Obama's Budget Speech

(The transcript can be found HERE)


Do only the 'rich' donate to charities and buy houses? Is the reduced deduction meant to put more government control on where charitable monies go?

QUESTION: Mr. President, are you -- thank you. Thank you, Mr. President. Are you reconsidering your plan to cut the interest rate deduction for mortgages and for charities? And do you regret having proposed that in the first place?


OBAMA: No, I think it's -- I think it's the right thing to do, where we've got to make some difficult choices. Here's what we did with respect to tax policy.


What we said was that, over the last decade, the average worker, the average family have seen their wages and incomes flat. Even in times where supposedly we were in the middle of an economic boom, as a practical matter, their incomes didn't go up. And so, well, we said, "Let's give them a tax cut. Let's give them some relief, some help, 95 percent of American families."


Now, for the top 5 percent, they're the ones who typically saw huge gains in their income. I -- I fall in that category. And what we've said is, for those folks, let's not renew the Bush tax cuts, so let's go back to the rates that existed back in -- during the Clinton era, when wealthy people were still wealthy and doing just fine, and let's look at the -- the level at which people can itemize their deductions.


And what we've said is: Let's go back to the rate that existed under Ronald Reagan. People are still going to be able to make charitable contributions. It just means, if you give $100 and you're in this tax bracket, at a certain point, instead of being able to write off 36 percent or 39 percent, you're writing off 28 percent.


Now, if it's really a charitable contribution, I'm assuming that that shouldn't be the determining factor as to whether you're giving that $100 to the homeless shelter down the street.


And so this provision would affect about 1 percent of the American people. They would still get deductions. It's just that they wouldn't be able to write off 39 percent.


In that sense, what it would do is it would equalize -- when I give $100, I'd get the same amount of deduction as when some -- a bus driver who's making $50,000 a year, or $40,000 a year, gives that same $100. Right now, he gets 28 percent -- he gets to write off 28 percent. I get to write off 39 percent. I don't think that's fair.

Maybe they should be taxed at the same rate too. Wouldn't that be 'fair'?

Stimulating Sex

The 'stimulus' bill that passed through the House without any Republican support is still supporting illicit sex with millions of dollars.
OneNewsNow:

...Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America (CWA) points out (that)Planned Parenthood and others are still seeking money through the stimulus package to reduce population and promote "safe sex" programs for youth. Wright says it does not make sense. "The economic stimulus bill shifts the burden of the debt onto the next generation; yet if we are spending billions of more dollars in 'family planning,' there won't be much of a next generation to pay this huge debt," she argues.
In a CWA press release, Wright points out the $825-billion stimulus package halts funding for abstinence education programs while including $335 million for sexually transmitted disease (STD) education and prevention programs. She notes that the Centers for Disease Control -- a recipient of STD education funding -- previously has used federal funds for programs that she says "may stimulate some people, but not the economy."
"A transgender beauty pageant in San Francisco that advertised available HIV testing, that funded an event called 'Got Love? – Flirt/Date/Score' that taught participants how to flirt with greater finesse," the family advocate notes, "and also funded events called 'Booty Call' and 'Great Sex' put on by an organization that received nearly $700,000 in government funds."
Simply put, says Wright, the economic stimulus bill still funds programs that "encourage irresponsible sexual activity that increases healthcare costs."

(h/t Catholic Fire)

"Capitalism and Christianity"

Ottawa Theology On Tap held a lecture featuring Richard Bastien:

"Capitalism and Christianity: Cooperation or Conflict?"


Is capitalism a 'Protestant' invention? Has the Catholic tradition played a role in the rise of capitalism? Why the tension between the Christian tradition and the capitalist 'spirit'? What does the Church have to say about economics? Why are so many Christians opposed to capitalism?



Richard Bastien studied public finance at the University of Montreal and at Harvard University and spent most of his career working as an economist in the Canadian Ministry of Finance, specializing in international finance. Throughout the 1990s, he was Canada’s representative in the Paris Club and in the G-8 Group of debt experts. Mr. Bastien is currently Director of the Canadian Catholic Civil Rights League for the Ottawa region and a founding member of ÉGARDS - the only culturally-conservative journal in Canada in either official language. He also writes for Challenge Magazine.

