Tag Archives: 2007

News

Julia Gillard’s carbon tax leads to massive defeat in Queensland election

Leave a comment
Australia 2010 federal election results
Australia 2010 federal election results (Red = Labor Party)

I was disappointed with Queensland because of the last federal election in 2010. They elected several Labor Party MPs. And now the federal Labor Party is pushing for a carbon tax and gay marriage, too.

Look what happened in 2010:

Turnout 94.41% (CV) — Informal 3.56%
Party Votes % Swing Seats Change
Australian Labor Party 1,020,665 42.91 +8.13 15 +9
Liberal Party of Australia 818,438 34.40 –5.01 10 –7
National Party of Australia 239,504 10.07 +0.32 3 –1
Australian Greens 133,938 5.63 +0.57 0 0

The Liberal Party and the National Party are the two conservative parties – they form a conservative coalition, and they continued to lose seats, just like they did in 2007.

Given that, I was heartened by the results from this past weekend, when Queensland held state-level elections. (H/T Bill M.)

Excerpt:

[Opposition leader] Tony Abbott has sought to capitalise on the Queensland election saying Labor MPs right across the country will be worried about the “fundamental lesson” from yesterday’s landslide defeat.

Speaking on Sky News’s Australian Agenda the Opposition Leader said Labor needed to have a “good, long, hard look at itself” and said the party’s brand was “toxic” around Australia.

“This is a triumph for Campbell (Newman) and the LNP,” Mr Abbott said this morning of the Queensland result.

“I think Labor members of parliament right around Australia would be very worried about the fundamental lesson from this which is that a government which isn’t competent, which isn’t frugal and which isn’t truthful loses and loses big time.

“The basic message is that the Labor brand is toxic right around Australia.”

“Certainly there were two candidates for Queensland one of them Anna Bligh, who was for the carbon tax, and the other Campbell Newman who was against it,” Mr Abbott said.

Mr Newman’s Liberal National Party ended Labor’s 14-year reign in Queensland last night with a crushing win.

The latest forecasts have the LNP winning as many as 78 seats in the 89-seat parliament, with Labor expected to hold just seven seats of its former 51.

Mr Abbott said while the Queensland election had buoyed the Coalition’s hopes of winning the next federal election he conceded things could be different if Julia Gillard improves.

“If the federal Labor government is able to lift its game and be truthful, yes things could be different,” the Opposition Leader said.

“But I think federal Labor has clearly established its character.”

Mr Abbott stood by his comments last week that the Queensland election would be a referendum on the carbon tax and dishonest politicians.

Those results are now final – Labor went from 51 seats to 7 seats! This is as bad as what happened to the leftist Liberal Party in Canada in 2011.

Let’s hope that Julia Gillard, the head of the Australian Labor party, doesn’t learn anything from this and continues to push for left-wing fiscal and social policies. Tony Abbott is quite awesome in general, so they do have a good candidate running against her whenever the next election is held.

News

Did George W. Bush’s tax cuts cause Obama’s trillion dollar budget deficits?

5 Comments

Let’s take a look at the budget deficits again, keeping in mind that the last Republican budget was the 2007 budget. In January of 2007, the Democrats took control of the House and Senate, and all spending was in Democrat control until January of 2011, when the Republicans took back the House.

Obama Budget Deficit 2011
Obama Budget Deficit 2011

Next, let’s see what impact the Bush tax cuts from 2001 and 2003 had on tax revenue:

Federal receipts after Bush tax cuts
Federal receipts (1994-2008)

From the chart:

  • Revenue in 2001 was 2.0 trillion in the year of the first round of tax cuts
  • Revenue in 2003 was 1.8 trillion in the year of the second round of tax cuts
  • Revenue then rose in each subsequent year, ending at 2.6 trillion in 2007, when the Democrats took over the House and Senate
  • In 2007, Bush was only spending about 2.8 trillion – very close to what he was taking receiving in tax revenues
  • The budget deficit went down in each year after both tax cuts were in place (2004), until the Democrats took over the House and Senate
  • Obama is currently spending over 3.8 trillion per year, but he is only receiving about 2.2 trillion in revenue.
  • It’s a spending problem, not a revenue problem

Doug Ross explains:

According to the OMB’s own figures, the Bush tax cuts resulted in an explosion of revenue to the U.S. government.

