Tag Archives: Tax and Spend

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Would Ted Strickland or John Kasich be a better governor of Ohio?

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Here’s a clip of Ted Strickland giving a speech to his Democrat supporters.

Here’s the transcript of Ted Strickland’s speech from the Weekly Standard.

Excerpt:

“The Republican party has been overtaken by the zealots, by the extremists, by the radicals … and they don’t seem to like Ohio very much… And quite frankly they act like they don’t like America very much. They want to change our Constitution. They want to change Medicare. They want to change labor rights. They want to change this country in fundamental ways.”

Does Ted Strickland encourage businesses to remain in Ohio and hire workers in Ohio?

Let’s see:

Wow. 400,000 jobs lost in Ohio while Strickland was governor? He sounds as competent at encouraging job creation as his fellow Democrat Barack Obama.

Ted Strickland raised taxes on citizens of Ohio by 840 million dollars. He thinks he knows how to spend your money better than you do.

Social Issues

I wonder how Ted Strickland is on social issues?

Life News says:

In June of last year, Strickland upset pro-life Ohio residents by using his line-item veto to axe the section of the $1.3 billion funding bill banning state funds for cloning human beings.

Mike Gonidakis, the director of Ohio Right to Life, told LifeNews.com at the time, “By vetoing a ban on using taxpayer funds for human cloning, Ted Strickland has demonstrated that he supports treating human life as a commodity.”

“Most Ohioans don’t share Governor Strickland’s cavalier disregard for the value of human life and they should not be forced to pay for its creation, exploitation and destruction in cloning research,” Gonidakis said.

In March 2007, Strickland feuded with pro-life advocates over his budget proposal that eliminated the $500,000 the state normally spends annually on encouraging kids to practice abstinence.

The governor said he would not apply for any more federal funds for abstinence education for future budgets.

In February 2007, Strickland would not fight to save an Ohio law that protects women from the dangerous RU 486 abortion drug which has killed seven women in the United States and injured more than a thousand more. With little fanfare, Strickland quietly dropped a legal effort to salvage a law that puts safety limits on the drug.

The Ohio state legislature previously approved a bill to bring the use of the abortion pill in Ohio in line with Food and Drug Administration guidelines.

During his tenure in Congress, Strickland had a strong pro-abortion voting record while Kasich compiled a strongly pro-life record.

Ohio Right to Life says:

Ohio Right to Life today announced its endorsement of a slate of pro-life candidates seeking elected office statewide. The pro-life organization picked Rob Portman as its endorsed candidate for the U.S. Senate and named John Kasich as its endorsed candidate for governor.

[…]Marshal Pitchford, the chairman of the Ohio Right to Life Society Board of Trustees said the pro-life movement in Ohio “is fortunate to have experienced and highly qualified pro-life candidates seeking the state’s executive offices.”

“John Kasich had an outstanding pro-life voting record during his career in Congress,” he said. “His running mate, Mary Taylor, is an articulate advocate of the right to life movement. As Governor and Lt. Governor, they will reflect the common sense and common decency of the people of Ohio.”

And he’s also lousy on traditional marriage and the rights of children to be raised by a mother and a father. He was opposed to the Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage, and opposed to banning gay adoption in D.C. He’s a left-wing radical on social issues. Just like Barack Obama.

Right now, the Ohio governor race is a toss-up. I recommend that all my Ohio readers get out and vote for Kasich on election day.

 

n June of last year, Strickland upset pro-life Ohio residents by using his line-item veto to axe the section of the $1.3 billion funding bill banning state funds for cloning human beings.

Mike Gonidakis, the director of Ohio Right to Life, told LifeNews.com at the time, “By vetoing a ban on using taxpayer funds for human cloning, Ted Strickland has demonstrated that he supports treating human life as a commodity.”

“Most Ohioans don’t share Governor Strickland’s cavalier disregard for the value of human life and they should not be forced to pay for its creation, exploitation and destruction in cloning research,” Gonidakis said.

In March 2007, Strickland feuded with pro-life advocates over his budget proposal that eliminated the $500,000 the state normally spends annually on encouraging kids to practice abstinence.

The governor said he would not apply for any more federal funds for abstinence education for future budgets.

In February 2007, Strickland would not fight to save an Ohio law that protects women from the dangerous RU 486 abortion drug which has killed seven women in the United States and injured more than a thousand more. With little fanfare, Strickland quietly dropped a legal effort to salvage a law that puts safety limits on the drug.

The Ohio state legislature previously approved a bill to bring the use of the abortion pill in Ohio in line with Food and Drug Administration guidelines.

During his tenure in Congress, Strickland had a strong pro-abortion voting record while Kasich compiled a strongly pro-life record.

 

News

Obama flip-flops on health care mandates – now it IS a tax

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Here’s the deal. In order to get the health care bill to pass, Obama had to trick people into thinking that it was not going to result in higher taxes.

So, you would see him on ABC News before the bill was passed saying that forcing people to buy things they don’t want is not a tax:

OBAMA: No. That’s not true, George. The — for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase.