(via Facebook)

"Hopey Changemas"

...Steynism of the day!

Mark Steyn :

....General Motors now has a market valuation about a third of Bed, Bath & Beyond, and no one says your Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet Seat Bidet is too big to fail. GM has a market capitalization of about $2.4 billion. For purposes of comparison, Toyota's market cap is $100 billion and change (the change being bigger than the whole of GM). General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary. The UAW is AARP in an Edsel: It has three times as many retirees and widows as "workers" (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people.

How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars: Honda and Nissan make a pretax operating profit per vehicle of around $1,600; Ford, Chrysler and GM make a loss of $500 to $1,500. That's to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell. Like Henry Ford said, you can get it in any color as long as it's red....

(h/t rightgirl)

"We Fail To Learn From History"

Star Psrker:

...How can you not feel that emptiness in the pit of your stomach as you watch our financial markets spin downward? The broad stock market indices are down well over 40 percent since the beginning of the year. Losses are somewhere in the neighborhood of $9 trillion.

The real economic realities behind these numbers are starting to show up. The only question at this point is how severe the recession we are now entering will be.

Maybe, when everyone is depressed I am supposed to write cheery things to encourage folks. But I can't, because I care about our country and what I see is not encouraging.

We just had a presidential election that in some circles produced a lot of euphoria. But I believe that at some point -- I hope sooner rather than later -- many Americans are going to wake up and realize that this election was not a cure for our problems but a symptom of the disease....

Shocking Generosity Sets Example

Scott Ott:

Coming off a month in which his campaign raised a record-breaking $150 million, Sen. Barack Obama announced today that he would voluntarily redistribute his cash to his presidential rivals including Libertarian Bob Barr, Independent Ralph Nader, Green Party pick Cynthia McKinney and even Republican John McCain, who has struggled to make ends meet while running on public assistance....

Did She Mean Canada?

Sarah Palin warns about 'big government':

“See, under a big government agenda, what you thought was yours, your income, your property, your inventory, your investments, really would belong to somebody else, to everybody else. And it would be shared with everybody else.” Palin said, “That philosophy of government taking more, which is a misuse of the power to tax. It leads to government moving into the role of taking care of you and government and politicians and kind of moving in as the other half of your family to make decisions for you. Now they do this in other countries where the people are not free.”

??

.

Not Really Funny!

"This offer depends on the willingness of the Chinese government to continue buying U.S. government debt. Terms and conditions depend on the whim of Congress and may be changed without notice. U.S. Taxpayers may not apply."

Nightly Business Report (h/t SJ)

Party Like Its 1929

American Ingenuity at 'Instructables' site. Homeschoolers love this stuff....

Scott Roundhouses Corrupt Media

(Posted at PTBC) ORSON SCOTT CARD:Would The Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On The Lights?:

...Now let’s follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate’s campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an “adviser” to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama’s people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn’t listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis...

Can The Republic Withstand A "Liberal Supermajority"?

Wall Street Journal:

If the current polls hold, Barack Obama will win the White House on November 4 and Democrats will consolidate their Congressional majorities, probably with a filibuster-proof Senate or very close to it. Without the ability to filibuster, the Senate would become like the House, able to pass whatever the majority wants.

Though we doubt most Americans realize it, this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven't since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s. If the U.S. really is entering a period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy, Americans at least ought to understand what they will be getting, especially with the media cheering it all on...

(medicare for all)

..The commitments would start slow, so as not to cause immediate alarm. But as U.S. health-care spending flowed into the default government options, taxes would have to rise or services would be rationed, or both. Single payer is the inevitable next step, as Mr. Obama has already said is his ultimate ideal..

(business climate)

..The danger is that Democrats could cause the economic downturn to last longer than it otherwise will by enacting regulatory overkill like Sarbanes-Oxley. Something more punitive is likely as well, for instance a windfall profits tax on oil, and maybe other industries..

