Archive for the ‘Taxes’ Category
By Thomas E. Brewton
Marxian economic dogma explains why liberal-progressives, the Obama administration in particular, push for restructuring our constitutional government to concentrate more power in the hands of labor unions and the Federal government.
Marxian economic dogma has been emphasized to an increasing degree in our colleges and universities, even in our high schools, since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal imposed state planning upon the United States in the 1930s. That emphasis became dominant in the late 1960s and 1970s. Today so many generations of teachers and students have been so thoroughly and subtly imbued with Marxian concepts that they are unaware of their ideological environment, assuming that such concepts represent exclusive truth.
Marxian doctrine leads to the assertion that private property is power and that such power is used by employers to exploit the workers. To end exploitation, government must restructure society, using progressive income taxes, high death taxes, and punitive regulation of private businesses, coupled with welfare-state entitlements.
What then are the elements of Marxian economic doctrine that underlie the Democrat/Socialist Party's socioeconomic paradigm?
First, the conception of scientific socialism, as opposed to the earlier varieties of utopian socialism. Utopian socialism had propounded broad concepts of social justice, appealing to the reason and benevolence of society. Marx and Engels dismissed this as unscientific and ineffective.
By Thomas E. Brewton
The housing market is the most recent of many examples of the failure of Obama's stimulus plans to revive the economy by repealing principles of human economic behavior.
Predictably, the still vastly overbuilt and over-supplied housing market drops dead, as it should, when not artificially supported by socialistic government subsidies. The Wall Street Journal describes the deteriorating situation:
Quote:
Federal tax credits of as much as $8,000 for home buyers spurred sales in recent months…Since April 30, new purchase contracts have plunged as buyers no longer have the incentive of a federal tax break, builders and real estate agents say. Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the Realtors, estimated that contracts signed in May were 10% to 15% below the weak level of a year earlier.
Ronald Peltier, chief executive officer of HomeServices of America Inc., which owns real estate brokers in 21 states, said new home-purchase contracts in May and June so far are down about 20% from a year earlier. The tax credit accelerated sales that otherwise would have occurred later in the year, Mr. Peltier said…
Read the rest of this entry »
Congress and the White House are using to Gulf oil spill to advance dubious energy agendas
by Bishop Harry Jackson, Jr., Niger Innis and Reverend Samuel Rodriquez
Business and capitalism are dirty words in many White House and progressive circles, except in two ways.
Business is good when it can be co-opted and manipulated by government to advance “progressive” energy, social or economic agendas. And capitalism is a virtue in the sense of capitalizing on every crisis to promote those agendas – through the guiding principle enshrined by leftists like Saul Alinsky and Rahm Emanuel: “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
Thus the tragic Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been incompetently handled by a White House, EPA and Corps of Engineers unable even to make timely decisions about constructing sand berms to keep oil out of fragile estuaries. But the crisis is being exploited brilliantly to justify policy initiatives like cap-tax-and-trade, EPA’s “endangerment” decree, more bans on drilling, and mandatory fuel switching to higher priced options, most notably wind and solar power.
The economic facts of life simply don’t support this agenda.
Senator John Kerry asserts that China and India are spending billions to take our “clean energy” discoveries and technologies, make the wind turbines and solar panels in Asia, and sell them back to us. He is right about what’s happening, but completely wrong about why. The fault, dear Senator, is not in our stars (or in Asia), but in ourselves.
China and India pay their workers less than we do, especially in union shops so beloved by progressives. They use coal to generate cheap electricity to power their factories, while the White House, EPA and Congress strive to tax and regulate American coal-fired power plants into oblivion. China mines its abundant rare earth minerals (essential for wind turbine magnets and Prius batteries), whereas we have made hundreds of millions of acres of superb mineral prospects off limits.
China and India are creating tens of thousands of jobs, financed by American taxpayers and consumers, while we tax and over-regulate productive industries to pay for subsidies, tax breaks and payrolls for wind and solar companies that then must buy turbines and panels from China and India, because we cannot afford to make them here in the United States.
After just two weeks in office, the Obama administration is having a hard time living up to the Obama campaign's mantra of change for the better. Unless, of course, "better" is defined as an administration made up of a handful of tax cheats and broken promises.
While much of the United States is still basking in the afterglow of an historic election and an inspiring inauguration, much of the world is looking at Obama's first two weeks in office with in credulousness.
