May 3
Sophistry is used by Obama, the Democrats and even some Republicans to vilify very successful companies dealing with crucial commodities – like gas. Opponents and demagogues portray the $10.65 billion profit of Exxon Mobile as obscene and rapacious – and demand that punitive actions such as windfall profits taxes be imposed in order to “recoup” what shouldn’t be theirs.
This is an essential component of the Democratic Party’s ideology - punishing those individuals and companies that are successful and ironically, pay inordinate amounts of taxes to begin with.
In contrast, what has Government Motors (GM), a government and union favorite and perennial loser, done for us lately?
How about cost the American taxpayer tens of billions of dollars that we will never see again. A failed company on life support (thanks to Federal government) that should have been allowed to fail and close or markedly downsize that is persistently sucking out rather than contributing tax dollars.
The editorial below places this deception into proper perspective. We will add one more element. Though not entirely linear, if Exxon Mobil had produced only one fifth the amount of oil that it actually did, its profit would have been only be around $2 billion – not so excessive sounding. However, this would have also translated into a higher cost of a gallon of gas (due to supply and demand issues) and its tax “contribution” to our government would have been billions of dollars lower.
Seen And Obscene
Investor’s Business Daily 04/28/2011
Earnings: A few oil firms post what some call outrageous profits. How long before the uninformed and envious demand these companies pay a windfall profits tax?
Exxon Mobil, the largest oil company in the U.S., reported Thursday a first-quarter profit of $10.65 billion, or $2.14 a share, up 61% from a strong year-earlier period. Royal Dutch Shell came in at $8.78 billion, or $1.76 a share, up 68%. And on Friday, Chevron is expected to post a 27% increase in earnings to $5.69 billion, or $3 a share.
Speaking for the anti-capitalist, anti-corporate wing of his party (it's a big wing), Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., called Exxon's profits "obscene" and claimed that "Big Oil" is "robbing" the middle class.
Two days earlier, ABC's Jonathan Karl displayed the bias widely found in his profession when he, too, asked if there is something "obscene" about high oil and gas profits "when Americans are struggling just to fill up the tank."
While billions in profits might seem a little much, let's take a look at the context.
Exxon earned $10.65 billion on $114 billion in revenue. Shell's $8.78 billion profit came on $114.84 billion in revenue. Chevron's expected top line of $66.62 billion will likely yield a bottom line of $5.69 billion. These are not outsize margins — roughly 9% after taxes in the case of Exxon, less than 5% for Shell and 8.5% for Chevron.
In comparison, Apple made $6 billion on revenue of $24.7 billion, a profit margin of almost 25% in the first quarter. Google's profit margin for the same period was nearly 27%. Too high-tech for you? McDonald's makes 20 cents on the dollar. Where is the outrage over their profits? Aren't they committing robbery too?
Also lost in the rush to demonize oil companies is historical context. What some would say are large profits simply aren't inevitable. The oil industry has gone through periods of low profits before and will again.
Further, there's a (probably willful) misreading on the left and in the media of oil company profits. They aren't squandered by rich executives but paid to investors — some of them Democrats — and plowed back into producing more energy. If profits are taxed more, investors are hurt, as are consumers who pay higher prices due to energy scarcity caused by curtailed development.
"Obscene" profits? A need for punitive taxes on oil companies? The facts show the Democrats and the media (but we repeat ourselves) are wrong on both counts.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/570568/201104281905/Seen-And-Obscene.htm
Posted in Capitalism Democrat Ideology Liberal Obama Taxes with No Comments
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Apr 23
Obama is using the power of government, effectiveness of demagoguery and the obvious power or wealth redistribution in order to stack the deck in his favor for re-election.
As clearly stated in the article below:
Obama's potential for a "near lock" in the Electoral College shows the political power of "income redistribution" in combination with an ever-larger, all-pervasive government that (including state and local) controls and spends nearly 40% of GDP in a discriminatory manner …
Members of Obama's potential coalition receive disproportionately large amounts from government but pay little of the cost of government.
