This is where we are

We are witnessing a complete breakdown in American civics.  In the President of the US, our putative leader, we are seeing a professional community organizer, trained by Saul Alinsky, who has no idea how to lead, how to govern, how to interact with others.  Instead we see on a daily basis, one who is adept at creating discord and divisions among the people in order to break down the existing order in society.  Once achieving this objective, the next step is to rebuild, transform, and restructure the civil society in the leader's vision of a just and fair one.  There is nothing new in this approach.  To some extent it has been subscribed to by progressives going back to Woodrow Wilson.  What is new is having a leader willing to literally destroy the existing order in order to put in place his particular vision of the right order.  Most earlier progressives believed in at least the bedrock American values based upon Christian ethics and at least a somewhat market based economy.  They were more interested in ameliorating or reforming what they viewed as the rough edges of the existing system but not necessarily in changing it wholesale.  The incumbent progressive leader clearly wants to replace market based capitalism with state controlled socialism.  There is simply no other way to interpret his rhetoric or actions.  In the end he is bent on wrecking and destroying the current structure in order to start fresh to create a society based upon the undefinable concept of social justice.  The only way to achieve this end is by collectivizing society and then dictating change.  I seriously doubt he can get away with this plan, however he can make life difficult for everyone in the attempt.

Not Warren Buffett again?

Haven't we heard enough from Warren Buffett about tax fairness.  His argument and rationale for raising taxes on the rich is thoroughly exposed here:

Warren Buffett’s Fiscal Innumeracy

August 15, 2011 by Dan Mitchell

Warren Buffett’s at it again. He has a column in the New York Times complaining that he has been coddled by the tax code and that “rich” people should pay higher taxes.

My first instinct is to send Buffett the website where people can voluntarily pay extra money to the federal government. I’ve made this suggestion to guilt-ridden rich people in the past.

But I no longer give that advice. I’m worried he might actually do it. And even though Buffett is wildly misguided about fiscal policy, I know he will invest his money much more wisely than Barack Obama will spend it.

But Buffett goes beyond guilt-ridden rants in favor of higher taxes. He makesspecific assertions that are inaccurate.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

His numbers are flawed in two important ways.

1. When Buffett receives dividends and capital gains, it is true that he pays “only” 15 percent of that money on his tax return. But dividends and capital gains are both forms of double taxation. So if he wants honest effective tax rate numbers, he needs to show the 35 percent corporate tax rate.

Moreover, as I noted in a previous post, Buffett completely ignores the impact of the death tax, which will result in the federal government seizing 45 percent of his assets. To be sure, Buffett may be engaging in clever tax planning, so it is hard to know the impact on his effective tax rate, but it will be signficant.

2. Buffett also mischaracterizes the impact of the Social Security payroll tax, which is dedicated for a specific purpose. The law only imposes that tax on income up to about $107,000 per year because the tax is designed so that people “earn” a corresponding  retirement benefit (which actually is tilted in favor of low-income workers).

Imposing the tax on multi-millionaire income, however, would mean sending rich people giant checks from Social Security when they retire. But nobody thinks that’s a good idea. Or you could apply the payroll tax to all income and not pay any additional benefits. But this would turn Social Security from an “earned benefit” to a redistribution program, which also is widely rejected (though the left has been warming to the idea in recent years because their hunger for more tax revenue is greater than their support for Social Security).

If we consider these two factors, Buffett’s effective tax rate almost surely is much higher than the burden on any of the people who work for him.

But this entire discussion is a good example of why we should junk the corrupt, punitive, and unfair tax code and replace it with a simple flat tax. With no double taxation and a single, low tax rate, we would know that rich people were paying the right amount, neither too much based on class-warfare tax rates nor too little based on loopholes, deduction, preferences, exemptions, shelters, and credits.

So why doesn’t Buffett endorse this approach? Tim Carney offers a very plausible answer.

