THIS IS MY BLOG!
No, YOU Didn’t Build That!
The truth is the opposite of what our campaigner-in chief claims.
Speaking in Roanoke, Virginia, on July 13, President Barack Obama famously uttered the words that may come to define him and the 2012 presidential campaign: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
The truth is the opposite: It is government that is utterly dependent on the private sector, in fact on a small highly-productive subset of the private sector, for its ability to do anything.
Obama says entrepreneurs should be fawningly grateful to government (and implicitly to him) for teachers, roads, bridges, and the Internet. But who paid for that teacher, that infrastructure, and that scientific research?
The answer is not “taxpayers” and certainly not “all of us” but rather “a very small percentage of Americans.”
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently released a study on income and tax distribution for the years 2008 and 2009. The imbalance between incomes earned and taxes paid is dramatic — in exactly the opposite way from the claims of President Obama and his supporters. The funding of our government embodies, as Mart Laar so eloquently put it (in remarks I highly recommend you watch), the “grand idea of Karl Marx.”
(“Income distribution” is itself a misleading term, implying that the economy “distributes” a fixed amount of income, like your mother deciding who at the table gets how big a slice of the cherry pie. But wealth is created, not distributed, when people provide goods or services that the purchasers value more than the money they part with to receive them. Outside of monopoly or near-monopoly situations, both parties to a transaction believe themselves better off, which is why we do not get richer by making other people poorer, but rather by making other people richer, happier, healthier, and more productive.)
In 2009, the highest quintile (top 20 percent) of earners, with household incomes over $223,500 before taxes, took in 51 percent of the nation’s income but paid 68 percent of all individual federal taxes. The middle quintile — the oppressed middle class, earning between $64,300 and $93,800 — took in 14.7 percent of America’s income but paid only 9.4 percent of federal taxes. And the lowest 20 percent of earners, making less than $23,500, brought home 5 percent of the nation’s income (much of which was transfer payments from the rest of America) but paid only 0.3 percent of federal taxes.
The effective federal tax rates for these groups were: 1 percent for the lowest quintile, 11.1 percent for the middle quintile, and 23.2 percent for the highest quintile. Keep this in mind when liberals tell you that data showing the rich pay a disproportionate share of all taxes are skewed because they don’t include the fact that lower income Americans pay Social Security and Medicare (payroll) taxes; the CBO data do include those taxes, as well as certain federal excise taxes such as on alcohol and tobacco. (Excise taxes are the only category in which lower earners pay more tax as a share of their income than higher earners because they spend disproportionally more on beer and cigarettes.)
Even these numbers understate the penalty for success in America. The top 1 percent, who earned 13.4 percent of the nation’s income in 2009, paid 22.3 percent of all federal taxes and their average tax rate was 28.9 percent.
By including Social Security and Medicare (payroll) taxes, which — at least theoretically — return to those who pay them as health benefits or cash repayments in the future, the CBO study plays down the degree to which a small section of society is paying the freight for the entire nation. For example, the top 1 percent of earners paid nearly 37 percent of all federal income taxes — down from over 40 percent just a couple of years earlier because the recession hurt upper-earners disproportionately. The top 10 percent of earners pay an astonishing 70.5 percent of federal income taxes.
Looking only at income taxes, as this Tax Foundation report does, other relevant facts jump out:
- While tax rates for the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers have been dropping steadily for three decades, rates for the highest quintile, and particularly the top one percent, have been little changed. The tax code is more “progressive” than any time in our nation’s recent history because so many Americans now pay no income tax at all.
- The top quintile “now pays 94% of income taxes.”
- The share of national income earned by the top 1 percent has dropped to roughly the average level found the 1990s.
Even with a CBO methodology which obscures the magnitude of the penalty for success in America, the lessons from the study go beyond debunking Obama’s repeated claim that “millionaires and billionaires” don’t pay their “fair share.”
Read all of this HERE.
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Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one world: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint an servitude.
— Alexis de Tocqueville
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OBAMA CAMPAIGN SUES TO RESTRICT MILITARY VOTING
The left is so self-righteous about voting rights for illegal aliens and the homeless (“just because we’re homelesss deoesn’t mean we don’t have an opinion”), but our soldiers fighting and dying for this great nation? Drop dead! More of the ‘Obama Administration’s War on America.’
I have long blogged on the Obama campaign and adminstration attempts to restrict military voting. Our soldiers’ voting rights are systematically destroyed under this administration. These men and women are putting their lives on the line every day and dying in recordnumbers under Obama’s crippling rules of engagement. And how does Obama thank them? By making sure their vote doesn’t count. This is noaccident.
