Entries from January 2012 ↓

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The Reagan Tax Cuts and Revenues from the Rich: A Lesson on the Laffer Curve for Barack Obama

From Judge Janet Napolitano
The root of economic freedom is the recognition of the right to own private property. That includes the right to utilize it unmolested, to dispose of it without anyone’s permission and to exclude anyone from it, even the government. Suffice it to say, no American president since the advent of the income tax and the Federal Reserve 100 years ago has fully accepted or meaningfully defended that right. The more the government extracts in taxes and the more it inflates the money supply, the more it rejects and assaults property rights.

Every president in the 20th century, even Ronald Reagan, signed legislation raising income taxes. The theory behind the income tax is that the government’s need for cash is so great, it can just take it from you and use it as it sees fit. This presumes that the federal government has a greater right to your income than you do.
The absence of economic freedom today is nothing new and didn’t come about overnight. It is the culmination of the Progressive Era, which gave us the Federal Reserve and the income tax; the New Deal, which gave us the beginning of entitlements; the Great Society, which enhanced the numbers of people who received entitlements; Ronald Reagan, who bashed entitlements during the six years he was running for president but did nothing to dismantle them; and every president from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush, all of whom just accepted the welfare and warfare state as if the Constitution didn’t exist.

Today, we have President Obama who wants to enhance the welfare and warfare state by having socialized medicine and perpetual war at the same time.

Whats means a word? If it’s spoken through Obama’s lips you can bet it’s pure double speak!

Recently he announced more drastic cuts for the military stating he intends to make it “leaner” insinuating these draconian cuts will make it better! He wants us to believe it’s too fat and spending for the war in Iraq, now that he’s put a premature end to it (the ramifications are another subject), leaves lots of opportunity to reduce military spending. He wants us to read it that the military is going to hit the gym and become a svelte and agile force able to serve and protect our country and overseas interests in times of crisis sure to come. What he really intends leaner to mean is an emaciated military unable to serve and protect our country and overseas interests in the coming times of crisis. Up to this point he’s encouraged the “Arab Spring” that’s creating a power base for radical Islam, now he wants to make certain we’re powerless to stop the snowball.

To make matters even worse, what about the thousands of jobs dependent on direct or indirect military spending. Spending that historically has returned new technologies and many times more money back into the economy than spent!

The Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano writes that Obama’s strategy amounts to pulling “the safety net out from a global security architecture that has protected U.S. vital interests worldwide since 1945.”

Wishful thinking cannot keep our nation free and safe. It’s the duty of Congress to confront the White House and move to restore America as a leader of the free world.

At some point every president defines himself and his policies. By turning to TR’s New Nationalism model in his own Osawatomie speech, Obama revealed once and for all that his objective as president is to complete the progressive transformation of America, and define its next phase as assuring not equal opportunity, but “Fair” outcomes, by redistributing wealth and benefits through an ever more complicated and extensive government that regulates more and more of the economy and society.
He alluded to “an America where hard work paid off, and responsibility was rewarded, and anyone could make it if they tried–no matter who you were, no matter where you came from, no matter how you started out.” But continued with this “basic bar­gain” has become so “eroded by the mar­ketplace that the defining issue of our time is to restore growth and prosperity, restore balance, restore Fairness.”
The choice we face, as Obama frames it is between the harshness of mar­ket capitalism (defined in straw-man fashion as “you’re-on-your-own econom­ics” with “a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can” and the fairness of progressive nationalism (the view that “we are greater together–when everyone engages in fair play, and everybody gets a fair shot, and everybody does their fair share”.
The word “Fair” recurs in various forms throughout the speech, with reminders along the way that things have to be made Fair–and that means ever more govern­ment authority, programs, and regulation. “As a nation,” Obama said, “we’ve always come together, through our government.” And so Obama returned to his mantra of more federal education programs, more infrastructure spending, and more eco­nomic regulations. And, of course, raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for these “investments” would only be fair.
Obama denies the charge of class war­fare but what he is actually doing is cobbling together an alliance of state dependents, government hangers-on, and political elites who claim the capacity to run things. Obama’s program is fundamentally about the rise of a new governing class that insists on enforcing political and economic “fairness” rather than letting us govern ourselves.
As the national government becomes ever more centralized and bureaucratic, acting without constitutional limits, it also becomes more undemocratic, and more potentially despotic, than ever. The result is a government designed to secure the right to “the pursuit of happiness” and to break down unjust barriers to opportunity now penalizes success, restricts opportunity, and has become the chief barrier to the achievement of the American Dream.
Consider that after almost 50 years of the governments war on poverty the poor have lost.

Do you recall speaker Pelosi on Obamacare?

http://youtu.be/hV-05TLiiLU

Recently 93 Senators voted for a defense authorization bill that included repeal of Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice(UCMJ) which bans soldiers from engaging in either sodomy or bestiality.

When asked whether he knew about the measure, a baffled Senator McCain spluttered to a CNSNewsreporter: “I don’t, I don’t know what you’re — honestly. I read the bill. And I was there for many hours of deliberation and debate and amendments, and probably spent hundreds of, several hundred hours on it. But that particular provision I did not know.” 

I’ll admit that even after 100 hours I might miss a non doted “i” or uncrossed “t” but not a section titled “Repeal of the military ban on sodomy and bestiality”.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who also voted for the bill, was more cagey in his response. Asked if he had been aware of the provision, Graham, a former military prosecutor and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the CNSNewsreporter, “No, I can’t say I was. But … I think I know what the military is getting at there, in light of the change in policy. But no, I can’t say that I was, so we’ll look at that.”

More recently the House and Senate passed a trillion dollar plus omnibus authorization bill.  One sane Representative who voted against it more or less said “how can I rationally vote on a trillion dollar bill that has just be presented”.