For more information about why class-warfare taxes are misguided, this video may be helpful.

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Thank you Bob Woodward

Bob Woodward is in the news for calling out the thuggish Obama WH and its media intimidation techniques.  While it is probably the case that all administrations engage in a certain amount of this nasty business in an attempt to get their message out, clearly this administration has taken the strategy to a whole different, and more despicable level.

The Battle of Bob Woodward

March 1st, 2013 - 1:20 am

 

The Obama administration, I believe, will come to rue the day it declared war on the dean of the Washington press corps, Bob Woodward of Watergate fame. Now, I have never met Woodward, although I’ve been friendly with Carl Bernstein, the other half of the Watergate duo, for many years. But from what I know of both men, and of the journalists of their generation, I believe them to be good old-fashioned reporters for whom the story is everything. And if this is the moment when the last remnants of what used to be the American journalistic establishment dig in their heels and finally draw the line on rank partisanship — well, it’s about good and goddamned time.

It’s axiomatic today that “mainstream” journalists are corrupt tools of the liberal ascendancy, ethical roundheels who finally found Mr. Dreamboat in Barack Hussein Obama and have spent the years since 2008 lying on their backs and moaning. And that’s partly true. Obama was the culmination of everything they had wished for since the civil-rights movement, which to journalists of a certain age is the equivalent of Mao’s Long March, the event by which they define themselves. He was black, but not too black; indeed, were Obama a Republican (stop laughing) he’d be pilloried on the Left as an “Oreo,” black on the outside and white on the inside. He had gone to all the right schools (Columbia and Harvard), and yet he had a legend-ready exotic background (the “narrative”) that distinguished him from the usual private elementary school/Exeter/Yale progressives. Punahou? Who knew anything about Punahou? (Well, I do, but that’s a story for another time.) And the fact that his middle name was redolent of the culture that had wantonly attacked us on 9/11… bonus!

All those things are true, and yet — speaking as someone who began his journalistic career in 1971 — they are more true of the younger generation(s) of journalists, kiddies like the Juicebox Mafia ideologues masquerading as reporters, for whom leftist attitude is everything, especially when it is put to the service of the Democratic Party. That is to say, I hope and pray that some of us old coots still believe in the reporter’s core mission: to find out the truth and publish it. Period. That the thrill lies in the hunt, and it doesn’t matter which variety of big game you’re hunting as long as you bag it.

So return with me now to those glory days of 1972-74, when “Woodstein” was chasing the biggest story of their lives. Those of us in the profession (I was working at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle at the time) were enthralled by what the lads were doing — not running Nixon to ground or even, ultimately, bringing him down, but getting their stories on the front page every day. That was the true mark of journalistic success, and everything else was commentary. Our ethics were not those of The Party Line, but of The Front Page:

Which is why the hostility directed toward Woodward by the punks from the kindergarten klass of 1990 is so laughable, since they wouldn’t know a story if it came up and tried to change their red diapers for them. Mistaking ideology for ethics, the Juicers are incapable of understanding what the function of journalism used to be; hence their attack on Woodward for daring to correct the Emperor Hussein while the rest of them pull down paychecks from the Ministry of Propaganda and guard against any deviance from the prevailing orthodoxy, whatever it happens to be on that particular day.

I have no doubt that, like Lee and Meade at Gettysburg, Woodward blundered into this fight — he wasn’t looking to start something, just articulating the unexceptionable truth that, based on his reporting, the sequester was Obama’s idea, and that it was the height of hypocrisy for the president to rail against it and try to pin it on the GOP. (That tactic, by the way, isfailing.) But here he is — even invited to speak at CPAC!

But now that the fight’s here, let’s have it. I think it’s entirely likely that the journalism I was taught (on the job, by the way, not in a classroom) is dead, having fallen victim to the radicalization of the universities, to mad credentialism, and to society’s overall abdication of moral standards in favor of “non-judgmentalism” and “fairness.” And, of course, the satanic code that makes all this possible, “political correctness” — a term worthy of the Gulag Archipelago.

