Image by Getty Images via @daylifeOne of the things that you have to do when you listen to President Obama give a speech is to learn how to decipher the code words. His biggest word to decipher is FAIRNESS. Fairness in the lexicon of Obamanese double speak means the institution of the equality of outcome. America's tradition and core values, best enunciated by Conservatives, is equality of opportunity, after that it is up to the individual to take it from there operating under the rule of law and the liberty endowed by his Creator as codified in the Constitution.
What the President would like is to tax everybody at rates that yield the SAME TAKE HOME PAY FOR EVERYBODY. So if the target take home pay is $75,000 per household then a person making a million dollars would pay all of his income to taxes except $75,000. That means he would give the government $925,000 and keep $75,000. A person earning $100,000 would pay $25,000 in taxes so he would take home the same $75,000. And the person earning $35,000 would get a government gift of $40,000 to bring him up to $75,000.
Now why would anybody have the incentive to produce and earn more money under this system? This is Socialism folks.
Listen to what the President said in his State Of The Union Address:
"We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share and everyone plays by the same set of rules.""Right now, we're poised to spend nearly $1 trillion more on what was supposed to be a temporary tax break for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. Right now, because of loopholes and shelters in the tax code, a quarter of all millionaires pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households. Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary."
"Do we want to keep these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans? Or do we want to keep our investments in everything else_ like education and medical research; a strong military and care for our veterans? Because if we're serious about paying down our debt, we can't do both."
"...we need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of Members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes. Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes. And my Republican friend Tom Coburn is right: Washington should stop subsidizing millionaires. In fact, if you're earning a million dollars a year, you shouldn't get special tax subsidies or deductions. On the other hand, if you make under $250,000 a year, like 98 percent of American families, your taxes shouldn't go up. You're the ones struggling with rising costs and stagnant wages. You're the ones who need relief."
"Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense."
"We don't begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it. When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it's not because they envy the rich. It's because they understand that when I get tax breaks I don't need and the country can't afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference_ like a senior on a fixed income; or a student trying to get through school; or a family trying to make ends meet. That's not right. Americans know it's not right. They know that this generation's success is only possible because past generations felt a responsibility to each other, and to their country's future, and they know our way of life will only endure if we feel that same sense of shared responsibility. That's how we'll reduce our deficit. That's an America built to last."
CLASS WARFARE GARBAGE, MR PRESIDENT.
BUFFETT DOES PAY AS MUCH IN TAXES AS HIS SECRETARY
The issue is not tax policy or tax cuts, it is over spending. We wouldn't need more taxes if you hadn't over spent, Mr. President. Besides, lower taxes yield higher tax revenues. And when confronted with that fact Mr. President what have you said?
"IT'S A MATTER OF FAIRNESS" In other words , we don't care how much we collect in taxes, we care about leveling everybody to the same equality of outcome. Bringing everybody down to the lowest common denominator is the President's idea of fairness. The problem is it brings all the job producers down. Now who is going to finance the risk taking of developing new products and opening new businesses?
The President , as he has often said before, is willing to work with anybody as long as they agree with his policies but he will not compromise his positions nor give any inclusion to Republican ideas. That's what he said. Read and decipher the inferences of his words. He in effect says one thing and then in the very next breath takes it away.
"As long as I'm president, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum. But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place. "
Then there is the the totally false impression the President made about new trade agreements. The recent agreements he signed were proposed by Republican legislators when George Bush was President. For three years Obama vilified them and refused to sign into law what a majority of lawmakers had approved. Big time unions in the US were against Free Trade and the President, owing a big debt to unions for his election, refused to approve what a majority of people said would be a big boost to our economy and create jobs.
"We're also making it easier for American businesses to sell products all over the world. Two years ago, I set a goal of doubling U.S. exports over five years. With the bipartisan trade agreements I signed into law, we are on track to meet that goal - ahead of schedule. Soon, there will be millions of new customers for American goods in Panama, Colombia, and South Korea. Soon, there will be new cars on the streets of Seoul imported from Detroit, and Toledo, and Chicago."
"I will go anywhere in the world to open new markets for American products."
Next there is the issue of illegal immigration. We often hear the words "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" from the President. When we decipher the words we find that what the President wants is amnesty without first closing our borders. The majority of American citizens have repeatedly said - first fence off our southern border. Shut down and close the border - the entire border - and then we will sit down and work out an equitable solution for those who are here now. But the President does want to do that. He wants a blanket amnesty first and then he will think about - no do - closing borders. He has the cart before the horse for political expediency.
"Let's also remember that hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: The fact that they aren't yet American citizens. Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others came more recently, to study business and science and engineering, but as soon as they get their degree, we send them home to invent new products and create new jobs somewhere else."
"The opponents of action are out of excuses. We should be working on comprehensive immigration reform right now. But if election-year politics keeps Congress from acting on a comprehensive plan, let's at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people who want to staff our labs, start new businesses, and defend this country. Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship. I will sign it right away."
He gives it on one hand:
"Nowhere is the promise of innovation greater than in American-made energy. Over the last three years, we've opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration, and tonight, I'm directing my administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources. We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly one hundred years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy."Then takes it away on the other hand:
"I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here. We have subsidized oil companies for a century. That's long enough. It's time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that's rarely been more profitable, and double-down on a clean energy industry that's never been more promising. Pass clean energy tax credits and create these jobs."
LIKE SOLYNDRA, MR PRESIDENT?
KILLING THE KEYSTONE PIPELINE IS YOUR SOLUTION?
