Category Archives: Taxation

Pravda Pities the US, And With Good Reason

Barack Obama, Elections, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Political Philosophy, Russia, Socialism, Taxation

Writing against Barack Obama in Pravda, Xavier Lerma offered his assessment of Obama and the people that reelected him. To capture the gist of Mr. Lerma’s (somewhat unartful but truthful) article, here’s a riff on an old joke: These days, if you send your son to Moscow he will return an anti-Communist; send him to Washington and he will return a Communist. (Your daughter will probably lean left wherever she goes. “Sisters love Uncle Sam.”)

Doff of the hat to Lou Dobbs and The Examiner for the Lerma link:.

….Recently, Obama has been re-elected for a 2nd term by an illiterate society and he is ready to continue his lies of less taxes while he raises them. He gives speeches of peace and love in the world while he promotes wars as he did in Egypt, Libya and Syria. He plans his next war is with Iran as he fires or demotes his generals who get in the way. …
…O’bomber even keeps the war going along the Mexican border with projects like “fast and furious” and there is still no sign of ending it. He is a Communist without question promoting the Communist Manifesto without calling it so. How shrewd he is in America. His cult of personality mesmerizes those who cannot go beyond their ignorance. They will continue to follow him like those fools who still praise Lenin and Stalin in Russia. Obama’s fools and Stalin’s fools share the same drink of illusion.

The Examiner provides an example (one among tens of millions) of the Idiocracy that elected Obama. He is Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx, who said this “on a previously recorded broadcast of the Soul Train Awards on Black Entertainment Television (BET) Sunday:

‘Give an honor to God and our lord and savior Barack Obama. Barack Obama.’”

In Fiscal Free-Fall

Debt, Democrats, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Republicans, Taxation

We’ve been in fiscal free-fall for a long time. Right now, we’re just trying to determine how to land, says Michael Maloney, founder of Gold-Silver.com, on… RT. (Where else?) There is no way of avoiding the “fiscal cliff.” More pain now or a whole lot of if later.

I’ve categorized and transcribed Mr. Maloney below (not verbatim).

DEFICITS SPENDING & THE SHRUB. It all came to a head with Bush, as this column pointed out in … 2002 and 2003. Bush accelerated deficit spending, initiated the production known as the War on Terror, on Afghanistan, Iraq, Medicare Part D, etc. Genghis Bush set in motion the deficit-spending orgy, and the trajectory of government growth.

Government accounts for 50 percent of the economy, says Maloney, when you take into account the trickle down effect of deficit spending that must be sustained if the effect is to be sustained. All jobs created via deficit spending do not add value to the economy but drain energy from it.

The fiscal cliff and the wall of debt that accounts for it has been with us for … ever. Well, at least for a decade, starting with the rule of the Republican George Bush.

THE POLS VS. THE PAUL. Among Maloney’s pearls of wisdom: Ron Paul was the only candidate who understands economics. We run a popularity contest every 4 years, during which we elect telegenic empty suits, en masse, whom we send to D.C. to run the economy by taxing us and redistributing our wealth. These clowns know nothing about economics or the economic consequences of what they do.

MONETARY POLICY. We do not have a free-market economy, chiefly because the currency is manipulated: the quantity of money in the economy and the price of the currency (interest rates). Currency is 50 percent of every transaction. This portion is manipulated by a group of central planners who’re bereft of the information that the market holds.

TAXING THE RICH: GOLD FINGER OR STICKY FINGERS?. The 1 percent employ the 99 percent. What happens to money removed from its rightful owner? Take $1000 away from the producer. The sticky-fingered IRS employees get some of it. Some of the money sticks to Congress’ mitts; as members pass laws that redistribute it. But these are all “frictional jobs.” No new products or new services have been created that go directly into the economy.

MORE of Mr. Maloney, on RT.

We Are ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’ As The Beltway’s Bitches

Debt, Government, Politics, Taxation, The State, Welfare

Better late than never. The Beltway press discovers and reveals that wealth in the D.C. hood comes from, as I put it in 2010, the graft flowing into Rome from the ‘provinces.’ FoxNews.com quotes Tim Carney, columnist for the Washington Examiner, explaining why D.C. prospers as the rest of the country buckles under its weight.

