My dictionary defines reality as: “…the state of things as they
actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them…”
Reality is not a pill taken by this White House. After mounting a
Nixon-esque campaign of "smear the opposition," which characterized Mr. Romney
as a dastardly scoundrel, even as Mr. Obama avoided his record in his first term, he strides on through his fantasy land, talking about "compromise" while busily back-stabbing the House Republicans over their “failure to solve the fiscal cliff problem.”
But we can expect no more from this rhetorician. Mr Obama lies with great skill,
manipulating reality to fit his needs politically. This is a denial of reality. And our
national media lets him get away with it. For example, we are well on our way to the fifth trillion-dollar deficit in five Obama years. But he has yet to propose a meaningful budget scheme that will solve this.
Could it be that he doesn’t want to? That he is perfectly willing to pull down the American dollar?
Some of the smart guys are beginning to bet that way, and one can certainly sketch out the scenario that will cause it to happen when realistically sorting through the Administration policies. His feeble "tax-the-rich" chorus, repeated over and over again, will only generate a pittance of the revenue needed to float his expenditures if passed. The reality is that he MUST
tax the middle classes – and eventually, he will.
Fiscal and financial affairs are in a horrible mess, in short. That is THE reality. We simply
await the crisis that will result from this miserable stewardship of Obama-and-party.
The reality of foreign affairs is equally miserable, yet also drowning in rhetoric and spin. The truth of the Libyan assault on our diplomats has not been told… only spun. And once again the complicit national media allows the administration to get away with this.
The reality abroad is that our position in the Middle East, established by the Truman Administration in 1948 and expanded by the Eisenhower Administration, placed Israel as keystone there; it is deteriorating fast. Egypt has put a tawdry regime dedicated to Islamism into power, throwing out the balancing influences in that government’s judiciary when they proved inconvenient. They have instituted Sharia (Islamic) law.
Will we soon see a new Iranian-type state on the delta of the Nile? It looks that way in the light of cold reality; the Muslim Brotherhood is triumphing there and they do NOT promise moderation and compromise!
Syria is disintegrating, and could easily fall into similar straits. This means Israel could be beset on all sides in the future, with only an enfeebled "great power" and a wishy-washy Obama at the helm of her rescue ship. That could well generate a hot – and escalating – war in the Middle East.
Extraordinary accomplishment, isn’t it? Wait until you hear the spin on that one!
Friday, December 28, 2012
Yes, Let’s tax the Rich!
Mr. Obama has been telling us for years he wants to "tax the rich" without being
very rigorous concerning who are the rich. Oh, sure, he says, "those who make more than $250,000 per year," but he is a rhetorician! And that means ambiguity is always present.
But there are some FACTS available about who is paying federal income taxes: figures recently released by the federal government tell us the Bottom 50% of the taxpayers remitted a total of 2.36% of the total tax paid this year.
So guess who paid the bills?
The top 1% of the tax payers – those with $369,000 or more in income – paid 37.4% of the total income tax collected. The top 5% of the taxpayers paid 59.1% of the total tax. The top 10% paid 70.6% of the total tax.
It would seem the upper-income earners are not exactly dodging the tax bullet! And it would also seem that the bottom half of the income-earners are getting a pretty good deal under the tax law as it currently is written. Of course, the reality is that most of those in the bottom half are actually paying no tax because of tax credits under the current law.
The danger of increasing rates on the upper-bracket earners is that of de-motivation: why should they work and/or aggressively invest their money only to remit more money to Washington for the Beltway boys to spend so flippantly?
Our current bunch in Congress has not even managed to have a civilized discussion, much less actually write and pass a budget for several years! We are running the country on "continuing resolutions." In cowboy English, that is "kicking the can down the road" (deferring any decisions or adjustments until some unknown future time).
Yet each and every one of the 535 Congressmen and Senators are drawing their salaries and benefits, you can be sure of that!
very rigorous concerning who are the rich. Oh, sure, he says, "those who make more than $250,000 per year," but he is a rhetorician! And that means ambiguity is always present.
But there are some FACTS available about who is paying federal income taxes: figures recently released by the federal government tell us the Bottom 50% of the taxpayers remitted a total of 2.36% of the total tax paid this year.
So guess who paid the bills?