From a policy perspective, several countries have voiced concerns about the protectionist aspects of Obama's "stimulus" bill currently making its way through the US Senate. Meanwhile, even left-leaning France has rejected an Obama-style spending binge.
Read the rest of this article at World News Examiner.
By Thomas E. Brewton
As prolongation of the 1930s Depression and stagflation in the 1970s demonstrated, Senator Obama’s announced policies are a prescription for economic disaster.
Keynesian economic doctrine, not under that name, but in substance, is back in the news in a truly menacing way. Senator Obama proposes to repeat the policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that turned an ordinary two-year recession into an eight-year disaster, with unemployment rates continuously in the high teens.
The key elements of Senator Obama’s proposed economic policies, as in the New Deal and the stagflation of the 1970s, are much higher taxes, along with a pervasive increase of business regulations and price controls in healthcare and energy (which sharply depress business activity and employment rates), full-frontal embrace of labor unions (which will push up wages and benefits to levels deterring profitable expansion of industrial production), and massive new government deficit spending (which will accelerate the already dangerously high rate of inflation and devaluation of the dollar). Carried out as he proposes, Senator Obama’s polices will lead us again into the swamp of stagflation.
The basic thrust of Keynesianism is the belief that control of the economy must be collectivized at the Federal level, because private business is incapable of providing full employment, and because the proper goal of economic policy must be thwarting greedy businessmen to attain so-called social justice: equal distribution of income and wealth, without regard to merit, capability, or hard work.
Not surprisingly the New York Times editorial board and the Times’s propagandist Paul Krugman are prominent Keynesian enthusiasts.
WASHINGTON, February 13, 2008 — Accuracy in Media editor Cliff Kincaid disclosed today that a hugely expensive bill called the "Global Poverty Act," sponsored by Democratic Senator Barack Obama, was quickly passed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday and could result in the imposition of a global tax on the United States. Kincaid said that the major media's cover-up of the bill, which makes levels of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient to the dictates of the United Nations, demonstrates the media's desire to see Senator Obama elected to the presidency.
In a column posted on the AIM web site, Kincaid noted that Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was trying to rush Obama's "Global Poverty Act" (S. 2433) through his committee without hearings. The legislation would commit the U.S. to spending 0.7 percent of gross national product on foreign aid, which amounts to a phenomenal 13-year total of $845 billion over and above what the U.S. already spends. It was scheduled for a Thursday vote but was moved up a day, to Wednesday, and rushed through by voice vote. Kincaid learned, however, that conservative Senators have now put a "hold" on the legislation, in order to prevent it from being rushed to the floor for a full Senate vote.
The House version (H.R. 1302) was suddenly brought up on the House floor last September 25 and was passed by voice vote. House Republicans were caught off-guard, unaware that the pro-U.N. measure committed the U.S. to spending hundreds of billions of dollars. Kincaid's column notes that the official in charge of making nations comply with the U.N. Millennium Goals, which are prominently highlighted in the Obama bill, says a global tax will be necessary to force American taxpayers to provide the money.
By Thomas E. Brewton
The experience of the Soviet Union, Japan, and China should, but will not, cause liberal activists to proceed with caution.
According to the New York Times:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said that if she became president, the federal government would take a more active role in the economy, to address what she called the excesses of the market and of the Bush administration…
Reflecting what her aides said were very different conditions today, Mrs. Clinton put her emphasis on issues like inequality and the role of institutions like government, rather than market forces, in addressing them.
The logical end of Senator Clinton's prescription was first articulated by the followers of Henri de Saint-Simon, who in 1829 addressed the following to the President of the French Chamber of Deputies:
The sole effect of [the free market place] system is to leave the distribution of social advantages to a chance few who are able to lay some pretence to it, and to condemn the numerically superior class to deprivation, ignorance, and misery. [Socialists] ask that all the instruments of production, all lands and capital, the funds now divided among individual proprietors, should be pooled so as to form one central social fund…
By Thomas E. Brewton
Liberals propose to follow the same game plan that gave us stagflation in the 1970s.
As success with the military surge in Iraq increasingly belies their claim that the war is already irretrievably lost, liberals have changed the subject from Iraq to the economy and the rising possibility of a recession. Liberal Republicans and Democrats, as usual, prescribe Federal deficit spending and higher taxes on "the rich."
That is the doctrine of Keynesian economics, which advocates consumer spending as the exclusive highway to full employment and prosperity. According to Keynes, consumer and business savings must be offset by massively increased Federal spending. What the money is spent for doesn’t matter; just flood the market with money created by bookkeeping entries at the Federal Reserve banks.