The sabotage of the military vote is a high crime. I previously reported on Lema Bashir, the Palestinian stealth jihadist at Obama’s Department of Justice. Lema Bashir was at the center of Virginia’s failing to mail military ballots in time in 2008. The same mistakes were made again in 2010, and United States military voters were heavily disenfranchised because of in-actions by Bashir and DOJ throughout that year.
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I’ve never been to Chick-Fil-A, never had any interest in going, and don’t care what the owner thinks of gay marriage. Meanwhile the average American worker will pay an extra $1000 in taxes next year.
— Warren Redlich
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Column: The anti-Romney press is behaving like spoiled children
Let us now praise the unknown reporters! Let us acclaim those stolid scribes who, at the conclusion of Mitt Romney’s overseas trip to England, Israel, and Poland, told Politico—anonymously, of course, and presumably with a straight face—that the days of going easy on the Republican nominee were over.
You see, the former governor of Massachusetts occasionally visits his traveling press corps, to whom he distributes baked goods. But our nameless heroes have had enough. “You can’t hand out cookies now when there are serious questions to ask, and there are very serious questions to ask that the campaign has refused to answer,” one said. A second brave but unidentified journalist agreed: “I don’t think anyone wants cookies anymore. This is the rough and tumble, now.”
What audacity, what daring! To whine on background that the Romney campaign has not treated you well, to threaten reprisal without having the courage to go on the record, even as your colleagues tar Romney with allegations of gaffes and racism—are there two more fitting spokesmen for the immaturity, insularity, and idiocy of the political press in the age of Obama? Let us celebrate these unknown reporters. Only they had the gumption to reveal to the world that the liberal media would no longer pull their punches for a box of Samoas. And only they have managed to display fully the elite media’s sense of self-entitlement and lack of self-awareness. After the pummeling these cookie monsters gave Romney last week, dessert should have been the least of their concerns. They were lucky to get a ride home.
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Columbian Cable Kids
Daisy Mora attaches herself, and the sack containing her five-year-old brother, to a pulley before setting off on a breakneck 60-second journey to the other side of the canyon, and school.
Photograph: Christoph Otto
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Faced with the prospect of legal action from casino mogul and philanthropist Sheldon Adelson, the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) is maintaining radio silence, refusing to disavow a vicious smear campaign it launched against the prominent GOP donor and legendary pro-Israel activist.
The NJDC came under bipartisan fire last month for waging a heavily criticized campaign to slander Adelson as an “unethical” character.
First, the partisan group circulated erroneous reports that Adelson had permitted a prostitution ring to operate out of his casino. Then it organized a petition to pressure Republicans into returning Adelson’s money.
NJDC was forced to retract the petition, however, after multiple liberal Jewish leaders and organizations condemned the effort as a defamatory disgrace.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which promoted the NJDC smears, profusely apologized to Adelson Thursday after the mogul threatened to take legal action, Buzzfeed reported:
In press statements on June 29 and July 2, 2012, the DCCC made unsubstantiated allegations that attacked Sheldon Adelson, a supporter of the opposing party. This was wrong. The statements were untrue and unfair and we retract them. The DCCC extends its sincere apology to Mr. Adelson and his family for any injury we have caused.
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Tommy Robinson, Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller in Stockholm
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Landing on Mars: Curiosity’s 7 minutes of terror…
Curiosity is the size of a small car so they can’t land it the way they have in the past with the balloon landing that bounces on the surface. Landing Curiosity is way more complicated and involves parachutes, rockets, and a sky crane. Yeah it’s pretty awesome:
Curiosity lands on Mars at 1:31am EST on Monday morning (10:31pm PDT Sunday night) so this is basically happening tomorrow night.
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Picture of “liberal tolerance”: Gays harass homeless man reading Bible at Chick-fil-A…
Liberal Tolerance: These people say the dumbest things which is proof they have no clue what the Bible says or what it is about:
“The god that you worship stones rape victims”
Um I dare you to go to the Gaza Strip and start yelling that at people. Or Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan…well, you get the picture.
Here’s the video:
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Surprise: Obama Campaign Explicitly Approved Reid’s Anti-Romney Lies
Earlier this morning, Karl Rove appeared on Fox & Friends to discuss Harry Reid’s reckless accusations against Mitt Romney. In case you’re just joining this controversy, the Senate Majority Leader has spent the last few days peddling a scurrilous and evidence-free claim that Romney is a serial tax evader.
Read all about it and view the video HERE> And do spend time on this site!
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