Too Poor
This will be an evolving, growing page. Firstly I will post older info from debates and discussions over the years. Then I will add new information as I get it and re-arrange the old. Topics will mainly deal with economic issues, the most important is JOBS!
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Dan Sparks hit one out of the park:
The enviros have succeeded in destroying both the environment and jobs with their radical legislative successes. First, it was their complete stranglehold on our nation’s energy policy: no new nuclear plants, a complete ban on exploring for natural gas domestically or for drilling for oil near our coasts. This forced us into the more hazardous and more expensive deep water drilling. This time they’ve succeeded with the outlawing of the lowly light bulb. The incandescent light bulb, the one Thomas Alva Edison invented in 1879, will be put to death in the US due to federal energy regulations. A law passed quietly in 2007 will be phased in next year with the final sales of incandescents occurring in 2014. Don’t blame Obama, this was done under George W. Bush’s watch.
The liberals, who always cry for “choice”, don’t want to give the American consumer choice in choosing light bulbs. They’re apparently only pro-choice with baby killing. Otherwise, they will tell you just how to live your life, thank you. The banning of the incandescent light bulb meant that General Electric, the largest maker of light bulbs, had to close all their plants in the US. The last factory closed in Winchester, VA. in September of last year. The jobs are now all in China. They’re the largest makers of the compact fluorescent bulbs, CFLs. They’re not made here, in part, because they’re too hazardous.
Ironically, the CFL’s contain mercury, a highly toxic substance. A broken bulb can create an environmental nightmare and according to Scientific American at least one case of mercury poisoning has been linked to these bulbs. Toxic cleanup crews may be necessary to contain a broken light bulb. I guess this is what the enviros mean by creating more “green jobs”. Cleaning up the mess that they’ve foisted on the American people through advocacy of their radical legislation. First, we ban imports of lead in Chinese toys and now this: forcing Americans to buy toxic light bulbs from the Chinese at the expenses of American jobs and consumer safety? What kind of insanity is this?
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Fortunately, there’s hope on the horizon. The new chairman of the House Energy Committee, Michigan Republican Rep. Fred Upton, promised to re-examine this ban on the incandescent. Let’s just hope Representatives Fred Upton and Ted Poe along with their GOP house can keep the lights on for us.
The problem comes when a bulb breaks. Mercury escapes as vapor that can be inhaled and as a fine powder that can settle into carpet and other textiles. At least one case of mercury poisoning has been linked to fluorescents: A 1987 article in Pediatrics describes a 23-month-old who suffered weight loss and severe rashes after a carton of eight-foot (2.4-meter) tubular bulbs broke in a play area.
The Job Killing President and His Policies
Gateway Pundit has this video of forward charging Republican Congressman John Shimkus “interviewing” Lisa Jackson in a House Energy and Commerce Committee:
Big Government reported in October: A recent report from the Senate Environment and Public Works committee detailed how the EPAs new backdoor regulations will cause a shocking job loss – nearly a million jobs. In their quest “green” the nation, the EPA is steamrolling over American industries – cement, steel and coal, among others – with unrealistic standards and impossibly complex regulations, threatening thousands upon thousands of jobs, not just in the industries themselves, but in the surrounding communities that depend heavily on the industries’ welfare.
Related… House democrat Dem Rep. Markey announced at the hearing, “If GOP Blocks The EPA, The Terrorists Win.”
If the Democrats inherited any deficit, it was the FY 2007 deficit, the last of the Republican budgets. That deficit was the lowest in five years, and the fourth straight decline in deficit spending. After that, Democrats in Congress took control of spending, and that includes Barack Obama, who voted for the budgets. If Obama inherited anything, he inherited it from himself. In a nutshell, what Obama should saying is: “I inherited a deficit that I voted for and then I voted to expand that deficit four-fold since January 20th”.
(Green is the new Red… see the hammers? Can you spot the sickles? [windmills])
Jennifer Kerns over at UNLIBERAL has written a short, concise example of the failure of the left in one of its most prized positions… Green Jobs.
First Evidence that Green Jobs Were a White Lie
….Just one day after environmental advocates achieved victory in protecting their $140-billion Energy Tax at the ballot box, one of California’s prominent solar companies announced plans to close its solar panel factory and lay off workers in California. According to Todd Woody at the New York Times, that’s not all. The Silicon Valley solar company also declared they will cancel plans for further expansion to a second, new facility in California.
Wait, weren’t we supposed to become the perfect market for Green jobs?
