Yeah, Obama Was a Little Off On this One

This President, just like virtually all of his predecessors (Reagan and FDR included), has engaged in a fair amount of demagoguery. Perhaps the most egregious example of it had to do with his 2008 campaign assertion that HIS administration would crack down on tax havens and that that act alone would raise $100 billion extra every year for the treasury.............................................................................A little bit off? Yeah, the dude was a little bit off. Less than a year later, (by then) President Obama's own international tax proposal claimed to collect only $21 billion a year (a 79% reduction) AND the vast majority of that was in the form of tax increases on companies trying to compete in a world market. The amount of money that the report ultimately claimed to raise from this supposed tax evasion in low tax jurisdictions? Try $870 million dollars a year, a whopping 99.1% reduction from his original 2008 claim. Youza, huh? Millionaires and billionaires indeed.

Hillary Clinton Update/Shame on Fox

It appears that Mrs. Clinton has been admitted into the hospital with a blood clot relative to her concussion. Hm, I wonder if any of those idiots over at Fox News (O'Reilly, Gutfeld, Bolton, etc. - and kudos to Greta Van Susteren for defending Mrs. Clinton) who implied/joked around that the woman was faking to get out of testifying are going to apologize for it. A little something tells me here, probably not.

Miscellaneous 160

1) The cost of cosmetic surgery has been rising at a rate that is lower than the rate of inflation (this, from the National Center for Policy Analysis). This tells me that competition in healthcare CAN work when in fact it's allowed to.............2) In 1975, there were 25 million people on Medicare and the average cost was $2,000 per enrollee. By 2040, those numbers are expected to be 88 million and $17,000, respectively. To say that this trajectory is thoroughly unsustainable should be obvious - TO EVERYBODY.............3) Medicaid was started in 1965 and its original budget was approximately $1 billion. The program's current budget is $250 billion AND, according to the CBO, the budget for that program is expected to hit $600 billion by 2023 and eclipse a trillion ten years later. Again, UNSUSTAINABLE.............4) According to the National Tax Journal, less than 50% (39-42, depending on the survey) of the people in the top 1% in 1996 were still in that group by 2005. This whole notion that the affluent have somehow carved out a permanent high status is ludicrous (not to mention a figment of the President's imagination).............5) The President seems to be operating on a notion that tax policy doesn't in any way influence economic behavior, that increasing taxes will never cause people to work less, invest differently, and/or shelter their money. The fellow is being exceedingly naive on this one, I think.............6) According the Social Security Trust, there were 5.4 workers per retiree in 1960. By 2040, that ratio will dip all the way to 2.3 workers per retiree. Time to think outside the box, I'm thinking.............7) Have you ever wondered why the terrorists switched from machine guns (their previous mode of terror) to suicide bombers in Israel? I'll tell you why. It's because Israel has a right to carry law and little old ladies were pulling guns out of their underwear and killing the terrorists before they could get off too many shots. Interesting, huh?

On this Notion that Israel Somehow Practices Apartheid

It's absurd. Israel is the only nation in that shit-hole part of the world in which Jews, Arabs, and Christians are able to dine together, work together, shop together, and even serve in the government together (there are a lot of Arabs serving in the Knesset NOW). It's also a country in which Arabs (many of them residents of the West Bank) probably receive the best healthcare of any Arab population in the whole region (some hospitals having close to 40% Arab patients). Yes, they did build a wall along the West Bank but the only reason that they did that was to stop the suicide bombers who were coming in like a sieve and wreaking havoc (it's been successful, btw, terrorists acts are down 90%). Look, I'm not opposed to criticizing Israel and I've done it myself on occasion. But to have people like Jimmy Carter throwing around such loaded terms as apartheid is well beyond the pale, imo.

Cuts Shmutts/Podesta Lies

Washington is strange place. Only there would a person even attempt to call adjustments to the rate of growth of spending "budget cuts" - and savage ones, no less. It's a dirty little secret that they have and they call it baseline budgeting.........................................................................................So, yes, even with the supposedly "draconian cuts" of the Ryan budget, the vast, VAST, percentage of those (yes, there are some actual cuts in the first year of it but after that the budget grows approximately 40% over the next 11 years) are basically slowdowns in the rate of projected growth.........................................................................................And why do the nummies do it this way, you ask? I don't know, probably for several reasons. a) Bureaucrats and politicians love power (and wealth) and what better way to consolidate it than to remove it from the private sector and b) it also provides multiple opportunities to demagogue. Take, for instance, this quote from the Center for American Progress's John Podesta - "Closing the budget gap entirely on the spending side would require draconian cuts - cuts that would affect Americans' everyday lives, threaten the fundamentals of our health and safety, and reduce investment in science and technology, which undergird innovation in our economy." It's utter nonsense (and, yes, I could come up with a conservative counterpart regarding defense spending), in that as I plainly pointed out in a previous post, we don't even have to cut (real cuts, I'm saying) spending in order to balance the budget in the short term (10-12 years). We just have to keep the growth of it to 2.5% and it'll balance itself!! Enough already with the BS, you slugs.

A Fair and Balanced Addendum to Miscellaneous 154

As you folks may recall, I castigated President Obama for the fact that even the Democratic-friendly witness at those recent Congressional debt hearings (one Mark Zandi) had had some issues with the man. Yeah, well, guess what, the Republican-friendly witness at those very same hearings didn't exactly rubber-stamp his side, either. According to Kevin Hassett, the optimal debt consolidation package is one in which is the budget cuts outweigh the spending increases by approximately 5.7:1. Considering the fact that every single Republican at that (now infamous) Presidential debate said that they would have no problem walking away from a 10:1 cuts to revenue package, it doesn't necessarily sound as if they're being all that serious, either, I'm thinking.

The World Bank on High Corporate Tax-Rates (Yeah, You Heard Me Right)

"High tax-rates do not always lead to high tax revenues. Between 1982 and 1999, the average corporate income tax-rate fell from 46% to 33% while corporate income tax collections rose from 2.1% of national income to 2.4% of national income."......Wow, it seems as if they're saying that competitive tax-rates can sometimes improve a country's economy/ its economic standing in the world. Who'd have ever thunk it?