Obama is committed to expanding Government and strangling private enterprise
Well, it was former Bush adviser Keith Hennessey who discovered a big obstacle in all this. Team Obama wants a gargantuan $1.6 trillion tax hike over the next 10 years to finance larger government. And Hennessey surmised — and I agree — that the reason the president couched his language in terms of higher tax “revenues” rather than tax “rates” is that he essentially wants both. Raise the top rates and cap or eliminate a number of tax deductions for more revenues. This is going to be a big problem. It could well be a deal-breaker.
House Speaker John Boehner has been pressing for a quasi tax reform, which may be the best Republicans can get. Namely, leave the tax rates alone and put a Mitt Romney-like cap on so-called tax loopholes that mainly concern upper-end earners. This Republican revenue concession would at least preserve economic-growth tax incentives. Yes, it would transfer $1.3 trillion from the private sector to government hands, a huge anti-growth transfer of resources. But at least the Boehner plan leaves tax rates unchanged.
However, raising the two top rates would only produce about $440 billion, which is way below Obama’s $1.6 trillion number. So you can almost sense that the president is going to go for higher tax rates, strict limits on itemized deductions, a phase-out of the personal exemption, and tax-rate hikes on capital gains, dividends, and estates. On top of all that, the Financial Times reports that Team Obama wants a $150 billion business tax hike over 10 years.
Sooner or later this is the Obama agenda. […]
By making capital less valuable and more expensive, you get less of it. And you can’t have entrepreneurial capitalism without capital. Higher capital costs block business formation, productivity, jobs, and incomes.
Does anyone seriously think we’d be looking at $500 bil in tax hikes if Romney was going to be sworn-in in January?
We are all Julia now.
– Actually, what with the state of things these days, even Julia isn’t what she once was, not knowing where her next EBT check is coming from, but what the hell, if she ends up living under some freeway overpass at least she’ll always know her birth control pills will be covered, so theres that.
I’ve gotten to the point I just don’t care anymore.
Feelings trump truth these days.
– Post turkeyday potpourri:
– Stick a fork in him, he’s done.
– Ledes at Drudge:
‘Gang fight’ at Black Friday sale…
Man Punched in Face Pulls Gun On Line-Cutting Shopper…
Woman busted after throwing merchandise…
Thousands storm VICTORIA’S SECRET…
VIDEO: Insane battle over phones…
Mayhem at Nebraska mall where 9 murdered in 2007…
Shoplifter tries to mace security guards…
Men Steal Boy’s Shopping Bag Outside BED, BATH & BEYOND…
– Macy’s, a parade to die for.
– Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the mall.
Raise rates and close loopholes during a minor depression? Now, who was the last to do that?
McGehee
I’m reading The Forgotten Man and it turns all the shibboleths held about Hoover & FDR on their head.
Hoover sneered at Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. He believed in “the beneficial hand of Government” especially during the time when Mussolini was quite the darling of American progressives.
Darleen,
I have a copy of “The Forgotten Man” on my shelf and definitely agree with your assessment.
I pre-ordered “Coolidge” by Amity Shlaes and am looking forward to receiving the book.
As a side note, if memory serves, Coolidge did not think much of Herbert Hoover.
on a happy note
50 Charts That Explain why ‘Dr. Doom’ Thinks Were Headed Toward ‘Massive Wealth Destruction’
There wasn’t much Hoover did right — yet a lot of things he’s blamed for doing would have helped matters if he had actually done them.
In the end, the main thing distinguishing Hoobert Heever from FDR is that FDR turned it up to 11, and with the help of an adulatory press was able to stay in office until a war finally ended the Great Depression he, not his predecessor, ultimately caused.
Blake
You’re right. Coolidge did not like Hoover.
and McGehee, the irony is that FDR adopted a lot of Hoover’s policies, but all economic failures were shoved on him (kind of a BLAME BOOOOSH strategy of the 1930’s)
Also the funny part is that $50o billion in tax hikes is not the same thing as $500 billion in new revenue.
Why antisemitism? Why the hatred of America?