As it turns out, no. But it wasn’t for lack of bloated government funding. You may recall that Governor Schwarzenegger participated in Solyndra’s groundbreaking ceremony last year, promising that AB 32 would bring exactly these kind of Green jobs. President Obama visited the plant as recently as May of this year. In fact, Solyndra had already received a half-billion dollars in Federal guaranteed funding. But even high-profile political attention and hundreds of millions of dollars weren’t enough to keep their doors open.
The closure of California’s leading solar plant just proves the theory that government can’t “buy” Green jobs. You can’t force people into doing business in a state that isn’t friendly to business. And you can’t throw money at the problem. Amid big promises of Green jobs, California’s companies — and their employees — will unfortunately soon discover that the Green jobs promise was all a white lie.
…(UNLIBERAL)…
“I now find that many environmental groups have drifted into self-serving cliques with narrow vision and rigid ideology…. many environmentalists are showing signs of elitism, left-wingism, and downright eco-fascism. The once politically centrist, science-based vision of environmentalism has been largely replaced with extremist rhetoric. Science and logic have been abandoned and the movement is often used to promote other causes such as class struggle and anti-corporatism. The public is left trying to figure out what is reasonable and what is not.” Patrick Moore, co-founder of Green Peace.
A new study warns that a value-added tax would kill 850,000 jobs in a year and cut retail spending by $2.5 trillion over 10 years. Sounds too bad for Washington to pass up.
An analysis for the National Retail Federation by Ernst & Young finds that adding a VAT to the U.S. tax system would reduce GDP for years, causing the loss of “850,000 jobs in the first year,” plus “700,000 fewer jobs 10 years later.”
If you are not aware of what the Value Added tax is (VAT), Dick Army explains it a bit:
….“But, I always believed that when the Democrats got the majority in both the House and the Senate – and I’ve told this to people for years – when they get the House and the Senate and the White House, they’re going to add a Value Added Tax to the existing income tax,” said Armey.
“It’s not going to be a VAT instead of – it’s in addition to, and, of course, they are doing exactly what I predicted. Why? Because they’ve got gluttonous spending habits, and they want to spend more, and they need to raise money to do it, and they can’t raise the money out in front of God and everybody for the taxpayer to recognize what they’re doing,” he said.
“So they are looking at that best instrument to hide the tax from the taxpayer. And that’s why the VAT tax is attractive. The VAT tax has never been attractive to anybody except tax leviers,” Armey added.
The VAT is a general sales tax added to the price of goods and services at each step of production whenever value is added to those goods and services. According to the Tax Policy Center, the VAT was first imposed by France in 1948 and then by the European Community (EC) in 1968. To date, over 100 countries impose some form of a VAT except Australia and the United States.
VAT is a good idea (flat tax is the best) if you abolish the income and state taxes all-together. But the Democrats want to add this tax ON TO the already existing tax matrix, thus, hurting the poor the most. Charles Krauthammer has been saying almost immediately after liberal-care (Obama-care) passed. Here is his article on the issue:
…We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that another $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks — the unfunded $200 billion–plus doctor fix, the double-counting of Medicare cuts, the ten-six sleight-of-hand (counting ten years of revenue and only six years of outflows) — is, at minimum, a $2 trillion new entitlement.
It will vastly increase the debt. But even if it were deficit-neutral, Obamacare would still pre-empt and appropriate for itself the best and easiest means of reducing the existing deficit. Obamacare’s $500 billion of Medicare cuts and $600 billion in tax hikes are no longer available for deficit reduction. They are siphoned off for the new entitlement of insuring the uninsured.
This is fiscally disastrous because, as President Obama himself explained last year in unveiling his grand transformational policies, our unsustainable fiscal path requires control of entitlement spending, the most ruinous of which is out-of-control health-care costs.
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What will it recommend? What can it recommend? Sure, Social Security can be trimmed by raising the retirement age, introducing means testing, and changing the indexing formula from wage growth to price inflation.
But this won’t be nearly enough. As Obama has repeatedly insisted, the real money is in health-care costs — which are now locked in place by the new Obamacare mandates.
That’s where the value-added tax comes in. For the politician, it has the virtue of expediency: People are used to sales taxes, and this one produces a river of revenue. Every 1 percent of VAT would yield up to $1 trillion a decade (depending on what you exclude — if you exempt food, for example, the yield would be more like $900 billion).
It’s the ultimate cash cow. Obama will need it. By introducing universal health care, he has pulled off the largest expansion of the welfare state in four decades. And the most expensive. Which is why all of the European Union has the VAT. Huge VATs. Germany: 19 percent. France and Italy: 20 percent. Most of Scandinavia: 25 percent.
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Ultimately, even that won’t be enough. As the population ages and health care becomes increasingly expensive, the only way to avoid fiscal ruin (as Britain, for example, has discovered) is health-care rationing.