That’s not to say Bush wasn’t a profligate spender — he was. But in virtually no cases were Democrats arguing that he spend less (unless you count national security).

In fact, fiscal conservatives opposed Bush’s absurd policies on spending, amnesty and the expansion of Medicare.

But no one in world history has ever spent money like Barack Obama.

These statements are indisputable.

Which is why they are certain to be rejected by the diminishing cadre of Obama-Democrat drones, who appear to be completely immune to facts, logic and reason.

And let’s just see what happened to the unemployment rate since the Democrats took over spending in January of 2007:

Unemployment Rate (Not seasonally adusted)
Unemployment Rate (Not seasonally adusted)

There are a lot of people who don’t know about these numbers because they watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on the Comedy Channel, or Rachel Maddow and Ed Schulz on MSNBC.

I actually spoke to someone who voted for Obama about these numbers. He said that 2.6 trillion in tax revenues was worse than 2.0 trillion in tax revenues. And he said that a 4.3% unemployment rate was WORSE than a 9.2% unemployment rate. And he also said that a $160 billion dollar deficit was WORSE than a $1650 billion dollar deficit. Ok I just made that up, but still. That’s how Democrats think. Tax and spend.

News

Bush’s tax cuts led to a 44% increase in revenues from 2003 to 2007

6 Comments
Federal Receipts 2003 through 2007
Federal Receipts 2003 through 2007

From Newsbusters. It turns out that Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 were not responsible for adding to the deficit. They actually increased the amount of tax money being collected, as the economy grew, and more jobs were created. People pay more in taxes when they have jobs.

Excerpt:

The graph doesn’t show collections tanking, does it? Instead, the graph shows that collections increased by 44%, or almost $800 billion, in four years. Adding up the individual increments in each of the four years compared to 2003 (2004 – $98B; 2005 – $371B; 2006 – $624B; 2007 – $785B; 2008, not shown, treating IRS stimulus payments as outlays instead of negative receipts – $835B), what really happened is that in the five full fiscal years after George W. Bush got the across-the-board and investment-related tax cuts he had been pushing for since taking office in 2001, the cumulative increase in tax collections was over $2.7 trillion.

Doubtless, the static analysis crowd will claim that collections would have been even higher (I guess by a cumulative $1.6 trillion, given the AP’s Democratic Party talking point above) if the Bush cuts hadn’t been enacted. Two words, guys: Prove it. Two follow-up words: You can’t.

We can argue all day long about the how much of the increase in collections was due to the incentive effects of the tax cuts and how of the improvement might have occurred anyway, but no one can credibly act as if it’s an established fact that the Bush cuts somehow caused collections to go $1.6 trillion in the opposite direction. There is absolutely no proof for this contention, and plenty of evidence that the Bush cuts jump-started an economy and federal collections, both of which had been flat or declining during the two years leading up to mid-2003. The more reasonable conclusion to reach is that the country would already be dead in the water if the Bush tax cuts hadn’t passed in 2003. Instead, the wire service hopes that its “Bush tax cuts cost us” meme will be gullibly recited during the next several days at its subscribing newspaper, TV, and radio outlets. “Disgraceful” doesn’t even begin to describe this pathetic promotion of self-evident falsehood.

The fact is that the federal budget was one good year away from balancing after the $162 deficit reported in fiscal 2007. Unfortunately, that was the last budget passed by a Republican-controlled Congress, and it was the only year which showed a modest increase in overall spending. Beginning in 2007 with effects beginning in fiscal 2008, the House and Senate controlled by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid began increasing spending at rates far beyond what profligate Republicans spent earlier in the decade, and, unfortunately, Bush 43 made no real effort to stop them…

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Reggie sent me this article showing that the Reagan tax cuts also increased revenues.

Excerpt:

In 1980, the last year before the tax cuts, tax revenues were $956 billion (in constant 1996 dollars).

Revenues exceeded that 1980 level in eight of the next 10 years. Annual revenues over the next decade averaged $102 billion above their 1980 level (in constant 1996 dollars).

The graph is here.

When you get people to start engaging in the economy, you can collect more taxes from them. They engage when they think that they will be able to keep more of what they make from their labor.