(taxes)

..Taxes will rise substantially, the only question being how high. Mr. Obama would raise the top income, dividend and capital-gains rates for "the rich," substantially increasing the cost of new investment in the U.S. More radically, he wants to lift or eliminate the cap on income subject to payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security. This would convert what was meant to be a pension insurance program into an overt income redistribution program. It would also impose a probably unrepealable increase in marginal tax rates, and a permanent shift upward in the federal tax share of GDP...

(free speech and voting rights)

..A liberal supermajority would move quickly to impose procedural advantages that could cement Democratic rule for years to come. One early effort would be national, election-day voter registration. This is a long-time goal of Acorn and others on the "community organizer" left and would make it far easier to stack the voter rolls. The District of Columbia would also get votes in Congress -- Democratic, naturally.

Felons may also get the right to vote nationwide, while the Fairness Doctrine is likely to be reimposed either by Congress or the Obama FCC. A major goal of the supermajority left would be to shut down talk radio and other voices of political opposition...

...It's always possible that events -- such as a recession -- would temper some of these ambitions. Republicans also feared the worst in 1993 when Democrats ran the entire government, but it didn't turn out that way. On the other hand, Bob Dole then had 43 GOP Senators to support a filibuster, and the entire Democratic Party has since moved sharply to the left. Mr. Obama's agenda is far more liberal than Bill Clinton's was in 1992, and the Southern Democrats who killed Al Gore's BTU tax and modified liberal ambitions are long gone.

In both 1933 and 1965, liberal majorities imposed vast expansions of government that have never been repealed, and the current financial panic may give today's left another pretext to return to those heydays of welfare-state liberalism. Americans voting for "change" should know they may get far more than they ever imagined.

Markets Nervous About Obama

New York Post:

... Most investors know the devil is in the details - and the details of Obama's economic plans are anything but reassuring.

Of course, the market turmoil is first a reflection of grim reality - the bursting of the housing bubble and the billions upon billions in writedowns and losses that have forced upon the hugely leveraged financial firms companies that had cranked big profits during the bubble years.

The resulting credit crunch is hitting Main Street harder than ever before. The country is headed for recession; the only question is: Just how low can the markets and economy go?

It could be a lot lower - it all depends on the policies of the next president.

And, as it looks increasingly likely that Obama will be that man, the markets are casting a vote of "no confidence." ...

No matter how you look at him, Obama's no saviour!

The (Not) Exclusive Club of Poor Artists

Kelly McParland comments on the self-centered whining of the 'arts' community..which according to Conference Canada includes nearly everyone!

...It was more than a little gratifying to learn from the National Post Editorial Board that I qualify as a Canadian artist and thus able to share insights and grant application forms with Margaret Atwood, Colm Feore and other leading lights of the stage, screen and written word.

It was less satisfying to discover that half the Canadian population also apparently rates full membership in the “arts industry” that Ms. Atwood says is worth $86 billion to Canada yet has been “totally dismissed” by the Bush/Harper military regime in those moments when it isn’t supplying $50 billion in tax breaks to Big Oil and plotting to send more troops to Iraq. (You’ll have to forgive me: ever since I became a part of the arts industry I’ve felt compelled to make trite allegations against the Prime Minister using borrowed cliches from my American colleagues -- God I hate Americans! -- while slamming any business that makes a profit and is thus able to support the networks, publishers and cultural institutions I live on).

According to my fellow culture vultures here in our cold-water sixth-floor walk-up garret in Don Mills, the $86 billion figure cited by Ms Atwood derives from a Conference Board of Canada calculation that takes figures from 2003, gooses them up with a few years of economic assumptions, chucks in a whole whack of ancillary activity and projections and finally extrapolates all that to reach $84.6 billion, which is rounded out to $86 billion, the extra billion or so being for canapes.

The estimate includes a rather broad definition of culture, embracing a number of dubious characters you’d never see invited to the Junos, unless they were considering financing your next project, in which case they would qualify as patrons of the arts and thus become barely tolerable. Advertising executives, it appears, are artists. Public relations hacks ... sorry public relations performers ... are artists. The teenager who takes your ticket at the Cineplex (when she can tear herself away from her iPod and her cellphone) is an artist. Every slovenly Tory-voting tax-cut-favouring Harper-loving photographer, editor and bean-counting administrator at this sorry excuse for a newspaper -- including the malicious little copy editors who would love to ruin my day by questioning my allegations and second-guessing my “facts” ( if I gave them half a chance) -- is an artist.