It will take a while to break the American populace to that idea. In the meantime, get ready for the VAT. Or start fighting it.
This is a huge story in my mind’s eye and Gateway Pundit must be thanked for bringing it to a larger audience. Here is the story as found over at Gateway, whom you should visit:
The far left radicals at the Sierra Club announced that Obama EPA officials will not allow mining at the largest mountaintop removal coal mine.
Victory for Appalachians as a Determined EPA Recommends No More Mining at Biggest Proposed Mountaintop Removal Coal Mine
Statement from Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune
Washington, D.C. — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took courageous action today to protect the people and waterways of Appalachia when Shawn Garvin, the agency’s Region 3 Administrator, recommended the withdrawal of the mining permit for America’s largest proposed mountaintop removal coal mine site, the Spruce No. 1 Mine in Logan County, West Virginia.
In response Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune issued the following statement:
“The Sierra Club praises the EPA, Lisa Jackson and Regional Administrator Shawn Garvin for staring down Big Coal and industry lobbyists and doing what’s right for Appalachians and hardworking Americans everywhere. This mother of all mountaintop removal coal mines would destroy thousands of acres of land, bury seven miles of streams and end a way of life for too many Appalachian families.
“We stand with the local grassroots heroes who have spent over a decade fighting this largest mountaintop removal coal mine, and today’s announcement is a victory for everyone who has stood up for their air, water and health. While the coal industry has been cutting jobs and cutting corners in Appalachia, clean energy and efficiency investments there could generate almost 80,000 jobs by 2030 and save consumers more than $25 billion in energy costs.*
Remember to thank Barack Obama when your electricity bills go up.
And, why do these awful leftists always lie about their green programs creating jobs?
Shovel Ready Jobs!?
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In the above video we see Obama saying the following:
“IF you are already getting health insurance on your job, then, that doesn’t change. Health insurance reform passed was passed six months ago. I don’t know if anybody here has gotten a letter from their employer saying, ‘you have to go on government health care’….”
This statement is just false. I have posted in the past on this topic of companies dumping their plans because it will be cheaper for them just to dump their employees onto the government plan. Here is a recent example exemplified over at HotAir – 3M to dump retirees from medical coverage:
Remember when Barack Obama repeatedly promised that no one’s current coverage would have to change if Congress approved the health-care overhaul he demanded? When the ObamaCare bill passed, the Associated Press suddenly discovered that the change of tax law that would supposedly generate billions of dollars to pay for the costs of the bill would also drive companies to dump retirees from their existing drug coverage and push them into Medicare. Minnesota-based 3M became one of the first large corporations to do just that — and push retirees off of all their plans as well:
3M Co., citing new federal health laws, said Monday it won’t cover retirees with its corporate health-insurance plan starting in 2013.
Instead, the company will direct retirees to Medicare-backed insurance programs, and will provide reimbursement for that coverage. It’ll also reimburse retirees who are too young for Medicare; the company didn’t provide further details.
The company made the changes known in a memo to employees Friday; news of the move was reported in The Wall Street Journal and confirmed Monday by 3M spokeswoman Jackie Berry.
The ObamaCare bill created a fund to subsidize employers who didn’t dump their retirees, but the WSJ notes that it simply wasn’t enough to change the negative incentives created by the government interventions:
The changes won’t start to phase in until 2013. But they show how companies are beginning to respond to the new law, which should make it easier for people in their 50s and early-60s to find affordable policies on their own. While thousands of employers are tapping new funds from the law to keep retiree plans, 3M illustrates that others may not opt to retain such plans over the next few years. …
Democrats that crafted the legislation say they tried to incentivize companies to keep their retiree coverage intact, especially until 2014. The law creates a $5 billion fund for employers and unions to offset the cost of retiree health benefits. More than 2,000 entities, including many large public companies, have already been approved to submit claims for such reimbursement. 3M did not apply.
How did Democrats come up with the $5 billion figure for subsidies to protect retirees from losing their plans? From the looks of it, they simply made it up. They also didn’t do much calculation to determine whether the subsidies would actually incentivize employers into rejecting this strategy for cost savings. To some extent, they may not have been able to make that calculation, because thanks to the massive amount of ambiguity in the bill, no one can really say for sure what the future costs would be. And of course, that’s why 3M chose now to dump the retirees.
3m has 23,000 retirees, many of them likely to be living in Minnesota. They’re also likely to vote in the upcoming midterms, perhaps even more likely now than ever. That won’t be good news for House Democrats in the Minnesota delegation hoping to win a new term in four weeks.
