Two years ago I never though Obama would stand a chance at reelection, but now I think he has a pretty good chance. Primarily because the Republican candidates are so weak.
Nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide for R. McGraham. Out of the loop as usual, but not to worry, the inanity is only just beginning.
And whose fault is that? The Bush Tax cuts for the wealthy have to be rejected if we're ever going to dig our way out of this hole.
Let's forget USA Today and do some serious thinking all on our own. After Bill Clinton and George Bush, together, over nearly a 20 year period, left the nation with some 9 to 10 trillion in debt, Obama, by himself, in just 2 years, raised that to 15 trillion, and in another year to 16 trillion. Obama and his party have drastically increased the rate at which government debt has been created, and created the most obscene carnival of crony capitalism, economic fraud, business corruption, and destruction of private wealth in history.
The Bush tax cuts have nothing whatsoever to do with government debt. They are tax cuts to individuals in the private sector, and do not create debt. All the federal government needs to do, to avoid such cuts creating more debt, is to reduce spending by the amount of the tax cuts. If they do not, then any further debt has been created of their own free will and choice, and the political class has nobody to blame but itself.
The very argument itself is a clear demonstration of the fact that the major economic problems we face, regarding government's role in the economy, is out of control spending, not tax cuts. Petty, self aggrandizing moral posturing about "tax cuts for the rich" are nothing but a red herring for the real issue: the vast waste and destruction of wealth by a ravenous political class that uses the United States tax code as its primary engine of social engineering and permanent incumbency.
Graham then trots out, economic illiteracy and his well known lack of educational background in full bloom, the old hoary class war shibboleth, so beloved of pseudo-moralizing leftists everywhere, of "tax cuts for the rich." Lacking the desire or temperament to do any actual homework, he regurgitates the standard nostrums of others who agree with him while avoiding actual serious thinking on the matter.
The Bush tax cuts, in point of fact, went to everyone who paid taxes, with a bit more going to the upper earners, one fundamental reason being that those who earn much more income, and pay taxes at a much higher marginal rate, will, given any percentage rate of tax cut, get a "larger" decrease in absolute dollar amount then someone who makes $25,000 a year. Did the Bush cuts "disproportionately" help the wealthy? Of course they did, because any tax cut, regardless of the percentage, with have a disproportionate effect on someone with significantly higher earnings. If I make $30,000 a year, and get a 3% reduction in my marginal rate, that's going to help me, but not nearly as much as the same 3% reduction helps someone making $300,000 or $3,000,000 a year.
In any case, "the rich" are now pay more of the total tax burden then before Bush entered office, and the share of all individual taxes paid for the bottom 40% decreased from 0% to -4%, which means that the average American family in this income level was actually being subsidized by wealthier taxpayers. The top 20% at this time increased their share of tax payments from 81% to 85% of all income taxes paid.
Tax breaks for the wealthy would be reduced so that they are no better than those for the middle class. No household making more than $1 million a year would pay less than 30% in income taxes.
This is pure ideological twaddle, for a number of reasons. First, if any of these faux moralists were really interested in a "fair" rate of taxation, they would all be clamoring for a single, low, fair,
flat tax on income at its source, and taxed only once. That, however, would throw cold water on the entire government-is-the-fountain-of-all-blessings mentality of the Left and of its project of total centralization of human life in the state.
Secondly, by any measure, the forced confiscation of upwards of 30% of one's hard earned income is tantamount to legal plunder. There is no possible rational, constitutional, or sustainable moral argument for taxes at these rates on the job and opportunity creating class of entrepreneurs and investors other than:
1. A rapacious thirst for wealth confiscation needed to fund the vast welfare state/regulatory bureaucracy that is the engine of dependency creation and regulatory control that buys politicians permanent or near permanent incumbency.
2. A purely emotion based animus against large sums of privately earned wealth, grounded in class resentment, that manifests itself as a desire to "cut the rich down to size."
