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Post by philunderwood on Jun 29, 2011 9:18:09 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?p=10991Common sense reasons why GOP should stand firm on tax increases June 28th, 2011 | Author: Bruce McQuain James Pethokoukis provides the reasons. As you’ll note, economically, they’re not rocket science, but they certainly are something that the left seems to want to ignore in focusing its solutions to the debt problem on getting tax increases included. One – the economy will not tolerate a tax increase at this time. It is simply not in the shape in which it can shrug a tax increase off. And it certainly won’t matter if the tax is only on “the rich”. As someone once asked, “ever get a job from a poor man?” The increase in revenues generated by taxing the rich (or anyone for that matter) will not offset the loss it will generate in hiring or expansion of business. Pethokoukis points out that the economy is in incredibly fragile shape at the moment. Thus: …[T]he economic recovery is sputtering with stall speed fast approaching. Now would be a terrible time to penalize investors and business, both big and small, with new taxes. Common sense 101. Two – Tax revenue isn’t our problem when it comes to debt. Spending is the problem. Yet as I pointed out Saturday, the solution the left seems to prefer involves nothing but tax revenue increases or tax increases. What they’re less inclined to do is focus on the spending problem and make appropriate spending cuts. “Greek heroin” is the reason. Take a look at this: By 2021, the the CBO says, the annual budget deficit would be 7.5 percent of GDP and by 2035 a truly monstrous 15.5 percent. Throughout this period, tax revenue would be 18.4 percent, right around the historical average. But spending would be 25.9 percent in 2021, 33.9 percent in 2035 vs. an average of roughly 21 percent. It’s spending that’s way out of whack, not revenue. That means that if the so-called “Bush tax cuts” (they’re just the current tax rates) are left in place, that’s where we find ourselves in 2035. As Pethokoukis proves, it isn’t tax revenue that’s the problem. Unless you believe that it’s the government’s money in the first place and they have every right to determine how much you get to keep. Let’s go with that. Let’s see what happens if the left gets its way: But let’s say all the Bush tax cuts were left to expire, as was AMT relief. Assuming no economic fallout, according to the CBO, revenue would be 23.2 percent of GDP by 2035. Three problems here: a) even with all those tax increases, the annual budget deficit would still be nearly an unsustainable 10.7 percent of GDP in 2035; b) the U.S. tax code has never generated that level of revenue and almost certainly can’t without a value-added tax; and c) there would be tremendous economic fallout. Axing all the Bush tax cuts would chop three percentage points off GDP growth, according to Goldman Sachs, certainly sending America back into recession. Tax revenue would again plummet. Spending, not tax revenue, is the obvious problem. Common sense 101. Three – boosting economic growth is the fastest way to increasing tax revenues. However there’s one problem to that as far as an intrusive government is concerned. It has to get out of the way. Pethokoukis and I part ways a bit here as he endorses a consumption tax vs. an income tax and further endorses raising the revenue percentage of government’s part of the GDP to 19%. Can’t go there with him even if Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan is similar. I’m not so much against a consumption tax (it at least taxes what you consume thereby not penalizing you for what you save, nor do you get double taxed assuming the income tax goes away) but I am against such an increase in the tax percentage. I think very aggressive cuts in government spending plus fairly massive deregulation (and the obvious cuts in compliance spending by businesses that would save) would yield a fast recovering and growing economy. Granting an increase in the historic percentage of GDP that government has taken opens a door of precedence I don’t want opened. It is time government lived within its means and understood that that economic growth takes precedence over government growth – every time. It is spending – uncontrolled and wasteful spending – that is our problem. Not tax revenue. Government must be cut and cut fairly severely. That’s something the heroin addicts don’t want to hear. So they spin out solutions which always end up in one place – “the problem is revenue, we need more revenue”. No. They don’t. And the GOP, if it is to have any credibility with voters come 2012, had best not cave on this point. Again, Common Sense 101. ~McQ
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Post by philunderwood on Jun 30, 2011 13:42:32 GMT -5
Couldn't figure out how to post it here so go to you tube and look up ray stevens obama budget plan. I think you will enjoy the song.
