Here is a video from Hot Air of our hero Jim Demint, the best senator in the Senate.
Here’s the best part:
These are not Government decisions. We need to focus on what we were set up to do and do it much better than we are doing, instead of every week coming in here, bringing our good intentions and our compassion and every problem we see across the country we say something needs to be done. Then we say: The Government needs to do it.
That is the fatal flaw of the Congress today, is we forget that sacred oath of office that says: We will protect and defend the Constitution which says this Federal Government has a very limited function. And those functions that are not prescribed in the Constitution are left to individuals and to the States. At least we have someone fighting back against the democrats.
I also noticed this other video related to one of my old posts in which Demint opposed discrimination against religious schools in one of Obama’s massive spending bills.
And remember Obama’s defunding of charities, including churches and other religious organizations. As I argued before, when government increases, secularism increases right along with it. Big government is anti-Christianity and anti-religious-liberty.
Politico is reporting that the Democrats are spending like drunken sailors.
“In just 50 days, Congress has voted to spend about $1.2 trillion between the Stimulus and the Omnibus,” McConnell says. “To put that in perspective, that’s about $24 billion a day, or about $1 billion an hour—most of it borrowed. There’s simply no question: government spending has spun out of control.”
The math: 50 days times 24 hours equals 1,200 hours. 1,200 times 1 billion equals 1.2 trillion (a thousand billions is a trillion).
On her official Townhall.com blog, Michele Bachmann asks whether Obama will ever be able to find money to pay for all the spending he has announced.
To pay for the trillions in spending that President Obama and his Congressional Democrat allies have passed and are about to pass in the months ahead, our President has assured us that taxes on Americans making less than $250,000 will not be raised by “one single dime.” His plan is to increase the tax rates on Americans making more than $250k a year to offset the spending. But is this even statistically feasible was the question the Wall Street Journal set out to answer?
She links to this story in the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ piece notes that Obama’s current plans to raise taxes won’t pay for the spending:
Note that federal income taxes are already “progressive” with a 35% top marginal rate, and that Mr. Obama is (so far) proposing to raise it only to 39.6%, plus another two percentage points in hidden deduction phase-outs. He’d also raise capital gains and dividend rates, but those both yield far less revenue than the income tax. These combined increases won’t come close to raising the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Mr. Obama is going to need.
But there just isn’t enough money to pay for the spending even if we take 100% of the earnings of those who make only $75,000 and up.
A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That’s less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable “dime” of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.
And as usual Democrats are ignorant of the fact that when you raise taxes on wealthiest producers, they stop producing, so the tax revenues actually go down. Not only that, but all of this tax and spend socialism destroys economic growth – so that tax revenues are reduced even further.
Fast forward to this year (and 2010) when the Wall Street meltdown and recession are going to mean far few taxpayers earning more than $500,000. Profits are plunging, businesses are cutting or eliminating dividends, hedge funds are rolling up, and, most of all, capital nationwide is on strike. Raising taxes now will thus yield far less revenue than it would have in 2006.
And the cap-and-trade scheme he announced earlier is going to hurt the economy even more by raising prices on energy production.
The bottom line is that Mr. Obama is selling the country on a 2% illusion. Unwinding the U.S. commitment in Iraq and allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire can’t possibly pay for his agenda. Taxes on the not-so-rich will need to rise as well.
On that point, by the way, it’s unclear why Mr. Obama thinks his climate-change scheme won’t hit all Americans with higher taxes. Selling the right to emit greenhouse gases amounts to a steep new tax on most types of energy and, therefore, on all Americans who use energy. There’s a reason that Charlie Rangel’s Ways and Means panel, which writes tax law, is holding hearings this week on cap-and-trade regulation.
WINTERY KNIGHT 