What the President thinks is - that you people, you citizens, are too stupid to get the danger of man made Global Warming. So I am going to bypass Congress and act on my own because I know better and I am your leader.
"The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change. But there's no reason why Congress shouldn't at least set a clean energy standard that creates a market for innovation. So far, you haven't acted. Well tonight, I will."
This State Of The Union address was a divisive class warfare diatribe, with repeated messages from years past and a government activist - Big Brother will make it right, do it for you attitude. The President holds his ideology as sacrosanct and all who disagree are heretical deniers. And if you, the American people, are too stupid to realize that I am right, I will mandate what is necessary.
But the President left out the really important issues.
NO SERIOUS MENTION OF THE DEBT
NO SERIOUS SOLUTION TO OVER SPENDING
NO MENTION OF A BUDGET
NO MENTION OF THE PIPELINE
This speech offered a vision of a profoundly technocratic and activist government, with its hands in every nook and cranny of the nation’s economic life—a government guiding particular business decisions and nudging individual choices through just the right mix of incentives and rules to reach just the right balance between fairness and growth while designing the perfect website for job retraining programs and producing exactly the proper number of “high-tech batteries.” The president described the government’s bailout of the Detroit automakers as a roaring success and then said “What’s happening in Detroit can happen in other industries. It can happen in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Raleigh.” If he thinks that all the tasks he laid out for government are things that people “cannot do better by themselves” then he must have a very high opinion of how well government can do things, or a very low opinion of how well people can do things by themselves, or (most plausibly) both.
The intensely activist tone of the speech also meant, of course, that no real attention could be paid to what was the dominant theme of our political debates over the past year: Our out-of-control deficits and debt. Indeed, this was probably the foremost purpose of the speech. As he prepares for his reelection campaign, the president is clearly trying to move voters away from a focus on our coming fiscal disaster and toward a renewed focus on public spending and public programs—the outlook that defined the beginning of his administration, before his specific public spending and public programs soured the public on such spending and programs and (having resulted in unprecedented deficits) alarmed the Tea Party movement into being and yielded the 2010 election. But of course, those deficits and debt have only gotten worse, not better. And if we do not bring them under control—above all by reforming our health entitlement programs—we face fiscal prospects that would make an utter joke of the kind of approach to public policy and government embodied by this speech, with its explosion of spending, its barriers to economic growth, and its laughably misguided little millionaire’s surtax. Those prospects, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would involve debilitating levels of debt unlike anything we have experienced in America. This is the future from which the president needs to distract us. (1)
Warren Buffett’s secretary is reportedly sitting in the box with the First Lady tonight. Obviously, President Obama will repeat the utterly false claim that Warren Buffett bears a lower tax burden than his secretary does. If you understand the varying tax treatment of labor and capital income at the corporate level — the former being deductible from taxable income, the latter a part of taxable income — then you understand why Buffett’s claim is false. If you further understand how screwed up the tax calculation on phantom capital gains is, how taxing the principal of an investment already taxes its return, and how America’s corporate income tax came about in the first place (Congress enacted it as a substitute for individual income taxation, after the Supreme Court declared direct income taxes unconstitutional), then you understand that those who defend Buffett’s false claim about the undertaxed wealthy are either ignorant or dishonest.
The wealthy pay a significant higher share of their income in taxes than the middle class or the poor do. If you combine federal, state, and local taxes together and divide by income, the top quintile of U.S. households pay about twice as much in taxes as a share of their incomes as the bottom quintile does. Because government spending disproportionately benefits lower-income households, the progressivity of government’s fiscal structure is even more steep than the tax data alone would show.
If you want to defend this level of progressivity, fine. If you want to argue that the system ought to be even more punitive at higher income levels, go for it. But denying that the wealthy already pay a disproportionate share of taxes is an act of gross irresponsibility. (2)
"No feature of the Obama presidency has been sadder than its constant effort to divide us, to curry favor with some Americans by castigating others. As in previous moments of national danger, we Americans are all in the same boat. It’s not fair and it’s not true for the President to attack Republicans in Congress as obstacles on these questions. They and they alone have passed bills to reduce borrowing, reform entitlements, and encourage new job creation, only to be shot down nearly time and again by the President and his Democrat Senate allies…" - Mitch Daniels in the Republican reply
To sum up the SOTU: "I went ... I know ... My ... My ... I took office ... I'm president ... I will work ... I intend ... I will oppose ... I want to speak ... I took office ... I refused ... told me ... My message ... Send me ... I'll sign ... I set ... I signed ... I will go ... I will not stand ... It's not fair ... I'm announcing ... I promise you ... I also hear ... I want ... Join me ... My administration ... I want to cut ... I call on ... I spoke ... let me put ... I believe ... my administration ... I took office ... I will sign ... I'm directing ... my administration ... I'm requiring ... I will not walk away ... I will not walk away ... I will not cede ... I will ... I'm directing ... I'm proud ... Send me ... I will sign ... I'm sending ... I've approved ... my presidency ... I've ordered ... I guess ... I'm confident ... I will not back down ... I will not back down ... I will not go back ... I will not go back ... I'm asking ... fair play ... So do I ... I told ... I'm prepared ... fair share ... my fair share ... I get tax breaks I don't need ... I recognize ... I bet ... I've talked ... Send me a bill ... I will sign ... I ask the Senate ... I've asked ... I'm a Democrat ... I believe ... my education reform ... I will keep taking ... I can do ... I have no doubt ... I will take ... I'm president ... I intend ... I have proposed ... I have already ... I'm proposing ... brings me ... my proudest ... I sat ... I look at ... I'm reminded." --BO (3)
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(3) The Patriot Post -
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