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POPSShe lied This is what I hate about these guys. They don't tell the truth...
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POPSThe Presidential Candidates and The "Experience Issue"
The line McCain’s been using “He’s Not Ready to Lead” is still viable – and should emphasize a discussion of Obama’s policies, not his job history—his radicalism, not his resume. Meanwhile, we should invite comparisons of Governor Palin’s experience with Obama’s: won’t the PTA connect more with middle class voters than “community organizer,” and property tax-cutting small town mayor count more than slippery State Senator who voted “present” a disquieting proportion of the time. In any event, both tickets now balance experience with youthful energy – but McCain is balancing it the right way, with the experience at the top. If Obama supporters now see an opening for attack in regard to Sarah Palin’s “lack” of experience, they will only succeed in bringing back to scrutiny Obama’s own leadership (in)experience. Let’s see that “Tale of the Tape” chart that Curt linked to by Jeff Emanuel, http://www.floppingaces.net/2008/08/30/palin-not-the-most-inexperienced/
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POPSSuperior Economic-Policy Reporting And Writing This, from Sunday's NYTimes magazine, is the most clear and comprehensive economic-policy piece I've read in awhile. (It even makes the tax code nearly digestible.) Regardless of your political stance, it's worth a look.
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POPSBlue to Gray Flames "Businessmen are taking advantage of the national emergency in order to make money. They break the regulations which protect the common welfare of all—for the sake of their own personal gain. They're profiteers of the black market who grow rich by defrauding the poor of their rightful share, at a time of desperate shortage. They pursue a ruthless, grasping, grabbing, antisocial policy, based on nothing but plain, selfish greed." Rearden sat looking at him, as if studying an object seen for the first time. Somewhere deep in Rearden's mind, as a steady, gentle, inexorable beat, was a man's voice, saying:
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POPSWaPo: 'Obama Tax Plan Would Balloon Deficit' -- "It's not unreasonable to say, 'We're inheriting a budget that's going to have substantial deficits into the future'....But after we've been saying, 'Bush has irresponsible policies we can't afford,' he will be asking us to replace them with different policies we can't afford,' " said a Democratic congressional aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity so he could speak candidly. -- "Leaving some of the tax cuts in place would cost us a small fortune," said Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), a member of a group of conservative House Democrats known as the Blue Dogs who have been adamant about following pay-as-you-go rules. "I don't know that any Blue Dog has a good way to pay for that." Perhaps we should recommend closing the deficit a bit by imposing a tax on newsprint paper, just to see how comfortable the Washington Post and other tax-hiking newspapers are with raising taxes on everyone and everything.
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POPSNot your father's democrats Thus the task before Obama and Biden this week is threefold. They must feign toughness on foreign policy and moderation on values. At the same time they must present their enthusiasm for bureaucracy as sympathy for the economic challenges of the middle class. They must persuade the country that they are not what they are: the most left-wing ticket their party has run in 36 years. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time; 51 percent may be more feasible.
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POPSObama's Depressing Tax Plan He has opposed the Columbian Free Trade Agreement, even though it primarily removes tariffs on American exports to that country, with barriers to Columbian exports to America already almost all removed under the Andean Trade Preferences Act. In sharp contrast, McCain has promised tax cuts to promote economic growth and strengthen the U.S. dollar. The federal corporate tax rate today is 35 percent, and McCain suggests cutting it to 25 percent. This would mirror rates elsewhere: The average corporate tax rate in the European Union was slashed from 38 percent in 1996 to 24 percent by 2007. The rates in India and China are lower as well. American companies are not going to produce more jobs and higher wages with this crippling competitive disadvantage.
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POPSObama's Fair Tax Mr. Warren, a man of the cloth, has done us a great service by asking the candidates to answer a pretty secular question: What kind of income makes an American "rich"? Maybe in the more secular setting of an upcoming debate, one of our nonpastor moderators could ask the candidates the moral question: What specific rate of individual taxation would it take for the rich to be paying their fair share?
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POPSWhat the new taxes cost Seattle They do have a point - there is a growing riff between the social policy liberal Democratic Party and the Labor Union Democratic Party. It is hard to see why the two joined the same party except that the other major party was totally inhospitable to either of their agendas.