With the help of fellow Progressives in government and an irresponsible fawning far left news media … combined with our money stolen away in usurious taxation, he is close to achieving a stolen and manipulated election victory.
Riding Income Redistribution Back To White House In 2012
Ernest S. Christian and Gary A Robbins 04/20/2011
How can Barack Obama be about the worst president in history — and at the same time the "best politician" in America, according to some experts?
Simple answer: Being president is about substance; being a politician is about theatrics. Sometimes, the twain meet and — as in the case of Ronald Reagan and others — produce a statesman.
But not in Obama's case. Just the opposite!
Being a good president involves competence, integrity and making Americans better off, often by stopping government from doing things that make people worse off. (Rep. Paul Ryan's trailblazing blueprint for reducing the deficit and downsizing government is a prime example.)
To Obama, politics is about bamboozling people into thinking that he's making them better off when he's making them worse off.
The trick is to expropriate money from people who work hard and pay their taxes — and use the loot to scatter around enough political lagniappe to piece together a majority of bought-and-paid for votes strategically placed in the right locations to yield an Electoral College victory.
Obama never lets a cynical political ploy go unexploited. He blares away about raising taxes on the "rich." He knows that high taxes ruin the economy and hurt everyone who depends on a nongovernment job for a living.
But so what?
The sotto voce Obama plan: Get rid of pesky Republicans; get re-elected; raise taxes through the roof starting in 2013; knock smug middle-class Americans off their high-earning perch; crash the economy; catch everyone in a new "safety net" where all have the same modest government-controlled income and live under federal supervision.
In his "now you see it, now you don't" speech at George Washington University on April 13, the president of the United States declared war on mainstream America and common sense.
Obama insulted Rep. Ryan for trying to save and reform Medicare. How dare Ryan defy King Barack and stand in the way of ObamaCare and the government-run health care rationing that Americans hate?
Among other cost-cutting priorities, repeal of ObamaCare should be a condition for any increase in the federal debt limit.
Obama's latest phony "solution" to the Obama debt crisis is to appoint a committee to run in circles and gum up Congress sufficiently to delay a Budget Resolution that cuts spending.
Obama is funding a new political imperium built upon a massive voter turnout of government-oriented constituencies. These include government employees (about 17% of total employees); the roughly 60 million people who depend significantly on government assistance; and a large portion of the three rapidly growing "minority" groups who, according to census data, will soon constitute an arithmetic majority in America.
In 2008, African-Americans favored Obama by 95%. Overall, he got 67% of the Hispanic vote and 62% of Asians. In key locations, his percentages were sufficiently enormous and concentrated to tilt the electoral vote count. Obama got 67% of the electoral vote with 53% of the popular vote.
Members of unions vote heavily (60%) for Obama in exchange for favors. So do abortion supporters (73%) and members of the GLBT community (70%).
Obama will get the "kiddie" vote on campuses, the anti-American left, the hard-core environmentalists, the brass-collar Democrats and a lot of nice people who cannot bring themselves to vote against America's first black president.
Obama's potential for a "near lock" in the Electoral College shows the political power of "income redistribution" in combination with an ever-larger, all-pervasive government that (including state and local) controls and spends nearly 40% of GDP in a discriminatory manner among an increasingly diverse and balkanized population.
Members of Obama's potential coalition receive disproportionately large amounts from government but pay little of the cost of government.
A small minority of Americans (roughly one-third of eligible voters) already pay nearly all the personal income tax — and Obama will whip the "tax slaves" into paying more and more until they collapse.
Originally, the disparity in treatment between "net payers" and "net takers" was to help people who were actually poor (instead of merely less well-off than someone else) — but Obama and other levelers have made broad scale "redistribution" the main mission of government.
Jeffrey Miron at Harvard points out that in 2007 — before the recession — Washington was already spending about 50% of the budget on programs designed to redistribute money from the better-off to the less well-off.
The Heritage Foundation's Index of Dependency shows that dependency on government has increased by about 15% since 2007.
In Obama's un-American America, a modest standard of living will become both the minimum and the maximum.