We already know we will not know the ultimate costs… and going off of experience, we know all government programs are always more than what we are told:
This is a concern for the Dems and will be a losing issue (among the many others). Here are a couple examples of the impact this ridiculous bill has had on business:
Some great articles by Malkin:
….These are not the wealthy fat cats and Big Business titans that Democrats love to demonize.
They’re employees of companies like Assurant Health, which announced last week that it would slash 130 jobs at its offices in Milwaukee and Plymouth, Minn. to prepare for costly Obamacare mandates.
They’re employees of medical device firms in Massachusetts, where officials say they’ll be forced to cut back on operational costs and jobs thanks to a little-noticed Obamacare tax on their products that goes into effect in 2013.
They’re employees of restaurants like White Castle and International House of Pancakes, whose executives say they will be forced into layoffs and premium hikes to cope with the federal law’s $3,000-per-employee penalty on companies whose workers pay more than 9.5 percent of household income in premiums for company-provided insurance.
They’re mom-and-pop enterprises across the country who must now deal with Obamacare’s onerous Section 9006 tax-filing mandate. It requires them to file 1099 forms with the IRS for every vendor from whom they purchase $600 or more in goods. Nebraska GOP Sen. Mike Johanns calls it one of many “job-crushing provisions” that will bury small business in paperwork and legal costs.
They’re the estimated 23,000 workers in the deepwater drilling industry whom the White House deliberately wrote off in pursuit of its junk science-based drilling moratorium.
They’re the estimated tens of thousands of workers employed by car dealers shut down by President Obama’s auto czars at a time, as the TARP inspector general pointed out last month, “when the country was experiencing the worst economic downturn in generations and the government was asking its taxpayers to support a $787 billion stimulus
package designed primarily to preserve jobs… — all based on a theory and without sufficient consideration of the decisions’ broader economic impact.”
They’re employees of Utah oil and gas companies whose leases have been pulled without cause by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. The Interior Department’s own Inspector General rejected Salazar’s explanation that the Bush administration had rushed the leases through. The Deseret News reports that “rescinding these leases has likely cost the state millions already. Officials in Uintah county estimate the county lost 3,000 jobs in 2009, and Duchesne lost 1,000 jobs.”
They’re employees of commercial and recreational fishing businesses in New England, who have organized a flotilla on Martha’s Vineyard on Thursday to protest the Obama administration’s restrictive environmental policies and stealth regulatory ocean grab….
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How’s that Summer of Recovery working out for you? Continuing my series on the White House War on the West, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s attack on the economy, and the White House land lock-up (Part 1, Part 2) and ocean grab, here is the latest on Barack Obama’s deliberate job destruction policies.
According to the WSJ, the administration forged ahead with its junk science deepwater drilling ban despite knowing it would cost 23,000 jobs….
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….Liberal ideology is much more important to Democrats than your job, or the financial future of your children. The Bush tax cuts will become implosion bombs when the Democrats allow them to expire. The owners of small businesses, which are the primary engine of job creation, will be caught in the blast radius. The Left is busy feeding its tattered old class-warfare sheet music into the media player piano, and stuffing themselves into hilarious “deficit hawk” costumes three sizes too small for them. Soon the air will be filled with shrill demands to “end tax cuts for the rich” who need to “pay their fair share.” Anyone who isn’t blinded by ideology can see the folly of sucking more money out of an anemic economy….
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6-Months To Go! Q: Will These Increased Taxes Help Or Hinder Job Growth? (this was posted 7-2-10)
…Small business expensing will be slashed and 50% expensing will disappear. Small businesses can normally expense (rather than slowly-deduct, or “depreciate”) equipment purchases up to $250,000. This will be cut all the way down to $25,000. Larger businesses can expense half of their purchases of equipment. In January of 2011, all of it will have to be “depreciated.”
Taxes will be raised on all types of businesses. There are literally scores of tax hikes on business that will take place. The biggest is the loss of the “research and experimentation tax credit,” but there are many, many others. Combining high marginal tax rates with the loss of this tax relief will cost jobs….
…Charitable Contributions from IRAs no longer allowed. Under current law, a retired person with an IRA can contribute up to $100,000 per year directly to a charity from their IRA. This contribution also counts toward an annual “required minimum distribution.” This ability will no longer be there.
It’s time to call Obama what he is: The Great Jobs Killer. With his massive spending and tax hikes — rewarding big government and big unions, while punishing taxpayers and business owners — Obama has killed jobs, he has killed motivation to create new jobs, he has killed the motivation to invest in new businesses, or expand old ones. With all this killing, Obama should be given the top spot on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.
