productivity of their workers, and thereby inherently lowers their wages — a conclusion validated by researchers from Harvard Business School, the Tax Foundation, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, among others.

Source: Aparna Mathurm, “How Taxing the Rich Harms the Middle Class,” The American, February 15, 2012.

For text:

http://www.american.com/archive/2012/february/how-taxing-the-rich-harms-the-middle-class

For more on Tax and Spending Issues:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=25

Claim is that the Education Gap is Growing between Rich and Poor

Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say

While researchers have focused for years on the race gap in educational achievement, recent studies show that the gap has decreased substantially in recent years.  However, the achievement gap between children of high-income families and low-income families has grown significantly over the same period of time, says the New York Times.

• Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist, found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students has grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s.
• In another study, the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s.
• During these same decades, the gap between whites and blacks shrunk by a large margin.

A number of factors explain why children of high-income households outperform their low-income classmates.  Much of the difference stems from the fact that, because a family has fewer resources in general, it has fewer resources to dedicate to a child’s education.

• Meredith Phillips, an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, used survey data to show that affluent children spend 1,300 more hours than low-income children before age 6 in places other than their homes, their day care centers or schools.
• She also found that, by the time high-income children start school, they have spent about 400 hours more than poor children in literacy activities.
• Additionally, wealthy parents invest more time and money than ever before in their children, including extracurricular activities that aid cognitive development and direct assistance with schooling.
• A 2007 study found that wealthy parents spent nine times as much per child as low-income parents did.

Education, long recognized as the great equalizer, no longer appears to be aiding that end.

Source: Sabrina Tavernise, “Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say,” New York Times, February 9, 2012.

For text:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-grows-between-rich-and-poor-studies-show.html?_r=2&ref=todayspaper

Comment:   I am suspicious of any ‘research’ presently undertaken by university sociologists and so-called standardized tests.    I am not confident that the tests they advertise have validity.  

Recent studies have indicated that the generation of students who have ‘graduated’ from college in the social science ater the years of the cultural revolution, 1966-1977, have ‘amassed’  30% or more less knowledge  than the previous generation with about the same loss of recognizeable vocabulary.  

The ignorance of today’s American graduate in the social sciences is profound.    Fifty years ago one studied botany….today vagina studies,  black racism, and psychology of gay suffering instead.    One group accumulated knowledge and a measure of understanding.   Modern groups learn bigotry, propaganda, and hate.

BEWARE OF TODAY’S  UNIVERSITY SOCIOLOGIST WEARING PROFESSOR CLOTHING!   They have a habit of cooking statistics to fit their Marxism.

 

 

David Brooks Advocates Forced Integration of Charles Murray’s Belmont and Fishtown Communities

 

THE GREAT DIVIDE

By DAVID BROOKS     AT THE NEW YORK TIMES:

“I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.

Murray’s basic argument is not new, that America is dividing into a two-caste society. What’s impressive is the incredible data he produces to illustrate that trend and deepen our understanding of it.

His story starts in 1963. There was a gap between rich and poor then, but it wasn’t that big. A house in an upper-crust suburb cost only twice as much as the average new American home. The tippy-top luxury car, the Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, cost about $47,000 in 2010 dollars. That’s pricey, but nowhere near the price of the top luxury cars today.

More important, the income gaps did not lead to big behavior gaps. Roughly 98 percent of men between the ages of 30 and 49 were in the labor force, upper class and lower class alike. Only about 3 percent of white kids were born outside of marriage. The rates were similar, upper class and lower class.

Since then, America has polarized. The word “class” doesn’t even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.

The upper tribe is now segregated from the lower tribe. In 1963, rich people who lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan lived close to members of the middle class. Most adult Manhattanites who lived south of 96th Street back then hadn’t even completed high school. Today, almost all of Manhattan south of 96th Street is an upper-tribe enclave.

