Obama's Ideology Of Biting The Hand That Feeds Us

[Update] This 2:27 minute Rubio video is so awesome that I am putting the update of it on top of this piece..... Rubio speaks to class warfare: (H/T Hot Air)

“It’s class warfare, and it’s the kind of language you would expect from a leader of a third-world country, not the President of the United States.”

[End update]

Original post below

Who funds our government? Not who lends us more money to spend more, but where does the bulk of our revenue come from?

It comes from income taxes paid by the rich.

Tax Year 2008

Percentiles Ranked by AGI	AGI Threshold on Percentiles	Percentage of Federal Personal Income Tax Paid
Top 1%	$380,354	38.02
Top 5%	$159,619	58.72
Top 10%	$113,799	69.94
Top 25%	$67,280	86.34
Top 50%	$33,048	97.30
Bottom 50%	<$33,048	2.7
Note: AGI is Adjusted Gross Income Source: Internal Revenue Service

Chart obtained from National Taxpayers Union

If you go to the National Taxpayer Union link above you will see the charts all the way back to 1999.

The very same people that receive the tax breaks that Barack Obama has been harping on all week and in his radio address this morning are the people that pay an overwhelming majority of the income taxes across the country to fund Washington's wasteful spending habits.

These are the millionaires, billionaires, hedge fund managers, corporate jet owners, oil and gas companies etc.. and Barack Obama said something today to which I believe should be highlighted boldly.

"It would be nice if we could keep every tax break, but we can’t afford them," Obama said. "Because if we choose to keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, or for hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners, or for oil and gas companies pulling in huge profits without our help – then we’ll have to make even deeper cuts somewhere else."

Emphasis mine.

Pulling in huge profits without our help!!! Obama's words.

These companies and people are not asking the government to give them a dime. They are earning their profits. Any business owner will tell you the reason they go into business is to succeed, to earn money, most want to expand and grow to earn more. Hire more. Sell more. All of which would help the economy.

The American dream.

Extending tax breaks to these people is not giving them money, it is taking less money from them that they have earned.

These are the folks that employ millions, provide jobs when the official unemployment is at 9.1 percent. These are the people that pour money into the economy by providing paychecks to those employees that go out and spend money on food, gas, clothing, school supplies for their kids and anything their families need.

These are the people that Barack Obama and the liberal left are declaring class warfare on.

Barack Obama and the liberal left would have you believe that letting them keep more of their own money, is actually giving them something and is adding to our nation's deficit.

An intellectually dishonest argument because the government is not writing them a check, is not paying them any money, is not bailing them out, is not spending one cent of taxpayer money on them.

If you have a bank account with $100 in it and you do not have to write a check out of it then no money is being taken out, there is no expenditure.

Barack Obama's statement that "we can’t afford" taxbreaks is another false argument.

When you go to the grocery store to get food for the week but you only have (XXX) amount of money in your pocket, you may not be able to afford extras because you do not have the money in your pocket to spend on them.

You do not look at the person next to you and say "hey, I don't money for cookies so give me a few bucks" and when he says no, you blame him for not being able to afford those cookies.

Or do you?

Expenditure, via Dictionary.com

1. the act of expending something, especially funds; disbursement; consumption.

Yet Obama and far left liberal Democrats (yes, redundant, I know) would like you to think that not taking more from people out of their pockets is some type of "expenditure."

It isn't.

What the far left liberals are doing is trying to feed on jealousy and envy and every negative emotion human nature has.

I will repeat Obama's words, the so-called rich and businesses owners are funding America without our help, are creating what jobs there are left without our help, are feeding us without our help and Obama wants to bite the hand that is feeding him and even worse, he wants you to do the same.

The reason Obama and the far left liberal Democrats are doing this is because they do not want to cut wasteful government spending, they do not want to live within a budget, they do not want to fix the problem of spending more money than they have.

Tell me, when Obama and the far left liberals are done eating the rich, finished their meal and are patting their nice fat bellies, who is going to fund America's wasteful spending habits then?

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By The Numbers: Obama's False Tax Narrative

Barack Obama and liberals across the board continue to harp on raising taxes aka revenue as they battle against meaningful spending cuts, but the numbers, the data prove that narrative to be false.

Wall Street Journal's Review and Outlook explains:

But what about the liberal claim, repeated constantly, that the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 caused today's deficits? CBO has shown this to be demonstrably false. On May 12, the budget arm of Congress examined the changes in its baseline projections from 2001 through 2011. In 2001, it had predicted a surplus in 2011 of $889 billion. Instead, it expects a deficit of $1.4 trillion.