Lefties used to say that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Now they run from it like exploding vampires. But as my friend Bill Whittle likes to point out, all it takes is the light from a single candle to destroy a universe of darkness. And God’s first words in Genesis are, after all, “let there be light.”

Whose side are you on?

Practicing the art of crony capitalism

This, from Jenifer Rubin of WaPo, describes the crony capitalism that rules in Washington and Wall Street these days, and has probably forever.  Both parties are guilty of this stuff,  however the Dems have an advantage of at least 10 to 1.  Recall Fannie and Freddie in particular.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) got the ball rolling early, but Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) picked it up and ran with it. I’m speaking, of course, of marshaling the voluminous evidence of Jack Lew’s unfitness for secretary of Treasury.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (Mandel Ngan/AFP)

Grassley has been digging into Lew’s tenure at New York University, where he pulled down an enormous salary, including sweetheart loans, while the students were footing enormous tuition bills. Worse, under his nose NYU negotiated a deal with Citicorp (miraculously, Lew’s next employer!) to provide loans to students, a deal that then-state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo found to be illegal.

As the Wall Street Journal editorial board put it:

The Grassley inquiry is unlikely to derail Mr. Lew’s nomination, because Senate Democrats, the White House and most of the media really don’t care. But Mr. Grassley is doing a public service in revealing how liberals redistribute income to themselves. And Mr. Lew is finally delivering educational value to youngsters by providing a lesson for the Obama era: If you want the big bucks, go into the world of taxpayer-backed enterprises.

That was only the beginning of Lew’s remarkable good fortune. At Citicorp, Lew was paid gobs of money for doing goodness knows what, certainly not for doing a good job. The Post reports, “In early 2008, he became a top executive in the Citigroup unit that housed many of the bank’s riskiest operations, including its hedge funds and private equity investments. Massive losses in that unit helped drive Citigroup into the arms of the federal government, which bailed out the bank with $45 billion in taxpayer money that year.” But once again Lew failed upward:

Things continued to deteriorate the rest of the year. More than 50,000 employees, or one-seventh of Citigroup’s global workforce, were laid off in November. That year, the stock price dropped about 75 percent. Lew, meanwhile, was paid at least $1.1 million in 2008, according to financial disclosure statements.

By the end of December 2008, Lew had lined up a new job: away from Wall Street and back in Washington as a deputy secretary of state under Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Meanwhile, Citigroup’s alternative investments unit had become such a stain on the bank’s record that it was relaunched three years ago with a new name. It’s now known as Citi Capital Advisors.

And what’s more, he was given whatJonathan Weil at Bloomberg calls a “bounty” for getting himself into a high government post:

Lew’s employment agreement with Citigroup said his “guaranteed incentive and retention award” wouldn’t be paid if he quit his job, with limited exceptions. One was if he left Citigroup “as a result of your acceptance of a full-time high level position with the United States government or regulatory body.” This applied if he left “prior to the payment of any incentive and retention award for performance year 2008 or thereafter.” Such an award wasn’t guaranteed but would be consistent with the company’s practice, the document said.

A similar provision concerned his stock-based compensation. If Lew left in 2008 or afterward to accept a high-level U.S. government position, all of his outstanding equity awards, including restricted stock, would vest immediately, the document said. Alternatively, Citigroup had the option of paying Lew the cash equivalent of any shares he forfeited upon leaving. The terms didn’t mention other kinds of public-service work, such as a midlevel U.S. government job, a position in municipal or state government, or working at a nonprofit organization such as a university.

At a time financial institutions were being pilloried for giving executives extraordinary bonuses and perks, Lew was at the head of the trough.

This is precisely the grotesque crony capitalism Republicans have been railing against during the Obama era. Lew made an art form of profiting at the expense of the little guy and, specifically, the American taxpayer. If he were a Republican, he would not get within a mile of a confirmable post. Perhaps he won’t this time if Democrats are as repulsed by his record as Republicans have been.