Meanwhile, he has kept the union workers of GM and Chrysler employed (with taxpayer money). He has made sure that most government employee union members got their annual raises for sleeping on the job (with taxpayer money). He made sure that his voters got handouts mislabeled as “tax cuts” even though they never paid taxes (with taxpayer money). And he made sure that major campaign contributors collected billions off government stimulus (with taxpayer money)….
…I’ve polled all my friends who own small businesses — many of them in the Internet and high-tech fields. They all agree that in this new Obama world of high business taxes, income taxes, payroll taxes, capital gains taxes, and workers compensation taxes, the key to success is to avoid employees. The only way to survive as a business owner today is by keeping the payroll very low and by hiring only independent contractors or part-time employees provided by temp agencies….
So who is going to pay Obama’s taxes? Not his voters. They want government to pay them. Who is going to create Obama’s jobs? Not his voters — they’ve never created a job in their lives.
VIDEO: Jobs Lost Because of Democrats
….One idea floating around to protect American business and manufacturers is a protectionist carbon tariff. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu appears to be open to the idea:
Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Tuesday advocated adjusting trade duties as a ‘weapon’ to protect U.S. manufacturing, just a day after one of China’s top climate envoys warned of a trade war if developed countries impose tariffs on carbon-intensive imports.
Mr. Chu, speaking before a House science panel, said establishing a carbon tariff would help ‘level the playing field’ if other countries haven’t imposed greenhouse-gas-reduction mandates similar to the one President Barack Obama plans to implement over the next couple of years. It is the first time the Obama administration has made public its view on the issue.
‘If other countries don’t impose a cost on carbon, then we will be at a disadvantage…[and] we would look at considering perhaps duties that would offset that cost,’ Mr. Chu said.”
When businesses are faced with the higher costs from an energy tax through a carbon capping policy, they can certainly make production cuts. Another logical solution is for these companies to move overseas where they can make more efficient use of labor and capital.
The economic perils of a cap and trade are bad enough; adding a tariff to carbon-intense imports simply makes it worse, not only for the United States but also for developing countries relying on trade to better their own economies. A carbon tariff would:
- Increase costs for consumers. Not only will our energy costs be higher but now everything we import will be more expensive too. Say goodbye to affordable foreign goods.
- Cause a trade war. Protectionism begets more protectionism. Other countries will view this as unfair, because it is, and respond by implementing more tariffs in retaliation. Other country’s governments may not find it in their interest to pursue a carbon capping policy; punishing them for this decision could ruin trade relationships.
- De-develop the developing world. Developing countries rely heavily on free trade to prosper. Exporting goods in which countries hold a comparative advantage is critical their economic growth, just like it is ours.The developing world is doing just that, developing. For that reason, the technologies they use are newer, cleaner, and more efficient. Penalizing nations for developing is nonsensical….
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….Global warming skeptics are quick to point out the exorbitant costs of global warming legislation because they are, well, exorbitant. The $1.9 trillion of tax revenue generated over eight years from a cap-and-trade bill would still be larger than the $1.5 trillion from NASA, the New Deal, and Hurricane Katrina. It amounts to a nearly $2,000 tax every year for every American household. Projected job losses that would have resulted from the Lieberman-Warner cap and trade would have surpassed 900,000 in some years.
But if it saves the planet, isn’t it all worth it? Some radical environmental alarmists believe saving the environment should come at any cost and capitalist greed and short-sightedness is superseding the preservation of the planet for future generations.
Herein lies the problem: When the benefits of a cap and trade are measured against the costs, the costs significantly outweigh the negligible benefits. We’ve highlighted the costs in the first two parts of this series (here and here). Let’s dissect the benefits.
Analysis by the architects of an endangerment finding that would circumvent Congressional legislation to regulate carbon dioxide, the Environmental Protection Agency, strongly suggests that a 60 percent reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions by 2050 will reduce global temperature by 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2095. The bottom line: The extraordinary perils of carbon dioxide regulation for the American economy come with little, if any, environmental benefit….
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….The difference between the price of a gallon of milk at a local grocery store and a corner market or convenient store may be modest, but add it up over the course of a few years, as well as paying higher prices for the rest of your groceries, and the difference is quite sizeable. That’s the theme of DeNeen Brown’s article in today’s Washington Post, asserting that the poor do not have supermarkets to walk to and thus pay a premium for most goods they buy:
Prices in urban corner stores are almost always higher, economists say. And sometimes, prices in supermarkets in poorer neighborhoods are higher. Many of these stores charge more because the cost of doing business in some neighborhoods is higher. ‘First, they are probably paying more on goods because they don’t get the low wholesale price that bigger stores get,’ says Bradley R. Schiller, a professor emeritus at American University”
Jeanette Reed, a retiree living on a fixed income who sold her blood for money, discussed how the housing market hurts the poor too: “You pay rent that might be more than a mortgage. But you don’t have the credit or the down payment to buy a house. Apartments are not going down. They are going up. They say houses are better, cheaper. But how are you going to get in a house if you don’t have any money for a down payment?”
