by | ARTICLES, BLOG, ECONOMY, ELECTIONS, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, OBAMACARE, POLITICS, TAXES, TRUMP
I’m sick and tired of reading over and over again in places, both liberal and conservative, that the Trump and GOP-proposed tax reforms are going to give the lion’s share of the cuts to the top 1%. The entire concept is utterly distorted, especially in light of the fact that nobody talked about the litany of tax increases that occurred when Obama and his Democrat cronies passed the Obama and Obamacare increases.
Obama raised the Bush tax rates on only the wealthiest earners from 36% – 39.6 % and then again raised the tax rates on only the same wealthiest by adding a Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT) of 3.8%, — otherwise known as the “Obamacare Tax” — which covered all investment income of individuals, estates, and trusts. What’s more, Obama also raised capital gains on the wealthiest earners from 15% – 20%, but when the NIIT 3.8% tax was added to it, it actually raised the capital gains rates on the highest earners from 15 – 23.8% — an effective increase of nearly 59%!
Those ludicrous tax increases that no one talks about were principally responsible — along with the hemorrhage of regulations coming out of the Obama administration — for the horrific economic performance we’ve experienced since Obama took office. The first step the new Trump administration should take would be to reverse those very tax increases that Obama inflicted, which went 100% to the higher income individuals, and 0% to the middle class and lower income earners. The reversal of those insane tax increases should in no way be considered a tax cut as part of any tax reform package. Such a change would be a mere restoration of more reasonable rates from what was in fact an insane toxin on our entire economy.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, ECONOMY, ELECTIONS, FREEDOM, NEW YORK, POLITICS
Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) won a major court victory last week in a lawsuit against New York Attorney General Schneiderman. They demanded he disclose documents under New York’s Freedom of Information Law that outlines agreements he made with other attorneys general and allied non-profits regarding Attorneys General United for Clean Power – the coalition which subpoenaed CEI about our climate and energy work.
CEI’s General Counsel, Sam Kazman noted: “CEI’s court victory is a blow to the anti-free speech campaign led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. While the campaign by him and his cohorts that began in March continues against those who disagree with him on global warming, we are glad to see that it is being held subject to the basic laws of the land. By requiring Schneiderman to fully comply with our freedom of information request, the court is ensuring that agencies cannot use shortcuts as a means of skirting New York’s Freedom of Information law.”
While the litigation victory gained attention across several media platforms, my favorite headline came from The New York Post editorial yesterday, “The disclosure that could end Eric Schneiderman’s career.” Read the full editorial below:
State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s witch hunt against supposed “climate-science deniers” became an even more embarrassing debacle late last month — and just might wind up ending his career.
A state judge ruled in favor of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank whose Freedom of Information request the AG had denied. That gave Schneiderman 30 days to cough up documents concerning his agreements with other states’ AGs, and with a group of green activists, about their joint persecution of ExxonMobile and other entities for supposed “climate fraud.”
CEI had been targeted by one of Schneiderman’s co-conspirators, the Virgin Islands AG, with legal demands that plainly aimed at suppressing free speech and scientific inquiry that the nonprofit sponsors.
The think tank’s lawyers believe the documents could show improper conduct by the AGs. If they do, Schneiderman faces serious trouble.
Oh, and New York taxpayers are out some more cash over the AG’s bid to dodge the Freedom of Information Law: The court ordered Schneiderman to cover CEI’s court costs, because his defense of his denial of the FOIL request was so transparently lame. (His brief merely quoted New York law, without even making any argument as to why it applied in this case.)
It all began in March, at a press conference where Schneiderman and 16 other AGs seemed to join Al Gore to announce joint operations against Exxon. In fact, more of the AGs were never on board — they’d shown up for a far less ambitious announcement.
And both of the two AGs who did mean to work with Schneiderman have now backed out, with the Virgin Islands AG completely abandoning his suits and the Massachusetts AG “suspending” her work until further notice.
Schneiderman, meanwhile, has dropped his initial claims that Exxon covered up scientific findings. He had to: The evidence is clear that for decades the company’s been publishing scientific results that fit neatly into the mainstream.
