Obama's Tax Fairness Doctrine

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Obama says it’s only ‘fair’ to raise taxes on the rich. He’s wrong.

By Arthur C. Brooks, Published: April 22 at The Washington Post

President Obama’s criticisms of the Republican budget proposal put forward by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin center on one main objection: It is unfair.

The Ryan plan is based on three premises. First, our economy is headed for a predictable disaster because of the ruinous levels of government spending. (Standard & Poors’ decision this week to downgrade its outlook for U.S. debt only confirms this worry.) Second, we already have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, and we can’t load more income taxes onto entrepreneurs without expecting collateral harm to jobs and economic growth. Third, therefore, we must cut spending and reform entitlements, and this would necessarily affect the nearly 70 percent of Americans who take more from the government than they pay in taxes.

The president isn’t buying it. “There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires,” he said in a speech on April 13. Knowing that some polls show support for tax increases, he also complained that, over the past decade, “the top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. And that’s who needs to pay less taxes?” And in his town hall meeting Wednesday, he called for a tax code that is “fair and simple,” proposed spending cuts that are “fair” and ask for shared responsibility, and concluded that he wants to “live in a society that’s fair.”

While conservatives have criticized the economic principles and class-baiting cadences of Obama’s budget rhetoric, no one has answered his fundamental charge that the Ryan plan is unfair. Conservatives have long stayed away from fairness debates, preferring to build unemotional arguments on the right angles of economic efficiency. This is a lost opportunity. Advocates for limited government can win the fairness argument in a walk.

For years, economists have conducted experiments to study attitudes about economic fairness. One such experiment is the “ultimatum game.” Two strangers are asked to split $10. One is given the $10 and instructed to choose how much to offer the other. Say you and I are the players, and I offer you $3, meaning I would keep $7 for myself. If you accept my offer, we both keep the respective amounts. If you reject it, we both leave empty-handed.

Economic theory predicts that you should accept any positive offer — even one penny — because it’s better than nothing. But, of course, that’s wrong. If the offer seems too unfair, you’ll walk away out of spite and punish me for my selfishness. In the United States, games like this have an average offer of about $4, and offers are accepted about 85 percent of the time.

Note that merit is not part of the experiment; nobody earned the $10. When we bring merit into the mix, the results change. Another experiment shows this by asking subjects to imagine they are lying on a hot beach, craving a cold beer. Would they be willing to pay more, less or the same for their favorite beer if it were purchased from an upscale resort hotel versus from a run-down grocery store?

Jurassic President

April 22, 2011 - by Sarah Hoyt

from Pajamas Media

I’ve read discussions about President Obama for the last two years — is he a villain or a fool? Both or neither?

The answers vary and make for heated debate, but sooner or later we have to admit neither covers all facts. For instance, neither villain nor fool covers his odd, time-displaced “Sputnik” moments: his obsession with unionized labor, or his fascination with trains, or his commitment to the SALT treaty, or his view of Cleveland as a cutting edge technological center, or his odd certainty that cars getting eight miles per gallon throng our highways.

All through the last two years, I’ve been sure this was all a movie I’d seen before. I was right.

Remember how in Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton had dinosaurs recreated from dinosaur DNA frozen in amber and coupled with frog DNA? Remember how it all went awry because these time displaced creatures couldn’t safely exist in the modern world?

Jurassic President starts with the soft-lighted comparisons between Obama and FDR leading up to the 2009 swearing-in. People who weren’t on board with the ethos of Obama’s campaign rolled their eyes and mumbled things like depression chic and there they go again, but I submit to you that Obama believed it. He not only thought he was the new FDR, he thought the world wanted and needed a new FDR. He knew FDR was the change we’d all been waiting for.

Other reports followed, such as that he had decided to run for president to undo Reagan’s presidency and get us back to where we’d have been if Carter had been elected a second time.

I know right about this time, you’re scratching your heads and wondering how he could mean this nonsense. I think the sheer absurdity has kept us from seeing Jurassic President for what he is. Because here, in the early 21st century, we have our doubts about how good FDR was for the country after all and, frankly, we’ve been making jokes about Jimmy Carter since — well, since Jimmy Carter was president.

