Category Archives: Taxation

The Price Of The Parasitical Class

Business, Debt, Government, Labor, Politics, Regulation, Socialism, Taxation, The State

Maybe the following sobering statistics will penetrate the thick skulls of those who crave the creation of new government departments filled with workers who are free to pay themselves very generous packages, out of tax dollars, while looking forward to retiring a decade sooner than the stiffs who support them; and providing, in return, that stellar service for which the US Postal Service has become famous. Ah, for a government job!

The obscene numbers come courtesy of the “The Free Enterprise Nation”:

• When wages and benefits are combined, federal civilian workers averaged $119,982 in 2008, twice the average compensation of $59,909 for private sector workers.
• A State of California retiree gets an annual pension of $500,000
• A driver’s education teacher in Illinois gets a $170,000 annual salary and $120,000 annual pension.
• In New York, some city workers amass more than $100,000 in overtime during their last year before retirement to create a monthly pension higher than their salary.
• 420 of Illinois’s physical education teachers, 332 English teachers and 94 driver’s education teachers make more than $100,000 a year, with salaries for each position topping out at more than $160,000 a year.
• A senior citizen in Houston, Texas would find their number of police officers has remained the same for six years running, despite a 40 percent budget increase to cover higher salaries, pension and healthcare benefits.
• A small business receiving an IOU in California might be surprised to learn that in 2008, 40 percent of Vallejo’s 613 employees had salaries greater than $100,000 a year, the same year the city filed for bankruptcy.
• In Fort Worth, Texas, one police chief recently retired at age 55 with a guaranteed annual pension of $188,692. His successor retired at age 52 with an annual pension of $113,614. In the Northeast, two University of Connecticut professors are currently collecting six-figure pensions while simultaneously collecting a six-figure salary.

There are 115 million workers in the private sector, a portion of whom carry 20 million of these pampered parasites on their backs. (Yes, Republicans: Your beloved police and military are numbered among them!)

ANY PUNDIT WHO preaches, as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow does nightly, more bureaucracies, should have to hear from YOU. Flood their miserable cable station with indignant letters.

“The Free Enterprise Nation” “is beginning a national effort to unite more than 5 million businesses with 115 million employees and everyday citizens to fight excessive government spending on a bureaucracy too big to sustain.”

The Free Enterprise Nation represents the economic interests of the businesses and employees who are taxed to provide government and public education employees higher wages and pension benefits, 10 to 25 years sooner, than can be provided in the private sector. The effort launched today with a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal to be followed by full-page ads in Inc., FORTUNE Small Business, Forbes, and Fast Co.

Updated: Big Daddy Dodges Questions About Healthcare Diktat

Barack Obama, Healthcare, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Media, Propaganda, Rights, Socialism, Taxation

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos exposes BO’s thesaurus of excuses for what most media are euphemizing as “a mandate to buy health insurance,” also a tax.

Writes Stephanopoulos:

“…in our most spirited exchange, the President refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy health insurance is equivalent to a tax.

Here it is:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You were against the individual mandate…

OBAMA: Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: …during the campaign. Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don’t. How is that not a tax? …

[Observe the president’s slithering and sliming for yourself.]

STEPHANOPOULOS: I — I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax — “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”

[SNIP]

BO’s ignorance and evasion would pose no major obstacle given the dogged devotion among the dogs of the media to minimizing and covering up Da Man’s many mistakes.

However, even this master of manipulation might find it hard to slither away from his latest faux paux: The Baucus bill reads:

Excise Tax. The consequence for not maintaining insurance would be an excise tax. If a taxpayer‘s MAGI is between 100-300 percent of FPL, the excise tax for failing to obtain coverage for an individual in a taxpayer unit (either as a taxpayer or an individual claimed as a dependent) is $750 per year. However, the maximum penalty for the taxpayer unit is $1,500. If a taxpayer‘s MAGI is above 300 percent of FPL the penalty for failing to obtain coverage for an individual in a taxpayer unit (either as a taxpayer or as an individual claimed as a dependent) is $950 year. However, the maximum penalty amount a family above 300 percent of FPL would pay is $3,800. [P. 29]

Of course, the Baucus-Obama coercion is simply a natural extension of the collectivization of choices. If the state is to become the custodian of every individual in this country, and assume the onus of their care—then said serfs cannot act as they please. Big Daddy puts it as follows:

[F]or us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase. People say to themselves, that is a fair way to make sure that if you hit my car, that I’m not covering all the costs.