The top 1% of the tax payers – those with $369,000 or more in income – paid 37.4% of the total income tax collected. The top 5% of the taxpayers paid 59.1% of the total tax. The top 10% paid 70.6% of the total tax.
It would seem the upper-income earners are not exactly dodging the tax bullet! And it would also seem that the bottom half of the income-earners are getting a pretty good deal under the tax law as it currently is written. Of course, the reality is that most of those in the bottom half are actually paying no tax because of tax credits under the current law.
The danger of increasing rates on the upper-bracket earners is that of de-motivation: why should they work and/or aggressively invest their money only to remit more money to Washington for the Beltway boys to spend so flippantly?
Our current bunch in Congress has not even managed to have a civilized discussion, much less actually write and pass a budget for several years! We are running the country on "continuing resolutions." In cowboy English, that is "kicking the can down the road" (deferring any decisions or adjustments until some unknown future time).
Yet each and every one of the 535 Congressmen and Senators are drawing their salaries and benefits, you can be sure of that!
Thursday, December 6, 2012
“Who says they will hang around?”
The Obama Administration has said over and over again it wants to raise taxes on the "rich" (whoever that might be ... it seems to be a flexible concept with the administration).
I have poked fun at it, since for this to be successful tax policy, one has to have these people stand still and "pay up."
And that ain’t the way human nature works!
Maybe Warren Buffett and his buddy, Bill Gates, and the rest of their bridge club will "pay up," but DON’T expect many of the rest of the rich to pay much higher taxes without doing what they can to minimize the impact on their tax bill. To expect otherwise is, first, stupid, and, second, delusional.
Current experience in other places offers instructive information; the Wall St. Journal explained this on December 3rd in an editorial: “Britain’s Missing Millionaires.” It seems in 2009 the British government raised the tax rate on their "rich" from 40 percent to more than 60 percent, effective beginning in 2010. So what happened?
“Lo, the total number of millionaire tax filers plunged to 6,000 in 2010-11, from 16,000 in 2009-10. The new tax was meant to raise about 2.5 billion pounds in new revenue. So much for that,” The Journal tells us. The OLD tax rate had yielded about 9 percent of the total income tax when it was 40 percent, about $13 billion. The NEW (higher percentage) rate yielded only 4.4 percent of the total income tax, about 6.5 billion – half as much. So the government’s "take" slipped by 50 percent!
So where did the missing millionaires go to? Ten thousand of them left the country?? How likely is that? Or fiddled their taxes in order to cut the take of the government? That is probably more likely. Whatever happened, they worked to cut their tax bill!
Experience in the various states in the U.S. confirms the British experience. New Jersey raised tax rates under the last Democratic gubernatorial administration – which lost to the Republicans next time around – and saw exactly the same result: the tax take went down when hit with higher percentage rates. But they also had a large number of people physically move OUT of the state – mostly to Florida – so the state not only gave up revenue but also considerable business talent and expertise that could help their struggling economy right now.
California is soon to discover this reality of human nature, it seems. The Golden (though deficit-ridden) State passed a proposition raising taxes on the "rich," so now the wealthy, finally fed up with the stupidity of it all, are flocking across the borders to Nevada and Arizona looking for a more friendly place in which to live. The Golden State is turning to Brass!
What makes those who work for Obama think they can make it turn out differently?
Raise the tax rates: Watch the take from those brackets go down absolutely, watch the wealthy switch out of job-producing investments to tax-exempt municipal bonds and similar passive investments. Watch them move away! Watch them quit working!
Would YOU stay put just so Mr. Obama could tax you at a higher rate if it was pretty easy for you to change your investments or your residence?
I don’t think so!
I have poked fun at it, since for this to be successful tax policy, one has to have these people stand still and "pay up."
And that ain’t the way human nature works!
Maybe Warren Buffett and his buddy, Bill Gates, and the rest of their bridge club will "pay up," but DON’T expect many of the rest of the rich to pay much higher taxes without doing what they can to minimize the impact on their tax bill. To expect otherwise is, first, stupid, and, second, delusional.
Current experience in other places offers instructive information; the Wall St. Journal explained this on December 3rd in an editorial: “Britain’s Missing Millionaires.” It seems in 2009 the British government raised the tax rate on their "rich" from 40 percent to more than 60 percent, effective beginning in 2010. So what happened?