But Obama is not in the early 21st century, or not in the same 21st century the rest of us inhabit. Instead, he’s preserved in the amber of an echo chamber where the romanticized version of the thirties seen through the new-agey 1970s is paradise. In his circles, denying this vision is akin to insisting the sky is made of cheese.

I don’t share his view, but I can understand it because we do move in intellectually similar circles.

As an author and, further, a science fiction author, and as someone who has moved in and out of academic circles over the years, I know that artists, academics, and self-describedintellectuals have self-selected themselves into an almost parallel universe of leftist chic and wishful thinking.

In that universe, if only Carter had served a second term, we’d have all-green-energy, caring, helpful, gentle, earth-loving communities, no competition, and a mandated minimum wage of $100 per hour that somehow works perfectly and doesn’t bankrupt any businesses.

How wonderful it all would be depends on how far left the thinker is, but you’d not be out of place insisting that, say, instead of falling, the USSR would have opened up to the world and reformed their model into an utopia of “true communism.” (A total lack of contact with history, economics, and practical realities helps in believing all this.) Ronald Reagan had never been elected…

I submit to you that Obama was raised by people who believed all of this with the intensity ofmessianic religious faith. Being about my age, Carter versus Reagan was the electoral contest that ushered him into adulthood.  Unlike me, because of his upbringing, he saw the results as others view the expulsion from earthly paradise.

He heard all our economic and social problems had to do with the weakening power of unions. He heard our trimming back of the social net made us harsher and “meaner” than other nations in the world. (That’s something that erupted from his wife’s mouth during the election campaign).  He heard that Reagan would bring about another war and only preemptive surrender would save humanity. He heard — and believed — that our loss of close-knit communities had to do with the evil and selfish Republican policies. (Instead of the automobile, suburbs, technology, and a hundred other things.) He heard we needed someone to save our soul; to take us back to the time of FDR, or at least Jimmy Carter.

My experience was different. I arrived from Portugal as an exchange student in 1980, bringing with me the normal European prejudices. Jimmy Carter had been painted in Europe as a level-headed leader, a compassionate statesman. But all the promotion in the world couldn’t survive watching the man give speeches, or hearing of the infamous killer rabbit incident. And my European view could not survive coming in contact with American history books, which even then glorified FDR, the whole “the government saved us from the Depression” mythology.

I didn’t object to the portrayal of FDR. I simply was not economically literate enough.

However, I was savvy enough to know propaganda when I read it.  I was disturbed by the palpable longing these texts revealed for an America in the 30s — an America that probably never existed. Even then it seemed to me what they promoted meant turning the clock back to a simpler — and dirtier, poorer, and more brutal — world. I could see we’d got from the ’30s to the ’80s through technological and social changes. This meant the changes weren’t the results of politics and couldn’t be undone by politics. The Democrats could pine for and promise the close-knit society of the ’30s, but they could not bring it back.Even if the ’30s were desirable (I prefer today), they couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle.

Obama doesn’t seem to have ever realized this. He moved in more rarefied circles than the Ohio suburb where I finished high school. You could say he was exquisitely educated not to see the holes in the myths about FDR.

He never got to be a normal person, in a normal environment. His isolation, as the product of a biracial couple, and two broken families, might also have made it harder for him to distance himself from the one security he had — the security of his echo chamber that surrounded him like a an amber bubble encasing dinosaur DNA.

I’ve read somewhere that you simply can’t make large changes in life outlook after 45. I’m not sure that’s true. I could give several examples of people I know who have changed their entire outlook on life after that age.

It is, however, unlikely that someone as thoroughly indoctrinated as Obama was can change his outlook. The narrative he grew up in covers every detail of life and provides a facile explanation for everything. Our arugula shopper knows nothing of the average person’s life and, let’s face it, is unlikely to ever figure it out.

He’s been brought into the present after a fashion, the ’30s DNA spliced into the DNA of a Clinton Democrat, so that he’ll make half-hearted gestures, like proclaiming — in contradiction to his earlier pronouncements — that he’s following in the path of Ronald Reagan; or talking about being a centrist; or disguising tax increases as cuts in spending.

