Tax the rich, pay for 1 percent of budget

I guess it’s the ‘fair’ thing that is causing such a problem
with the nominal tax increase for the wealthy. If the tax
cuts expire that problem will be solved. Anyone check
the Obama tax cuts that were included in the stimulus?

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Iraq had WMD’s but they were disguised as airliners
and eluded detection.

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Actually md,

There is a story that was not verified through the media that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the new name for the KGB, rushed to get the WMD’s that EVERYONE saw via satellite out of Iraq days before the initial invasion.

And further more, the FSB, is on record of helping Saddam Hussein usurp the UN’s blockade sell Billions of dollar$ of oil behind the backs of the UN.

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Kyle,

When you signed the Republican cult oath, was it witnessed?

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Yeah barking frog… it is all a Video Game to you, I guess.

Go have another bong hit and hot pocket. I’ll hit “reset” for you.

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Linda:

So its Clinton’s fault, but we shouldn’t blame Bush for anything because that was almost 2 years ago! You are an idiot.

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fair and imbalanced

I did not see that Linda blamed only Clinton, but he, or his policies, also contributed to this mess.

What about the likes of Maxine Waters, Barney Frank, and Cynthia McKinney? I guess your intellectual dishonesty won’t let you address them.

I guess you are in the “HATE GEORGE BUSH” crowd who doesn’t like “hate speech”.

You certainly do sound imbalanced…

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Enter your comments here

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Old Man

Did you get into the bottle? “Enter your comments here”

I am just kidding

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Amen Linda,

Very well said.

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USMC Dawg @ 9:36, I LOVE those capital letters! The corp deserves to be capitalized in every way! Stand out!
Thank you for taking my back tonight. You are so special! My husband of 34 yrs. will be appreciative & will get a few laughs tomorrow when he reads these posts.

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Thanks Linda, It was actually VERY easy to take your back tonight.
Your comments are intellectually honest and articulate.

@”barfing frog”
Take it easy on that bong of yours and get off of the junk food diet of Hot Pockets and Pogey bait.
I am for legalizing drugs, but that does not mean that I advocate their comsumption.

“Hey Dude, where’s my car?”

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USMC Dawg, What does Dawg stand for?

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USMC Dawg 10:03 What do you expect to do
with legalized drugs? Wear them?

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USMC Dawg 10:22 If you are thinking of marijuana
only, your plan might work. Other drugs might create
consequences much worse than ‘crime’.

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barking frog:

What consequences do you think would come about?

Sure, I know it sounds delusional, but think about it.

If someone wants to do”fill in the blank drug” now, what is stopping them?

If you wanted to do some coke, you would do some coke. Is there anything stopping that now.

And think about what happened with Prohibition. Once they legalized alcohol, the crime VANISHED into thin air.

What do you think?

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USMC Dawg 10:42 The main thing that is stopping a lot
of drug use is illegality. Legal hard drugs would
escalate the use drastically and the resulting
damage to society of increased medical costs and
crime to obtain the drug cost would be hard to
absorb. I believe a person has the right to do with
their body what they will and a totally free
society is desirable but it would take a toll
I don’t think we would want to pay.

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got to the grown-up table late (was reprimanding the kids on CT’s blog). no comment on the politics of raising taxes or budget deficits, but I believe the term “taking one for the team” is a sports metaphor. for example, if a team is in need of baserunners and a batter allows himself to be hit by a pitch, he “takes one for the team” (endure the pain of a fastball in the ribs). it is about sacrifice, not compromising one’s ideals or values. if the wonderful 2% (”rich”) truly care about America it will “take one for the team”. I also agree that the DoD needs to “take one for the team” and the Congress (eschew pork) needs to “take one for the team” but does anyone think these two beasts will “sacrifice” for the greater good. let’s face it folks; $250,000.00 year is the new middle class. the old middle class is now the working poor or below the Mendoza/poverty line (another baseball metaphor), and as I said, the beast needs to be fed so it just looks to the next level on the food chain. and as I noted on CT’s blog, we are not talking about “new” taxes. we are talking about allowing tax cuts to expire. whether they produce revenue or not, the Bush tax cuts failed to curtail spending, and the deficit needs to be dealt with.

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barking frog – September 21st, 2010
8:39 pm

“Iraq had WMD’s but they were disguised as airliners
and eluded detection.”

– (1) Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from
Saudi Arabia – not Iraq. No connection in terms of
nationality were ever uncovered (Saddam did offer
compensation to the families of the hijackers, though).

– (2) All of the planes were tracked by ATC towers
in the Northeast, and even had voice communication
with the cockpits (even after the cockpit doors were
breached).

– (3) Passenger planes are not typically used as
“weapons”. A more accurate description, IMO, would be
“improvised explosive devices (IED’s)”.

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How very Christian of the rich to throw a tantrum over 36% vs. 39 %, while the poor suffer.