Thanks, but no thanks.
• Christian, an attorney, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Ford administration.
• Robbins, an economist, served at the Treasury Department in the Reagan administration.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/569753/201104201842/Riding-Income-Redistribution-Back-To-White-House-In-2012.htm
Posted in Arrogance Labor Unions Media - Far Left Obama Redistribution of wealth with No Comments
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Apr 16
Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-WI), Chairman of the House Budget Committee, has proposed massive, desperately need federal government spending cuts as well as tax rate reductions in his “Road to Prosperity”. Troves of empirical data support this approach – benefiting all except the demagogic Liberal politicians.
The vast majority of the Democrats still irrationally support continued unrestrained federal spending and high and increasing taxes, tax rates and fees. They never can have enough of other people’s money to spend. A larger, more controlling and intrusive government that knows best is their ideology. Control the masses, engender their dependency and buy votes by wealth transfer from those who work, particularly the higher wage earners.
Cal Vs. Krug
Investor’s Business Daily 04/11/2011
Taxes And Spending: House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's bold entitlement reform plan goes beyond taming spending. It recognizes that the history of cutting taxes vindicates Calvin Coolidge, not Paul Krugman.
Rep. Ryan has emerged as someone the country has been waiting for: a fearless, energetic politician with the guts to propose a detailed reform of the out-of-control, until-now-untouchable federal mandatory spending programs. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, with their annual automatic spending increases, now make up roughly 60% of outlays.
Some might find irony in Ryan ending up as spending hawk-in-chief, since back in the 1990s he was an aide to supply-side icons like Jack Kemp and Bob Kasten. Both were accused of caring too little about spending cuts as they fought for tax cuts to grow the economy and create millions of private jobs.
Today, after years of unchecked Democratic control of Congress and the White House, the problem of untamed government spending has become a runaway locomotive hurtling us toward a fiscal cliff.
The American public has reacted, spawning the populist Tea Party movement. And in this new environment, tax-cutting politicians are also spending-cutters.
But Ryan still recognizes, as did Kemp and Kasten, that low tax rates are key to restoring the greatness and vibrancy of the U.S. economy.
So when the New York Times' spending-addict columnist Paul Krugman launched his error-riddled attack on Ryan's plan last week, his first volley targeted not spending but Ryan's tax cuts. Ryan would bring both the individual top tax rate and the soon-to-be-highest-in-the-world U.S. corporate tax rate down to 25%.
According to Krugman, "Republicans have once again gone all in for voodoo economics — the claim, refuted by experience, that tax cuts pay for themselves" because they "would set off a gigantic boom."
It's so many years after Ronald Reagan's tax cuts produced the longest peacetime economic expansion in history — extending past the brief George H.W. Bush recession to the Internet revolution of the 1990s. One might have hoped that the losers of the tax-cut debate would, by now, have gone the way of the Berlin Wall.
But then, had history been heeded, the Krugmans actually would have been laughed off the political stage long before Reagan. John F. Kennedy knew when he bucked fiscal liberals in his party and pushed hard for cutting tax rates — including those on high incomes — that President Calvin Coolidge had proved tax cuts do exactly what Krugman says they don't: produce new jobs and fill government coffers with new revenues.
As Veronique de Rugy, senior research fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, pointed out in a paper for the Cato Institute, "detailed Internal Revenue Service data show that the across-the-board rate cuts of the early 1920s — including large cuts at the top end — resulted in greater tax payments and a larger tax share paid by those with high incomes."
De Rugy found that as "the marginal tax rate on those high-income earners was cut sharply from 60% or more (to a maximum of 73%) to just 25%, taxes paid by that group soared from roughly $300 million to $700 million per year." From 1922 to 1929, real GNP grew 4.7% a year and unemployment fell from 6.7% to 3.2%.
What Krugman mocks as "trickle-down" was actually a tsunami of prosperity that expanded by 84% those making between $10,000 and $100,000 annually.
Taxes and spending can't be divorced. The Krugman way of big spending and high tax rates condemns future generations to never-ending government dependency.
