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Obama’s plan to fix the economy with tax increases
*** SCROLL DOWN FOR UPDATES & REACTIONS TO OBAMA’S SPEECH ***
A quick peek under the tent before President Obama starts his circus show gives his tax hike speech later today.
President Barack Obama will call for a combination of reductions in entitlement spending and tax increases on higher-income Americans to address long-term fiscal debt while drawing a sharp contrast with the Republican alternative proposed by Representative Paul Ryan, according to a person familiar with the plan.
Funny, it was just five months ago that Obama was saying the Bush tax cuts were a “good deal for America” and he extended the Bush-era tax cuts for two more years. But then again, all Barack Obama statements come with an expiration date.
Now, Chairman Zero has flip-flopped back to his 2009 “everybody’s going to have to give” mode, which translates to “soak the rich.”
A senior administration official confirmed that the president will renew his call to end the Bush-era tax cuts for families making over $250,000 a year, a proposal that Republicans fiercely oppose.
“We can’t tax the very people we expect to reinvest in our economy and create jobs,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters. “Washington has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.”
The President’s plan to raise taxes on achievers in order to fix the deficit makes about as much sense as robbing from your neighbor in order to balance your checkbook. Stealing money from someone else in order to bolster your income doesn’t equal living within your means.
Even if Obama could legally seize every penny from “the rich”, America would still be in the hole financially.
This year, Congress will spend $3.7 trillion dollars. That turns out to be about $10 billion per day. Can we prey upon the rich to cough up the money? According to IRS statistics, roughly 2 percent of U.S. households have an income of $250,000 and above. By the way, $250,000 per year hardly qualifies one as being rich. It’s not even yacht and Learjet money. All told, households earning $250,000 and above account for 25 percent, or $1.97 trillion, of the nearly $8 trillion of total household income. If Congress imposed a 100 percent tax, taking all earnings above $250,000 per year, it would yield the princely sum of $1.4 trillion. That would keep the government running for 141 days, but there’s a problem because there are 224 more days left in the year.
How about corporate profits to fill the gap? Fortune 500 companies earn nearly $400 billion in profits. Since leftists think profits are little less than theft and greed, Congress might confiscate these ill-gotten gains so that they can be returned to their rightful owners. Taking corporate profits would keep the government running for another 40 days, but that along with confiscating all income above $250,000 would only get us to the end of June. Congress must search elsewhere.
According to Forbes 400, America has 400 billionaires with a combined net worth of $1.3 trillion. Congress could confiscate their stocks and bonds, and force them to sell their businesses, yachts, airplanes, mansions and jewelry. The problem is that after fleecing the rich of their income and net worth, and the Fortune 500 corporations of their profits, it would only get us to mid-August. The fact of the matter is there are not enough rich people to come anywhere close to satisfying Congress’ voracious spending appetite. They’re going to have to go after the non-rich.
In The Washington Post, Robert Samuelson wrote a great article calling our government’s current course “suicidal.”
The package to prevent a shutdown barely touches the prevailing stalemate. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s proposed 2012 budget forthrightly addresses health spending but doesn’t make any cuts in Social Security. Ryan’s plan would ultimately gut defense and some valuable domestic programs; it wouldn’t reach balance until about 2040. Compared with Democrats, however, Ryan is a model of intellectual rigor and political courage. Obama would run huge deficits from now to eternity; the Congressional Budget Office has projected about $12 trillion of added debt from 2010 to 2021 under his policies. Obama urges an “adult” conversation and acts like a child, denying the unappealing choices.
The only appealing choices for Obama are increased spending and increased taxes. But today’s speech isn’t about restoring America’s prosperity, this is about securing Obama’s reelection by paying off the poor with more entitlement spending.
And I find it ironic that he plans to call for additional tax increases right before Americans file their income taxes. Get ready to hear “shared prosperity and shared responsibility,” which is just Newspeak for Socialism.
“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” ~Winston Churchill
“The political expression of altruism is collectivism or statism, which holds that man’s life and work belong to the state—to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation—and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.” ~Ayn Rand
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UPDATES: The reactions to Obama’s speech (full transcript available at Red State) have been almost universally negative, except for the Kool-Aid drinkers who would cheer him for reciting the nutrition label on a box of cereal. Here’s my Reader’s Digest review:
Patriotism means paying higher taxes. So bend over for the Red, White and Blue, collectivism is your duty. Otherwise, our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, just like those eeeevil Republicans want them to.
Here are a few of my favorite reactions so far…
- Ed Morrissey thoroughly fisked Obama’s pathetic four-step plan. Grab some popcorn and enjoy the smackdown.
- ABC’s Jake Tapper characterized Obama’s speech as “Throw Grandma From The Train” and pointed out the president’s duplicity.
- Even liberal columnist Kristen Powers saw through King Barry’s hypocrisy, tweeting:
Obama warned against demagoguing entitlement reform before he demagogued entitlement reform
- Paul Ryan slammed Obama’s fearmongering as “dramatically inaccurate and hopelessly inadequate…”
“Rather than building bridges, he’s poisoning wells. …Exploiting people’s emotions of fear, envy, and anxiety is not hope. It’s not change. It’s partisanship. We don’t need partisanship. We don’t need demagoguery. We need solutions. And we don’t need to keep punting to other people to make tough decisions. If we don’t make tough decisions today, our children are going to have to make much, much tougher decisions tomorrow.”
- Charles Krauthammer said “I thought it was a disgrace”
“I thought it was a disgrace,” he said. “I rarely heard a speech by a president so shallow, so hyper-partisan and so intellectually dishonest, outside the last couple of weeks of a presidential election where you are allowed to call your opponent anything short of a traitor. But, we’re a year-and-a-half away from Election Day and it was supposed to be a speech about policy. He didn’t even get to his own alternative until more than halfway through the speech. And when he did, he threw out numbers suspended in mid-air with nothing under them with all kinds of goals and guidelines and triggers that mean nothing. The speech was really about and entirely an attack on the [Rep. Paul] Ryan plan.”
- Vice President’s reaction was priceless: Obama’s deficit reduction speechcampaign speech put him to sleep!
Posted by FullMetalPatriot
12th gen. American, Constitutionalist, Harley-riding Texan, gun owner & NRA member, blogger, illustrator, Florida Gator alumnus. #TCOT
12th gen. American, Constitutionalist, Harley-riding Texan, gun owner & NRA member, blogger, illustrator, Florida Gator alumnus. #TCOT
I hope the GOP does not go squishy
You mean squishier than they've been in the past week?
They will, they have the same masters as the dems
[...] latest bit of chutzpah comes from the same president who demagogued entitlement reform just two months ago. And demagogued the notion of debating Obamacare before voting on it as [...]