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As I asked on Jay Bookman’s blog:

Three questions for those who aren’t opposed to raising taxes, or are just fiscally liberal:

1. What tax rate is too high a tax rate for the top income bracket? Is there one?
2. Since taxation is necessary to operate the government, but taxation is fundamentally the confiscation of wealth of one sort or another, what amount of government as a % of GDP is enough or too big? Is government ever too big?
3. Since there isn’t any “social security fund” to pay future retirees, demonstrating that the government fundamentally doesn’t have the ability to “save”, would you support a gradual transition over decades to “mandatory savings in personal accounts” with high regulations (to protect workers / savers / etc) so that your savings are yours, that cannot be taken by the government and spent, and that you can pass on to your children if you don’t need them for whatever reason?

Just wondering what those opposed to fiscal conservatism think about this,. Or do they think about this?

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“Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise”.

Don’t worry Kyle I won’t, i’ll take your word for it.

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Fair and ethical would be if no one were extorted, if the local, state, and federal governments had to beg for donations. A reasonable compromise might be if government extortions amounted to no more than 10% of earners’ incomes (not 11% per capita as it is now) or retail purchases. When the Fed was created and income extortion imposed federally (some states had income extortion earlier), earnest denials were made in congress that the top bracket earners would ever face a rate as high as 9%.

What has changed as far as federal debt is that the over-spending has gone up and up and up and up. In previous times, after a war, spending was restrained and federal debt was paid off within a decade or two (and usually within 5 years), but not since FDR. As a result of the creation of a multitude of unconstitutional programs, foreign adventurism, and pork at undreamed of levels, all bets have been off.

The only effective solution would be to make it impossible for the federal government to float so much debt. By eliminating the Federal Reserve, they would no longer be able to monetize government debt and extort us all by inflation, i.e. by making our earnings worth less. By eliminating income extortion, we could make plain to the federal government that our tolerance for over-spending and over-taxing and their attempts to divide the citizenry along socialist lines is finite. By consistently rejecting congress-critters who vote for pork and unconstitutional programs — a re-election rate of 5% instead of 95% — candidates would eventually get the message.

Oh, and Democratics are not “liberal”; they are leftists (and not very democratic, come to think of it). Some (like Obama, Reid, Sanders, Frank, Waters and Pelosi) are more extremely flaming radical than others.

“Another signifiant development in the art of verbal cleansing has been changing the names used to describe people who espouse government intervention in the economy and society, as most intellectuals tend to do. In the United States, such people changed their own designation more than once during the course of the 20th century. At the beginning of that century, such people calld themselves ‘Progressives’. However, by the 1920s, experience had led American voters to repudiate ‘Progressivism’ and to elect national governments with a very different philosophy throughout that entire decade. When the Great Depression of the 1930s again brought to power people with the government intervention philosophy — many of whom had served in the ‘Progressive’ Woodrow Wilson administration — they now changed their name to ‘liberals’, escaping the connotations of their earlier incarnation, much as people escape financial debts through bankruptcy. The long reign of ‘liberalism’ in the United States — which lasted, with few interruptions, from president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s [FDR's] New Deal in the 1930s through president Lydon B. Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s — ultimately ended with ‘liberalism’ being so discredited that later presidential and other political candidates with long records of ‘liberalism’ rejected that label or rejected labeling altogether as somehow misleading or unworthy. by the end of the 20th century, many ‘liberals’ began calling themselves ‘progressives’, thus escaping the connotations which ‘liberalism’ had acquired over the years, but which connotations no longer applied [in the minds of many] to the word ‘progressive’, which was from an era too far in the past for most people to associate any experience with that word.” — Thomas Sowell 2010 _Intellectuals & Society_ pp141-142

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JDW wrote: “the only real successful administration of the last 30 years”

There have been no successful administrations, no successful congresses in the last 65 years… maybe not even in the last 100 years.

Of course, “success” depends on one’s goals. I supposed you can say you “succeed” at being a thug (increasing regulations, taxes, concentration of power, violations of individual rights, violations of oaths of office to uphold the US constitution…) if you’re a thug (and regardless of whether call yourself a Democratic or Republican thug). So, many Republican and Democratic admins and congress-critters have “succeeded” at this over the last century.

If you’re an honest, peaceful, generous, charitable person you can “succeed” at generally increasing liberty, and individual rights including respect for life and property, and quality of living. No administration or congress has succeeded at this over the last century.

Ah, but perhaps you’re cherry-picking your decades. Let’s see, 30 years: Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama. Nope, no successes there on an admin by admin basis. Reagan failed to eliminate the unconstitutional departments of educationism and energy, for instance, failed to eliminate the Socialist Insecurity Abomination, Medicare and Medicaid. Congress passed one tax-relief bill, and 13 extortion increases during the Reagan admin. There were no improvements in immigration law over that time, but only a series of worsenings of the flood with repeated amnesties, proliferation and expansion of already excessive visa programs. There has been a partial recovery in the form of moderating crime rates, which had gotten much worse in the 1960s and 1970s. We’ve had a long, shallow economic depression and notably dysfunctional job markets since 1987 (though Lester Thurow wrote in 1980 that unemployment has been elevated back to the late 1920s), and bodyshopping has soared since the early 1980s. We have half as many petroleum refineries as we did in 1982, no new nuclear power plants, and very few coal-fired power plants, though effective scrubbers and other clean coal tech has been deployed since the 1960s. The Saturn was a bust (just as the Cruze promises to be, and what are these slightly insulting over-priced made-in-GA Kia things? Where are our inexpensive air-cars?!).