But the end result always breeds true to his dinosaurian world view: He’ll favor unions because somehow, over the years, they’ve become associated with the 1930s (even though FDR did not approve of civil service unions); he’ll sell out allies for a SALT treaty, because it was very important in the 70s; he’ll try to expand train service because he has the odd idea public transport fosters the type of close knit communities we had in the 1930s; he’ll obsess over green energy, because Carter did; he’ll do his best to bring back make-work paid for by the government because he imagines that’s what we want.

In fact, throughout all of it, he thinks he’s doing what everyone — not just the people who brought him up — longs for.

And throughout his flailing around in a world in which he doesn’t fit, examples of this displacement emerge in his speech: Sputnik, Cleveland, cars which use up eight miles a gallon.

If, like the restored velociraptor, he weren’t such a danger to the modern world, one would be tempted to feel sorry for our Jurassic President, wandering around in a landscape he can neither perceive nor understand because all his senses and training show him a world that no longer exists — and perhaps never did.

The Morphing of Obama

Obama ran against Bush, but now governs like him

By Steven Thomma | McClatchy Newspapers

Silver-tongued, not tongue-tied. A team player on the world stage, not a lone cowboy. A man who'd put a stop to reckless Bush policies at home and abroad. In short, Barack Obama represented Change.

Well, that was then. Now, on one major policy after another, President Barack Obama seems to be morphing into George W. Bush.

On the nation's finances, the man who once ripped Bush as a failed leader for seeking to raise the nation's debt ceiling now wants to do it himself.

On terrorism, he criticized Bush for sending suspected terrorists to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and denying them access to U.S. civilian courts. Now he says he'll do the same.

On taxes, he called the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy wrong, and lately began calling again to end them. But in December he signed a deal with Republicans to extend them for two years, and recently he called the entire tax cut package good for the country.

And on war, as a candidate he said that the president didn't have authority to unilaterally attack a country that didn't pose an imminent threat to the U.S., and even then the president should always seek the informed consent of Congress. Last month, without a vote in Congress, he attacked Libya, which didn't threaten the U.S.

Big differences remain between Obama and Bush, to be sure. His two nominees to the Supreme Court differ vastly from Bush's picks. Obama does want to end the tax cuts for the wealthy. He also pushed through a massive overhaul of the nation's health insurance system.

Telling it like it is.

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeThe Mendacity of Barack Obama
By Steve McCann


Over my 45+ years in the business community, both domestic and international, I have dealt with an overwhelming variety of people of all races and political philosophies.  Men and women who were thoroughly honest and many who had no concept of honor and integrity.  Among them were those who would do or say anything to achieve their ends and do so with a straight face and an air of self-confidence that would deceive the most gullible.  It is only through painful experience that one is finally able to develop an antenna to quickly weed out those charlatans.

While I have always been wary of and have written about his dishonesty, after the speech the president delivered the 13^th of April regarding the federal budget, one that was chock full of lies, deceit, and crass fear-mongering, it must be said that Barack Obama is the most dishonest, deceitful, and mendacious person in a position of power I have ever witnessed.

That performance was the culmination of four years of outright lies and narcissism that have been largely ignored by the media, including some in the conservative press and political class who are loath to call Mr. Obama what he is in the bluntest of terms: a liar and a fraud.  That he relies on his skin color to intimidate, either outright or by insinuation, those who oppose his radical agenda only adds to his audacity.  It is apparent that he has gotten away with his character flaws his entire life, aided and abetted by the sycophants around him, thus he is who he is and cannot change.

The question becomes is he a compulsive liar or a sociopath?  By definition:

A sociopath is typically defined as someone who lies incessantly to get their way and does so with little concern for others.  A sociopath is often goal-oriented (i.e., lying is focused -- it is done to get one's way).  Sociopaths have little regard or respect for the rights and feelings of others.  Sociopaths are often charming and charismatic, but they use their talented social skills in manipulative and self-centered ways.

A compulsive liar:

A compulsive liar is defined as someone who lies out of habit.  Lying is their normal and reflexive way of responding to questions.  Compulsive liars bend the truth about everything, large and small.  For a compulsive liar, telling the truth is very awkward and uncomfortable while lying feels right.  Compulsive lying is usually developed in early childhood, due to being placed in an environment where lying was necessary.