Add in a massive, unprecedented tax on energy and it only gets worse.
The Heritage Foundation analysis of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, which focuses primarily on a cap and trade bill to reduce carbon dioxide, estimates a $1500 per year direct tax on household energy use. But that’s just the beginning. The energy tax also hits producers. As the higher production costs ripple through the economy the household pocketbooks get hit again and again. When all the tax impacts have been added up, the average per-family-of-four costs rise by $4,300 per year. In the year 2035 alone the cost is $8,276. And the costs per family for the whole energy tax aggregated from 2012 to 2035 is $116,680.
You think the $116,680 lost from higher energy prices, all for a temperature change too small to recognize, could have helped with a down payment for Jeanette Reed?
The real tragedy is that these energy taxes fall disproportionately on the poor. Although upper income families tend to use more energy (and thus emit more carbon per household), since low-income households spend a larger percentage of their income on energy, the poor suffer most. Proponents of a carbon cap acknowledge this, saying, “Relative to total expenditure, however, the poor pay more […]. This means that carbon emission-reduction policies have a regressive impact on income distribution – unless coupled with revenue-recycling policies that protect the real incomes of the poor and middle classes.” Policymakers sought to protect consumers, especially the poor, from higher energy prices by handing out rebate checks or tax cuts. But,
House Democrats said Friday they plan to auction only 15 percent of the allowances to help lower- and middle-income families pay for higher energy bills. The rest will be given away to a variety of industries and states to ease costs and to help pay for improvements in energy efficiency and investments in clean-energy technology.”
If only a small portion of the energy tax revenue is given back to the consumer, the burden on the poor obviously becomes heavier. Rebates or not, the higher energy prices would reduce economic activity by forcing businesses to cut costs elsewhere, possibly by reducing their workforce, and thus doing damage that no check would cover.
The first bit of info comes from part of Dinesh D’Souza’s book (pictured here), Even though it is dated, the main idea and history still stand:
So, you ask, does wanting to get rich make you a bad guy? Of course not. Indeed, I would go further: The rich are in the best position to be the good guys, because only the rich have the resources to really help those who are in need. Still, despite the philanthropic advantages conferred by wealth, I am not at all surprised that your roommate is outraged by your desire to make money. Your roommate apparently believes that rich people are evil because they make money and that the government is good because it takes away some of that money. Not that liberals would put it that way. They would say that the government’s job is to promote equality by redistributing resources from the rich to the poor. In my last letter, I tried to argue that this attempt is wrong-headed; here, let me argue that it is unnecessary. Indeed, I intend to show that technological capitalism – not government – is the catalyst for equality. You can consider this letter a kind of extended postscript to my previous critique of Big Government.
Whenever a Republican – be it Reagan or George W. Bush – proposes a tax cut, the liberals say, “This tax cut will mostly help the rich. ” Of course tax cuts help the rich the most; the rich in this country pay most of the taxes. I wonder how many Americans know that the top 10 percent of income earners in America pay two-thirds of all income taxes. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent of income earners pay less than 5 percent of the income taxes. These statistics, which I got from the Internal Revenue Service, are of obvious relevance in determining who is going to benefit most from virtually any proposal to reduce income tax rates.
Thus if the rich guy makes $250,000 and pays $100,000 in taxes, and the (relatively) poor guy makes $40,000 and pays $5,000 in taxes, a ten percent across-the-board tax cut will cut the rich guy’s taxes by $10,000 and the poor guys taxes by $500. This provokes the liberal wail, “But the rich guy is getting twenty times more than the poor guy.” One does not have to be a math major to figure out that it is not even possible to cut the poor guy’s taxes by $10,000 because he pays only $5,000 in the first place. Contrary to liberal demagoguery, proportional tax cuts are just because they benefit citizens in proportion to what they have been paying in taxes.
Liberals usually oppose tax cuts and advocate higher taxes for the rich because they are convinced, as the old liberal mantra has it, that “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.” But is this really true? For the past half century, and especially for the past two decades, it has not been true in America. In reality, the rich have grown richer, and the poor have also grown richer, but not at the same pace.
Let me explain. In 1980, when Reagan was elected, America was a much more egalitarian society. According to the Census Bureau, if one earned $55,000 that year, one was in the top 5 percent of earners in the United States. That sounds amazing, but it’s true. Now, taking inflation into account, $55,000 in 1980 equals something like $75,000 today. But today if you want to be in the top 5 percent of income earners, you have to make $155,000.