“Lo, the total number of millionaire tax filers plunged to 6,000 in 2010-11, from 16,000 in 2009-10. The new tax was meant to raise about 2.5 billion pounds in new revenue. So much for that,” The Journal tells us. The OLD tax rate had yielded about 9 percent of the total income tax when it was 40 percent, about $13 billion. The NEW (higher percentage) rate yielded only 4.4 percent of the total income tax, about 6.5 billion – half as much. So the government’s "take" slipped by 50 percent!
So where did the missing millionaires go to? Ten thousand of them left the country?? How likely is that? Or fiddled their taxes in order to cut the take of the government? That is probably more likely. Whatever happened, they worked to cut their tax bill!
Experience in the various states in the U.S. confirms the British experience. New Jersey raised tax rates under the last Democratic gubernatorial administration – which lost to the Republicans next time around – and saw exactly the same result: the tax take went down when hit with higher percentage rates. But they also had a large number of people physically move OUT of the state – mostly to Florida – so the state not only gave up revenue but also considerable business talent and expertise that could help their struggling economy right now.
California is soon to discover this reality of human nature, it seems. The Golden (though deficit-ridden) State passed a proposition raising taxes on the "rich," so now the wealthy, finally fed up with the stupidity of it all, are flocking across the borders to Nevada and Arizona looking for a more friendly place in which to live. The Golden State is turning to Brass!
What makes those who work for Obama think they can make it turn out differently?
Raise the tax rates: Watch the take from those brackets go down absolutely, watch the wealthy switch out of job-producing investments to tax-exempt municipal bonds and similar passive investments. Watch them move away! Watch them quit working!
Would YOU stay put just so Mr. Obama could tax you at a higher rate if it was pretty easy for you to change your investments or your residence?
I don’t think so!
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Stock market off 1000 points; businesses reduce investment… Thanks, Obama!
Nov 19, 2012
Wall Street Journal front page headline:
"Investment Falls Off a Cliff – U. S. Companies Cut Spending
Plans Amid Fiscal and Economic Uncertainty”
Is this the positive response greeting the newly re-elected Obama Administration? Or does it echo the sell-off of 7 percent and more of the securities market once the election results were in?
Right-thinking business people know what they want from government:
A level and fair playing field without hidden pitfalls.
No special deals from the government for any particular competitor.
No unanticipated surprises.
Reasonable demands for information and corporate behavior from regulators.
Fair distribution of the cost load of carrying the government.
But these reactions from business and investors does NOT complement the current Washington environment.
The election results promises more of the same we have struggled with for the last four years. That’s why I opposed Obama – who clearly dislikes the business sector. And why I endorsed Mitt Romney, who is a successful and capable businessman.
The only chance we have of returning to financial health in this country is to overcome the current recession problems, to control the runaway Federal expenditures, and to encourage the American economy.
In short, stimulate private enterprise economic activities and grow our way out of our troubles.
But this White House leadership is not capable of creating the environment that American business, large and small, wants and needs in order to feel confident in the future. So we will see little growth.
The WSJ says: "U.S. companies are scaling back investment plans at the fastest pace since the recession, signaling more trouble for the economic recovery." Note that these are new plans, new decisions, made since the election. And business investment had already stalled in the third quarter for the first time since 2009. Now it will be even less.
Not exactly a vote of confidence in the re-elected administration and Congress.
We are uniquely lucky in our local economy because Oklahoma is bucking the national trends and growing, but our insulation from the national troubles is less than perfect. We can easily get pulled into the national malaise.
Some states have added to their economic troubles through actions taken on Election Day; notable among them is California, which passed Proposition 30, which established a new, higher state income tax rate on those taxpayers (the "rich" in the current political-speak of our time) making over $250,000 per year of 13.3 percent, which brings the combined federal and state tax to more than 50 percent; this supposedly will balance the Golden State’s budget.
But the hard-nosed opinion of many economists think it will simply generate an increased out-migration of high-income people into Nevada, Arizona and Oregon. The last state to try to impose very high state rates on these people was New Jersey several years ago and the result was the outward migration – mostly to Florida – of 30,000 high-income people!
The people racked by this new California tax are NOT dumb! They will not hold still while the state bureaucrats work to ‘stick it to them’. They will vote with their feet! What can Jerry Brown and his Democratic buddies be thinking? It is a real good time to be scouting California for industrial and business prospects finally ready to move, I’d think.
