This must be stopped! Enough of our spendthrift, profligate government. Much more of this money should remain with us rather than be wasted on pork or pet projects that allow these government officials to have their name plastered on some building or institution, or to be transferred to those who are irresponsible and lazy but feel that it is their right to share in the American dream. (You know these individuals: they use food stamps to buy liquor and cigarettes and their money to buy iPods, iPhones, $200 sneakers, cell phones, tattoos and gold onlays for their teeth while having numerous children by countless and nameless partners.)

We must use all means possible to let our representatives know that we want the Bush tax “cuts” to remain in effect. If they are allowed to expire, the government will be taking billions of additional dollars more from us each year – which is on top of Obama’s new taxes for healthcare.

Remember Nov. 2nd.

The Tax Tsunami On The Horizon
Investors Business Daily 07/21/2010

Fiscal Policy: Many voters are looking forward to 2011, hoping a new Congress will put the country back on the right track. But unless something's done soon, the new year will also come with a raft of tax hikes — including a return of the death tax — that will be real killers.

Through the end of this year, the federal estate tax rate is zero — thanks to the package of broad-based tax cuts that President Bush pushed through to get the economy going earlier in the decade.

But as of midnight Dec. 31, the death tax returns — at a rate of 55% on estates of $1 million or more. The effect this will have on hospital life-support systems is already a matter of conjecture.

Resurrection of the death tax, however, isn't the only tax problem that will be ushered in Jan. 1. Many other cuts from the Bush administration are set to disappear and a new set of taxes will materialize. And it's not just the rich who will pay.

The lowest bracket for the personal income tax, for instance, moves up 50% — to 15% from 10%. The next lowest bracket — 25% — will rise to 28%, and the old 28% bracket will be 31%. At the higher end, the 33% bracket is pushed to 36% and the 35% bracket becomes 39.6%.

But the damage doesn't stop there.

The marriage penalty also makes a comeback, and the capital gains tax will jump 33% — to 20% from 15%. The tax on dividends will go all the way from 15% to 39.6% — a 164% increase.

Both the cap-gains and dividend taxes will go up further in 2013 as the health care reform adds a 3.8% Medicare levy for individuals making more than $200,000 a year and joint filers making more than $250,000.

Other tax hikes include: halving the child tax credit to $500 from $1,000 and fixing the standard deduction for couples at the same level as it is for single filers.

Letting the Bush cuts expire will cost taxpayers $115 billion next year alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and $2.6 trillion through 2020.

But even more tax headaches lie ahead. This "second wave" of hikes, as Americans for Tax Reform puts it, are designed to pay for ObamaCare and include:

The Medicine Cabinet Tax. Americans, says ATR, "will no longer be able to use health savings account, flexible spending account, or health reimbursement pretax dollars to purchase nonprescription, over-the-counter medicines (except insulin)."

The HSA Withdrawal Tax Hike. "This provision of ObamaCare," according to ATR, "increases the additional tax on nonmedical early withdrawals from an HSA from 10% to 20%, disadvantaging them relative to IRAs and other tax-advantaged accounts, which remain at 10%."

Brand Name Drug Tax. Makers and importers of brand-name drugs will be liable for a tax of $2.5 billion in 2011. The tax goes to $3 billion a year from 2012 to 2016, then $3.5 billion in 2017 and $4.2 billion in 2018.

Beginning in 2019 it falls to $2.8 billion and stays there. And who pays the new drug tax? Patients, in the form of higher prices.

Economic Substance Doctrine. ATR reports that "The IRS is now empowered to disallow perfectly legal tax deductions and maneuvers merely because it judges that the deduction or action lacks 'economic substance.'"

A third and final (for now) wave, says ATR, consists of the alternative minimum tax's widening net, tax hikes on employers and the loss of deductions for tuition:

• The Tax Policy Center, no right-wing group, says that the failure to index the AMT will subject 28.5 million families to the tax when they file next year, up from 4 million this year.

• "Small businesses can normally expense (rather than slowly deduct, or 'depreciate') equipment purchases up to $250,000," says ATR. "This will be cut all the way down to $25,000. Larger businesses can expense half of their purchases of equipment. In January of 2011, all of it will have to be 'depreciated.'"

• According to ATR, there are "literally scores of tax hikes on business that will take place," plus the loss of some tax credits. The research and experimentation tax credit will be the biggest loss, "but there are many, many others. Combining high marginal tax rates with the loss of this tax relief will cost jobs."

• The deduction for tuition and fees will no longer be available and there will be limits placed on education tax credits. Teachers won't be able to deduct their classroom expenses and employer-provided educational aid will be restricted. Thousands of families will no longer be allowed to deduct student loan interest.

Then there's the tax on Americans who decline to buy health care insurance (the tax the administration initially said wasn't a tax but now argues in court that it is) plus a 3.8% Medicare tax beginning in 2013 on profits made in real estate transactions by wealthier Americans.