What this means is that lots of people who use to be in the middle-class, or the lower middle class, have moved up. In moving up, they have increased the economic distance between themselves and the rest of the population. So, inequality is greater. But the exclusive liberal focus on inequality misses the larger picture, which shows that more and
more people are moving into the ranks of the affluent class.
Dinesh D’Souza, Letters to a Young Conservative (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2002), 85-87. (Any bold text is emphasis I added.)
During the 2004 elections I was deep in debates at various places about if the Republican Party were the party of the rich. I pulled this info from various sources, unfortunately a lot of it isn’t properly referenced, but easily found if one so wishes. These subjects tend to have become so accepted in modern culture that they are effectively icons at the most, at the least, liberal mantras. So let’s deal with a few of these mantras.
Republican’s are the party of and for the rich:
Democrats Get More Money From “Rich”
Another myth about “the rich” has been shattered – namely the conventional wisdom that they are all Republicans – thanks to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. A December 18, 2002 Washington Times editorial reports that donors giving “small and medium amounts” in 2002 overwhelmingly supported the GOP, while “rich or deep-pocketed givers” hugely backed the Democrats!
Those giving $200 to $999: GOP $68 million; Democrats $44 million. Those giving $1,000 to $9,999: GOP $317 million; Democrats $307 million. The “fabulously wealthy” donors of $10,000+ gave $111 million to the GOP – a whopping $29 million less than the $140 million they lavished on the Democrats! Among those who gave $100,000+, the Democrats raised $72 million – more than double the $34 million the GOP took.
“Yeah, Rush, but all those millionaires are Republicans.” No, that’s not a fact, my friends. The fact is that in the 2002 election cycle, those who gave a million dollars or more poured $36 million into the Democrat coffers, and a paltry $3 million into the pockets of the GOP. Again: millionaire donations went Democrat by a 12:1 margin! The two parties took in about the same amount overall – GOP: $384 million; Democrats: $350 million. Just look at the Hollywood left, and you see where the big money goes.
In addition, the GOP attracted 40% more individual donors! (George W. Bush set an all-time fund-raising record by collecting the most money from one-thousand-dollar donors in the history of presidential politics.) Far more people giving small amounts exist as contributors to the Republican Party – while Democrats skunked the GOP among the super-rich. That’s no surprise, since nine of the twelve richest members of the United States Senate are Democrats.
We’re going to put this up on our website homepage permanently, right alongside the story that the top 50% of wage earners, those who make more than $26,000 a year, pay over 96% of all income taxes. (The IRS data) This myth that the Republicans are the party of the rich is breathing its last gasps, so we’re giving you these figures to help put it out of its misery for good. This is not a political commercial you have to disprove. These are actual results of campaign contributions in just the 2002 cycle, which is why this class-envy garbage isn’t getting the traction it used to.
And this next bit is from a debate I was in on the topic, I entitle it,
Greedy Religious Conservatives!
I wanted to isolate a previous discussion and get some of your input on us greedy conservatives. The only reason I bring this up is that while playing golf in Vegas I got into a discussion with one of the caddies about politics and faith. The conversation started out very interestingly though. Democrats/Liberals place a lot of emphasis on feelings in their anti-Bush diatribe. This elderly caddy maybe in his mid-fifties said he wouldnt vote for bush because his wife worked for the phone company making good money for fifteen-years. She lost her job and is now a receptionist for a Veterinarian. He said, I wont vote for that assho#@!& because my wife isn’t making any money!! I pointed out, politely, so as to not make him explode, that it is not Bushs fault that his wife does not have a degree or a specialty that can get them by in these lean times. He realized that his wifes life choices put them in the spot their in, not Bush (with a little coaxing from me of course). So I explained some of the following during our conversation, passerbys stopping and patting me on the back for such a great example of conservatisms values at work.
If you can remember back to the 2000 election here in the U. S. and the blue state, red state scenario of which voted for Gore and which voted for Bush, Im sure you do, even if another country. Once in awhile stats are done to see which part of the country (which states in fact) give more to charity per-capita than other states. Do you know which of the top twenty states gives the most to charity? You got it, Bush country! Every single one of the red states in that top-twenty are the middle-income fly-over states. Guess how many red-states got the lower twenty of giving? Two. Eighteen States that were in the lowest giving ratio to charity were Gore states. This is even more interesting with a few recent poles. Just under 66-percent republicans go to church one-to-two times a week. Just fewer than 66-percent democrats do not even go to church once a week. DRAT those nasty religious / conservatives!