Well, more news from Washington; news that had been carefully put on the hook until AFTER the election: Buried in the thousands of pages of Obama care is a NEW Federal EXCISE Tax. Every sale of any kind of real property will now bear an excise tax of 3.7 percent of the face amount of the sale, payable through your income tax return. Sell your house for $100,000, pay Uncle Sam $3,700 in excise taxes. Plus Federal capital gain taxes.
This was conveniently buried in the huge bill that authorized Obamacare, but now begins to pound down the U. S. taxpayer on January 1 next year; proceeds will go into the pot to pay for some aspect of Obamacare.
What is the connection between real estate and health care? There is none! It is just a sneaky way to take a bigger bite of the stream of real estate transactions that flow in the country.
It reminds me of the British tax on tea in 1775! Too bad we cannot board the Obamacare ship and throw all the tea chests into the ocean, like our ancestors did in Boston harbor!
What other post-election surprises will drop on us?
Wall Street Journal front page headline:
"Investment Falls Off a Cliff – U. S. Companies Cut Spending
Plans Amid Fiscal and Economic Uncertainty”
Is this the positive response greeting the newly re-elected Obama Administration? Or does it echo the sell-off of 7 percent and more of the securities market once the election results were in?
Right-thinking business people know what they want from government:
A level and fair playing field without hidden pitfalls.
No special deals from the government for any particular competitor.
No unanticipated surprises.
Reasonable demands for information and corporate behavior from regulators.
Fair distribution of the cost load of carrying the government.
But these reactions from business and investors does NOT complement the current Washington environment.
The election results promises more of the same we have struggled with for the last four years. That’s why I opposed Obama – who clearly dislikes the business sector. And why I endorsed Mitt Romney, who is a successful and capable businessman.
The only chance we have of returning to financial health in this country is to overcome the current recession problems, to control the runaway Federal expenditures, and to encourage the American economy.
In short, stimulate private enterprise economic activities and grow our way out of our troubles.
But this White House leadership is not capable of creating the environment that American business, large and small, wants and needs in order to feel confident in the future. So we will see little growth.
The WSJ says: "U.S. companies are scaling back investment plans at the fastest pace since the recession, signaling more trouble for the economic recovery." Note that these are new plans, new decisions, made since the election. And business investment had already stalled in the third quarter for the first time since 2009. Now it will be even less.
Not exactly a vote of confidence in the re-elected administration and Congress.
We are uniquely lucky in our local economy because Oklahoma is bucking the national trends and growing, but our insulation from the national troubles is less than perfect. We can easily get pulled into the national malaise.
Some states have added to their economic troubles through actions taken on Election Day; notable among them is California, which passed Proposition 30, which established a new, higher state income tax rate on those taxpayers (the "rich" in the current political-speak of our time) making over $250,000 per year of 13.3 percent, which brings the combined federal and state tax to more than 50 percent; this supposedly will balance the Golden State’s budget.
But the hard-nosed opinion of many economists think it will simply generate an increased out-migration of high-income people into Nevada, Arizona and Oregon. The last state to try to impose very high state rates on these people was New Jersey several years ago and the result was the outward migration – mostly to Florida – of 30,000 high-income people!
The people racked by this new California tax are NOT dumb! They will not hold still while the state bureaucrats work to ‘stick it to them’. They will vote with their feet! What can Jerry Brown and his Democratic buddies be thinking? It is a real good time to be scouting California for industrial and business prospects finally ready to move, I’d think.
Well, more news from Washington; news that had been carefully put on the hook until AFTER the election: Buried in the thousands of pages of Obama care is a NEW Federal EXCISE Tax. Every sale of any kind of real property will now bear an excise tax of 3.7 percent of the face amount of the sale, payable through your income tax return. Sell your house for $100,000, pay Uncle Sam $3,700 in excise taxes. Plus Federal capital gain taxes.
This was conveniently buried in the huge bill that authorized Obamacare, but now begins to pound down the U. S. taxpayer on January 1 next year; proceeds will go into the pot to pay for some aspect of Obamacare.
What is the connection between real estate and health care? There is none! It is just a sneaky way to take a bigger bite of the stream of real estate transactions that flow in the country.
It reminds me of the British tax on tea in 1775! Too bad we cannot board the Obamacare ship and throw all the tea chests into the ocean, like our ancestors did in Boston harbor!
What other post-election surprises will drop on us?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)