Not all Americans may fully realize what's in store come Jan. 1. But they should have a pretty good idea by the mid-term elections, and members of Congress might take note of our latest IBD/TIPP Poll (summarized above).

Fifty-one percent of respondents favored making the Bush cuts permanent vs. 28% who didn't. Republicans were more than 4 to 1 and Independents more than 2 to 1 in favor. Only Democrats were opposed, but only by 40%-38%.

The cuts also proved popular among all income groups — despite the Democrats' oft-heard assertion that Bush merely provided "tax breaks for the wealthy." Fact is, Bush cut taxes for everyone who paid them, and the cuts helped the nation recover from a recession and the worst stock-market crash since 1929.

Maybe, just maybe, Americans remember that — and will not forget come Nov. 2.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/541131/201007211841/The-Tax-Tsunami-On-The-Horizon.aspx

Yes, there is some real change: from a President and his wife who respect America, their responsibilities and the office to Obama and his spouse who denigrate America both here and abroad, attend to their personal and political needs as priorities and disgrace the office of the President.

Now that the tables are turned, the Progressives are crying foul at anything that is less than reverential about Obama. It seems that such rights are only acceptible to them when they support their purposes and ideologies only.

Hypocrisy Watch: Left-Wing Hate and Violence

This is a formidable problem that should have been aggressively addressed by military force under the Bush Administration but wasn’t. Inexcusable negligence. The Obama Administration has only made matters worse… and essentially hopeless if Iran is to be stopped from developing and deploying nuclear weapons of which their intent is infinitely clear. Talking has been going on for at least 8 years without any iota of major progress. Even your average non-union member Village Idiot would confidently exclaim: Discussion time is over. BOMB IRAN!

Will Israel save the world? We better hope so and provide her our unwavering and total support, politically and economically.

Secretary Of Defenselessness
Investors Business Daily

Iran: Incredibly, the Bush national security team's sole holdover has announced Peace in Our Time as the only hope against a nuclear Tehran. There is no defense for Secretary Robert Gates.

Appearing in Paris with the French defense minister on Monday, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates made an announcement to the world that will astonish our friends and embolden our enemies.

"We must still try and find a peaceful way to resolve this issue," Gates said of the never-ending defiance of the free world by Iran's Islamofascist regime as it moves ever closer to becoming a nuclear weapons power.

"The only path that is left to us at this point, it seems to me, is that pressure track," Gates added. "But it will require all of the international community to work together."

Anyone care to hold your breath on that last hope?

After meeting for an hour with French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday, Gates and he "agreed that the time has come for the adoption of strong sanctions, in the hope that dialogue will be resumed," a Sarkozy aide said.

The time has come? That must be what passes for black humor in Paris these days. The time for getting tough with the Iranians came years ago.

And anyway, what value does a joint statement from the U.S. and France against Iran have? U.S. diplomats on Monday were putting on a good face about France's decision to send 80 — count 'em — more personnel to help the U.S. with what President Obama has called the central front in the war on al-Qaida in Afghanistan.

Add to that France's plans to send amphibious assault ships to Russia against our wishes, with the rationale that Russia, has "changed deeply" since losing the Cold War, and so it's time to nurture a new relationship.

They might ask the family of the murdered dissident Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned by a radioactive isotope in 2006, how nurturing Russian ruler Vladimir Putin is. Or ask the former Soviet bloc nations seeking missile defense from Russia.

At any rate, something seems to have happened that spoiled all the love and respect our cool, new commander in chief was supposed to be getting from the land of Robespierre, so unlike the treatment afforded that Europhobic Texan predecessor of his.

Think what Tehran thinks when it hears the defense secretary of this and the previous presidency say that the only path left to the world's lone superpower — and, by extension, to the community of civilized nations — is more sanctions.

"The key," Gates said in Paris, "is persuading the Iranian leaders that their long-term best interests are best served by not having nuclear weapons, as opposed to having them. And so I think that an approach along these lines, as long as the international community is seen pressing vigorously to resolve this problem, my hope is we will then be able to keep this in economic and diplomatic channels."

That is a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates those who rule Iran. The mullahs, the ayatollahs and their henchman who returned to the Iranian presidency in a rigged election last summer see "their long-term best interests" in supernatural terms.

The return of the 12th Imam, the destruction of the Jewish state in an apocalyptic holy war, an eternity spent in that giant brothel in the sky — those things dominate their thoughts, not the effects of economic sanctions or isolation from the international community.

It must be with that reality in mind that we consider what the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad think when the U.S. says, through Gates, that force is not an option.

We have a Western alliance, unallied even on fighting al-Qaida in Afghanistan, which spends years watching a jihadist regime work toward atomic weapons before it even seriously considers anything approaching real economic warfare against it, and which tells its enemies that force is out as a solution.

When a secretary of defense considers defense a nonoption, it's time to think about (as the president would say) pressing the reset button.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=520540

Someone's great sense of humor during difficult times.

What if George W. Bush Had Done That?