What explains that $2.29 trillion budget reversal? Well, the direct revenue loss from the combination of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts contributed roughly $216 billion, or only about 9.5% of the $2.29 trillion. And keep in mind that even this low figure is based on a static revenue model that assumes almost no gains from faster economic growth.

After the Bush investment tax cuts of 2003, tax revenues were $786 billion higher in 2007 ($2.568 trillion) than they were in 2003 ($1.782 trillion), the biggest four-year increase in U.S. history. So as flawed as it is, the current tax code with a top personal income tax rate of 35% is clearly capable of generating big revenue gains.

CBO's data show that by far the biggest change in its deficit forecast is the spending bonanza, with outlays in 2011 that are $1.135 trillion higher than the budget office estimated a decade ago. One-third of that is higher interest payments on the national debt, notwithstanding record low interest rates. But $523 billion is due to domestic spending increases, including defense, education, Medicaid and the Obama stimulus. Mr. Bush's Medicare drug plan accounts for $53 billion of this unanticipated spending in 2011.

The other big revenue reductions come from the "temporary" tax changes of the Obama stimulus and 2010 bipartisan tax deal. CBO says the December tax deal—which includes the one-year payroll tax cut and the annual fix on the alternative minimum tax—will reduce revenues by $196 billion this year. The temporary speedup in business expensing will cost another $55 billion.

The payroll tax cut was sold in the name of stimulating growth and hiring, yet the economy has grown more slowly this year than in last year's fourth quarter. As we've long argued, the "temporary, targeted and timely" tax cuts favored by Keynesians and the White House don't do much for growth because they don't permanently change incentives to save and invest. Mr. Obama was hawking more of those yesterday, even as he wants to raise taxes overall.

Bloomberg points out that that in yesterday's speech, the same speech that MSNBC senior political analyst Mark Halperin is catching flack for calling Barack Obama a "dick" for, Obama mentioned corporate jet benefits and ending tax breaks for corporate jet owners, six times, yet as the article informs it's readers, that would account for "less than one-tenth of 1 percent of his target for reducing the federal deficit."

Obama's purpose in specifying that one item is to feed into a class warfare mindset, an "everyone should hate the rich because we are not rich too" type of thought.

Heritage seems to find it ironic that the very benefits Obama was criticizing in his speech, were "created by his own stimulus package."

But the corporate jet tax break to which Obama was referring – called “accelerated depreciation,” and a popular Democratic foil of late – was created by his own stimulus package.

Proponents of the tax break lauded it as a means to spur economic activity by encouraging purchases of large manufactured goods (planes). So the president’s statement today – and his call to repeal that tax break generally – is either a tacit admission that the stimulus included projects that did not, in fact, stimulate the economy, or an attempt to “soak the rich” without regard for the policy’s effects on the economy.

Redistribution of wealth is Obama's meme again,, where those that earn more money than others should be soaked for more than 35 percent of their income to provide for those who make less, is popular among liberals and Barack Obama, but even if the government stole 100% of the so-called rich's money, our debt would still not be paid off.

Obama is desperate for a platform for his 2012 reelection campaign since his actual record is weak because his policies have failed to stimulate the economy, failed to bring unemployment down but has seen it rise during his term, failed to cut government spending, and has instead created more debt and more spending.

Obama has simply failed across the board so he cannot run on his "success" because he has none economically and polling shows the public knows it and severely disapproves of his whole handling of the economy and deficit problem as I noted and linked to various polls from multiple organizations in the "by the numbers" portion of yesterdays post showing Obama is losing yet another portion of a demographic, pro-Israel Jewish Democrats, approval.

His swan song is old and I seriously doubt the majority of the American public, aside from his most liberal base, is going to join him in singing the chorus this time around.

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Redistributing the Wealth

cross posted from MarstonChronicles.info

One only has to look around to see that some people have a great deal of wealth and some people are desperately poor. Is this fair? After all, the wealthy have more money than they can ever use so why not take some of their excess money and give it to the poor who need it so much? Since the wealthy clearly do not give enough to charity, why not harness the power of the federal government to force a more equitable distribution of the wealth? Before we can answer that question we need to determine why some people have more money than other people in the first place. In order to justify seizing this "excess" wealth which Obama thinks should be making more than $250,000 a year, we need to determine that the wealthy came by their wealth unjustly. We need to determine that they stole it directly or indirectly by taking unfair advantage of other people.

Most of all we need to determine that everyone is equally talented at making money as everyone else. If the explanation is that for the most part, the wealthy simply are better at managing money than poor people then even if we take their excess money and give it to the poor, in a relatively short period of time, the more talented people at making money will soon be the wealthy people again and the poor people will revert to being poor once they have spent the money the government gave them and be no better off than they were before. This in turn forces us to look at the uneven distribution of talent in general among our population.