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Post by Ritty77 on Jul 8, 2011 15:47:00 GMT -5
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Post by Ritty77 on Jul 14, 2011 15:40:30 GMT -5
Feds continue to make money nobody wants.New vault may be necessary to store unpopular dollar coinsPosted 7/14/11 1:33 p.m. BALTIMORE (ABC News Radio) - The U.S. Mint in Philadelphia is a big, noisy, busy operation, capable of minting nearly 2 million presidential dollar coins daily. But most of those coins go into storage, never seeing the light of day. Costing 32 cents apiece to produce, these manganese brass dollars have proven unpopular with a public that prefers paper. ABC News went to one such storage facility, the Federal Reserve in Baltimore, where the coins are in plastics bags and cardboard boxes, stacked one on top of another, creating several aisles of presidential coinage worth millions of dollars. In their most recent annual report to Congress, the Federal Reserve says the coins are piling up so quickly they will need to spend $650,000 to build a new vault in Dallas to hold them. Shipping the coins to the new secure facility will cost an additional $3 million. Passed by Congress in 2005, the Presidential $1 Coin Act ordered the mint to make millions of coins to honor every dead president, but not even Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., one of the co-sponsors of the original bill, uses the legal tender. "Do you use these things? Do you have any of these things in your pocket?" Reed was asked by ABC News' Jonathan Karl while holding the dollar coins. "I don't I tell you, but I like everyone else repeatedly use nickels, dimes, quarters. In fact I have a little jar in my car for the traffic meters." Reed and other senators sent a letter this week to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Mint Acting Director Richard Peterson asking for help in improving the program while eliminating waste of taxpayer resources. Meanwhile, the coins keep coming off the production lines, already more than a billion made and counting. The Fed's report estimates that they could have more than $2 billion in excess $1 coins by the time the program is expected to end five years from now. Copyright 2011 ABC News Radio www.wlsam.com/Article.asp?id=2237209
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Post by philunderwood on Jul 16, 2011 7:50:06 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?cat=1How screwed are we? July 15th, 2011 | Author: Dale Franks I have to admit, I sometimes get tired of being the voice of doom. Sadly, our political class–Republicans and Democrats alike–seems determined to follow the worst policy options available. So, doom slouches closer. The proximate doom they’re fiddling with this time is the approaching debt limit. Now, I yield to no man in my hatred for ever-increasing government spending, but this debt-limit battle is pointless. We will increase the debt limit. We have no choice. Here’s the current situation: OMB estimates federal revenues for 2011 will hit $2.17 trillion. Granny, our servicemen, and other such untouchables — by which I take him to mean Social Security, Medicare, national defense, and debt-service payments — will add up to $2.21 trillion, meaning that even if we cut the rest of the federal budget to $0.00 — no Medicaid, no food stamps, no Air Force One — revenues still would not cover these untouchables, according to OMB estimates… Our deficit is about 40 percent of spending this year; continued recovery, if the estimates hold, will do some of the work for the 2013 regime, but even under current forecasts that are arguably too rosy, we’ll still be running a 26 percent deficit in 2013. Even if we eliminate every penny of spending this year except for Social Security, Medicare, and Defense, we still can’t cover this year’s spending. And next year’s spending projects an economic recovery will save us, and reduce the deficit to 26% of spending. Absent such a recovery, next year we’ll be back to another 40% deficit. And the politicians of both parties are nowhere near to making the appropriate cuts in the budget in years farther out than that. The biggest deficit reduction package currently on the table is for $4 trillion over the next 10 years. Which sounds impressive, until you remember that the actual projected budget deficit over the next 10 years is $13 trillion. So, we’re still $9 trillion short of closing the budget deficit for the next 10 years. But, wait! It gets better! This $13 trillion figure assumes that interest rates will remain stable where the currently are. If interest rates for treasuries go up by 1%, that wil add 1.3 trillion to the deficit over the same period. As the moment, the Office of Management and the Budget (OMB) projections are for a stable average interest rate of 2.5%. Of course, the current 20-year average is closer to 5.5%, so a return even to normal interest rates will add up to $3.9 trillion to the deficit. But the magic doesn’t stop yet! OMB forecasts growth rates of between 4%-4.5% from 2014 to 2014. The average trend rate of growth is between 2.5%-3% however. So, if we don’t get the strong growth the OMB is predicting over the next three years, and the following years, we’ll need to add another $3 trillion or so to the deficit over the next decade. And, frankly, if you believe Goldman Sachs today, a return to trend rates of growth seems..unlikely, as they’ve lowered 2Q GDP growth to 1.5% from 2.5% and 3Q to 2.5% from 3.25%. They also forecast unemployment at end of 2012 to be 8.75%. So, the best case scenario is that we’ll add $9 