…

OBAMA: My critics say everything is a tax increase. My critics say that I’m taking over every sector of the economy. You know that. Look, we can have a legitimate debate about whether or not we’re going to have an individual mandate or not, but…

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you reject that it’s a tax increase?

OBAMA: I absolutely reject that notion.

So forcing people to buy health insurance and fining them if they don’t is NOT A TAX, he says.

And so the bill was passed.

But the thing is, the government can’t legally force people to buy health care coverage – it’s unconstitutional! And people are suing them for having passed an unconstitutional law. So now the Obama regime has to argue in court that it really is a tax in order to escape court challenges that they overstepped their bounds by passing a health care mandate.

The American Spectator explains. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

In order to protect the new national health care law from legal challenges, the Obama administration has been forced to argue that the individual mandate represents a tax — even though Obama himself argued the exact opposite while campaigning to pass the legislation.

Late last night, the Obama Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss the Florida-based lawsuit against the health care law, arguing that the court lacks jurisdiction and that the State of Florida and fellow plaintiffs haven’t presented a claim for which the court can grant relief. To bolster its case, the DOJ cited the Anti-Injunction Act, which restricts courts from interfering with the government’s ability to collect taxes.

The Act, according to a DOJ memo supporting the motion to dismiss, says that “no suit for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax shall be maintained in any court by any person, whether or not such person is the person against whom such tax was assessed.” The memo goes on to say that it makes no difference whether the disputed payment it is called a “tax” or “penalty,” because either way, it’s “assessed and collected in the same manner” by the Internal Revenue Service.

It actually is a tax, and just another one of the many ways that Obama broke his campaign promise not to tax the middle class. How else is he going to pay for the trillion-dollar deficits he is creating? He has to raise taxes – or devalue our savings with inflation. There is no third way. The money has to come from somewhere – and if you tax the rich you just end up losing jobs.

News

How bad is the situation in Greece?

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From the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Verum Serum)

After months of dithering over how to rein in its vast deficit, the Greek government has been forced to plead for a £93billion international bail-out package and implement hugely unpopular austerity measures, to be voted on today.

Amid the rioting, the euro plunged, stock markets crashed and German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted the very ‘future of Europe’ was at stake.

[…]In the most horrific incident, 20 terrified staff were trapped in the burning Marfin bank after it was firebombed by protesters. The mob blocked firefighters from getting to the blaze.

Two women and a man suffocated in the smoke as they tried to escape the flames. Bank officials told reporters one woman had been pregnant.

A fire department official said their lives could have been saved had ‘ crucial minutes’ not been lost getting through the rioters’ blockades.

The death toll is now up to four.

The socialists have owned Greece for most of the last 30 years

What happened in Greece? Marketwatch wrote about their recent elections in 2009.

Excerpt:

The political drama is about socialist George Papandreou’s electoral victory over the conservatives and his rise to the same position, prime minister of Greece, which his father and grandfather had held before him.

The tragedy will come if he is tempted to follow in his father’s populist footsteps, as his campaign rhetoric suggests he will. Such a choice might prove disastrous not only for Greece but for the rest of the European Union as well.

Greece’s turn left is unique, even in the wake of the economic perplexity that has gripped the world since summer 2008.

[…]Promises to raise public-sector salaries are problematic enough, but to raise wages beyond the amount eroded by inflation, as Pasok said it would, is altogether derelict. So is the thought that such spending, along with 3 billion euros in aid to small businesses, can be financed by further taxing the rich and cracking down on tax evasion.

In 1981, the Greek socialist party formed the first socialist government in Greece’s history, and subsequently governed the country for most of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. They were the main opposition party between 2004 and 2009.

And here’s what happened:

Year Debt (Million € equivalent) Number of civil servants
1960 33 185,000
1970 226 280,000
1980 1,062 400,000
1985 4,828 600,000
1990 22,304 815,000
2007 234,776 1,050,000

That’s right, they had the equivalent of Barack Obama in charge, for a long, long time. Tax and spend, hope and change.

The crisis of debt in Europe

And check out this alarming analysis from RealClearMarkets: (H/T Belmont Club via ECM)

Virtually every country in the EU spends more than it takes in and has made long-term fiscal promises to an aging work force that it can’t keep. A little over a year ago, economist Jagadeesh Gokhale, writing for the National Center for Policy Analysis, produced a pithy – and scary – summation of the fiscal challenges faced by Europe. Don’t read it if you have trouble sleeping.

“The average EU country,” he concluded, “would need to have more than four times (434%) its current annual gross domestic product in the bank today, earning interest at the government’s borrowing rate, in order to fund current policies indefinitely.”

In other words, Europe would have to have the equivalent of roughly $60 trillion in the bank today to fund its very general welfare benefits in the future. Of course, it doesn’t.

Things haven’t changed much since that study was done. So suppose they don’t put aside all that money. What then? By 2035, Gokhale reckons, the EU will need an average tax rate of 57% to pay for its lavish welfare state.

Today, Greece is only the tip of a very large iceberg. Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland together owe $3.9 trillion in short- and medium-term debts, an amount larger than their combined GDP, estimated last year at $3.3 trillion.

Picture:

Don’t let socialists run your country. They spend too much!