Each human is born with a certain maximum capability in any given area. That is their genetic inheritance. Environmental factors, their upbringing, culture, social status, can only subtract from the built-in maximums, but without some form of them the child likely dies.
What happened thousands of years ago is that the Jewish people came to have a society, a way of raising children, that subtracted less from each child. This leads to their society being more successful than those which subtract more. With the Diaspora they spread out over the world and in each society were more successful than that society in which they lived. Resentment by the larger society follows, resentment being the precursor to hatred.
So too for the society which was founded here. One whose basis was in it’s founding documents which codified a relationship between government and individuals which caused less harm to each individual and to the society[ies] that they formed. Government to a society, like the environment to a child, can only subtract from the maximum which can be reached, and also too if it is lacking then the chaos destroys the society and the individuals.
The success of America is fuel for resentment by others whose society is less so. Resentment which becomes hatred.
The Left has worked to spread its own culture of resentment, its hatred of the very idea of America, not just to the rest of the world but within the United States too. To establish a second society within these borders. One which hates the idea, ideals, of America.
They have been successful at this as hate is a powerful force and easily manufactured and manipulated. They want, desire with their entire being, to crash, to burn America. To destroy that which they hate. They think there will then arise a new society which will be built by them. This is what every move by Obama works toward. It is his/their vision.
Unfortunately all they have to build on is the hate. Hate can destroy. What it can’t do is form a society once its object of hate disappears.
We also don’t know what will emerge from such a crash. Thinking that there will be a new “America” as free and successful as the original is more probable than what the Left sees, but only because their vision is of an impossibility.
Or..
Hannibal Lecter: First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What do they do, these people you oppose?
Clarice Starling: They seek power…
Hannibal Lecter: No. That is incidental. What is the first and principal thing they do? What need do they serve by gaining power?
Clarice Starling: Control, um, social justice, and, huh, sexual liberation, sir…
Hannibal Lecter: No! They hate. That is their nature. And how do we begin to hate, Clarice? Do we seek out things to hate? Make an effort to answer now.
Clarice Starling: No. We just…
Hannibal Lecter: No. We begin by hating what we are taught to resent. What we have been encultured, socialized into hating. Power, to them, is only a means to shaping, enculturing, socializing the entire world to hate as and what they do.
Shorter yet.
But it is way more than $500 billion in control of the economy and control is what is sought by this maneuver, control to be used to further what I said above.
– A note of interest. Cspan is doing full coverage of the Battle of Antietum reenactment with a long list of excellant lectures.
It’s all just semantics now. Haven’t you heard? The Dems won, and you didn’t build that. All money is the governments, and they’ll decide how much you get.
The time for arguing tax rates is past. Everything is entitlements now.
The taxes, the regulations, they are part of the revenge, payback. Imposing by force huge costs on those whose success is resented and by doing so squashing that success into failure.
They should be sued for intellectual property theft as there is a much older name for this system of revenge the Left is about. It has been known for a long time as jizya.
230 years was a pretty good run…but its time to burn it down and start over.
Welcome to the machine.
Of course by the time they collect that $500 billion it won’t even be worth $500 billion. So TAX MORE right? RIGHT ?
palaeomerus, more than likely, the government will give up any pretense of taxing, call Treasury and have the money printed.
Printing more money is basically the same as taxing us. Also, it taxes any accumulated wealth that is held in cash, as well as profits from drug dealers. So, win-win.
Tax
Borrow Domestic
Borrow Foreign
Promise IOU’s
Print Fiat Money to devalue Debt and ruin or damage value of all assets represented by cash.
—— the ‘fuck you stupid little termites ‘barrier that must never be crossed——–
Reduce spending to a reasonable portion of GDP and keep it there.
Sell enormous collection of public assets to private institutions to raise cash and back new printed specie with.
Revenue is only of secondary concern in the matter of taxes. It is the power that comes from granting or withholding exceptions that is primary.
However if power is only the means, which is sought in order to destroy the entire system, then hyper-inflating the currency will be preferable to hyper-taxes.
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