Keynesian economics failed to end the Depression. Its repetition, as we saw in the bitter experience of Great Society stagflation in the 1970s, discouraged investment in projects of long term value and led to speculations that promised high rates of return in the short-run.
For example, during the 1970s stagflation, is was only marginally profitable to build rental apartments, because the rate of return on those investments was far below the inflation rate. What occurred, instead, was an unprecedented boom in hotel construction, because room rates could be increased every day. By 1980, there was a shortage of rental apartments and an oversupply of hotels.
(Alexandria, VA) — As House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY) plans another push this year for an overhaul of the Tax Code, lawmakers should abandon Rangel's multi-rate proposal and follow the worldwide movement toward a simple flat tax system, according to the 362,000-member National Taxpayers Union (NTU). In the mid-20th century, Hong Kong was the only country with a flat — and proportional — national personal income tax rate. Since then, 17 other countries have followed suit and introduced flat taxes, according to the World Taxpayers Associations (WTA), a coalition of 60 taxpayer-advocacy groups — including NTU — from 44 countries.
"A single-rate tax would create a more simplified and transparent Tax Code," NTU Vice President for Policy and Communications Pete Sepp said. "Instead of 'wrangling' more money from families, Chairman Rangel and other legislators should catch on to what the rest of the world is discovering — lower, flatter taxes benefit their citizens and their economies."
One recent trend many countries have followed is to introduce very low flat income tax rates — usually from 10 percent to 13 percent. Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Macedonia have introduced flat tax rates of 10 percent over the past two years. Russia enacted a 13 percent income tax rate in 2001, and Ukraine did the same in 2004, according to WTA.
Estonia, the first European country to introduce a flat tax rate (in 1994), plans to reduce its rate by 1 percent each year, with a goal of an 18 percent rate by 2011. Estonia's current rate is 20 percent. Both Lithuania and Hong Kong reduced their income tax rates for 2008, from 27 percent to 24 percent and from 16 percent to 15 percent, respectively. Jersey, Georgia, Guernsey, Iraq, Ireland, Latvia, Macau, Romania, and Slovakia also have flat income tax rates ranging from 12 percent to 25 percent.
"Whether it's a flat income tax or even better, a retail-level national sales tax, American policymakers should look abroad to see what's working," Sepp concluded. "Single-rate taxes represent the wave of the future for countries that want to be competitive and governments that want to respect the rights of their taxpayers."
NTU is a nonpartisan, nonprofit citizen organization founded in 1969 to work for lower taxes, smaller government, and economic freedom at all levels. Note: For further tax policy information, visit www.ntu.org.
By Frank Hyland
Food for thought.
Picture this if you will: You are on the way to a soccer game in your car with your kids and the children of neighbors in the back seat. Your SUV has been acting up and again this time the engine falters and sputters. It is running so poorly that you realize clearly that it is destined to wind up on the shoulder of the downhill side of the road, to run no more. The kids sit there disconsolately, staring out the windows, waiting for you to take some action on their behalf so that they can make it to "the game."
Now try to imagine yourself walking around to the rear of the vehicle and pushing it forward, only to realize that you and the children are approaching the edge of a cliff.
Dumb Question # 287: What do you do when you realize that the SUV is picking up speed toward the cliff’s edge? It was a trick question for anyone with more than four functioning brain cells. Of course you would do everything in your power, once you saw the danger ahead, to stop the vehicle before the children were hurt. Why, then, would anyone continue pushing your kids and others’ kids toward and over a cliff, you ask? Why, indeed.
By now you’ve figured out that the "SUV" is the federal and state programs collectively known as "entitlements," chief among them being Social Security and Medicare. Both have been the subject of repeated warnings, followed by repeated creation of commissions to investigate and recommend solutions. I would recommend, for openers, the near-term renaming of both, to become Social Insecurity and Mediscare as a means of getting the attention of those who still hope to become recipients.
In case those pushing the two programs off the cliff haven’t noticed, we’re now in the year 2008. It was one thing for proponents to put things off when we were still in the 20th Century, back in the ‘90s, and insolvency was still more than a decade away. For those who get elected every six, four, and especially for those elected every two years, that’s a lifetime and the problems can safely be "kicked down the road" for others to deal with. Depending on the date of the estimate and the source, the year of impending insolvency swings back and forth by a year or so.