Being a freeman and receiving freebies from the State are mutually exclusive. A pact with the devil has consequences. These will be bearable for the parasites who demand some form of taxpayer-subsidized care. Not so for those of us who yearn to live free.

Update: Here are a few pertinent points (which, naturally, do not address rights) made by Philip Klein of the American Spectator:

“While it is true that some people end up showing up in emergency rooms without paying and that imposes costs on others, there’s two things that Obama isn’t taking into account. First, just because you mandate coverage it doesn’t mean you elimate [sic] the uncompensated care. Second, if you have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on subsidies enabling people to purchase insurance, then that costs far more than whatever would be saved by reducing uncompensated care. … Many of those who are currently uninsured simply have very low health care costs, which they are willing to pay out of pocket when they get sick. The reason why Obama supports a mandate is that he wants to be able to force insurers to cover those with preexisting conditions, and the only way to do that is to bring uninsured healthy people into the system. So really, this isn’t about eliminating freeloaders, it’s about forcing healthy people to pay for more health care than they need to so that they can make premiums more affordable for the sick.” [My italics]

Update II: The Prejean Of Journalism (& On Entrapment)

Conservatism, Crime, Ethics, Journalism, Law, Republicans, Taxation

“Conservatives” may be adding another Carrie Prejean to their intellectual arsenal. Prejean is a beauty queen, and a ding dong of a girl, who has become the Republican spokesman against gay marraige.

The Breitbart enterprise is behind an ACORN-exposing operation starring the Prejean of journalism. I give you the “gutsy” Hannah Giles. Yes, it helps to be connected, to have a shapely behind, a videographer who is hip to your ass-ets, and who is behind this brand of tease “journalism,” with its pornographic connotation, not unfamiliar to Fox New and its cohorts.

Giles told a praise-oozing Glenn Beck that, “Like, one day I was jogging, and I saw ACORN, and I really didn’t like them,” so she hatched a scheme. She would pose as a hooker at ACORN. Well, read the transcript of the investigation, or watch the video clips to see for yourself how Giles and her accomplice, James O’Keefe, played it out.

ACORN is a contemptible outfit. It speaks to the Third Worldification of the US. ACORN is also obviously accustomed to dealing with crooked politicians, since the journalist in this clip is posing as a politician, I think.

Update II (Sept. 11): politician, pimp or politician-cum-pimp: They’re one and the same, really, except that politicians are way worse, as there is a good degree of choice to the pimping occupation. Politicians live off us and we have no say in the matter whatsoever.

Nevertheless, I’m unexercised about ACORN’s attitude to prostitution or tax fraud. The first is a choice; the second is a mitzvah.

If anything I’m impressed with the help these black mamas are offering a white ho. It’s almost delicious how mama tax lady comes up with a tax code designation—“performing artist”—for our ungrateful entrapment specialist as well as tax write-offs.

As for the alleged importation of underage, illegal girls from El Salvador (“exchange students”): The ACORN tax lady is from The Street. One look at the pretty white ho and her well-spoken white pimp, and she knows that the “girls” are better off with them than in the flesh markets of El Salvador. In fact, the Housing Assistant encourages the white madam to send her “girls” to school.

“ACORN has ascended. They elect our politicians and receive billions in tax money,” writes O’Keefe. That’s right. The government is the syndicate that feeds ACORN and facilitates its criminal activities. Let our intrepid Prejournalist go after politicians for enabling ACORN and, in general, for their everyday pimping.

Finally, I don’t like entrapment, not when citizens or cops use it to flush out potential criminals. The law must concern itself with catching criminals; not creating crime.

Update I (Sept. 11): I’m the first to admit when my readers make good points against mine. Something good has indeed come of this exercise: The Census Bureau has severed its ties with ACORN.

Over the last several months, through ongoing communication with our regional offices, it is clear that ACORN’s affiliation with the 2010 Census promotion has caused sufficient concern in the general public, has indeed become a distraction from our mission, and may even become a discouragement to public cooperation, negatively impacting 2010 Census efforts,” read a letter from Census Director Robert M. Groves to the president of ACORN.

