Welfare Capitalism = Patriotism?
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Joe Biden explained the rationale for Americans earning $250,000 or more per year having to pay even more in taxes under the Barack Obama economic plan.
As it stands right now, a married couple filing jointly with a combined salary up to $65,000 per year pays in the 15% tax bracket.
Meanwhile, a married couple filing jointly with a combined salary of $200,000 per year pay in the 33% tax bracket.
So essentially, they second couple already pays 33 cents on each dollar in federal tax, compared with 15 cents for the first couple.
It sort of makes you think they’re trying to discourage us from success, since the IRS asserts such a success penalty.
Anyhow, Barack Obama and Joe Biden don’t think the numbers are imbalanced enough as they are, so they want to slash taxes for the first couple and further increase them for the second one.
Today Biden stated, “It’s time to be patriotic … time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut,” according to the Associated Press.
So, if it is patriotic to have a further redistribution of wealth, also known as welfare capitalism, does Joe Biden think the inverse… paying less taxes for some Americans means they are unpatriotic?
Barack Obama #2 Recipient of Campaign Cash from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac
The collapse this week of Lehman Brothers’ is traced back to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two big mortgage banks that got a federal bailout a few weeks ago.
It turns out that the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae used huge lobbying budgets and political contributions to keep regulators off their backs, and the #2 recipient of these funds was Barack Obama, according to Center for Responsive Politics.
It’s jaw-dropping that Obama has collected such a sum in his short four years in office, as this tally covers all of contributions to politicians over the past 20 years.
And if you forgot (it’s understandable - the mainstream media apparently forgot), one of the initial members of Obama’s team searching for a running mate for him was former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson.
Additionally, there is a post at the Wizbang Blog, “Obama One of Leading Recipients of Fannie/Freddie Political Contributions,” with a transcript from a segment on Fox News yesterday that provides further details into the role of Democrats in this financial mess.
Now remember, Obama’s ads and stump speeches attack McCain and Republican policies for the current financial turmoil.
It is demonstrably not Republican policy and worse, it appears the man attacking McCain, Senator Obama, was at the head of the line when the piggy’s lined up at the Fannie and Freddie trough for campaign bucks.
Senator Barack Obama, number two on the Fannie/Freddie list of favored politicians after just four short years in the senate. Next time you see that ad, you might notice he fails to mention that part of the Fannie and Freddie problem.
But still we see Obama on the stump as he tries to lay the blame of this mess on the Republicans. I’ve got to wonder - is Obama that duplicitous, or is he really that unaware of how it all happened?
It’s Morning Again in America
In the midst of a banking crisis and Wall Street meltdown, it is crucial to bring the United States back to our land of pride and promise.
This reminds me of the famous Ronald Reagan commercials from 1984 with the opening line “It’s morning again in America.”
We are now in a moment where we need optimism and reform, rather than the blame games and attack ads that are flowing from the Barack Obama campaign.
It’s an interesting juxtaposition if you look at John McCain’s comments compared with those of Barack Obama yesterday.
“There has been tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall Street. People are frightened by these events. Our economy I think, still, the fundamentals of our economy are strong, but these are very, very difficult times. I promise you, we will never put America in this position again. We will clean up Wall Street.” - John McCain, 9/15/08
Obama was quick to issue an attack ad (what’s new?) about how he thinks John McCain is out of touch. But what are the fundamentals of our economy?
According to Stuart Varney of the Fox Business Network, the fundamentals of the economy are the basics: unemployment, job creation, and inflation.
Since we don’t exist in a bubble, it’s important to look at these items in the prism of the global economy.
Currently, unemployment is at 6.1%, which is a 5 year high, but much better than our European competitors.
We’ve lost about a half million or more new jobs this year, which is a negative, but again it is much better than our European and Japanese competitors.
And inflation is currently at 5.4%, which can be attributed largely to the cost of energy. As we diversify our energy plan and rely less on foreign energy, the rate will retreat.
Yes, the economy is struggling, and it’s not easy to be optimistic when we see gas prices as high as they are, and housing in a tailspin.
But we need to positive vision and plan to fix the mess. That’s what will fix the economy, not more attack ads that offer venom without solutions.
John McCain is talking about cleaning up Wall Street, and expanding our domestic energy programs.
Obama is reading from his TelePrompter that McCain is “out of touch.”
Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic offers an assessment of the state of the financial system in our country.
Who is Responsible for the Foreclosure Mess?
We continually hear how the rise in foreclosures is the fault of President Bush and his administration, but that’s the version from the mainstream media.
The reality is that this real estate implosion dates back nearly a decade to the Clinton years, according to the New York Post.
Each of the political parties shares responsibility for the troubles at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored organizations that needed to be bailed out this weekend by - who else? - the taxpayers.
The latest housing bubble started back in the Clinton administration, when Washington suddenly got the brilliant notion that all Americans should be able to buy houses.
No, let me change that.
Our elected officials concluded that everyone deserved to own a house regardless of whether they could actually afford one.
