Tag Archives: Wealth

Rich trust-fund leftists caught spying for Cuba

Heritage Foundation has the story:

Move over, Bill Ayers, you’ve got company. The arrest of retired State Department intelligence analyst Walter Kendall Myers has apparently uncovered yet another overweened Social Register Rebel in our midst. Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn, were arrested on June 5 and charged with being espionage agents for Fidel Castro for 30 years.

…Kendall Myers got his PhD and later taught at Johns Hopkins/SAIS…

Myers’s mother’s pedigree (AT&T money and top-drawer National Geographic Society founders) even topped Ayers’s father’s Commonwealth Edison/Chicago fortune. Both of these bad boys seemingly felt so bad about living large off the sweat of their ancestors that they became hard-core leftists and turned on their fellow Americans.

A bit more in a subsequent post:

Cases like those of Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Ana Belen Montes, convicted in 2002 of spying for Cuba, or the five Cubans convicted in Miami in 2001 on 26 counts of spying for the regime, demonstrate the ability of the Cuban operatives to work in the U.S. to the detriment of U.S. national security and interests.

What about Barack Obama?

Barack Obama launched his presidential campaign from the house of his friend, Bill Ayers. He was raised by a rich grandmother and went to expensive private schools, where he took illegal drugs like cocaine. His mentor Frank Marshall Davis was a member of the Communist Party and a Soviet-sponsored activist. I’ve posted before about whether Obama is destroying the United States with his policies. He voted against missile defense, but he favors nuclear plants for Iran.

And we know that Obama is traipsing around with dictators in Venezuela and is even trying to normalize relations with Cuba. Who cares about the torture and unlawful imprisonment that goes on in Cuba and Iran? Obama’s response to North Korea hasn’t been inspiring.

Obama’s corporate tax hike would cause Microsoft to outsource jobs

This Bloomberg article may be helpful to those Democrats who voted for Obama because they hoped that Obama would stop outsourcing by taxing “the rich” and by taxing “greedy coporations”. (H/T Club For Growth)

Excerpt:

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”

…In a roundtable discussion today, Ballmer, Symantec Corp. Chairman John Thompson and the heads of smaller companies such as privately held Bentley Systems, an Exton, Pennsylvania-based maker of engineering software, said such policies would hurt domestic investment, reduce shareholder value and increase the cost of employing U.S. workers.

See, there’s a difference between what Obama thinks will happen (fantasy) and what actual will happen (reality). He is probably very surprised that corporations are responding to his socialism by shipping jobs overseas. What an unexpected surprise! Let’s recall the simplest possible economics lesson from Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson”.

From this aspect, therefore, the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Obama shows no evidence of knowing this lesson. And neither does anyone who voted for him. And it isn’t just that he and his voting bloc seem to know nothing about economics, it’s that they seem not to know anything about anything. And this, coupled with disregard for the unemployment rate, the budget deficit and the national debt, is what fuels his domestic policy.

Isn’t it mysterious that Bush cut taxes across the board, and tax revenues skyrocketed, while unemployment dove down below 5%? It’s a mystery! At least it’s a mystery to people who have never cracked open a book.

How communists operate

Here’s a preview of what we can expect from someone like Obama, who has no doubt absorbed the views of many left-wing arts professors, who, like him, have probably never run so much as a lemonade stand. Chavez doesn’t even have a college degree. (I have not seen Obama’s grades, he hasn’t ever released them – but he used alcohol, pot and cocaine).

IBD writes about Chavez:

It ought to worry people that what’s happening at GM is perfectly recognizable in Caracas.

In 2004, Chavez began by expropriating cattle ranches in Venezuela, saying he only wanted to clarify property rights, not confiscate land. End result: Virtually all productive land now is in his hands, redistributed to his loyalists in serfdom.

After that, he went after the U.S. oil industry, snagging prizes like Exxon Mobil’s $1 billion heavy-oil complex on the Orinoco River in 2007, citing a different legal issue: tax disputes.

He did similar expropriations with steel, cement, ports, banks, sugar, rice, pretty much any industry that was viable.

Running out of companies to steal, he now persecutes private media — not, he claims, to stifle dissent, but to protect children from smut, his pretense for shutting down RCTV in 2007.

For the last remaining nonstate TV station, his concern is now environmental desecration, with Chavistas using the pretense of some old antlers on the wall of a Globovision executive following an open-ended state raid as the excuse to shut down the TV station.

Whatever Chavez’s legal concerns are, the punishment is always the same: expropriation and more power to the state, the two pillars of socialism.

Read the whole thing, it goes on to juxtapose Obama and Chavez. (MP3 Podcast is here)

The most productive taxpayers flee higher tax rates

UPDATE: Welcome readers from Pursuing Holiness! Thanks for the link, Laura! Laura knows about this from experience – she runs her own information technology business, and is scaling it back. Go read her post, too!

A few days back, I posted on the Cato Institute’s story about the New York businessman who shifted his residence to Florida to avoid paying confiscatory tax rates to the greedy socialists in Albany.

Well, that’s not the only place where this is happening. There is a reason why freedom-hating atheists had to build Gulags and walls to keep people from escaping their communist prison. When tax rates go up, the most productive citizens either stop working or they leave entirely!

Here is a story from the UK Times Online about the exodus of British taxpayers from Gordon Brown’s corrupt socialist regime.

Excerpt:

SOL ZAKAY, the billionaire property tycoon, is the latest entrepreneur to quit Britain after the introduction of a 50% tax rate on high earners.

…Zakay joins a growing list of businessmen and City financiers disenchanted at the new tax rate as well as the proposed changes to EU regulation of private-equity and hedge funds.

And here is a story from the Wall Street Journal about Maryland taxpayers fleeing their left-wing state’s tax hikes.

Maryland couldn’t balance its budget last year, so the state tried to close the shortfall by fleecing the wealthy. Politicians in Annapolis created a millionaire tax bracket, raising the top marginal income-tax rate to 6.25%. And because cities such as Baltimore and Bethesda also impose income taxes, the state-local tax rate can go as high as 9.45%. Governor Martin O’Malley, a dedicated class warrior, declared that these richest 0.3% of filers were “willing and able to pay their fair share.” The Baltimore Sun predicted the rich would “grin and bear it.”

One year later, nobody’s grinning. One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year there were 2,000, which the state comptroller’s office concedes is a “substantial decline.” On those missing returns, the government collects 6.25% of nothing. Instead of the state coffers gaining the extra $106 million the politicians predicted, millionaires paid $100 million less in taxes than they did last year — even at higher rates.

When the most productive taxpayers stop producing, they take your jobs with them. It’s called the Laffer curve. Maybe you progressives should read about it. Think about the way the world actually works in reality. And then ask yourself a very important question. A question that you never heard answered in Harvard Law School.

Who is John Galt?

UPDATE: Hot Air notes that IRS revenues are dropping rapidly. Gateway Pundit adds: 16K jobs lost PER DAY since stimulus passed. Gateway Pundit reports Democrats consider national sales tax (hurts the poor disproportionately, just like cap and trade), and China has warned democrats about printing more money.