For helping to uncover Lew’s unseemly past, most especially his dealings at NYU, Grassley deserves thanks. Well, done, Senator.

An honest politician -- Jeff Sessions

Jeff Sessions, Senator from Alabama, is a principled, honest conservative who says what he believes and believes what he says.  I have followed and admired his stands on many important issues.  In this plea to his fellow senators he asked that they vote on the record of lies perpetrated by Jack Lew (and the Obama administration) by rejecting this obvious deceitful member of the administration for one of the more important positions in government, Secretary of the Treasury.  Unfortunately this plea fell on deaf ears.  And why should we be surprised.  Sessions outlines why we shouldn't be surprised:

During my remarks today I have exhaustively documented the case against the confirmation of Mr. Lew. I have detailed his disastrous budget plans, rebuked by editorial boards across the country and unanimously rejected by Congress.

I have discussed his repeated, knowing, and deliberately false statements about those budget plans–most notoriously his claim that “Our budget will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we’re not adding to the debt anymore; we’re spending money that we have each year, and then we can work on bringing down our national debt.”

As I close my remarks, I would appeal to my colleagues to oppose Mr. Lew.
 
I would appeal to my colleagues to defend the integrity of the Senate, to defend the right of our constituents to hear the truth from government officials, and to defend the idea, the very concept, of truth itself.

I would also like to place this in a wider context.

Today is the 1,400th day since Senate Democrats passed a budget. Why has this gone on so long? Because they decided it would be better to offer no solution, no plan to help struggling Americans, and instead to tear down anyone who dared to offer a plan to solve our nation’s economic problems.

This is the heart of the problem here in Washington right now. We have one political party that sees the budget debate as exercise in political warfare, not problem-solving.

At the center of this strategy is the White House.

In his campaign for re-election, President Obama repeatedly said that he had a plan to “pay down our debt.” He even ran a campaign ad saying: “I believe the only way to create an economy built to last, is to strengthen the middle class—asking the wealthy to pay a little more so we can pay down our debt in a balanced way. So we can afford to invest in education, manufacturing, and home-grown American energy, for good middle class jobs.”

But this is all totally false.

Again, this was the strategy: offer a plan that does nothing to alter our dangerous debt course while pretending the opposite.

Then, once you’ve done that, attack anyone who dares to reduce the size of the bureaucracy. Attack anyone who suggests Washington is too powerful. Attack, attack, attack–while never offering anything to help Americans who are struggling every day.

After the White House budget was submitted in 2011, President Obama spoke at George Washington University and, with Congressman Paul Ryan sitting in front of him, and said:

One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives…It’s a plan that aims to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next ten years…But the way this plan achieves [that goal] would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known throughout most of our history…This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. And who are those 50 million Americans? Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome… These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.

Majority Leader Reid said of one Republican reform effort that it was “a mean-spirited bill that would cut the heart out of the recovery that we have in America today… It goes after little children, poor little boys and girls… We want them to learn to read.”

This is how the White House and Senate Democrat leaders approach the budget debate. It’s the same strategy with the sequester. And Republicans, candidly, have not done enough to stand up to these egregious slanders. Voting against Jack Lew would be a vote against these dishonest tactics. These misrepresentations of fact.

The painful truth is, the White House strategy has been largely successful up until now. President Obama and his Senate Majority have blocked fiscal reform and continued our path to fiscal disaster.

It is time that we pointed out that the establishment they are shielding from cuts–the big-government apparatus they are defending–is hurting people every day. Their policies, their endless support of the bureaucracy, has created poverty and joblessness and dependency. In cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago–governed almost exclusively by Democrats at every level–good, hardworking people are hurt every day by the policies of the Left.

* In the city of Baltimore, one in three children live in poverty. One in three Baltimore residents are on food stamps.