Some people are more athletically talented than others and make the big leagues. Others are better singers, dancers, mathematicians, etc. Unlike money, we cannot force an even redistribution of those kinds of talents. You are either good at something or you are not. Granted you can practice and become better at most things but some people just seem to be more gifted than others at just about anything you care to name. The only way to adjust for this uneven distribution is to deliberately handicap the more talented by playing favorites with the less talented. We see this in things like little leagues and even admission to colleges where everyone gets a chance to play regardless of their talent. The technical name for this attempt to force an even distribution of talent is egalitarianism. The uneven distribution of talent we see in the real world must be compensated for in the name of simple fairness or justice. Everyone should be just as good as everyone else at everything.

The question then is how this well this tendency towards egalitarianism works in the real world. A simple example will suffice to determine this. Some people are more talented at doing schoolwork than others. It may be that they are smarter or work harder or are driven just to be good at everything. Other people may be lazy or simply just not motivated enough to be good at schoolwork in addition to perhaps being less talented at doing it in the first place. Still this is manifestly unfair so let's see how we can adjust for this in practice. A new teacher comes into the classroom who is determined to right this manifest wrong. Since everyone should be equal to everyone else, he gives a "C" grade to everyone regardless of how good or how poorly a student performs.

It does not take a doctorate in psychology to figure out what the effects of such a policy will have. The good students think to themselves that they busted their butts to get a good grade and all they got was a "C" so what is the point of continuing to put in the extra effort? They promptly stop trying to make an extra effort. The poor students see that they got a "C" when inside their heads they know they did not deserve it. Since they know they will get a "C" anyway, why bother to try at all? It will come as no surprise to any student of human behavior, when standardized tests are given to this class of students; they will score abysmally compared to classes with teachers who are not committed to the doctrine of egalitarianism. All that happens under egalitarianism is that everybody is much worse off than before. There simply is no workable way to use some system to "force" a correction for the uneven distribution of talent.

This simple fact of life is why capitalism always wins out over communism, socialism, etc. because it employs a system of rewards and punishment to provide incentives for outstanding achievement. Communism and socialism do not provide such incentives so everyone is encouraged to "goof off" since there is no incentive to do more than just enough to get by. This can be made even worse by introducing a system where no one can be fired for poor work performance. In such a system, productivity goes out the window. This then brings us back to the question of whether money making ability is a talent that is also unequally distributed or not. There seems no reason to assume that it is any different from any other talent and that some people have a "knack" for making money and others do not.

That being the case how will taxing the rich to force them to give to the poor work out any better than giving everybody a "C" in a classroom? Why should the rich bother to bust their butts to start up new businesses or expand their old ones using the capital they have accumulated when the government is going to confiscate everything over a certain amount of money per person? Their incentive to put their money to work to make still more money is destroyed. All that happens is that everyone is worse off or poorer than they were before. Are you better off now than you were a few years ago? Most of us are not. Could it be that Obama's policies have discouraged the wealthy from creating more wealth for everyone and that is why everyone but the rich are worse off than ever?

Capitalism works best when the government is no more than a referee to insure that reasonable rules for fair play are enforced. Whenever it gets into the business of meddling with the mechanics of the economy in the interests of enforcing equality, it just makes a mess out of everything. Government then is in the business of picking winners and losers. Not surprisingly, the winners always turn out to be those individuals and entities that support whoever is running the government. All that happens is that crony capitalism runs wild as businesses figure out that there is money to be made by playing the game that those in power want to play by any means necessary. This distortion of the free marketplace causes a recovery from an economic downturn to be very anemic at best or even drives it back into another recession.

Government always screws up everything it touches. It simply is the nature of the beast. Government is an evil. It may be a necessary evil but it is still an evil. It will always pick winners and losers because it is run by humans who want to harness the power of government to reward their friends and punish their enemies. Unlike capitalism that rewards achievers, all government does is reward ass kissers and such people are seldom wealth producers for anyone but themselves. When capitalism works freely, it spreads wealth around to everyone, It does not spread it evenly because it rewards risk takers and producers and not just somebody who has a buddy in the government.

The other problem with government micromanaging everything is that it makes our decisions for us with a one size fits all mentality. All this does besides making us poorer is that we become less free as well. We are no longer in charge of our own lives because government elitists who think they are smarter than everyone else but themselves are making all of our decisions for us in the belief that we are too stupid to make them for ourselves. The fact that their policies are attempting to right "supposed" wrongs that cannot be fixed in the real world, this will not turn out well except for them. The rest of us will just get screwed, blued and tattooed and that we submit is exactly what is happening.