Archive for October, 2010

Herman Cain

In a New York Times interview last week, President Obama acknowledged that there’s “no such thing as shovel-ready projects”.

This was one of his main selling points for the $862 billion stimulus package. He now admits they don’t exist, and the stimulus is clearly not working.

The public was told that unemployment would not go above 8 percent if the stimulus package passed. They passed it and unemployment went to over 9.6 percent and stayed there. So now the president and his economic advisors say we might have to just get used to high unemployment. And they want to spend even more money.

70 percent of what?

Another New York Times article titled “Obama on Defensive at Forum” was buried in the lower left corner of Page 17 of the October 15, 2010 edition. It reported that a recent black college graduate “complained that despite the government’s costly actions, our unemployment rate still rises, and businesses uncertain about taxes are not hiring college graduates like me.”

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Bob Maistros

OK.  Now comes the real heavy lifting.

All week, I’ve been writing about the one-size-fixes-all solution that should be the heart of the GOP governing agenda:  The Fair Tax – a national sales tax with rebates – with the rebates slightly modified so that every American pays something.

Nah, nah, nah, nah ... hey, hey, hey, goodbye.

I’ve provided the first 16 of 20 reasons.  Now here are the last four – followed by the call to action:

Reason #17:  Peace of Mind. Nina Olson – the IRS’s National Taxpayer Advocate – has pointed out that eight in ten Americans pay for help with their taxes, more than 60 percent engaging a preparer and the rest purchasing software.

Paying for help – to pay a bill.

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Dacia Nichol

Well, Chris Coons and Christine O’Donnell avoided the question in their Delaware Senate debate, but I won’t: Should we support a reconciliation deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan? If I’m not mistaken, I believe we’ve already received what our answer should be from our commander there, General David Petraeus.

Yes.

Fine, Hamid, take your meds.

This morning’s report that International Security Assistance Forces (“ISAF”) in Afghanistan have facilitated the transport of a Taliban commander to Kabul for talks is an affirmation that this is the direction our military and NATO forces will be pursuing. No, I don’t like it, but yes, I trust the most qualified man in the field to make the determination of what is necessary to move things forward in Afghanistan. Either that or nuke the place. Kidding. Just nuke half of it.

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Dan Calabrese

Did you know that those wild-eyed, tax-cutting right-wing Republicans want to impose a new 23 percent tax on everything you buy?

Neither did I, because that’s ridiculous. But if you live in certain highly competitive congressional districts this year, you might have heard that very thing in any number of ads put out by Democratic candidates.

Scourge of "working families"?

“Republican candidate Wacky Van Rightwingsma wants to impose an additional 23 percent tax on the working families of Congressional District XL! Wacky Van Rightwingsma! Wrong for West Virtucky!”

This notion originates with the support many Republican candidates offer for the so-called FairTax – a proposal by which federal income taxes would be eliminated completely, as would the IRS, to be replaced with a national consumption tax. Although FairTax supporters have not proposed a specific rate, economists have estimated that the rate would need to be 23 percent to achieve a dollar-for-dollar replacement of federal tax revenues.

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Brett Noel

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Bob Maistros

Today’s must reading (other than this here post) is a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Arizona Senator John Kyl in which he identifies the centerpiece of a “growth agenda” as “pro-growth tax reform.”

Adds the Senate’s #2 Republican:  “And it just so happens that events are shaping up to achieve the kind of tax reform that could put our economy on a path of long-term growth.”

SOMEBODY is listening.

Dude.  Music to my ears.  Someone is listening over there in the puzzle palaces on the Potomac.

Kyl doesn’t specify a national sales tax – for which I am, all this week, making the case as the critical focus for the GOP.  He appears to lean toward a flatter income tax (which doesn’t address the intrusion, costs and confusion of defining and reporting income).

But I am certain that once my entire series reaches his hands – a near inevitability, I would think – Senator Kyl will change his mind and lead the entire House and Senate Republican leadership in pushing through a modified Fair Tax.

And herewith, four more reasons why the Fair Tax meets his prescription for “a bipartisan, comprehensive pro-growth tax reform:” Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Calabrese

Much to the dismay of “true conservatives” everywhere, it’s well-established that I am not a big fan of Republican U.S. Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell of Delaware. I think nominees for public office should have certain skills and qualifications that go beyond their ideological positioning, and O’Donnell clearly does not have them. That doesn’t mean I would prefer her far-left opponent, Chris Coons. It just means I wish the GOP could have found someone capable to nominate.

Quick, name the foreign minister of Usedjunkistan!

That said, the headlines from O’Donnell’s debate with Coons last night provide further evidence of the growing uselessness of debates as we do them in modern politics.

If you know one thing about last night’s debate, having scanned the morning’s headlines, it’s that O’Donnell couldn’t name a Supreme Court ruling with which she disagreed. Asked the question by a journalist who was serving as a “moderator,” she stammered and asked for a specific example. No, she was told, because the whole idea was to see if she could name one.

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Dacia Nichol

I have plenty of reason to side with the Palin-O’Donnell (“POD”) camps about their shoulder chips with expensive schools. I did not and cannot go to any of these institutions charging some $30,000 and upwards per year for undergrad tuition. Why? Let’s just say “life happened,” or more like, “kids, rent and bills happened.” But do I feel the need to discredit or be disgruntled with anyone who has earned a degree from one of them, just because it’s where they earned their degree?

Demonized.

Hell no. There’s a funny parallel I’ve noticed when it comes to, say, Harvard and Yale students. If you know them and like them, their education is highly spoken of and mothers are proud to announce the potential groom’s or bride’s “status”. If you don’t, they’re privileged snobs who think they’re better than everyone else. That’s fair – if you’re taking it on a case-by-case basis, that is. As a nation of individuals, it should be understood that judgment calls should be based on, well, the individual.

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Dan Calabrese

You have to wonder what it’s like to be John Dingell. The 84-year-old Michigan Democrat has been in Congress since he was 30 years old – having first been elected the same year Dwight Eisenhower won his second term as president. Before him, his father held the seat, having won it the same year Franklin Roosevelt won the presidency.

A new world.

As he rose in seniority, Dingell became the chairman – wait, sorry . . . you have to say it like this – Dingell became the powerful chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The way the House works, that means Dingell could pretty much delivery any goodies he wanted to his district in blue-collar, downriver suburban Detroit.

And delivering goodies got you re-elected, in Dingell’s case, year after year after free-spending year. This was the system Dingell knew. This was the system Dingell mastered. Many other members of Congress mastered it as well, including no small number of Republicans, but Dingell owned it. He thrived in a world in which the folks back home weren’t concerned about rising debt or the problem of how to pay for unfunded entitlement mandates stretching as far as the eye could see. Union retirees, ordinary grandmas and grandpas . . . they just wanted to be able to count on their checks, and as long as Big Jawn was in Congress, there was never a worry.

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Bob Maistros

What are the big problems that consume our political system and drove our recent financial crisis?  And what is the one factor that connects them all?

We don't need no stinkin' Obamacare.

You guessed it – the distortions caused by their treatment under the current income tax code.  Plus the ability to address these problems by ditching that code in favor of a modified version of the Fair Tax – a national sales tax.  Here we go with more of the reasons the Republicans should make its adoption their core focus: Read the rest of this entry »