He is milking it…and milking it… He is stretching his 15 minutes of fame longer than anyone I have ever seen!

Once again, it looks to me like conservatives are digging their own grave.  They seem to elevate and place their faith in the least trustworthy people they can find.  Stalwart, I guess, but it looks a little desperate to me.

The 2% Illusion…

President Obama has laid out the most ambitious and expensive domestic agenda since LBJ, and now all he has to do is figure out how to pay for it. On Tuesday, he left the impression that we need merely end "tax breaks for the wealthiest 2% of Americans," and he promised that households earning less than $250,000 won’t see their taxes increased by "one single dime."

 This is going to be some trick. Even the most basic inspection of the IRS income tax statistics shows that raising taxes on the salaries, dividends and capital gains of those making more than $250,000 can’t possibly raise enough revenue to fund Mr. Obama’s new spending ambitions.

Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and "the wealthiest 2%." Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That’s about 7% of all returns; the data aren’t broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% — about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 — paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.

Note that federal income taxes are already "progressive" with a 35% top marginal rate, and that Mr. Obama is (so far) proposing to raise it only to 39.6%, plus another two percentage points in hidden deduction phase-outs. He’d also raise capital gains and dividend rates, but those both yield far less revenue than the income tax. These combined increases won’t come close to raising the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Mr. Obama is going to need.

But let’s not stop at a 42% top rate; as a thought experiment, let’s go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That’s less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable "dime" of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.

Fast forward to this year (and 2010) when the Wall Street meltdown and recession are going to mean far few taxpayers earning more than $500,000. Profits are plunging, businesses are cutting or eliminating dividends, hedge funds are rolling up, and, most of all, capital nationwide is on strike. Raising taxes now will thus yield far less revenue than it would have in 2006.

Mr. Obama is of course counting on an economic recovery. And he’s also assuming along with the new liberal economic consensus that taxes don’t matter to growth or job creation. The truth, though, is that they do. Small- and medium-sized businesses are the nation’s primary employers, and lower individual tax rates have induced thousands of them to shift from filing under the corporate tax system to the individual system, often as limited liability companies or Subchapter S corporations. The Tax Foundation calculates that merely restoring the higher, Clinton-era tax rates on the top two brackets would hit 45% to 55% of small-business income, depending on how inclusively "small business" is defined. These owners will find a way to declare less taxable income.

The bottom line is that Mr. Obama is selling the country on a 2% illusion. Unwinding the U.S. commitment in Iraq and allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire can’t possibly pay for his agenda. Taxes on the not-so-rich will need to rise as well.

On that point, by the way, it’s unclear why Mr. Obama thinks his climate-change scheme won’t hit all Americans with higher taxes. Selling the right to emit greenhouse gases amounts to a steep new tax on most types of energy and, therefore, on all Americans who use energy. There’s a reason that Charlie Rangel’s Ways and Means panel, which writes tax law, is holding hearings this week on cap-and-trade regulation.

Mr. Obama is very good at portraying his agenda as nothing more than center-left pragmatism. But pragmatists don’t ignore the data. And the reality is that the only way to pay for Mr. Obama’s ambitions is to reach ever deeper into the pockets of the American middle class.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123561551065378405.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

An 87-Year-Old’s Economic Survival Guide by  Chuck Norris
02/24/2009 Print This Forward Feedback Facebook LinkedIn Digg This! Subscribe Sponsored By: —>

An old Spanish proverb says, "An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy." I believe that value holds, in or out of a recession. And seeing as my 87-year-old mother lived through the Great Depression, I think her value (and that of those like her) will increase through these tough economic times because her insider wisdom can help us all.

Mother was about 10 years old when her eight-member family endured the thick of those recessive days in rural Wilson, Okla., which only has a population of 1,600 today. The recurring droughts across the heartland during that period dried up the job market, making it worse in the Midwest than it even was in the rest of the country. Over the years, my grandpa worked multiple jobs, from the oil fields to the cotton fields, and he was even a night watchman. The family members did what they could to contribute, but most of them were simply too young to play a major part.