Today, Murray demonstrates, there is an archipelago of affluent enclaves clustered around the coastal cities, Chicago, Dallas and so on. If you’re born into one of them, you will probably go to college with people from one of the enclaves; you’ll marry someone from one of the enclaves; you’ll go off and live in one of the enclaves.

Worse, there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). This is where Murray is at his best, and he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play.

Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.

People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.

Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.

The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.

Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.

I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.

If we could jam the tribes together, we’d have a better elite and a better mass.”

Comment:  I am certain Charles Murray would not agree to launch a national service  program to enforce the blendings of the Fishtown and Belmont population   as  Brooks  suggests.

Brooks lives in Belmont  bubble where he gets well paid and comfort  sitting around making dumb remarks for publication.   Marxist Fidel Castro had a solution for the Belmont-Fishtown problem in his Cuba shortly after his military takeover.    He made Belmont professors, writers, ballet teachers, attorneys,  psychologists, therapists,  landlords, tax collectors, bankers, former business owners march down to  the sugar cane plantations now owned by the Marxist state, for the proper social mix.   Is that what David Brooks has in mind for his Belmont friends?    I wonder if his colleagues at the New York Times, Nick Kristof and Paul Krugman know about this!

I think I’d get a bit worried, David, if a truck shows up and distributes five thousand machettes to the New York Times journalistic and editorial   staff each with a free one-way ticket to southern Louisiana with your recommendations printed on all of the gift cards, with your name added as director assuring them there would be a police escort to accompany the migration.

This Brooks’ remark “we need a National Service Program”, is the traditional  leftwing-Marxist solution to a social problem.  “ We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together,”  is a totalitarian Marxist view of social manipulation.  

Philosophically and religiously, these New York Times Belmont folks are practicing Marxists…..and preach the religion every day.    That certainly doesn’t mean they practice Marxism themselves.   They, as Dave Brooks admits, WILL TELL OTHERS  WHAT TO DO AND WHERE TO LIVE. and will feel they are doing their Marxist duty.

They are Obama people.

I would like to “force” Mr. Brooks to work on a farm in North Dakots or spend a year at a Walmart, or  a year among police officers or firemen in any major city in the United States.   But, I am not a Marxist.   However, it might do Mr. Brooks ‘a whale of good’, for his life’s understanding and for his American citizenship to move to Fishtown for a period of time……if only to get acquainted.    He could get a job delivering pizza.

Brooks is a good guy, but he usually writes as a Belmont SNOT……but, remember fellow Americans, such snots  have a right to their opinions, too……..even though they are the most powerful purveyors and protectors of   Marxism’s  Political Correctness Censorship and its rules, the ones   Belmont folks  learn at university.

 

If Republicans Cannot Doom the Devious Obama, Perhaps Gas Prices Will

by Steven Hayward in Economy, Energy Policy

Obama’s Gas Pains

Interesting and complementing lead stories in the Washington Post and New York Times this morning, and neither of them can be good for Obama.  The Post’s lead story warns of “Taxmageddon” next year, when the payroll tax cut will expire, along with the Bush tax cuts; the Obamacare “surcharges” will also kick in on dividends and capital gains.  In all, it will amount to about a $500 billion tax increase next year:

Overnight, the marriage penalty for joint filers will spring back to life, the value of the child credit will drop from $1,000 to $500, and the rate everyone pays on the first $8,700 of wages will jump from 10 percent to 15 percent. . .

The potential shock to the nation’s pocketbook is so enormous, congressional aides have dubbed it “Taxmageddon.” Some economists say it could push the fragile U.S. economy back into recession, particularly if automatic cuts to federal agencies, also set for January, are permitted to take effect.

So it’s easy to make a prediction from here: the payroll tax cut, like the perennial “doc fix” for Medicare reimbursement and the annual AMT adjustment, will become permanent.  Maybe other adjustments will be made in a lame duck session after the election.  Seems to me Republican candidates ought to have the wit to run with the slogan: A vote for Obama is a vote for $500 billion in higher taxes next year.