Savings from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be put toward deficit reduction and investments sought by Obama, including new infrastructure spending.
As Iraq and Afghanistan unravel and set the stage for a far larger and more costly intervention in the future, let's not pretend that any savings from gutting the military (the only real target of real decreases in federal spending that ever actually materialize) will ever be used for deficit reduction. Neither Obama or his Democratic allies are interested in any such thing, nor do many of them have the economic literacy to understand how that could be achieved, even if they did.
About $350 billion in new investments, most of them remaining from Obama's American Jobs Act that was derailed in Congress, would be rejuvenated.
Yup, yet another Keynesian debt/inflation bubble of precisely the kind the got us where we are at the present moment. Government "investment" in the "creation" of jobs with taxpayer/fiat money? Uh huh...
And the next bubble(s) continues to swell
It doesn't matter. Until they end the corrupt practice of price speculations, the oil companies are going to continue to hammer us on gasoline.
This shows, if anything, the degree to which Kevin is incapable of serious thinking on his own and must be led by the hand from point to point, fact to fact, and logical argument to logical argument, in paint-by-numbers fashion, through any subject or issue of any gravitas.
Oil speculation has little to do with high gas prices, and the oil companies have nothing to do with it a all, except to the extent that the oil companies (the industry that fuels our entire civilization and its living standards) are doing nothing more than passing on to us the price of doing business in a country and under a political regime openly and viscerally hostile to its success, if not its existence, in a tax, regulatory, and political environment that has driven gas prices into orbit. These gas prices are
purely artificial, and are a creation of a
purely artificial shortage in supply driven by government policy, some of which has been the result of economic illiteracy in the past, but much of which now is animated by a psychological/ideological animus against energy production per se (itself driven by the truly monstrous ideological religion of AGW)
We are facing a critical shortage of gas because we are facing a critical shortage of drilling, R&D, refining infrastructure, and economic incentive. The same is true with our equally inane and shortsighted abandonment of nuclear energy, and both are completely political in nature and emanate from the federal government, not the oil companies.
This is something of
a myth as well. Production has actually increased under Obama:
Graham now feels he has to lie outright in order to prop up Obama and the mainstream media's own flat footed deceptions on this matter. Graham's capacity to swallow Kool-aid is all but astounding. The flat footed lie here is not that oil production has increased somewhat while Obama's been in office. It has. The problem is that it has increased in spite of Obama's being in office, but because of any policies he's pursued (which have been viscerally anti-business and anti-energy, save for politically connected and useful industries, such as union-heavy manufacturing and pseudo-industries such as "green" energy companies).
That increase has occurred almost totally on private and state land, which the President has little ability to control (yet, and until he and other progressive ideologues in Congress figure out a way to remove the constitution from that activity as too). The federal government leases no more than 2% of offshore areas for gas production, and less than 6% of offshore land.
The problem, again, is several decades of anti-energy animus in Congress and a wildly unprincipled but fantastically funded and vetted environmental movement, and Obama, as usual, sits atop a huge intensification of the problem. Oil and gas production, on federal lands, as fallen 40% since 2000, and under Obama, leasing for offshore drilling is less than half what Clinton permitted.
What' s the truth Kevin doesn't want you to know? Virtually the entire increase in oil production during Obama's reign of economic terror has come from the North Dakota Bakken formation, which has increased production 250% over the last decade while federal production has fallen 40%, and no new refining infrastructure (or nuclear power plant) has been constructed in over thirty years. This is all private land, and Obama can only take credit, at best, for not standing in the way of it, which, believe me, he would do if he could, and is probably working on at the moment (his imbecilic killing of the Keystone pipeline has no rational basis other than pandering to his fringe environmentalist base)
Given that Obama vowed to destroy coal as an energy source before his election, and a ten year permitting process of coal or nuclear plants, the future under progressive, neo-Marxist rule does seem bleak.
You can't make people like Graham up. He's a self parody of the typical Obama voter.
