Tag Archives: Tax Policy

News

Democrat stock-picker Jim Cramer angry with Obama’s socialism

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See this awesome post over at Nice Deb. She’s got the videos up showing democrat Jim Cramer complaining about the economic free-fall caused by Obama’s policies.

There are a lot of people in this country who do not know anything about economics, but they’ve been buying stocks based on hype generated by Obama-supporting Wall Street types.These gamblers (not investors) have not read Hayek or Sowell or Friedman. But they hope that Obama’s socialist policies will make the stock market go up.

According to Business Week, Cramer is a life-long Democrat. According to this article, he contributes to Democrats. I think it is interesting to note that it’s probably Democrats who are taking the most damage from the market right now, because they believe in Obammunism – they think that the market will rise as we go socialist.

Check out this video of Cramer being bullish on the Dow when it was around 14000 in the teeth of abysmal fundamentals, and then later denying that he was bullish.

And now Cramer is surprised that the party he supported is wrecking the economy. I hope he loses piles of money, and I hope everyone who voted for Obama loses everything. EVERYTHING.

Remember, Democrats caused this mess by forcing banks to make loans in order to achieve social justice for the benefit of other irresponsible Democrats who signed legal contracts with banks to purchase more house than they could afford. Many of these banks were being run by Democrats who got million-dollar bonuses while fudging the accounting and paying off Democrat lawmakers to block efforts by Bush to regulate them. Now the Democrat bankers are working for Obama.

The Democrats are voting in wasteful spending bill after wasteful spending bill, and none of this spending will help the economy one iota. And it’s not just socialist tax policy, it’s protectionist trade policy, too. And no matter how much Obama raises taxes on the productive class, we cannot afford to pay for this spending.

Democrats in general seem to believe that their socialism will make the economy grow faster. The falling stock market must be a real wake-up call to their ignorant faith in an ideology of feelings and intentions.

The fact that Obama’s policies are likely to cause inflation and/or stagflation means that the rest of us responsible people who have to pay for this crap will have the additional comfort of knowing that every dollar we saved after our hard work will be devalued when he has to print money to pay for his wasteful spending.

News

Round-up of US media interviews with Stephen Harper

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Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper

I spotted this round-up of media interviews with Stephen Harper on the Canadian blog Blue Like You. I’ve already blogged about the CNBC interview with optimistic Larry Kudlow here. That interview focused on economic policy.

In the Fox Business interview with Alexis Glick, (video here), she explains how Canada was able to avoid the subprime lending crisis.

Immediately after I talked to the vice chairman of the Swedish central bank, I interviewed — in a “First on Fox Business” — Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper about a lot of things: Everything from his meeting with President Obama last week, to NAFTA to the “Buy American” clause in the stimulus to carbon emissions and the Canadian Sands to the banking system. Why has Canada’s banking system withstood the financial crisis while other countries banking systems like the U.S. are in such dire straits? In 2008, the World Economic Forum ranked Canada’s banking system the healthiest in the world. The U.S. was ranked 40th. Canada’s system has much stronger federal regulations and lower mandatory leverage ratios. Canada’s firms never engaged in subprime mortgage lending. For over a decade, Canada has posted budget surpluses; only in the last quarter did they enter into a recession. What is working? What lessons could we learn from them? Take a look. Prime Minister Harper is very impressive.

Canada does not believe in forcing banks to make loans based on ACORN’s vision of social justice. I explained how Democrats like Carter and Clinton forced banks to make these loans and how Republicans tried in vain to stop them, here.

The Wall Street Journal interview was more focused on foreign policy. You may have heard of Harper’s recent free trade deal with Peru. But did you know that Canada also signed a free trade deal with Colombia?

But the mention of Canadian and American political opposition to free-trade agreements with Colombia has sparked a change in the PM’s unflappable manner. For a fleeting moment, what sounds a lot like frustration emerges. “I’m not going to say it’s a perfect government, but we have a government in Colombia that is democratically elected, that has increased democratic norms, that has taken on the insurgency, that is moving that country forward economically and politically. And it is in a hemisphere where we have an increasing number of real serious enemies and opponents.”

Meanwhile, the economically-illiterate, protectionist ACORN lawyer rejected a free trade deal with Colombia.

And did know that Canada has been taking a leading role in foreign policy?

Since establishing a minority government in January 2006, this prime minister and his Conservative Party have restored Canada’s international prestige by increasing military funding and tenaciously supporting Canada’s dangerous NATO mission in the Afghan province of Kandahar. No NATO ally has put more on the line against the Taliban, and Mr. Harper seems to sense not just the opportunity but the need for Canada to capitalize on it. There is a vacuum in conservative leadership in North America and on the world stage, and Mr. Harper is stepping into it. His objective would appear to be the restoration of liberal-democratic resolve against tyranny.

You want Reaganesque? I’ll give you Reaganesque:

An unreliable NATO has implications for Canada not least because Russia is once again becoming a menace. The Kremlin’s claim to the Arctic seabed can be discounted, he argues, because it is being pursued through the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty. But other provocations are worrisome. “They are testing our airspace more frequently than they have been doing in a long, long time,” he says. “It’s the aggression in the Arctic, aggression more generally, an aggression that is increasingly troublesome just to be troublesome.”

Check this out: 2 CF-18 fighters intercepted a Russian bomber that was snooping near Canadian airspace just last week. Look, if Obambi wants to focus on increasing welfare and nationalizing health care, then maybe Canadians will have to pick up the slacker’s slack.

I rarely say this, but I am going to say it for this WSJ interview: READ. THE. WHOLE. THING.

UPDATE: Welcome, Canadian visitors from Blue Like You! Thanks for the link Joanne! I’ve just blogrolled you! I am hoping Stephen Harper gets his majority soon, so he can get rid of those pesky HRCs that keep going after Ezra Levant.

UPDATE 2: I noticed in the comments on Blue Like You that they referenced this interview from CNN with Wolf Blitzer. Here is the video and a news article from the National Post. Ooops. I think the commenter Allison meant a more recent CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria which is here.

UPDATE 3: Welcome visitors from Post-Darwinist! Thanks for linking to me,  Denyse!

News

Higher taxes for the rich will not pay for Obama’s spending plans

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Representative Michele Bachmann
Representative Michele Bachmann

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.