New Stat that I am adding to my arguments by the way:
Only one of the top 25 donors to political 527 groups has given to a conservative organization, shedding further light on the huge disparity between Democrats and Republicans in this new fund-raising area. The top three 527 donors so far in the 2004 election cycle – Hollywood producer Steven Bing, Progressive Corp. chairman Peter Lewis and financier George Soros – have combined to give nearly $24 million to prominent liberal groups. They include Joint Victory Campaign 2004, America Coming Together, and MoveOn.org.
Dems the richest five senators?
Financial statements revealed the five richest members of the United States Senate are Democrats. The annual disclosure allows senators to represent their net worth inside a broad range.
Presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) is far ahead of his colleagues with $163 million, most of it coming from his wife’s inheritance of the Heinz fortune. The actual estimate is over $400 million.
Lagging behind is Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI) at $111 million. The Wisconsin senator’s family owns a department store chain. Sen. John “Jay” Rockefeller (D-WV) comes in third with a personal fortune reported to be $81 million.
Former Goldman Sachs chairman Sen. John Corzine (D-NJ) weighs in at $71 million, with Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) rounding out the top five at $26.3 million. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-IL) breaks the string of Democrat multimillionaires in sixth place at $26.1 million. Sens. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Bill Frist (R-TN), John Edwards (D-NC), and Edward Kennedy (D-MA) complete the top ten.
Democrats are 10 of the top 15 richest senators.
Here is another discussion I had on the topic many yearn ago:
Okay, let’s move on. Another point that needs setting straight is when Jen says “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.” Again, these bumper-sticker slogans are great if one just wishes to construct false claims for the express purpose of rejecting one political party for another. This phrase may seem right, like one I hear all the time, “the New Testament has been changed over the past 2,000-years,” it has a ring of truth to it. . . but just like the political statement that preceded it, when one studies the facts, it just doesn’t hold any water.
The Top 50% pay 96.54% of All Income Taxes
(The top 1% pay more than a third: 34.27%)
October 4, 2005
This is the latest data for calendar year 2003 just released in October 2005 by the Internal Revenue Service. The share of total income taxes paid by the top 1% of wage earners rose to 34.27% from 33.71% in 2002. Their income share (not just wages) rose from 16.12% to 16.77%. However, their average tax rate actually dropped from 27.25% down to 24.31%
Think of it this way: less than 3-1/2 dollars out of every $100 paid in income taxes in the United States is paid by someone in the bottom 50% of wage earners. Are the top half millionaires? Noooo, more like “thousandaires.” The top 50% were those individuals or couples filing jointly who earned $29,019 and up in 2003. (The top 1% earned $295,495-plus.) Americans who want to are continuing to improve their lives, and those who don’t want to, aren’t. Here are the wage earners in each category and the percentages they pay:
The top 1% pay over a third, 34.27% of all income taxes. (Up from 2003: 33.71%) The top 5% pay 54.36% of all income taxes (Up from 2002: 53.80%). The top 10% pay 65.84% (Up from 2002: 65.73%). The top 25% pay 83.88% (Down from 2002: 83.90%). The top 50% pay 96.54% (Up from 2002: 96.50%). The bottom 50%? They pay a paltry 3.46% of all income taxes (Down from 2002: 3.50%). The top 1% is paying nearly ten times the federal income taxes than the bottom 50%! And who earns what? The top 1% earns 16.77% of all income (2002: 16.12%). The top 5% earns 31.18% of all the income (2002: 30.55%). The top 10% earns 42.36% of all the income (2002: 41.77%); the top 25% earns 64.86% of all the income (2002: 64.37%) , and the top 50% earns 86.01% (2002: 85.77%) of all the income.
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The bottom 50% is paying a tiny bit of the taxes, so you can’t give them much of a tax cut by definition. Yet these are the people to whom the Democrats claim to want to give tax cuts. Remember this the next time you hear the “tax cuts for the rich” business. Understand that the so-called rich are about the only ones paying taxes anymore.
I had a conversation with a woman who identified herself as Misty on Wednesday. She claimed to be an accountant, yet she seemed unaware of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which now ensures that everyone pays some taxes. AP reports that the AMT, “designed in 1969 to ensure 155 wealthy people paid some tax,” will hit “about 2.6 million of us this year and 36 million by 2010.” That’s because the tax isn’t indexed for inflation! If your salary today would’ve made you mega-rich in ’69, that’s how you’re taxed.
Misty tried the old line that all wealth is inherited. Not true. John Weicher, as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank, wrote in his February 13, 1997 Washington Post Op-Ed, “Most of the rich have earned their wealth… Looking at the Fortune 400, quite a few even of the very richest people came from a standing start, while others inherited a small business and turned it into a giant corporation.” What’s happening here is not that “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.” The numbers prove it.
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