We are all artists. Canada, it turns out, is one of the most artistic nations on the planet. We have culture in our blood, artistic fervor ...

Another artist at the National Post created this interesting poll tracker, which shows that in spite of the 'art' communities efforts to rally the public behind their 'cause', Canadians are still backing Harper.

Economic Crisis Reader

Iain Murray at 'Open Market':

The bailout bill that passed through Congress today seeks to solve the financial mess by massively increasing government involvement in private finance. But more Government cannot be the answer to a government-created problem. The fact is that short-sighted government policies distorted the market in the first place. Bankers were certainly to blame for responding to these signals from government in the hope of a quick buck, but at its base, much of the problem was caused by government.

These are the top twelve articles, stories and papers that we think demonstrate this fact.

1. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are at the heart of the crisis, having helped to create an artificial mortgage boom. Fred Smith warned Congress about this in 2000, and was ridiculed for it. Read what happened here.

2. Steven Malanga outlines the “long road to slack lending standards” and just how government encouraged this, at RealClearMarkets.

3. Thomas Sowell explains how economic-populist politicians used their power to help create the problem...

"No Carbon Taxes"

(NoCarbonTax.Com)

"Your support, coupled with thousands of other Canadians is sending a powerful message to federal and provincial lawmakers.

Carbon taxes and trading schemes hurt families and damage the economy. They do far more to fatten government treasuries than control global temperatures.

Since 1990 the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) has been fighting on behalf of over-burdened taxpayers. But on this issue, your help is needed more than ever as politicians of all political stripes are bent on imposing policies that will lead to higher energy prices..."

PETITION

(h/t Western Standard)

No Carbon Tax Petition

(I know, tax credit is not the same!)


Sign Here

Pass It On!

'Loss of American Principles'

Star Parker:

"...What's bothering me today, and what I think should bother you, is not only don't we understand exactly what these guys are doing as they play with our economic engine, but few are asking what authority they have to be playing around in there in the first place.

Talking about Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, the Wall Street Journal reports "Today he finds himself in a position of power unmatched by his predecessors. He decides whether Wall Street firms live or die, picking winners and losers with the power of the federal purse."

Somehow the idea of our Treasury Secretary sitting like a Roman emperor, giving a thumbs up or down whether firm A or firm B will live or die, just doesn't wash with the basic principles of how I believe this country is supposed to work.

The "power of the federal purse" is a nice abstract way of saying there is open season on citizens and taxpayers. We are the federal purse.

Somehow we have gotten to the point where we citizens have been written out of the equation of our own country and Constitution. Paulson can decide to commit billions of our money -- you know, what we work for every day, save, and assume we own -- to play lifeguard and we don't even get a courtesy call asking if its okay.

So I ask, is this the disease pretending to be the cure?..."

Generous Americans

In spite of the constant barrage of negative assessments by Americans themselves, Star Parker points out - the facts tell a different story:

"To put this in some kind of perspective, the $8.8 billion in giving from American religious institutions to developing countries was $1.5 billion more than the total giving from all private sources in 30 of the world's major industrialized democratic countries combined."

"Who's to Blame?"

From the 'Financial Post':

"There have been commodity price spikes because of supply shortages in the past, such as the oil crisis of the 1970s, but there is no such shortage today, he said.

Over the past few years, institutional investors have moved into commodities as a way to protect themselves against volatility in interest rates and the stock market. Typically, he said, they spread their exposure across a swath of commodities, from energy and grains to metals. The first problem with this strategy is that the funds have been diverting so much capital that the market has ballooned.

"Commodities prices have increased more in aggregate over the last five years than at any other time in U. S. history," he said. Mr. Masters says institutional investment in commodities indexes rose to US$260-billion at the end of March, from just $13-billion at the end of 2003."



Well, that's settled then!

"I Have The Power"

(h/t SDA)