In 1933, when President Franklin Roosevelt took office, his administration, through the Works Project Administration, brought about the employment of millions in civil construction projects, from bridges to dams to airports to roads. My grandfather traveled about 90 miles for a day’s work to help build the Lake Murray dam. But with a far smaller ratio of jobs to potential laborers, if Grandpa worked five days a month (at $1.80 a day), it was a good month.
Like most families, my mother’s family didn’t have running water or electricity. And Granny did her best to keep the outhouse clean, with Grandpa helping by regularly depositing lye to control the odors. (You can imagine how the hot, humid Oklahoma summers turned that outside commode into one smelly closet-sized sauna.) A "scavenger wagon" came by once a week and cleaned out the hole, which had a small chairlike contraption over it with the center punched out. (They once had a two-seater in there, which allowed for two people to enjoy each other’s company and conversation. Mom told me that she always felt a little upper-class when she sat with someone else!) By the way, and I’m not trying to be crude, toilet tissue wasn’t around, so they used pages from Montgomery Ward catalogs (and you wondered why the catalogs were so thick). No joke — they preferred the non-glossy pages. I’ll let you figure out why.

Got the picture? With that in mind, I turn to a recent conversation I had with my mother. I asked her, "How would you encourage the average American to weather the economic storms of today?"

Here’s her advice, in her words:

— "Get back to the basics. Simplify your life. Live within your means. People have got to be willing to downsize and be OK with it. We must quit borrowing and cut spending. Be grateful for what you have, especially your health and loved ones. Be content with what you have, and remember the stuff will never make you happy. Never. Back then, we didn’t have one-hundredth of what people do today, and yet we seemed happier than most today, even during the Great Depression.

— "Be humble and willing to work. Back then, any work was good work. We picked cotton, picked up cans, scrap metal, whatever it took to get by. Where’s that work ethic today? If someone’s not being paid $10 an hour today, they’re whining and unwilling to work, even if they don’t have a job. The message from yesteryear is don’t be too proud to do whatever it takes to meet the financial needs of your family.

— "Be rich in love. We didn’t have much. In fact, we had nothing at all, compared to people today, but we had each other. We were poor, but rich in love. We’ve lost the value of family and friends today, and we’ve got to gain it back if we’re ever to get back on track. If we lose all our stuff and still have one another and our health, what have we really lost?

— "Be a part of a community. Today people are much more alone, much more isolated. We used to be close with our neighbors. If one person had a bigger or better garden or orchard, they shared the vegetables and fruits with others in need. Society has shifted from caring for one another to being dependent upon government aid and welfare. That is why so many today trust in government to deliver them. They’ve forgotten an America that used to rally around one another in smaller clusters, called neighborhoods and communities. We must rekindle those local communal fires and relearn the power of that age-old commandment, ‘Love thy neighbor.’

— "Help someone else. We never quit helping others back then. Today too many people are consumed with their own problems and only helping themselves. ‘What’s in it for me?’ is the question most are asking. But back then, it was, ‘What can I do to help my neighbor, too?’ I love Rick Warren’s book The Purpose Driven Life, and especially his thought, ‘We were created for community, designed to be a blessing to others.’ Most of all, helping others gets our minds off of our problems and puts things into better perspective.

— "Lean upon God for help and strength. We didn’t just have each other to lean on, but we had God, too. We all attended church and belonged to a faith community. Church was the hub of society, the community core and rallying point. Today people turn to government the way we used to turn to churches. It’s been that way ever since Herbert Hoover’s alleged promise of a ‘chicken in every pot’ and President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Too many have abandoned faith and community. We trust in money more than God. And maybe that’s a reason why we’re in this economic pickle."

Now that’s conventional wisdom that should be shouted and posted in every corridor of government, every community across America, and every blog on the Internet.

Call me overly pragmatic, but I think a little practical wisdom and encouragement is what we all need about now. Mom always was good for that. She still is.

 The lefties and their lapdogs in the press and willing accomplices in the Ohio state government tried their best to ruin Joe’s reputation and damage his ability to make an honest living.

 To all you liberals who live in your mothers basement, that means he works for money.

 Joe has used those vicious attacks to the advantage of the Republicans and is responsible for a grass roots fund raising effort worth millions of dollars and the money continues to roll in.

 In the mean time, Obama’s job approval rating is now lower than any president in modern history at this point in his term.

 You Libs better start worrying about your guy and his 15 minutes or you’ll end up with another Jimmy Carter.

 

.

  The Cal Ripken President by  Ann Coulter
02/25/2009 Print This Forward Feedback Facebook LinkedIn Digg This! Subscribe Sponsored By: —>

As Obama prepared to deliver his address to Congress on Tuesday, the Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner, Fox News’ Bret Baier and Charles Krauthammer all gushed that history was being made as the first African-American president appeared before Congress.
   
Even Gov. Bobby Jindal, whom I suppose I should note was the first Indian-American to give the Republican response to a president’s speech, began with an encomium to the first black president. (Wasn’t Bobby great in "Slumdog Millionaire"?)
   