Instead, the AG is now (supposedly) chasing a legal case based on the company’s failure to report the value of its oil reserves in the way he thinks it should.
(Seriously: The charge is that Exxon is overvaluing its oil reserves, because it doesn’t note the risk that anti-warming laws might make the petroleum worthless. Hmm: How is that going to fly with “climate science skeptic” Donald Trump sitting in the White House?)
Schneiderman maintains he shouldn’t have to come clean because he signed confidentiality agreements with the other AGs. But his office won’t say whether it’s going to appeal the FOIL ruling or obey the judge’s order.
If he does keep refusing to comply with the Freedom of Information Law, you have to think he’s worried about what those documents will reveal.
by | ARTICLES, ELECTIONS, FREEDOM, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAXES, TRUMP
On Election Day, many people were willing to overlook Donald Trump’s personal weaknesses because they realized that the biggest factor in this election was the economy — it affected their day-to-day lives more than anything else.
Many people – uniformly partisan Democrats – have accused Trump’s supporters of being bigots; but facts dispute this. A simple look at the voting changes between 2008/2012 and 2016 shows that fully one-third of counties that went for Obama in both 2008 and 2012 went for Trump in 2016. Clearly these Obama supporters were not bigots, and show that the move to Trump was based on real issues. You can hardly play the race card with such data. The electorate understood and believed that Trump’s economic policies were superior to Hillary’s, and they would be better off economically going forward with a President Trump instead of President Clinton.
Every single policy that Clinton advocated would have made the standard of living worse for the poor and the lower middle class – her major constituency. And this would have substantially increased inequality, the opposite of what she had promised. Her policies included:
- raising taxes on the upper middle class and the wealthy (who are already at an obscenely high tax rate). This stifles new growth by reducing the capital that would otherwise have gone into new or expanding businesses, and the jobs they would have created.
- increasing regulations, including overtime, sick pay, child care, union rules, environmental restrictions, etc. This places huge additional costs and burdens on job providers and creators, reducing the likelihood that they could provide new jobs.
- raising the minimum wage. This makes it too expensive for businesses to keep the least productive people on their payroll, as well as incentivizing business use of technology instead of people to grow.
Those that voted for Trump have been left behind or worse by Obama’s economic strategies. A vote for Hillary meant a vote for more of the same. So much of America is tired of that status quo, and wants to be able to not just try to survive — but thrive once again. For those who want to cast aspersions and heap cries of racism and other -isms upon the Americans who voted for our next President, they would be wise to remember the famous slogan of the other Clinton Era: “It’s the economy, stupid!”
by | ARTICLES, ELECTIONS, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, NEW YORK, OBAMA, POLITICS
I recently attended a dinner in NYC and sat next to a very nice professor from NYU. He was non-tenured, and have moved to the United States from Europe a decade ago. Because he was somewhat low-level, he felt he could not speak out any anything controversial or conservative, which is anathema to the idea of a university being a free exchange of ideas.
What’s more, this professor relayed how he had gotten an email from senior level administration at NYU after Trump was elected; the email pretty much stated how terrible it was the Trump one. This type of email from a high-ranking NYU official, could only be sent to faculty and staff if such positions were overwhelmingly singular-minded (in this case liberal) so that there would be little-to-no blowback for articulating such a position on a controversial matter.
Unfortunately, this anecdote represents a mindset that seems to be infecting NYU; two other, recent incidents support this. First, NYU decided to cancel a talk given by Milo Yiannopoulos that was scheduled this month. Mr. Yiannopoulos is the tech editor of the Breitbart website, and “has been criticized for his comments on Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists and feminists.” NYU’s official position cited “security concerns,” because the talk “was going to be held near student groups at NYU’s Manhattan campus ‘that are subjects of Mr. Yiannopoulos’ attacks.’” Of course, the real reason for this is that Yiannopoulos is popular among the alt-right, and giving him a platform to espouse his views — as controversial as some may find — would be bad. Better to silence someone with whom you disagree instead of mutual engaging and exchanging of viewpoints.