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POPSObama Tax Plan NO Friend to Deficit Reduction And those new policies will result in never ending liabilities for the government. Democrats have never killed a single project once it was funded. They have only made them bigger and more entrenched.
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POPSmccain vs obama on taxes there is more detail here, but look, this is a nice simple graphic that shows for 10 different tax brackets the amount of increase/decrease in taxes under both men's plans.
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POPSChange in the wind for Co-operative Research Centre The program was established in 1990 to enable collaborative research to benefit industry or the community. Professor O'Kane also says It should really be about tax payer's dollars causing major spill overs to the community.
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POPSGreat Tips But Here's Another I couldn't agree more with this article. I was definitely in the couple's shoes until getting some good advice. Another way to quickly build up a reserve fund, especially if you own a home and it's early in the year - deposit your entire tax refund into your safety net account. Resist the urge to splurge and you could have your net built up very quickly.
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POPSFreeeeeedom! of Information (National Security Archive) So much information, great site! National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Books provide online access to critical declassified records on issues including U.S. national security, foreign policy, diplomatic and military history, intelligence policy, and more. Updated frequently, the Electronic Briefing Books represent just a small sample of the documents in our published and unpublished collections. A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals. On March 17, 2000, Long Island University named the National Security Archive as winner of a Special George Polk Award for 1999 for "piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy" and "serving as an essential journalistic resource."
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POPSKnights Of The Planet Gore Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis hammered Obama for his insistence on auto job-killing, mandated fuel-mileage standards (so-called CAFE laws). "That shows how out of touch he is with Michigan voters," thundered Anuzis. "He's pandering to San Francisco liberals and environmentalists who would just as soon we not have cars." Yet, those words of support only highlight McCain’s similarities to Obama. On CAFE, for example, McCain himself has been no friend to the auto industry. In 2002, he co-sponsored a bill with John Kerry hiking mileage mandates by 30 percent — a proposal that ultimately became law last year over loud Big 3 protests. On drilling, McCain quickly steps on his message of “oil independence” by opposing drilling in ANWR — just as his opponent does. As for nuclear power, McCain’s strategy has serious flaws — beginning with the fact that the candidate doesn’t seem to know the difference between electricity and motor fuel.
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POPSMajor-League "Beat-Down" On Obama's Energy-Less Policies During yesterday's Special Report, Charles Krauthammer unleashed a major-league beat-down on Barack Obama's unhinged "energy" policy. Batten down the hatches.. The amount we would save in our tires generously calculated is about 1/200 of what you get from offshore oil alone, and the amount of oil shale is in the West would give us 10,000 years worth of the gasoline saved by inflating our tires. The problem with the Democratic position is they always say 'let's do x' instead of drilling. What the American people understand is you do x, y, and z, and everything. But the reason not to drill is untenable. You drill as well, and that will help us as well... ...BAIER: So inflate your tires. KRAUTHAMMER: It is not even a tenth of a hundredth of the solution. If that much.
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POPSThe facts about taxes from Morford's commenter
vkkv 8/6/2008 1:33:13 AM 2)-According to new research out of Princeton, real middle class wage growth is double when a Democrat is president compared to when a Republican is president. "...Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families...grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House. Only the incomes of affluent families were relatively impervious to partisan politics, growing robustly under Democrats and Republicans alike...": http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27wwln-ideal... Here is a short summary of this research: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008... Recommend: (8)(1) vkkv 8/6/2008 1:34:12 AM 3)-90% of Americans would pay less taxes under Obama's proposed tax plan compared to McCain's. This is according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Institute as reported by CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/11/news/economy/candidates... People making under $112,000 a year in individual (not household) inco
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POPSTaxation: Our Rulers Carnival Of Theft And Plunder But there is a case to be made for a kind of windfall profits tax: A tax on windfall political profits is indeed desirable. Our rulers cannot legally take home personally more than a minor share (in salary and perks) of the income they steal from us through taxation. But they "profit" from taxes nevertheless by using billions and billions of dollars to buy votes from various political constituencies in order to perpetuate their political careers. Then, in many cases, after spending years in Congress giving away our hard-earned dollars to various undeserving individuals and groups, they retire to earn large salaries from those very groups or to become lobbyists for the groups and use their political connections to keep this carnival of theft and plunder going. That is how our rulers profit personally from tax revenue.