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. A return to historical growth and interest rates–even if we assume the $4 trillion of budget cuts will actually happen–means a 10-year deficit of $16 trillion. Essentially, we will more than double the National Debt, pushing the debt to GDP ratio to about 160% by 2021. And that’s the good news. The bad news is that, in the current debate over the debt ceiling, everyone involved seems determined to play chicken with a default–even if only a selective default–of US treasury obligations. Tim Pawlenty even suggested that a technical default might be exactly what Washington needs to send a wake-up call to the politicians about how serious the situation is. Others, like Michelle Bachmann, and a not inconsequential number of Tea Party caucus members are steadfastly against raising the debt ceiling for any reason at all. This is insanity. Any sort of default, even a selective default that would suspend interest payments only to securities held by the government, while paying all private bondholders in full, will have completely unpredictable results. The least predictable result, however, would be business as usual. A technical default–i.e., delaying interest payments for a few days–or selective default, or any other kind of default is…well…a default. It is a failure to make interest payments. The most obvious possible result of any sort of default will be to eliminate the US Treasury’s AAA rating, and push interest rates up sharply. If we’re lucky, we’d be talking about a yield of 9%-10%…and an additional $5 trillion added to the deficit (running total in 2021: $21 trillion added to the national debt). And, again, that’s a best case scenario. Because it assumes that everyone will be willing to hold their T-Notes through all of this. If any major overseas institution or government–say, China–decides to unload their holdings, it could be the start of a flight from treasuries that will destroy the US Dollar in the FOREX, vastly increase the price of imported goods, like, say, oil, and spark uncontrollable hyperinflation in the US. The life savings of every person and institution would be wiped out. Naturally, yields on interest-bearing instruments would then pull back on the stick and climb for the skies. Not that it’d matter much at that point, since the currency would merely be ornately engraved pieces of durable paper. Suitable for burning in the Franklin Stoves with which we will be heating our homes, in the absence of oil. Flirting with default is extraordinarily reckless. I don’t even have the words to begin to describe how badly any sort of default might go. The thing is, we don’t know–we can’t know–what the results of a technical or selective default might be. It might be the judgement of worldwide investors that there are no better alternatives to US-denominated securities, so they’ll just have to ride out a technical default, and accept their interest payments coming a few days late. It might be their judgement that unloading their US-denominated securities and losing a little money is better than the risk of losing everything through a currency collapse. It might be a lot of things, and we have no way of knowing which of those things might come to pass. As Tim Pawlenty says, a default might be a wake up call. From an exploding phone filled with napalm and plutonium. Whatever political points might be at stake, is it worth this level of risk? The safe path here is a simple $500 billion debt limit increase. That’ll give us 6 months to figure things out, and try to discover some way to get our fiscal picture under control, and avoid a default. Government spending is out of control, but a default is really not the best way to impose fiscal discipline. ~ Dale Franks
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Post by Ritty77 on Jul 17, 2011 8:00:42 GMT -5
www.nationalreview.com/articles/272022/great-charade-mark-steynFrom the article: “Eric, don’t call my bluff,” he sternly reprimanded the GOP’s Eric Cantor. Usually, if you’re bluffing, the trick is not to announce it upfront. But, in fact, in his threat to have Granny eating dog food by Labor Day, Obama was calling his own bluff. The giant bluff against the future that is government spending.
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Post by philunderwood on Jul 17, 2011 12:08:26 GMT -5
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Post by Ritty77 on Jul 17, 2011 16:43:44 GMT -5
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Post by twinder on Jul 17, 2011 20:56:06 GMT -5
That was a really good article. Thanks for posting it.
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Post by Ritty77 on Jul 18, 2011 19:46:25 GMT -5
Steve Wynn, CEO of Wynn Resorts, trashed President Obama on a company conference call today. Below are the most damning portions of the call:I believe in Las Vegas. I think its best days are ahead of it. But I'm afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States. You watch television and see what's going on on this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President and nothing's going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress. But everybody is so political, so focused on holding their job for the next year that the discussion in Washington is nauseating.
And I'm saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next 3 hours giving you examples of all of us in this market place that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems, that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they are frightened of this administration.And it makes you slow down and not invest your money.
Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America. You bet and until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it's not going to change. And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President. And a lot of people don't want to say that. They'll say, God, don't be attacking Obama. Well, this is Obama's deal and it's Obama that's responsible for this fear in America.
The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don't invest, their holding too much money. We haven't heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody's afraid of the government and there's no need soft peddling it, it's the truth. It is the truth. And that's true of Democratic businessman and Republican businessman, and I am a Democratic businessman and I support Harry Reid. I support Democrats and Republicans. And I'm telling you that the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he's gone, everybody's going to be sitting on their thumbs. www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/07/18/wynn_slams_obama_on_business_responsible_for_this_fear_in_america.htmlwww.businessinsider.com/wynn-ceo-steve-wynn-conference-call-transcript-obama-2011-7
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Post by Ritty77 on Jul 24, 2011 10:19:09 GMT -5
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Post by Ritty77 on Jul 26, 2011 16:28:46 GMT -5
Carney Gets Hit for Ten Minutes on The Obama PlanBy Daniel Foster Posted on July 26, 2011 2:34 PM Or the lack thereof. After bobbing-and-weaving for nine minutes, Carney finally says what everybody knows: the president won’t put his plan on paper because he doesn’t want it to become “politically charged” before a compromise can be reached. In other words, you’ve got to pass it to find out what’s in it: White House Spends 10 Min. Saying They Won't Release A Plan They Might Not Have
UPDATE: So POTUS doesn’t have a plan, as such. The Republicans, for their part, have several. But the president’s senior advisers are recommending that he veto the latest. www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/272768www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbKemPlo-2E&feature=player_embedded
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Post by Ritty77 on Jul 26, 2011 16:39:13 GMT -5
At about the 5:20 point in the clip, Carney says to a reporter: "You need something printed out? You can't write it down?"
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Post by Ritty77 on Jul 31, 2011 11:25:28 GMT -5
Senator Sessions nails it:
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Post by Ritty77 on Aug 1, 2011 12:38:27 GMT -5
When a cut is not a cutBy Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) - 08/01/11 12:15 PM ET One might think that the recent drama over the debt ceiling involves one side wanting to increase or maintain spending with the other side wanting to drastically cut spending, but that is far from the truth. In spite of the rhetoric being thrown around, the real debate is over how much government spending will increase. No plan under serious consideration cuts spending in the way you and I think about it. Instead, the "cuts" being discussed are illusory, and are not cuts from current amounts being spent, but cuts in projected spending increases. This is akin to a family "saving" $100,000 in expenses by deciding not to buy a Lamborghini, and instead getting a fully loaded Mercedes, when really their budget dictates that they need to stick with their perfectly serviceable Honda. But this is the type of math Washington uses to mask the incriminating truth about their unrepentant plundering of the American people. The truth is that frightening rhetoric about default and full faith and credit of the United States is being carelessly thrown around to ram through a bigger budget than ever, in spite of stagnant revenues. If your family's income did not change year over year, would it be wise financial management to accelerate spending so you would feel richer? That is what our government is doing, with one side merely suggesting a different list of purchases than the other. In reality, bringing our fiscal house into order is not that complicated or excruciatingly painful at all. If we simply kept spending at current levels, by their definition of "cuts" that would save nearly $400 billion in the next few years, versus the $25 billion the Budget Control Act claims to "cut". It would only take us 5 years to "cut" $1 trillion, in Washington math, just by holding the line on spending. That is hardly austere or catastrophic. A balanced budget is similarly simple and within reach if Washington had just a tiny amount of fiscal common sense. Our revenues currently stand at approximately $2.2 trillion a year and are likely to remain stagnant as the recession continues. Our outlays are $3.7 trillion and projected to grow every year. Yet we only have to go back to 2004 for federal outlays of $2.2 trillion, and the government was far from small that year. If we simply returned to that year's spending levels, which would hardly be austere, we would have a balanced budget right now. If we held the line on spending, and the economy actually did grow as estimated, the budget would balance on its own by 2015 with no cuts whatsoever. We pay 35 percent more for our military today than we did 10 years ago, for the exact same capabilities. The same could be said for the rest of the government. Why has our budget doubled in 10 years? This country doesn't have double the population, or double the land area, or double anything that would require the federal government to grow by such an obscene amount. In Washington terms, a simple freeze in spending would be a much bigger "cut" than any plan being discussed. If politicians simply cannot bear to implement actual cuts to actual spending, just freezing the budget would give the economy the best chance to catch its breath, recover and grow. Source: thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/174717-when-a-cut-is-not-a-cut