NYU has extended this mindset to one of its own professors. On October 30, “An NYU professor crusading against political correctness and student coddling was booted from the classroom last week after his colleagues complained about his ‘incivility.’” Michael Rechtenwald was a professor of liberal studies, and was put on paid leave for the rest of the semester. According to the NY Post, “Rectenwald launched an undercover Twitter account called Deplorable NYU Prof on Sept. 12 to argue against campus trends like “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings” policing Halloween costumes and other aspects of academia’s growing PC culture.
Once his identity became known, a “12-person committee calling itself the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group, including two deans, published a letter to the editor:
“As long as he airs his views with so little appeal to evidence and civility, we must find him guilty of illogic and incivility in a community that predicates its work in great part on rational thought and the civil exchange of ideas. We seek to create a dynamic community that values full participation. Such efforts are not the ‘destruction of academic integrity’ Professor Rectenwald suggests, but rather what make possible our program’s approach to global studies.”
The same day the letter was published, Rectenwald was summoned to a meeting with his department dean and an HR representative, Rectenwald described how, “They claimed they were worried about me and a couple people had expressed concern about my mental health. They suggested my voicing these opinions was a cry for help.”
Apparently, expressing an opinion counter to the prevailing liberal cultural at NYU will silence you (if you are a professor), cancel you (if you are a speaker), or remove you and claim you have a mental health crisis (if you are an undercover and outspoken critic). This is what passes for academia these days, and it is truly reprehensible.
by | ARTICLES, CONSTITUTION, ELECTIONS, FREEDOM, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAXES
Jay Cost is one of my favorite writers these days, blending history and analysis in a straightforward tone. Here’s his take on why Clinton lost:
“Political coalitions are tricky things to manage in the United States. Ours is a country of more than 320 million people but only two major political parties—so each side’s voting bloc tends to be unstable at the margins, where national elections are actually won and lost. It is hard to build a winning coalition, harder still to maintain it during the laborious process of governing, and hardest of all to hand it off to a designated successor. It takes a politician of the highest caliber—a Roosevelt, a Reagan—to accomplish all this.
As last week’s results clearly demonstrated, Barack Obama is not cut from such an Augustan cloth. The political coalition he built in 2008 burst apart in spectacular fashion. His successor will not be Hillary Clinton, his secretary of state, but Donald Trump, the man who accused him of being a foreigner.
No lame duck president has ever had to suffer such ignominy. If Obama were to quietly steal out of town on January 20, as John Adams and John Quincy Adams did upon their defeats, nobody could blame him. Even so, Obama’s coalition fell apart because he failed utterly to maintain it during his tenure.
For eight years, we have heard stories about Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant.” Single women, millennials, Latinos and Asians, gays and lesbians, and so on, drove Obama to a fantastic electoral victory in 2008 and would power the Democrats for a generation—or more—to come.
While these blocs were integral to Obama’s triumph in 2008, there were other, more humdrum factions as well—the typical ones that every Democratic politician, be he as cool as Obama or as boring as John Kerry, has to win over. The suburban women of Florida’s I-4 corridor. The blue-collar workers in Dubuque and Erie. The African Americans in Detroit and Milwaukee, who are always counted on to deliver an enormous haul for the party. These voters are not the stuff of highfalutin’ think pieces for liberal magazines, but they were nevertheless an essential part of Obama’s victory.
They abandoned his successor last week. Not altogether, of course—but enough to serve the Democrats a shocking defeat.
There had been warning signs from virtually the start of Obama’s tenure. He won a smashing victory in 2008 by sweeping the traditional swing states and adding new ones to the list—Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. But voters in all these states signaled at some point over the last seven years that their loyalty was not unconditional. Starting with Bob McDonnell’s whopping victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race in 2009, then Scott Brown’s surprise Senate triumph in Massachusetts, and finally to the Tea Party wave of 2010—it was evident by the halfway point of Obama’s first term that personal affection for him did not necessarily translate to support for his policies or other Democrats. Then came 2012, in which the president was reelected with 3.6 million fewer votes than he received four years prior. The admonition was repeated in 2014, when the Republican wave that hit the House of Representatives in 2010 wiped the Democrats out of their Senate majority.