* In Chicago, there were roughly 500 homicides in 2012. Fifty-one percent of the city’s children live in a single-parent family.

* In Detroit, almost one in three households had not a single person working at any time in the last 12 months. The city’s violent crime rate is among the worst in the country. More than half of all Detroit children live in poverty.

This should not happen. These are the consequences of leftist policies. We are fighting to create jobs, to create rising wages, to create opportunity, to help more people earn a good living and care for themselves financially. We are trying to lift people out of poverty, to strengthen family and community. And we are trying to protect the good and decent people of this country from a debt crisis.

Where does Mr. Lew stand? Where does the White House stand?
 
They did everything they could to defend the bureaucracy–no matter the cost in wasted tax dollars or lost jobs. Mr. Lew submitted an indefensible budget plan that would have caused further social and economic devastation, deliberately misled the nation about that plan, and then participated in a strategy to shut down GOP efforts at reform.

I urge my colleagues to reject these tactics from the White House. I urge them to stand up for the good and decent people of this country and to oppose Mr. Lew.

For now, Democratic Party plutocrats are firmly in the saddle. But the handwriting, perhaps, is on the wall. Their policies have failed, again and again; they have no plan to rescue the nation’s finances; they have nothing to offer but slander and hate. Won’t the day inevitably come when they get what they deserve?

Who wants to be a Democrat?

20 Of The Most Embarrassing Moments In The History Of The Democrat Party

• 
 
• John Hawkins 
  John Hawkins is a professional blogger who runs Right Wing News

Feb 23, 2013

Click if you like this column!

 

For example, one will virtually never hear that the Palmer Raids, Prohibition, or American eugenics were thoroughly progressive phenomena. These are sins America itself must atone for. Meanwhile, real or alleged “conservative” misdeeds — say McCarthyism — are always the exclusive fault of conservatives and a sign of the policies they would repeat if given power. The only culpable mistake that liberals make is failing to fight “hard enough” for their principles. Liberals are never responsible for historic misdeeds because they feel no compulsion to defend the inherent goodness of America. Conservatives, meanwhile, not only take the blame for events not of their own making that they often worked the most assiduously against, but find themselves defending liberal misdeeds in order to defend America herself. -- Jonah Goldberg

1) The Trail of Tears (1838): The first Democrat President, Andrew Jackson and his successor Martin Van Buren, herded Indians into camps, tormented them, burned and pillaged their homes and forced them to relocate with minimal supplies. Thousands died along the way.

2) Democrats Cause The Civil War (1860): The pro-slavery faction of the Democrat Party responded to Abraham Lincoln's election by seceding, which led to the Civil War.

3) Formation of the KKK (1865): Along with 5 other Confederate veterans, Democrat Nathan Bedford Forrest created the KKK.

4) 300 Black Americans Murdered (1868): "Democrats in Opelousas, Louisiana killed nearly 300 blacks who tried to foil an assault on a Republican newspaper editor."

5) The American Protective League and The Palmer Raids (1919-1921): Under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson, criticizing the government became a crime and a fascist organization, the American Protective League was formed to spy on and even arrest fellow Americans for being insufficiently loyal to the government. More than 100,000 Americans were arrested, with less than 1% of them ever being found guilty of any kind of crime.

6) Democrats Successfully Stop Republicans From Making Lynching A Federal Crime (1922): "The U.S. House adopted Rep. Leonidas Dyer’s (R., Mo.) bill making lynching a federal crime. Filibustering Senate Democrats killed the measure."

7) The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (1932-1972): Contrary to what you may have heard, Democrats in Alabama did not give black Americans syphilis. However, the experimenters did know that subjects of the experiment unknowingly had syphilis and even after it was proven that penicillin could be used to effectively treat the disease in 1947, the experiments continued. As a result, a number of the subjects needlessly infected their loved ones and died, when they could have been cured.

