print“I’m really looking forward to hearing a speech by someone who is involved in innovation, knows America’s place in the world market and has fiscal responsibility. And I hope that Obama is listening very carefully when Steve Jobs speaks tomorrow.”
That was magician Penn Jillette on the eve of Barack Obama’s first, much-anticipated State of the Union Address. Tomorrow is his sixth State of the Union address. Like those that came before, it’ll be written at an eighth-grade level, “as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test,” and showcase the man’s utter economic illiteracy.
This year, like yesteryear, Zero is treating us to a Marxist maneuver: promising to move money around, from those who make it to those who take it.
” … during Tuesday’s State of the Union address, [Obama] will call for raising the capital gains rate on top income earners and eliminating a tax break on inheritances. The revenue generated by those changes would fund new tax credits and other cost-saving measures for middle-class taxpayers, officials said.” (Business Insider)
I’m copying from a 2010 column mocking this moron for his obfuscations with respect to tax cuts vs. tax credits.
Obama’s “tax credits” are not tax cuts. Ask Wikipedia, the left-leaning online encyclopedia, according to which tax credits are “subsidies disguised as tax cuts. In other words, they are spending in the form of direct transfers from the treasury to individuals, except that they are administered by the tax authorities rather than the agencies usually responsible for welfare.”
A better definition of tax credits is social tinkering or engineering, as they target certain politically desirable constituents to the detriment of others. “Taxpayers can receive a raft of tax credits if they engage in various government-specified activities,” confirms Peter Ferrara, director of entitlement and budget policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation.
Then there is the “Stalinesque extravaganza” that ought to offend “anyone of a republican (small ‘r’) sensibility,” which is how John Derbyshire described the annual State of the Union address. “American politics frequently throws up disgusting spectacles. It throws up one most years in January: the State of the Union speech,” writes Derbyshire in “We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism,” in which John goes on to detail how “the great man” is announced, how he makes an entrance; the way “the legislators jostle to catch his eye” and receive his favor. (MORE: “Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State.”)