Obama’s response to these electoral setbacks was to pretend they did not happen. Again and again, he stubbornly refused to change course. When he lost his filibuster-proof Senate majority in 2010, he passed an unfinished version of Obamacare through the budget reconciliation process. When he and House speaker John Boehner were on the cusp of striking a grand bargain on taxes and entitlements in the summer of 2011, he insisted on additional tax hikes at the last minute, skunking the deal. When he won a narrow victory in 2012, he called for extensive gun control legislation, framing the debate in Manichean terms that alienated those Midwestern voters who had the gall to support him and the NRA simultaneously. When the Democrats lost the Senate in 2014, he enacted immigration reform through executive fiat and brokered a highly unpopular deal with Iran.
Last but not least, he handed off leadership of his party to Hillary Clinton. Weighed down by personal and professional issues, she was his opposite in almost every way. During the Democratic primary battle of 2008, she had been a useful foil for Obama, illustrating his point that it was time for a new approach to governance. Now, she was the heir apparent—as if his voters would not care either way. Turns out they did.
Much of the blame for last week’s defeat obviously belongs to Clinton, who was a terrible candidate. But one cannot overlook Obama’s responsibility in this epic debacle. He blessed Clinton’s candidacy early in the cycle, despite the fact that she was under investigation by the FBI. And for years prior, he had acted as though he could do as he wished and retain the loyalty of his voters.
He was wrong. Clinton dramatically underperformed with the white working-class in the Midwest. She did not receive sufficient margins from African Americans in the Rust Belt or the South. And though she had the noxious Trump as her opponent, she failed to make up for these setbacks with swing voters in places like suburban Charlotte or Philadelphia. Nor did she make many inroads with traditional GOP constituencies in Milwaukee and Grand Rapids, who had been turned off by the bombastic Republican in the primaries. Even the Latino vote disappointed, leaving Florida out of reach and Colorado surprisingly close. Only the Harry Reid “machine” in Nevada functioned as expected.
When Obama leaves the White House in two months, the Republican party will hold more public offices than at any point since the Great Depression. The president’s greatest political ambition will therefore go unrealized: He is not the 21st century’s Ronald Reagan; he is its Woodrow Wilson.
The 28th president was quite a bit like Obama, a cerebral type with unceasing confidence in his superior intellect and moral purity. But Wilson’s ambition to recast society in his own image outstripped his political acumen. Elected in a landslide in 1912, he only narrowly squeaked by in 1916. Four years later, his would-be successor lost to Warren Harding, one of the most unspectacular specimens ever to occupy the Oval Office. Wilson tarnished the reputation of progressivism so badly that the GOP would enjoy complete control over the government for the ensuing decade. It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt—a pragmatic man who lacked Wilson’s scholarly disposition but had an intuitive grasp of what the people expected of him—who would become modern liberalism’s hero.
Maybe some Democrat down the line will re-create Obama’s coalition and reshape it in a durable way. After all, Obama was on to something back in 2008. There are common interests among working-class whites in the Midwest, college kids, minority voters, and suburban women. Democrats have thought for a decade that this coalition was waiting to emerge. Not so, but a gifted politician could unite that group and build a coalition for the long haul. Such a leader would have to be more like FDR or Reagan than like Wilson—or Obama.”
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, CONSTITUTION, ELECTIONS, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, POLITICS, TAXES
The long-forgotten IRS scandal has continued to limp along largely unnoticed. Unfortunately, the IRS has not entirely curbed its behavior of discrimination, despite assurances. Some tea party groups still have not had their applications approved; the longest seems to be nearly seven years (Dec. 2009). And that’s not all.
Incredibly instead of finishing the process, more questions and information has been requested in some instances. Yet even more incredulously, the “IRS has taken the unprecedented step of publicly filing actual return information,” putting taxpayer return information in the public realm; it released on of the sets of questions it sent to a tea party group in Texas. Here’s more:
“The IRS has taken the unprecedented step of publicly filing actual return information,” said Edward Greim, who is handling the case on behalf of more than 400 groups targeted by the IRS.