I came to the United States as a survivor of the Second World War.  I spent my early years alone on the streets of a totally destroyed city somewhere in central Europe.  In order to survive I had to steal food where I could and lie in order to survive.  I spent a good part of my life, even after coming to America and being adopted, battling those inbred impulses.  It was a never-ending struggle with successes and failures, but I was able to finally defeat those demons. 

What I say about Barack Obama I do not do lightly, but because I fear greatly for this country and can, not only from personal experience but in my dealing with others, recognize those failings in a person whose only interest is himself and his inbred radical ideology, which as its lynchpin desires to transform the country into a quasi-totalitarian state by any means possible.

In the United States there is great deference paid to the occupant of the White House.  Justifiably so, as that person is not only the chief operating officer of the country but also the head of state representing the nation around the globe.  The president's actions and demeanor set the tone for not only the political class but the country as a whole.  Over the centuries there have many exceptional but also a few inept men to hold the office of President.

Today so much power is now vested in the Office of President of the United States that honor and integrity must be a hallmark of a president's character.  It is not with Barack Obama; he may well be the most dishonest and disingenuous occupant of the Oval Office in history, and will do more damage to the nation than all his predecessors combined.

His failings can no longer be excused by this historical deference or timidity fostered by race, with the euphemisms of spin, obfuscation, fabrication, or politics being used to avoid the truth.  Obama is extremely adept at exploiting the celebrity culture that has overwhelmed the society as well as the erosion of the education system that has created a generation or more of citizens unaware of their history, culture as well as historical ethical standards based on Judeo-Christian teaching.

While the future of the country depends on dramatically altering the economic and governing landscape, it cannot do so unless the opposition politicians and average citizens forcefully challenge and respond to the lies and machinations of Barack Obama and his allies without fear of what may be said about them or to them.  As for me, I have already experienced far worse than anything that could be said or done to me.  My only concern is for the welfare of my fellow citizens and the noblest experiment in the history of mankind: the United States.

A Take on Obama's Speech from the Wall Street Journal

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The Presidential Divider

Obama's toxic speech and even worse plan for deficits and debt.

Did someone move the 2012 election to June 1? We ask because President Obama's extraordinary response to Paul Ryan's budget yesterday—with its blistering partisanship and multiple distortions—was the kind Presidents usually outsource to some junior lieutenant. Mr. Obama's fundamentally political document would have been unusual even for a Vice President in the fervor of a campaign.

The immediate political goal was to inoculate the White House from criticism that it is not serious about the fiscal crisis, after ignoring its own deficit commission last year and tossing off a $3.73 trillion budget in February that increased spending amid a record deficit of $1.65 trillion. Mr. Obama was chased to George Washington University yesterday because Mr. Ryan and the Republicans outflanked him on fiscal discipline and are now setting the national political agenda.

Mr. Obama did not deign to propose an alternative to rival Mr. Ryan's plan, even as he categorically rejected all its reform ideas, repeatedly vilifying them as essentially un-American. "Their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America," he said, supposedly pitting "children with autism or Down's syndrome" against "every millionaire and billionaire in our society." The President was not attempting to join the debate Mr. Ryan has started, but to close it off just as it begins and banish House GOP ideas to political Siberia.

Mr. Obama then packaged his poison in the rhetoric of bipartisanship—which "starts," he said, "by being honest about what's causing our deficit." The speech he chose to deliver was dishonest even by modern political standards.

Read the rest of the article here.

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When did we become a country for the minority?

Image via WikipediaPosted by :xPureEvilx April 3, 2011 - 3:29pm at Conservative Outpost.

The whole point of a democracy is to do what the majority of the people want. Yet all I see are laws being passed everyday that benefit a minority group of people. Does anyone else see a problem with this? What happened to the rights of the majority? Look at ObamaCare the only people who wanted it were democrats who are incapable of understanding the full cost and effect of something like that, all they see is "Free Health care" but don't understand that someone has to pay for that. Their answer is always "Raise taxes on the rich" but what good does it do to raise taxes on the people who sign your paycheck? Do you really think your going to get a raise or see your company expand when the guy in control of those decisions keeps making less money? How high of taxes would you  pay until you just say screw it, and move you company to a country who welcomes people like you?