ACORN had previously been tapped to help with low level data gathering for the 2010 census. A copy of the director’s letter has been sent to Congress and relevant committees, as well as ACORN

You could all be right (most of you have disagreed with me). Given the accretion of corruption in the US, perhaps we liberty lovers are in no state to quibble about minutia. Principled-thinking Republicans are few and far between. Therefore, all we can ask is that, while throwing fits about the affiliates of the Democrats (ACORN)—and pretending corruption and socialism began with Obama—Republicans do some good.

As long as you all remember that when their guy or girl ascends to the imperial throne, nary a word will be said about Republican corrupt subsidiaries—there will be no Town-Hall tartlets going undercover, wiggling their tushes to expose wartime socialism and the attendant corporate cronies such as Kellogg Brown & Root, the construction arm of Cheney’s Halliburton, and the Bechtel Corporation, to name a few from the “W” era. Just so you know.

Update III: Socialist America Sinking

America, Founding Fathers, IMMIGRATION, Journalism, Liberty, Old Right, Political Philosophy, Socialism, Taxation

In “Socialist America Sinking,” Pat The Patriot pulls open and holds back a curtain to reveal what the blind and bombastic leadership and commentariat don’t see: an America in permanent decline, “far … off the course the Founding Fathers set for our republic”:

“In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called George III a tyrant for having ‘erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.’

What did George III do with his Stamp Act, Townshend Acts or tea tax to compare with what is being done to this generation of Americans by their own government?

While the hardest-working and most productive are bled, a third of all wage-earners pay no U.S. income tax, and Obama plans to free almost half of all wage-earners of all income taxes. Yet, tens of millions get Medicaid, rent supplements, free education, food stamps, welfare and an annual check from Uncle Sam called an Earned Income Tax Credit, though they never paid a nickel in income taxes.

Coming to America to feast on this cornucopia of freebies is the world. One million to 2 million immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year. They come with fewer skills and less education than Americans, and consume more tax dollars than they contribute by three to one.

Wise Latina women have more babies north of the border than they do in Mexico and twice as many here as American women.

As almost all immigrants are now Third World people of color, they qualify for ethnic preferences in hiring and promotions and admissions to college over the children of Americans.

All of this would have astounded and appalled the Founding Fathers, who after all, created America – as they declared loud and clear in the Constitution – ‘for ourselves and our posterity.'”

[SNIP]

A must read, as is the case with most of Mr. Buchanan’s columns. He is assuredly one of the few patriots left among the government-fed news filters.

Update I July 20): Actually, there is no chance of “turning things around”—not so long as the US practices unfettered immigration, importing millions of people each year, into a country that no longer transmits or practices its founding values. The nature of immigration policies is such that it ensures most newcomers will end up consuming rather than paying taxes, and voting for more and more Statism. I wish people would realize that there will be no liberty when America is a Third World country. The reason Americans refuse to articulate this simple fact—that the American people are being dissolve and a new people elected—is, I suspect, because they are brainwashed about the wonders of diversity and multiculturalism, and have been taught that America is nothing without this tsunami of immigrants.

So no, Pat knows as I do that it’s all over. Pat is sad. Smart people will be sad.

Update II: Myron; you misunderstand Pat, who is 100% correct in his assertion about taxpayers vs. tax consumers. He is referring to those people–50% or so–who get back more from you and me than they pay in all taxes combined. I call them net tax consumers.

Update III: As I mentioned, people refuse to concede–are unable to due to a hippie, left-liberal state of mind—that not all immigrants come to this country to be rugged individualists. In fact, most are lured by a generous welfare state. Or, as I have pointed out a million times in immigration columns; one productive immigrant brings in a tribe (under the family reunification program), which falls to you and me to support.

The premise for our good reader’s optimism is precisely what has just been said: the goodness of the immigrants the law selects. So what if the economy is rapidly being socialized? There are still a few Atlases who carry the $13 trillion economy on their weakening backs. It takes a while to break the backs of the best. Decades hence, immigration will slow. Until then, the hordes will come to feed at the trough, which is still relatively full compared to other troughs.

But as I complain again and again, a liberal state of mind among Americans refuses to recognize that American immigration policy guarantees that socialism spread like kudzu. But since we have a mixed economy; not one in which all the means of production are nationalized, there are still a sufficient number of good people for the parasites—via the state—to feast upon for decades to come.