Still, the move to release the information has inflamed an already tense class action legal battle between the IRS and tea party groups who feel the agency is still targeting them more than three years after it promised to cease.
Mr. Greim said releasing the letter is proof that the IRS can’t be trusted to fairly handle the cases.
“The IRS‘ conscious decision to attach this Section 6103-protected request to a public filing makes it even harder to believe that the IRS can treat TPTP and similar groups fairly and neutrally. This is, and will continue to be, a core focus of our litigation in the coming weeks,” he said.
Both the IRS and officials at the Justice Department, which is acting as the tax agency’s lawyer, declined to comment, citing the ongoing legal battle.
But the tax agency said in court papers that Mr. Greim has been misleading the court, and said the documents were designed to prove that the IRS has been dealing fairly with the TPTP. The IRS said the information it requested focuses on the tea party group’s activities and whether they would be illegal for a tax-exempt group to engage in.
“It is more of the same: spurious attacks on the IRS and mischaracterizations of the facts,” the Justice Department said in its briefs.
The IRS admitted in 2013 that it singled tea party groups out for intrusive scrutiny, including crossing lines by asking questions about the groups’ associations, meetings and even members’ reading habits. Some groups received multiple letters, each time further delaying their applications.
After being dinged by its inspector general, the agency promised it would stop asking inappropriate questions, and insisted it canceled the use of secret targeting lists to single out groups.
But a federal appeals court this summer ruled that as long as some groups are still stuck in the backlog, the IRS is still conducting illegal targeting.
The tax agency, which had been blocking processing, claiming it couldn’t do anything while the court cases were proceeding, quickly kicked into gear and announced they would process the three remaining cases.
In a letter last week to the TPTP, the IRS fired off a new set of questions — the fourth inquiry the group has received since it applied for nonprofit status in 2012. In the new questions, IRS agent Jerry Fierro said he looked over the group’s website and spotted potential trouble spots, including “rallies, parades, educational workshops, speaking events, voter registration drives, fund raisers and straw polls.”
The IRS says those activities could squelch a group’s application.
Mr. Greim, the lawyer for the TPTP, said in making its letter public, the IRS was showing how aggressive its tactics are toward tea party groups. He said the agency, which has held up the TPTP’s application for 41 months, only gave the organization 30 days to respond, and said if the questions aren’t all answered, it could derail the application again.
“The IRS‘ conscious decision to attach this Section 6103-protected request to a public filing makes it even harder to believe that the IRS can treat TPTP and similar groups fairly and neutrally,” Mr. Greim said.
Section 6013 of the tax code prohibits sharing of information from taxpayers’ returns.
Tax experts said the IRS letter is likely considered protected information, but they said the IRS is probably on safe legal ground because the law allows for information to be filed if the taxpayer is a party in a lawsuit and the filing directly relates to an issue in the case.
In addition to the TPTP, two other tea party groups that were targeted by the IRS are still awaiting approval. Unite in Action, a Michigan-based group, applied in 2010, and the Albuquerque Tea Party applied nearly seven years ago, in December 2009.
Jay Sekulow, chief counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, which represents the other two groups, said they have not received a new set of questions similar to the list sent to the TPTP. But he said he’s been prodding the
IRS for a final decision.
“We again demanded that they review their applications and process them in a fair and expeditious manner,” he said in a statement.
by | ARTICLES, CONSTITUTION, ELECTIONS, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, TAXES
What happens when the government uses its power to give money from one group of people to another group of people? It’s happening. It’s not supposed to happen. See, in our Constitution, the government has the right do things — limited things — in order to safeguard the rights of the people. Our Constitution relates to individual rights; it’s not a document on democracy. Unfortunately, these lines are becoming more blurred all the time.
Maybe democracy as a system of government by itself cannot work; in other words, if a democracy allows two foxes and a chicken to vote on what to have for dinner, it reveals a fatal flaw — because it allows an unfortunate outcome. Of course the two foxes are going to vote on having the chicken for dinner!