Ryan's way not only reforms and saves entitlements. It saves us from the left's goal of a Europeanized American economy.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/568766/201104111904/Cal-Vs-Krug.htm
Posted in Balanced budget Financial Government spending Ideology Rep. Paul Ryan Republican Taxes US Debt with No Comments
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Apr 10
Through previously secret clauses in Obamacare, Obama and the Democrats are corruptly buying votes with billions of our taxpayer dollars. It’s an outrage that should not be tolerated by the American public.
The Early Retiree Reinsurance Program (ERRP), buried deep within the leviathan legislation, provides $5 billion to private companies, states and labor unions that is to be used for the payment of health insurance for those who are retiring and are under age 65. Not surprisingly, a significantly disproportionate amount of the money is going to unions, and companies and states that are strong supporters of the Democrats. Some is even going to the "mainstream" media (the Left) which, of course, doesn't hurt with regard to even more positive, gushing press coverage of Obama and the Democrats.
Such a slush fund is corrupt, intolerable and a massive waste of taxpayer dollars. Furthermore, this has nothing to do with the need for healthcare reform and everything to do with influence peddling.
This is yet more evidence of the depravity and duplicity of too many of our politicians (largely Democrats), the inherent problems of a large government and why it needs to be radically downsized, and the wasteful spending of the government. It adds another reason why Obamacare must be vaporized.
Washington Post and CBS receiving money from Obamacare slush fund
Matthew Boyle The Daily Caller 04/06/2011
Two mainstream news organizations are receiving hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars from Obamacare’s Early Retiree Reinsurance Program (ERRP) — a $5 billion grant program that’s doling out cash to companies, states and labor unions in what the Obama administration considers an effort to pay for health insurance for early retirees. The Washington Post Company raked in $573,217 in taxpayer subsidies and CBS Corporation secured $722,388 worth of Americans’ money.
“It is fine with me if they continue covering the ObamaCare debate,” said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, in an e-mail to The Daily Caller. “When NBC used to cover energy issues, they identified themselves as a subsidiary of General Electric. CBS and Washington Post just have to disclose that they are subsidiaries of the Obama Administration.”
The ERRP, which Republicans call a slush fund, provides taxpayer money to Obama administration-selected states, companies and labor unions with already-in-place early retiree health insurance programs, and aims to make certain that their employees who retire early still have health insurance coverage before they reach Medicare eligibility age. Almost $2 billion of the $5 billion fund, which was supposed to last until 2014, has already been distributed to corporations. New projections expect the funding to run out before the end of 2012, if not sooner.
At a Friday morning hearing, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, chaired by Rep. Cliff Stearns, Florida Republican, asked Center for Consumer Information & Insurance Oversight (CCIO) official Steven Larsen for how the administration decides who gets a slice of the $5 billion pie – and how the application process works. In his response, Stearns referred to the fact that corporations like General Electric, Verizon and AT&T in addition to several labor unions were getting taxpayer funding.
Stearns was not impressed. “This program is providing ‘free’ money to corporations, states, unions, and pension plans,” the Congressman said in an e-mail to TheDC. “In addition, the Washington Post and CBS received funding under this program. How can the Washington Post and CBS be impartial on the issue of health care when they received funding under the health care law?”
CBS Corporation spokesman Gil Schwartz told TheDC that newsroom employees, like any other CBS employees, are indeed allowed to take the taxpayer subsidies.
“Yes they are,” Schwartz said. “Why wouldn’t newsroom employees be allowed access to that money like all other CBS employees?”
CBS gets the money from the government, then provides early retirees with health insurance.
Though no current newsroom employees can benefit from the ERRP funds, they could retire early and still benefit from the money – or any newsroom employee who has retired since Obamacare became law could benefit from it too.
The Washington Post declined to comment. “We have no additional information to provide you other than what you have,” Post spokeswoman Rima Calderon told TheDC.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) told TheDC she couldn’t disclose information about applications or disbursements for specific companies.