Then we have laws that seem to get passed anytime some small outspoken group gets attention on the news.  Women aren't aggressive enough to get promotions or raises so they sue Walmart... Blacks don't pass a test to be cops or firemen so they make the test easier rather then telling them to study harder, I would be offended if they did that for white people! Gays get bullied at school so they pass bulling laws. What happened to a dad just telling them to punch the kid in the face? You might not win the fight but I bet the bully will think twice before picking on you again. Maybe these aren't the best answers, but its better then putting a new law on the books that will no doubt be twisted by some liberal lawyer to be used in the wrong way. They need to reverse this whole process and start removing laws not adding them. Telling me I have to were a seat belt or a helmet. Not allowing a small business owner to have a smoking area in his restaurant or bar. Its his business if he thinks he will make more money by not having a smoking area he will do it, but he should have the right to make that choice.

I Just don't understand how this stuff gets passed. We elect these people to do what the majority of us want and they just give us the middle finger and do whatever they feel like doing. Elected officials use to be outspoken people who had every intention of making their city, district, state, and country a better place. Now it just seems that everyone is just power hungry and more worried about "how is this decision gonna effect my re-election" this just isn't right! I do have some high hopes for the Tea Party as they seem to have the right ideas and are at least attempting to do what we ask them to. Its kind of refreshing to have a large group of people running for office who have the same opinions as I do, and now to see them attempting to accomplish what they promised. Not to mention all the Tea Party rallies that showed a lot of us that we weren't alone in this fight for freedom.

Seriously people we need to wake up and take our country back!

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• Pat: Tocqueville, "Tyranny of the Majority" (usdphl462.wordpress.com)

Setting the Record Straight

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The truth about GE's tax bill

Did GE pay U.S. income taxes in 2010? The company known for minimizing its tax bill made a muddled situation worse responding to a New York Times report suggesting it might get a refund. GE now says it has a small tax liability for 2010.
By Allan Sloan, senior editor-at-large, Fortune, and Jeff Gerth, senior reporter, ProPublica


FORTUNE - There's a heated debate over General Electric's taxes in places ranging from the front page of the New York Times to the blogosphere to, of all places, The Daily Show. In the 10 days since the Times touched off this debate, what started out as something resembling a conversation has degenerated into posturing, name-calling, and shrieking. So, did GE really not pay any income taxes on a $5.1 billion U.S. profit last year? Is it really getting a tax refund?

We're going to try to answer these questions. We'll also show you some things that we've learned about GE that few people outside the company and the insular world of tax techies know. The Times, of course, made GE and its tax gamesmanship a national issue with its agenda-setting piece on March 25. (By the way, they beat us on the story; we'd been working on it for months.) Unfortunately, for all its good work, theTimes story has created at least one major misperception -- that GE paid no U.S. income taxes last year and is actually getting a $3.2 billion refund from the Treasury.

The Times' own headline writers got that impression too. "GE Turns the Tax Man Away Empty-Handed," read the headline on early editions, including the Times' Washington edition, the version that politicians and the DC-based news media and commentariat see. "GE's Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether," was the original head on nytimes.com, the version the blogosphere reads.

Those headlines are based on the story's third paragraph, which discusses GE's 2010 financial results. "Its American tax bill? None. In fact, GE claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion." That seems to say that GE (GE) is getting a tax refund for 2010 -- but the words "tax benefit" are so ambiguous that it's not clear what they mean, and the article never explains them, or mentions them again.

By the time a revised (and accurate) headline got slapped on the later-edition print issues -- "At GE on Tax Day, Billions of Reasons to Smile" -- the idea that the Times was saying that GE paid no U.S. income taxes and was getting a big refund was firmly implanted.

GE made a muddled situation worse by putting complicated, technical, and lawyerly rebuttals on its website, tweeting them, tripping over itself, and then proving unable to explain itself in public exchanges with the likes of Henry Blodget, proprietor of the widely followed Business Insider blog. Or in conversations with reporters.

Now, we'll give you brief answers to the main questions, but you'll have to bear with us afterward for the full explanation.