At the same time, democracy is the only best form of government if the majority protects the rights of the minority, whether it’s racial, economic, or whatever — those rights must be protected. But this applies to all. In the same way, a democracy voting to allow the lower 51% to usurp the property of the upper 49% is just as intolerable as usurping rights based on gender, religion, or race.
You can elect a Chavez or a Castro in a duly elected election, but you can’t allow him to just use the fact that he got a majority of the people’s as an excuse to abuse a minority of the people. People just can’t vote to take all the money for themselves.
You could have a referendum on whether the richest people (making over $200,000/year) should give their money to those making under $200,000. You could vote that… but not really because people also have the right to their own property. What then? How do you resolve this kind of conflict?
There is no mandatory, compulsory requirement to vote. If our Founding Fathers want to put voting in the Constitution they could have, but they didn’t. On the other hand, our Constitution specifically does not allow our government to take money from somebody and give it to someone else. Our Constitution merely gives the Federal government enumerated powers, and it in no way allows us to take money from some people and give it to someone else that the government has deemed more worthy.
When Barack Obama stated for the first time that he would take money from one group and give it to another — when he announced he was going after millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share — it was the first time he verbally stated something unconstitutional.
In contrast, the states are allowed to make laws to do that — they don’t have Constitutions with enumerated powers as in the case of the federal Constitution.. States can legally, actually vote that more wealthy people must give money to less wealthy people. If and when that happens, people have the right to move within the United States to a different state with different laws — but yet still remain a US citizen. You can see the effect of this mentality even now, as high tax states have seen a population exodus to states that are less punitive.
So, what do when it is happening at the federal level? Vote for a new president? Perhaps that will change it. But how do we curb the effects of people receiving more and more wealth transfers and benefits? The unintended consequence of such policy is that the recipients will learn to always vote for the person that will create or continue policy that will benefit the voter in a tangible, direct, and economic way. As a result, the elections become less fair and based on being an informed citizen, and more on “How can I benefit? What’s in it for me?”
In this way, it logically follows that the argument could be made that you shouldn’t be able to vote if you have a conflict of interest. The suggestion of curtailing voting rights from those who are recipients of such egregious and unconstitutional policy is indeed drastic. But perhaps it should be a consideration for those who are too short-sided to see the long-term problems for this country — because the idea that our federal government can economically abuse a segment of the population for monetary gain is also radical.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, BUSINESS, CONSTITUTION, ECONOMY, ELECTIONS, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, HYPOCRISY, OBAMA, OBAMACARE, POLITICS, TAXES
Aetna’s decision to withdraw from 11 out of 15 state exchanges is a big deal; it follows the paths of UnitedHealth Group and Humana, both large insurance companies who have also chosen to cut ties with Obamacare. (Incidentally, the DoJ is trying to block a Aetna-Humana merger; are they worried about competition?)
A short analysis by Market Watch provides some insight into the decision and the current state of Obamacare:
**Aetna explained the decision as a way to “limit our financial exposure moving forward,” after pretax losses of $200 million in the second quarter and losses totaling $430 million on individual products since January 2014. The company did not specify what portion of the losses was attributable to individual public plan offerings.
**The company criticized the ACA’s “inadequate” risk-adjustment mechanism, which is meant to limit insurers’ losses as they start covering sicker individuals. It’s a common criticism from health insurers, which have long said that the risk-pool program isn’t working the way it’s supposed to, though others say big insurance companies should instead change their model to keep costs down.
**Of Aetna’s exchange membership this year, more than half is new, with those needing expensive care making up “an even larger share” in the second quarter, the company said.
**Coupled with the risk pool, this makes premiums costlier and “creates significant sustainability concerns,” the company said.
The affect of these withdrawls means fewer insurers and fewer choices for consumers than when the law first began several years ago. That’s not good. The law needs some reform. MarketWatch notes, “The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has indicated a willingness to make changes to the risk-pool mechanism, although it’s unclear whether legislation to that end would be passed.