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John wrote: “Add to that the [executives] who abuse the H1B Visa program. The program was intended to fill positions that couldn’t be filled with US workers….not to replace US workers with lowered salaried foreign workers.”

What they said was they neeeeded to bring in the “best and brightest”, the “pre-eminent”, the “super-stars”. Of course, before that, they (NSF) much more quietly said that they wanted to depress compensation in the USA for people with PhDs by flooding the job market, and that they knew this would discourage US citizens from getting PhDs but so what… and much more loudly predicted terrrrible talent short-falls with numbers which suspiciously varied.

What they DID, which reveals what they intended, was bring in hundreds of thousands of cheap, easily brow-beaten labor who were not especially bright, not especially well-educated (hundreds without the equivalent of US high school diplomas, thousands without the equivalent of US bachelor’s degree), not especially highly-skilled, and not remotely as well-paid as would be appropriate for anyone considered “best” or “brightest”.

Meanwhile, recruiting within the USA has grown extremely dysfunctional since the hatching of the H-1B as automated resume parsers have been deployed to scan resumes and dump the mangled scraps into data-bases, never to be seen by hiring managers; e-mail addresses, phone numbers, street addresses and contact names are being redacted from job ads; series of phone screenings with trivial pursuit quiz-games aimed at declaring all US applicants “unqualified” (see the Cohen and Grigsby videos as this major law firm teaches the techniques; of course Fragomen et al. another major law firm was also an eager player, and the immigration lawyer association declared that such dishonesty is all just part of the way this game of charades is played)…

They made certain the enabling legislation was crafted in such a way that there were no effective minimum skill, intelligence, knowledge and education standards; no effective requirements to match local market compensation for the education, skills, experience, etc. of the worker; no requirement to “test the market” for presence of able and willing US talent to do the job at local market compensation; and no consideration of the ability to relocate US talent within the USA (so that a firm even a mere 20 miles from one of the country’s best engineering colleges or 400 miles from several of them can still declare that they are unable to find “local” engineers even though there’s actually a plentiful supply).

So, what we got were bozos and terrorists like Faisal Shahzad, facilitated off-shoring, 21% fraud rates in the applications for these visas, and a teeny tiny fraction of a percent who might have actually merited being admitted (only we’ll never know because of all the sand thrown in our faces).

Even the unrestricted “Einstein visa”, the O visa, has been abused to bring in sleazy “actresses” who supposedly possess, ahem, “exceptional talent”.

US Department of Labor’s Strategic Plan for 2006 through 2011, on page 35 states: “H-1B workers may be hired even when a qualified U.S. worker wants the job, and a U.S. worker can be displaced from the job in favor of the foreign worker.”

2000-04-24 Joel Stewart _Immigration Daily_ “Legal Rejection of US Workers”: “even in a depressed economy, employers who favor aliens have an arsenal of legal means to reject all U.S. workers who apply.”

Larry Lebowitz [talking about the PERM process for people who already have H-1B or L-1 or J-1 visas and are applying for a green card]: And our goal is clearly NOT to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker. And, you know, that in a sense that sounds funny, ahh, but it’s what we’re trying to do here. We are complying with the law fully, ahh, but our objective is to get this person a green card, and to get through the labor certification process. So certainly we are not going to try to find a place [at which to advertise the job] where the applicants are going to be the most numerous. We’re going to try to find a place where, again, we’re complying with the law, and hoping, and likely, not to find qualified and interested worker applicants. So that’s the process that we will go through with you from the beginning onward… what 3 options are we going to select [for advertising the job]…
Jan Barton: The employer is obligated to review all of the resumes that are received in response to all of the ads… What we mean by if they’re interested, if they don’t like the salary [perhaps because you've set it a little lower than local market compensation levels], if they don’t like the work location, they’re not interested. Or if they just don’t like the job itself, they’re not interested. Um, those are ways we can disqualify them and get them out of the market, and focus on the ones who might be more qualified. If it gets to the point where they’re, somebody’s looking like they’re very qualified, we ask them to have the manager of that specific position step in and go over the qualifications with them. If necessary schedule an interview, go through the whole process to find a legal basis to [come up with a pretext to] disqualify them for this particular position. In most cases that doesn’t seem to be a problem… you can eliminate them…
Alex C?: That… is another incentive… 30 days of recruiting, 30 days of waiting… to get the thing final… The longer you leave it out there waiting, the more you are exposed to people possibly seeing something from the paper 6 weeks ago and saying, “Wait a minute, I qualify”.

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