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POPS"Obamanomics" A "Recipe For Recession" Thus, while Mr. Obama also proposes an alternative minimum tax (AMT) patch, he could instead wind up with the permanent abolition plan for the AMT proposed by the Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D., N.Y.) -- a 4.6% additional hike in the marginal rate with no deductibility of state income taxes. Marginal tax rates would then approach 70%, levels not seen since the 1970s and among the highest in the world. The after-tax return to work -- the take-home wage for more time or effort -- would be cut by more than 40%. That would, obviously, devastate the economy. Worse, it is unfair. It is simply immoral for the state to confiscate 70% of anyone's income. It would be deeply ironic if, at a time when the rest of the world is moving toward greater freedom in the form of lower tax rates, the United States were to regress to the stultifying statism of the 1970s. Yet that is exactly what Barack Obama promises.
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POPSNow They Say Global Warming is Racist Ever pandering for the black vote, the loony liberals are now saying the fictitious global warming affects blacks more than non-hispanic whites. Never mind that negros are more adapted to hot climates than white. This is just another blatant grab for black and hispanic votes by the goofy democrats
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POPS'Intellectuals' Pining For Higher Tax Rates Why are the treasuries of Hong Kong and Singapore flush with revenue? Why have the U.S. and Britain shown tremendous growth since Reagan and Thatcher while Continental Europe with their pseudo-socialism putters along with chronic double-digit unemployment? Go around the world these last 25 years and compare nations with high tax rates to countries with low tax rates, you'll find a pattern. Growth produces wealth, which leads to higher tax revenues and a more prosperous nation. Less growth produces less wealth and in turn lowers tax revenues. High tax rates retard economic growth; low tax rates encourage more growth. It really isn't that complicated. Seriously. The Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby The Return Of Voodoo Economics http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/14/AR2006051400806.html Bush Should End This Tax Cut Myth http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/07/AR2006050700924.html
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POPSWall Street Likes The Bailout Plus Drill, Drill, Drill But my thought is that a Senate victory might just blow Pelosi out of the water and open the floodgates to Democratic defections in the House. If a drilling bill ever passes Congress, oil prices will keep on plunging — perhaps all the way to $75 a barrel, which is the profitable break-even point for lifting the extra barrel of oil. That would drive the Dow to somewhere between 15,000 and 16,000, and it would have a huge tax-cut effect on the economy. And, of course, it could completely change the November election outlook in a highly favorable way for the GOP. The conventional wisdom says Republicans are gonna get clobbered again this fall. But drill, drill, drill would overturn that wisdom. More drilling today would have the potency of the Reagan tax cuts 28 years ago in the 1980 landslide race. But the GOP has got to make the case. And deregulating oil, which is great policy, would offset much of the bad policy pain coming out of the Fannie-Freddie housing bailout.
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POPSHousing Tax Credit Instead Fan & Fred pass some cheap money to home buyers, but the majority of it goes to banks. Why is the U.S. government subsidizing lenders? Instead, pass along the savings directly to homeowners.
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POPSMcCain Tax Plan favors Wealthy, Offers Little For Middle Class Right wing tax cut zealot/activist Grover Norquist agrees that McCain's tax policies are farther right than even Bush's. "The McCain tax policy is to continue the Bush tax cuts and add three more, so I prefer McCain," he told Salon. "McCain's is bigger, better." When Grover Norquist is excited about a tax policy, it means that people who aren't rich would be screwed. It's practically a law of physics.
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POPSObama's Tax Redistribution ...Obama's plan would greatly accelerate the decades-long trend toward a federal government that depends for tax revenue almost exclusively on a few high-income people. I guess you can call greatly accelerating in the same direction, "change". Hodge acknowledges that some Americans may cheer this dramatic dependence on the highest earners, but he says the shift should be part of a larger national discussion asking questions such as: * What is the long-term effect on the economy if so few households shoulder such a large share of the tax burden? * When a majority of Americans are paying so little for government, will that majority then demand even more services than they would have otherwise? * Can a tax system so focused on redistribution be compatible with economic growth? The new study, "Hard Numbers on Obama's Redistribution Plan," is available online at www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/23319.html.
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