Any fixes will also depend on strong enrollment figures. Premiums have increased for 2017, but the financial penalty for not having health insurance has also increased. Whether that penalty, an average of $969 per household, according to a Kaiser analysis, will prompt increased enrollment is a “big wild card,” according to a co-author of the Kaiser report. A rise in premium costs “suggests additional enrollment growth is not a given,” said Riggs, having potential negative implications for hospital and managed care, along with investors in those spaces.”
Will this have an impact on the 2016 election? It will be interesting to see — especially since the open enrollment period is slated to begin on November 1, just days before the 2016 election. The cost of premiums, especially if they are substantially higher, may affect people’s voting decisions. Of course, don’t put it past the Administration to delay open enrollment until Nov 15 and shift everything by two weeks, in order to avoid a “November surprise”. The only thing that’s not a surprise at this point is that the law continues to founder considerably, at the expense and disruption of everyday citizens.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, ECONOMY, ELECTIONS, FREEDOM, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAXES
Here’s another ridiculous article by “economist” Grep Ip, wondering aloud once again why the economy isn’t doing any better. (“Why Aren’t Low Rates Working? Blame Dividends!” WSJ, June 5). Either he’s truly incompetent as an economist not to see the detrimental effects of government policies on businesses and the economy, or he’s playing dumb to give political cover to the Obama Administration by pretending their policies aren’t harmful and looking the other way in his analysis.
Ip writes, “One of the great mysteries of the recovery is why low interest rates have done so little to lift business investment. After all, that is supposed to be one of the ways monetary policy works: A lower cost of capital makes any project more viable. But what if lower interest rates are actually hurting investment by encouraging companies to pay dividends or buyback stock instead?”
This is exactly what is happening — it’s no mystery. But he draws no substantial conclusions. If he would just come down from his ivory tower of what is “supposed to happen” under Keynesian economics, and actually observe what is happening, he might actually learn something. The fact of the matter is, Obama’s policies are destroying our business environment and eliminating the opportunity.
The burden of overregulation, the increases in taxes, the litigation-friendly environment, the overreaching government agencies, Obamacare, unprecedented debt and more — all of these factors cause businesses to essentially pause their business strategy. Who in their right mind really would consider substantial investment in an environment that is hostile to workers, and an economy that is now seeing more businesses close instead of open? The risk is often too great. Sitting it out is a safer bet.
Not only is it not a mystery as to why low interest rates haven’t spurred growth, it’s a no-brainer. To ignore the government’s effect on business and the economy is unprofessional and incompetent. “It’s the government, stupid!”
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, ECONOMY, ELECTIONS, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, POLITICS, RETIREMENT, SOCIAL SECURITY, TAXES
Entitlement reform is necessary for the fiscal health of this country, but it is something that no one wants to talk about, much less tackle. How can we begin? How can we open up the conversation and the possibility to reform and improve our social security system?
One step in the right direction would be to treat Social Security as a true retirement plan, and not as a wealth transfer system that it currently is. This could begin with reclassifying the payroll tax. The majority of the payroll tax covers Social Security retirement benefits. If we actually used it (or at least most of it) for that individual’s social security retirement, everyone’s perception would change. Instead of being viewed as a hated tax (just ask any young person who has received their first paycheck), it would be viewed as a desirable saving for their future!
A move in this direction could be helped by a characteristic of the present structure. The employer and employee contribute equally to the Social Security Tax. If the individual’s part went towards his personal retirement, the other part could go towards defraying the past obligations that are coming due. If we had done such a thing 20 years ago, the entire system would have been fixed. . Unfortunately, the present situation would probably require some portion of the individual’s portion to also go towards paying the ever growing obligation for past unfunded promises. It’s that dire! And it gets worse every year.
Let’s stop treating Social Security like welfare or wealth transfers and start treating it like a retirement system. It’s our money anyway, even though the government wants to act like it is being generous when it gives us back our money. This would lessen the loose-and-fast accounting gimmicks that contribute to the fiscal mismanagement of Social Security anyway — and may move it away from its impending insolvency.