 

Meanwhile, the Times notes in its lead story that rising gasoline prices may present a political problem for Obama.  Now this is a curious story, for several reasons.  First, Obama, like all right-thinking greenies, want gasoline prices to be higher, though, to be sure, they want high prices brought about by a government tax rather than the marketplace. 

 

High gas prices are no fun if it means more profits for private oil companies.  Obama admitted this directly when asked about high gas prices in 2008, when he said he didn’t have a problem with them, only that he “would have preferred a gradual adjustment.”  Well, prices have crept up gradually since they collapsed back to about $2 a gallon in 2008.  So what’s his problem?

 

His political problem can be seen in this chart, which suggests a correlation between presidential popularity and gasoline prices.  Click at Sabato to view the chart:    (Hat tip: Larry Sabato.)

 

More anomalous is Obama’s explanation this week that “gas prices are on the rise again because as the economy strengthens, global demand for oil increases.”  It is true that global demand for oil is probably the primary driver of the price of oil right now (though surely a risk premium because of Iran is in the mix somewhere), but here in the U.S. demand for gasoline seems to be way off, as shown in the figure below which I plotted earlier this week for my Energy Fact of the Week squib over on American.com.  The figure shows retail gasoline deliveries—the best proxy for consumption—falling off a cliff starting a few months ago—before prices began to creep back up.  The fall in consumption ought to be holding down gasoline prices, all other things being equal (which they never are).  Is the economy about to fall over the cliff along with this indicator?  That’s what a lot of people are wondering.

Loonies and Super Loonies….aka Maxine Waters and friends

There is a circus of characters in today’s U.S.  Congressional Merry-go-round and there probably always have  been.   Ben Franklin was a chracter, that is for certain…..but he wasn’t loony.

Most of today’s Washington characters are loony rather than, well, simply ‘characters’.   Loonies are certainly characters, but they don’t answer ’4′ to the problem of adding two and two.  They might not even come up with a number.   

Loonies  cook  their own facts, their own moods.   They are nearly all Democrats.     

Such a loony is Marxine Waters, a Congresswoman from California….becoming ancient as a fixture in the Democrat Party.

She is a forgetful loony…..several times before camera losing concentration and control, losses more frequent every year of her Lefty service, forgetting she isn’t supposed to admit to her devotion to Marxism.

Other loonies in Congress might express their conviction that the island Guam might sink into the ocean  if too many American servicemen land in its shores.   Others believe president Obama, a Demcorat, is an honest broker in his relationships professional and personal.   Still others celebrate the peaceful conclusion to the war in Vietnam culmination in two democracies, a North Vietnam and one more southern.

Maxine Waters is under examination today……for alleged crimes economic.   She’s apparently been caught, but like most politicians she reaches for straws for claims of innocence…….relying on the fact  that straws are hollow-centered and so, no one will pay any attention to her vacuous condition and won’t take her seriously.   After all, she is a Democrat.   Besides, Maxine Waters has the power of noise and the skills of an experienced loony when shouting to friends and foes alike.

The following is an article in the Lose Angeles Times by  Richard Simon regarding  Congresslady Waters:

 

Maxine Waters ethics case:

 6 committee members recuse selves

 

Washington, D.C.—

The tumultuous ethics case against Rep. Maxine Waters, one of Los Angeles’ most enduring politicians, took another strange turn Friday as six members of the House Ethics Committee recused themselves from considering the charges against her.

Committee Chairman Jo Bonner (R-Ala.) said that all five of the panel’s Republicans, including himself, and one Democrat were taking the unusual action of recusing themselves from further involvement in the long-running Waters case “out of an abundance of caution and to avoid even an appearance of unfairness.”  Six new House members immediately were named to the bipartisan panel to consider all matters related to the Waters case.