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Post by philunderwood on Aug 3, 2011 7:18:31 GMT -5
Back to Big Government-Spending as Usual By Michelle Malkin www.JewishWorldReview.com | The American Age of Austerity lasted approximately three minutes, give or take a nanosecond. Immediately after the Senate approved the bipartisan "Budget Control Act of 2011" on Tuesday afternoon, President Obama hustled over to the Rose Garden — to crow about the renewed opportunity to make "key investments." Yes, the pitched battle to force government to live within its means has preserved the failed stimulator-in-chief's ability to keep spending like there's no tomorrow. As the curtains closed on D.C.'s debt-ceiling theater, Obama wasted no time putting his new "investment" priorities on the table: higher taxes, more funding for endless unemployment benefits and a "national infrastructure bank." I don't need to bet you a super-sized bowl of peas that pushover Republicans will be ready to toss their tea party costumes under the bus and rejoin the spending parade faster than you can say "Fitch." Take that government-sponsored infrastructure bank idea. Undaunted by his spectacular porkulus bust and unemployment numbers still hovering near double-digits, Obama peddled this latest shovel-unready scheme last week: "We've got the potential to create an infrastructure bank that could put construction workers to work right now," he asserted at a press conference, "rebuilding our roads and our bridges and our vital infrastructure all across the country. So those are still areas where I think we can make enormous progress." How about some progress on the nearly $230 billion already allocated in the original trillion-dollar stimulus law for infrastructure, or the $73 billion in regular infrastructure appropriations spent every year by the feds? Ah, silly me. The government definition of "living within their means" requires politicians to blather, spend and repeat without regard to the consequences. Sponsored by Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry, the fantasyland infrastructure slush fund has support from Texas GOP Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and the corporate welfare-friendly U.S. Chamber of Commerce. How would it work, and who would pay? Unveiled at the radical leftist Center for American Progress in January, Kerry and Company's pipe dream would somehow leverage $10 billion in unidentified public funds into $640 billion in government loans and loan guarantees for union-exclusive construction and bogus green jobs projects. As I've summarized before, the infrastructure banks would borrow more money the government doesn't have to dole out grants that wouldn't be paid back and don't require interest payments. Last week at a Chamber of Commerce jobs summit shindig, Obama supporter and head of General Electric Co. Jeffrey Immelt pushed a "repatriation tax holiday" to help pay for the infrastructure bank. The idea would be to pressure companies to redistribute foreign profits back to the U.S. by giving them a special tax break. But this isn't just any ordinary tax relief. And this isn't just any ordinary company championing the proposal. This is the same GE lobbying machine that has raised rent-seeking — squeezing special regulatory and economic favors from government pals — to an art form. As Trey Kovacs at the Competitive Enterprise Institute points out: "GE notoriously paid zero taxes in 2010. GE has continuously lobbied Congress for beneficial legislation while contributing millions to top-down spending Democratic cronies to achieve these ends. ... In true GE fashion, the purpose of this financial policy is for GE to benefit from government subsidies from the infrastructure bank, and with Obama in charge, there is no doubt GE will be one of the largest beneficiaries of this government spending." In keeping with the increasing delegation of spending powers to unelected bureaucrats and donors, infrastructure bank projects would be funded based on their "social benefits," among other progressive criteria, by an Obama-appointed panel. Yes, ignore the bicker-fest. Democrats and Republicans are joining hands to kick the proverbial can down the road, toss it over the guard rail and plunge it irretrievably into a Grand Canyon of $6 trillion in new debt over the next four years. It's back to big government-spending as usual. Party on.
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Post by Ritty77 on Oct 26, 2011 20:30:35 GMT -5
VIDEO: Rep. Paul Ryan on Saving the American IdeaOctober 26, 2011
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Post by philunderwood on Jan 31, 2012 10:09:10 GMT -5
I couldn't copy it, so you'll have to go there. It's titled "The Debt Generation." Well worth the trip: drsanity.blogspot.com/
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Post by philunderwood on Apr 18, 2012 8:32:10 GMT -5
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Post by Ritty77 on Nov 2, 2012 14:46:07 GMT -5
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