Democrats would have you believe that every ill in the U.S. rests squarely on the Republicans, when they are hugely responsible for this mess, too.
The real trouble began in 1999 when Franklin Delano Raines, former budget director for Bill Clinton, took over as chairman of Fannie.
Only Raines knows why he pushed so hard to expand the number of mortgages and the size of those loans that Fannie could hold.
But at the end of the Clinton administration and into the Bush presidency, Fannie Mae and its sister organization, Freddie Mac, ended up owning trillions of dollars of mortgages.
So, we can either play the blame game, as Obama has favored, or admit it’s a bi-partisan screw-up and go about fixing it.
Another mess born in the Clinton days (like the Clinton Recession) that Democrats pretend magically appeared when Bush took office.
We’re Still Not in a Recession
The Barack Obama campaign has been beating the drum about the sour state of the U.S. economy, and the mainstream media keeps pushing the “r” word: recession.
But guess what… the reality is quite different than the jaundiced view coming out of Denver.
The economy performed better than expected in Q2 of 2008, according to the Associated Press.
The economy shifted to a higher gear in the spring, growing at its fastest pace in nearly a year as foreign buyers snapped up U.S. exports and tax rebates spurred shoppers at home.
The Commerce Department reported Thursday that gross domestic product, or GDP, increased at a 3.3 percent annual rate in the April-June quarter. The revised reading was much better than the government’s initial estimate of a 1.9 percent pace and exceeded economists’ expectations for a 2.7 percent growth rate.
I’m so sure we’ll hear about this in Obama’s speech tonight.
Sorry Obama, the Dollar is Strengthening
Despite attack ads from Barack Obama about the economy being in utter peril, Bloomberg.com reports the U.S. dollar heads for a fifth weekly gain on dropping oil prices and a global slowdown.
The dollar headed for a fifth weekly gain against the euro, its longest winning streak in more than two years, as crude oil prices declined and economies from Germany to Japan contracted.
The U.S. currency rose to the strongest level in almost six months against the euro and a seven-month high versus the yen. The pound dropped for an 11th day against the dollar, the longest run of declines in at least 37 years, on speculation a recession will force the Bank of England to cut interest rates.
That’s good news for the American people, but don’t expect to hear it in Obama’s stump speeches.
Obama Lies about being on the Banking Committee
Oops, he did it, again. Today Barack Obama falsely claimed to be on the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.
While Obama was at a press conference in Sderot, Israel, he told this tall tale…
“Just this past week, we passed out of the out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee - which is my committee - a bill to call for divestment from Iran as way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.”
Just one problem with that statement… he’s not on that committee.
What in the world will Barack Obama say tomorrow on his international gaffe tour?
Why I am a Republican in 2008
I explain in a video on YouTube why I will be voting Republican in 2008.
As a family man with four kids and a small business owner, my focus is on the economy and how we must reduce spending, rather than raise taxes.
I also touch on working towards being energy independent by following a number of paths, including oil and natural gas exploration and production, clean coal technologies, building nuclear power plants, and harnessing wind power.
It’s time to stop mortgaging our future, and to start investing in it.
Obama Mac vs. PC
Parody of the Mac and PC commercials that discusses wealth redistribution.
RedHatBlueHat 5: Potential First Ladies as MILFs?
Episode 5 of RedHatBlueHat included the regular cast of Tim Jones, Mike Allen, Sam Harrelson, Shawn Collins and Todd Crawford getting all hot and bothered over the potential first ladies, drilling for oil and the Obama plan to return to failed Clinton practices of prosecuting terrorists.
We discussed how America’s Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, had the following to say about the Obama idea to return to the Clinton plan when it comes to bringing jihadists to trial…
“I also believe that the remarks yesterday that were made by several people in the Obama camp that if (Osama) Bin Laden were taken to Guantanamo, he would be given habeas corpus rights is startling. The reality is that there seems to be more concern about the rights of terrorists or alleged terrorists than the rights that the American people have to safety and security.”
Regarding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, many of the responsible parties escaped prosecution because of the limits on civilian criminal prosecution.
Same result for the prosecution efforts of the monsters responsible for attacks on the Khobar Towers, the U.S.S. Cole, and the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
It was a toothless plan to treat foreign terrorists like U.S. born shoplifters on September 10, 2001 and we paid a dear price for it.
But like many things Obama, everything old is new again - bad ideas wrapped in new bumper sticker slogans.
We also discussed energy plans and how they contrast. Whereas McCain wants to work towards energy security for a prosperous economy, the Obama plan that focuses on what he doesn’t want and what we can’t do.
The reality is that our economy is tied directly to the availability of diverse domestic energy sources, and McCain is addressing the issue head on.
We talked about how McCain plans to work towards securing our future economy with offshore drilling and the construction of nuclear reactors.
Finally, the gang turns to the issue of which potential First Lady is the hottest. There is some crossing of party lines and surprising picks from both the blue hats and the red hats as things develop. Final verdict is that either way, there will be talk of FLILFs.