Waters, a South Los Angeles political fixture since the 1970s, has been accused of intervening on behalf of a bank where her husband owned stock and served on the board. She has denied wrongdoing. The case has taken on greater importance for Waters, who is in line to succeed retiring Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) as the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee.

The investigation against Waters has been anything but usual.  It has been sidetracked twice — once by the committee’s decision to put off a trial to conduct further investigation and then by allegations of misconduct against the ethics staff.

An outside lawyer was hired last July to examine whether the committee’s staff acted improperly in investigation allegations of misconduct.

While Washington lawyer Billy Martin has yet to complete his report, which will help determine whether the case against Waters proceeds, he recommended the recusals, according to a letter from Bonner read on the House floor  Friday.

“These recusal requests are not based on any indication of any wrongdoing or inappropriate partisanship by members,” the letter says, adding that the outside counsel has “not discovered any evidence to indicate actual bias or partiality by any current member or staff.”

But Bonner said in the letter that he and the other members were recusing themselves to “assure the public, the House and Rep. Waters that this investigation is continuing in a fair and unbiased manner.”

There was no immediate response from Waters.  The congresswoman,  73, has defended her actions, saying she didn’t benefit financially and was acting on

The BiPolar President Obama in Action……Mania Precedes the Fall and Blame Others for Failure!!

Barack Obama’s Budget Is Even Worse

Than It Looks

by    Peter Roff   at   USNews:

“While running for president, Barack Obama promised the American voters that he would change the way things were done in Washington.

Well, he’s kept his promise—though not perhaps in the way many people who voted for him had in mind. Under his leadership, the federal budget has exploded dramatically, leading to record deficits and bringing total federal indebtedness to a level equal to just about one year’s U.S. gross domestic product.

Under his budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2013, released earlier this week, the trends not only continue, they accelerate. Over the 10 year period FY 2012 and FY 2022, Obama’s budget proposes an astounding $8.011 trillion in new deficit spending, with the deficit for FY 2013 being the fourth trillion-dollar deficit in a row. And that’s only the beginning.

[Read David Shulman: Barack Obama's Budget to Nowhere]

According to an analysis prepared by the House Republican Study Committee, if Obama’s budget for FY 2013 is adopted as written, the federal budget “would never balance again.”

“The president’s budget does not just propose large deficits in the short-term, but they actually start increasing again from 2018 to 2022. Beyond that point, the president’s proposal to keep entitlement spending unreformed would ensure that the long-term budget outlook is worse,” the committee said.

The Obama budget would also increase the total tax burden from 15.4 percent of U.S. GDP in 2011 to 20.11 percent of U.S. GDP by 2022. Over the 10-year period contemplated by the budget document, revenues would average almost 19 percent of U.S. GDP which, the committee said, is notably above the 40-year average of 18 percent despite the large deficits.

[See a collection of political cartoons on the budget and deficit]

Obama’s budget furthers the orgy of spending upon which he embarked as soon as he came into office, with proposed federal spending at 24.3 percent of GDP, almost a full percentage point higher than the previous peacetime record of 23.5 percent set in 1983. And that’s on top of a 27.5 percent hike in federal spending since FY 2008, from $2.98 trillion to $3.82 trillion.

It’s doubtful the president’s budget will be enacted as is. Under Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s leadership, the U.S. Senate has gone more than 1,000 days without approving a budget—probably because Reid does not want to force his fellow Democrats to go on record in favor of all the spending Obama wants. Nevertheless, with numbers like these it is no wonder that the American electorate is up in arms about federal spending. The budget is simply too big to keep pace with the ability of a weak economy to generate the revenues needed to support it. What is needed now, more than anything, is a focus on economic growth, not Washington subsidies. It’s true that Obama has committed to “spread the wealth around” but, in order for him to be able to do that, the wealth has to exist. Instead, the president’s budget seems to be a commitment to wiping it out altogether.

• Check out a roundup of editorial cartoons on the economy. “