Are we going to have to hear about this for the next four years? Obama is becoming the Cal Ripken Jr. of presidents, making history every time he suits up for a game. Recently, Obama also became the first African-American president to order a ham sandwich late at night from the White House kitchen! That’s going to get old pretty quick.
   
But as long as the nation is obsessed with historic milestones, is no one going to remark on what a great country it is where a mentally retarded woman can become speaker of the house?
   
Obama spent more than twice as much time in his historic speech genuflecting to the teachers’ unions than talking about terrorism, Iraq or Afghanistan. So it was historic only in the sense that Obama is the first African-American president, but was the same old Democratic claptrap in every other respect.
   
After claiming that the disastrous stimulus bill would create or save 3.5 million jobs — "more than 90 percent" in the private sector — Obama then enumerated a long list of exclusively government jobs that would be "saved."
   
He was suspiciously verbose about saving the jobs of public schoolteachers. Because nothing says "economic stimulus" better than saving the jobs of lethargic incompetents who kick off at 2 p.m. every day and get summers off. Actually, that’s not fair: Some teachers spend long hours after school having sex with their students.
   
As with the Clintons, Obama so earnestly believes in public school education that he sends his girls to … an expensive private school. He demands that taxpayers support the very public schoolteachers he won’t trust with his own children.
   
It is one thing to tell voters that school choice is wrong, because, you know, the public schools won’t get better unless Americans sacrifice their children to the teachers’ union’s maw. But it is quite another for Democrats to feed their own kids to the union incinerator.
   
Consequently, no Democrat since Jimmy Carter has been stupid enough to send his own children to a public school.
   
And yet the stimulus bill expressly prohibits money earmarked for "education" to be spent on financial aid at private or parochial schools. Private schools might use it for some nefarious purpose like actually teaching their students, rather than indoctrinating them in anti-American propaganda.
   
The stimulus bill includes about $100 billion to education. By "education," Democrats don’t mean anything a normal person would think of as education, such as learning how to talk good. "Education" means creating lots of useless bureaucratic jobs, mostly in Washington, having nothing to do with teaching.
   
Apparently, nothing irritates public schoolteachers more than being asked to teach. While 80 percent of the employees of private schools are teachers, only half the employees of public schools are. The rest are "coordinating," "facilitating" or "empowering" something or other.
   
The Department of Education alone provides more than 4,000 jobs that haven’t the faintest connection with teaching. And now the stimulus bill will double the Education Department’s funding. (For those of you who went to a public school, that means it will become twice as big.)
   
We’ve come a long way from Ronald Reagan promising to eliminate the Education Department, which itself was a Jimmy Carter sop to the teachers’ unions.
   
Federal meddling in education has been an abject failure, so the Democrats’ plan is to keep doing more of the same. If only there were some aphorism about people who fail to learn from history — oh, well!
   
It can’t be easy to reduce the educational achievement in America year after year, but the education establishment has done it! Yes they can!
   
Thanks to the hard work of thousands of government workers at the Department of Education and well-paid teachers’ union employees, American schoolchildren perform worse on education tests for every year they spend in a public school.
   
It turns out that being in U.S. public schools has the same effect on people as hanging around Paris Hilton does.
   
In fourth grade, the earliest grade for which international comparisons are available, American students outperform most other countries in reading, math and science. Fourth-graders score in the 92nd percentile in science, the 58th percentile in math and the 70th percentile in reading, where they beat 26 of 35 countries, including Germany, France and Italy.
   
But by the eighth grade, American students are only midrange in international comparisons. (On the plus side, by the eighth grade they’re noticeably fatter.)
   
By the 12th grade — after receiving the full benefits of an American education — Americans are near the bottom. Let X represent the number of years spent in U.S. public schools, and Y represent average test scores in math and reading — oh, never mind.
   
With an additional eight years of a public school education under their belts, Americans fall from the 92nd percentile in science to the 29th percentile. While American fourth-graders are bested only by South Korea and Japan in science, by 12th grade, the only countries the American students can beat are Lithuania, Cyprus and South Africa.
   
Which suggests that if public education were extended all the way through college, by the time a student gets to graduate school he might very well be qualified to be … speaker of the house! My comment:  Both My wife and myself have been teachers and have seen the decline in the public schools.  I was a teacher from 1967-1982 (15 Yrs), and my wife was a teacher from 1968-1999 (31 Yrs).  In this time she saw a drastic decline in education.