8) Japanese Internment Camps (1942): Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive orderthat led to more than 100,000 Japanese Americans being put into "bleak, remote camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards."

9) Alger Hiss Convicted Of Perjury (1950): Hiss, who helped advise FDR at Yalta and was strongly defended by the Left, turned out to be a Soviet spy. He was convicted of perjury in 1950 (Sadly, the statute of limitations on espionage had run out), but was defended by liberals for decades until the Verona papers proved so conclusively that he was guilty that even most his fellow liberals couldn't continue to deny it.

10) The West Virgina Democrat primary is rigged by John F. Kennedy (1960): From an interview with the late, great Robert Novak.

John Hawkins: You also said that without question, John F. Kennedy rigged the West Virginia Democratic primary in (1960), but that the Wall Street Journal killed the story. Do you think that sort of thing is still occurring with great regularity and do you wish the Journal had reported the story when it happened?

Robert Novak: In my opinion, they should have. They sent two reporters down to West Virginia for six weeks and they came back with a carefully documented story on voter fraud in West Virginia, buying votes, and how he beat Humphrey in the primary and therefore got the nomination. But, Ed Kilgore, the President of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal, a very conservative man, said it wasn’t the business of the Wall Street Journal to decide the nominee of the Democratic Party and he killed the story. That story didn’t come out for many, many years — 30-40 years. It was kept secret all that time.

11) The Bay of Pigs (1961): After training a Cuban militia to overthrow Castro, Kennedy got cold feet and didn't give the men all the air support they were promised. As a result, they were easily defeated by Castro's men and today, Cuba is still ruled by a hostile, anti-American dictatorship.

12) Fire Hoses And Attack Dogs Used On Children (1963): Birmingham, Alabama's notorious Commissioner of Public Safety, Democrat Bull Connor, used attack dogs and fire hoses on children and teenagers marching for civil rights. Ultimately, thousands of them would also be arrested.

13) Stand In The Schoolhouse Door (1963): Democrat George Wallace gave his notorious speech against integrating schools at the University of Alabama in which he said, "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

14) Escalation In Vietnam (1964): Lyndon Johnson dramatically escalated our troops’ presence in Vietnam while he simultaneously put political restrictions in place that made the war unwinnable. As a result, 58,000 Americans died in a war that ultimately achieved none of its aims.

15) Chappaquiddick (1969): The Democrats’ beloved "Liberal Lion" of the Senate, Ted Kennedy ran off the road into a tidal pool with passenger Mary Jo Kopechne in the car. Kennedy swam free and then spent 9 hours plotting how he would reveal the news to the press while she slowly suffocated to death.

16) Democrats Deliver South Vietnam To The North (1975): "In 1975, when there were no Americans left in Vietnam, the left wing of the Democratic Party killed the government of South Vietnam, cut off all of its funding, cut off all of its ammunition, and sent a signal to the world that the United States had abandoned its allies." -- Newt Gingrich

17) The Iranian Hostage Crisis (1979-1981): 52 Americans were held hostage by the government of Iran for 444 days. After Jimmy Carter’s disastrous, failed rescue attempt, the hostages were finally released after Ronald Reagan's inaugural address.

18) Bill Clinton turns down Osama Bin Laden (1996): In Bill Clinton's own words, "'Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan. He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1991, then he went to Sudan. And we’d been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start meeting with them again. They released him. At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.' — Bill Clinton explains to a Long Island, N.Y., business group why he turned down Sudan’s offer to extradite Osama Bin Laden to America in 1996." Had Bill Clinton accepted Sudan's offer, 9/11 would have likely never happened.

19) Bill Clinton was impeached (1998): Clinton became only the 2nd President in American history to be impeached after he lied under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

20) America loses its AAA credit rating (2011): The United States was first given its AAA credit in 1917, but it couldn’t survive Barack Obama's record breaking spending. In 2011, America lost its AAA credit rating.

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