“Sometimes I think that D.C. is the vortex and there’s a giant sucking sound of American wealth and jobs coming in here. It’s not free trade, it’s not commerce … it’s government. The taxpayers are the ones who are paying to build up this region.”

The American Community Survey released last Thursday found seven of the nations top 10 wealthiest counties now surround Washington, D.C. They include Loudoun County, Va., ranked No. 1, with a median household income over $119,000 dollars a year. Fairfax County, Va., was second with $105,000 and Arlington County, Va., third with just over $100,000 a year in median household income.

From “Our Overlords Who Art in D.C.,” December 17, 2010:

“All life in Washington today derives ultimately from the capitals’ own version of Rome’s annona — the continuous infusion not of grain and olive oil but of tax revenue and borrowed money. Instead of ships and barges there are banks, 10,000 of them designated for this purpose, which funnel the nations’ tax payments to the city. This ‘never-ending flow of revenue creates a broad level of affluence that has no real counterpart anywhere in America.” Says Murphy: “Washington simply doesn’t look like the rest of America.” But its residents “fail to view this as bizarre.”
America’s annona was facilitated by the Sixteenth Amendment. With its passage, in 1913, Murphy admits begrudgingly, “A Rubicon was crossed, giving Washington the unimpeded power to levy an income tax and therefore spend ever larger amounts of money.” As in Rome, D.C. grubbiness coexists with “rhetoric of high-mindedness about the duties and burdens of leadership.”
Thanks to the graft flowing into the Beltway, the average income in and around Washington D.C. is $85,189 compared to $49,777 for the hinterland, where unemployment rates are almost double. The rest of the country exists to serve its masters in modern Rome.

Alas, “Statism Starts With YOU!” The fatter the feds the happier Americans seem to be:

As for America’s fondness for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — which combined, account for close to half of the federal government’s budget — …only 7 percent of the country will consider slashing the first two welfare programs. And a mere eleven percent of those living in the “Land of the Free” are prepared to pare down Medicaid.
Keep the government out of my Medicare! For a while — and in all seriousness — Dick Morris even promoted a similar slogan on Fox News. It was this Republican hack’s ploy to alert seniors to the dangers to Medicare from Obamacare. The sink-hole of debt into which this country has slid, because of state spending, scares its citizens. But not sufficiently to seriously motivate them to dent “defense” spending. Just a fifth will entertain trimming the estimated $1 trillion which the United States blows on defending to the death borders not its own.

Unless the people of the “provinces”—you out there—are willing to do something drastic, like repeal the American annona, we will all have to learn to live forever after as the Beltway’s bitches.

Global Tax Troglodyte

Business, Economy, Hillary Clinton, Human Accomplishment, Propaganda, Taxation

“There are rich people everywhere, and yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries” was the obscene comment made by Hillary Clinton, at the Clinton Global Initiative, on Monday.

Worse than her global crusade against under-siege, “market-dominant minorities” worldwide is Clinton’s crushing ignorance. As Economist George Reisman put it, “a Highly Productive and Provident One Percent Provides the Standard of Living of a Largely Ignorant and Ungrateful Ninety-Nine Percent.”

Contrary to such beliefs, in the modern world in which we actually live, the wealth of the capitalists is simply not in the form of consumers’ goods to any great extent. Not only is it overwhelmingly in the form of means of production but those means of production are employed in the production of goods and services that are sold in the market. Totally unlike the conditions of self-sufficient farm families, the physical beneficiaries of the capitalists’ means of production are all the members of the general consuming public who buy the capitalists’ products.
…the wealth of the so-called one percent is the foundation of the standard of living of the so-called ninety-nine percent … the “greed” of those who seek to become part of the one percent, or to enlarge their position within it, is what serves progressively to improve the standard of living of the ninety-nine percent.

To comprehend what Reisman wrote you’d have to, first, have a mind. And second, be in possession of moral fiber such that you were not jealous of those who have what it takes.

MORE.