In addition to CBS Corporation and the Washington Post Company, recipients of ERRP funding include the United Auto Workers union, which secured $206,798,086 in taxpayer money, AT&T, which took in $140,022,949, and General Electric (GE), which raked in $36,607,818. GE has made headlines recently for not paying any U.S. taxes last year. IBM got $12,989,690 in taxpayer money.
Verizon pulled $91,702,538 in taxpayer cash, too, and General Motors received $19,002,669. More than $6 million went to different Teamsters groups nationwide, and millions more went to the United Mine Workers, United Food and Commercial Workers, the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).
http://dailycaller.com/2011/04/06/washington-post-and-cbs-receiving-money-from-obamacare-slush-fund/
http://dc-cdn.virtacore.com/2011/04/hctn.jpg
Posted in Congress Corruption Democrat Government spending Labor Unions Media - Far Left Obama ObamaCare Tax with No Comments
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Apr 7
We don't hear any complaints from Obama or the Left including the news media that this is an unalloyed outrage. It's not quite like the treatment that Bush/Cheney received about Halliburton, a successful company that did pay taxes.
Could it be that GE is a huge supporter of Obama such as through its erstwhile ownership of NBC which broadcast unabashedly pro-Obama news?
Or that it is deeply involved with the "green" movement?
Or that Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, is working for the Obama Administration President's on the "Council on Jobs and Competiveness"? (What an irony!)
Posted in Obama Political Cartoon with No Comments
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7
More evidence of the crony capitalism of the left, the political corruption, duplicity, faux scruples. See GE and its CEO Jeffrey Immelt and Obama.
Obama cynically rails against Wall Street in order to amass votes and support yet his administration is infested with the worst from the private sector. His words mean nothing as his actions usually belie an opposing position.
Obama is morally unscrupulous. He is a master of mendacity.
And we aren’t lying…!
Obama and Immelt Playing US Like Fools
Ann Kane April 03, 2011
Why do former Sen. Feingold and MoveOn.org need to force GE's Jeff Immelt's resignation? They were all supposed to be on the same side, right?
From CBS News:
Former Sen. Russ Feingold and progressive group MoveOn today called on General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt to resign from the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness in the wake of a report that despite $14.2 billion in worldwide profits - including more than $5 billion from U.S. operations - GE did not owe taxes in 2010.
When the left rails against the left, it's about setting somebody up in order to take him down. You know, Obama appoints a progressive leader to a high profile position; a couple months later, leftists call for CEO's resignation because of dirty accounting practices. Obama remains "neutral" until said resignation, and reaps a reward in the polls for standing up against capitalists.
Just this past January at the State of the Union and in the same month as appointing Immelt to head the President's Council on Jobs, Obama took issue with companies like GE who spend hundreds of millions of dollars hiring lawyers and lobbyists to "rig" the tax code:
Mr. Obama has railed against just the sort of tax loophole exploitation of which G.E. is accused.
"Over the years, a parade of lobbyists has rigged the tax code to benefit particular companies and industries," he said in his State of the Union address in January. "Those with accountants or lawyers to work the system can end up paying no taxes at all."
Where was Obama's concern about underhanded companies when he appointed Immelt?
In addition to his company's tax evasion, Immelt has no loyalty to American ideals. He's been pushing China since 2001 and was doing business with Iran up to 2005. He likes the ways Germany does business as well; top down, bottom up and inside out government and business together.
All this maneuvering screams Obama 2012. Michael Moore recently bloviated that the U.S. is awash with money, but it's all in the wrong hands. Moore is a johnny-one-note always stirring up the oppressed masses by ranting about the "fat cats." You can be sure Obama will use this same strategy in his 2012 campaign; Immelt has to go because he doesn't fit the working man's profile.
Imagine Obama telling some sympathetic group in San Francisco or Chicago that he's sad to see Jeff go, that he's been a great ally to the administration, but we have to be about the working people.
And many Americans will eat it up.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/04/obama_and_immelt_playing_us_li.html
Posted in Corruption Obama with No Comments
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