The top 1% of U.S. taxpayers earns 22% of the income and pay nearly 40% of all income taxes. The bottom 50% pays just 3%. We are told that this is unfair, and the "rich" should pay their "fair share". It would probably not overburden the top earners to pay 43% and eliminate all taxes on the bottom 50%. After all, it would only take a 5.5% increase in the amount the top 1% already pays to eliminate the need to collect from the bottom 50%. Can the rich afford it - yes, but can the poor.
Could a house so divided prosper? Given the class-warfare rhetoric from the administration and Congress it appears that this is just the country they wish to create. Use tax credits for the bottom 50%…
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"Rather go to bed with out dinner than rise in debt" - Benjamin Franklin.
President Obama is attempting not merely to expand the role of the federal government but to put it in such a dominant position that its power can never be rolled back. Obamanomics is the means to that end. Obamanomics represents change with unconscionable trillion dollar annual deficits leading us to the brink of national insolvency. And to what end - to remake the United States into a mirror image of a European social democracy?
The prospect of Treasury flooding the world with dollars to support trillion dollar annual deficits for the next decade is alarming, and the world is rightly getting nervous. If China and other foreign creditors lose their appetite for U.S. debt, the result will…
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Coal-fired plants produce approximately 50% of the electricity in the United States and 82% of power generated carbon dioxide
emissions. If electric vehicles are charged exclusively by coal-fired electricity they produce more green house gases than a traditional gasoline-powered combustion engine car. In the future, electricity must be generated cleanly, if we expect automotive electric-drive technologies to reduce our carbon dioxide burden.
Wind and
solar will probably make a significant contribution to clean energy generation, but realistically, we cannot count on these two sources for more than 20-30% of our electricity needs in the next 20 years. Even reaching these modest goals will require a major investment in energy infrastructure and fundamental advances in technology. Nuclear power may be the only clean alternative.
In the United States…
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In an act of arrogant indifference to the well-being of women, the Pope stated on a recent trip to Africa that in his opinion condoms do not contribute to solving the AIDS problem but only make it worse. Promiscuity, shouted the old misogynists of Roman Curia! Eve be dammed for her beguiling intrigues, condoms will only make her more wicked… Let her be punished for her sins!
Reality rarely permeates the walls of the Vatican. Specifically, the United Nations estimates that 22 million Africans are infected with the HIV virus. Three-quarters of the world's AIDS deaths in 2007 were in sub-Saharan Africa where most health officials recommend condoms as a way to prevent its spread.
At the end of 2007 it was estimated that out of the… Continue reading | 1 Comment
The road to insolvency is paved with
red ink. How can the United States become
insolvent? Easy, just add the Obamanomics deficits, as laid out in the President's ten-year plan, to the existing $11 trillion
national debt and it will not be long before the US is unable to meet its financial obligations. Presently, debt held by the Social Security Trust Fund and other governmental agencies is $4.4 trillion, plus the remainder of the debt (owed to citizens or "foreign" owners) is $6.6 trillion. Approximately 50% of US debt is owed to
foreigners, up from 31% in 2000, and this debt will undoubtedly continue to climb. If China and other foreign creditors lose their appetite for US debt, the result will be catastrophic for the dollar…
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AIG paid $165 million in
bonuses, but angry lawmakers and administration officials insisted the money belonged to taxpayers and vowed to get it back. The clamor over compensation overshadowed AIG's weekend disclosure that it used more than $90 billion in federal aid to pay out to foreign and domestic banks, including some that had multibillion-dollar U.S. government bailouts of their own. The counterparty list is a veritable who's who of the world's top financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs (
GS), Bank of America (
BAC), British bank Barclays (
BCS) and Germany's Deutsche Bank (
DB). The question arises - Why did the United States Government insist on honoring these legally questionable obligations?
At the heart of this transfer of billions of taxpayer dollars to the world's leading financial institutions…
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When the only tool you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. In other words, there is no problem that a bureaucrat can't solve, if only we would let them pass another regressive tax. That may well be the sum total of the creative thinking that has gone into the Obama
Cap-and-Trade plan. The Obama Administration proposes that companies buy a permit for each ton of carbon emitted, at an estimated cost, to start of $13 to $20 per ton. The permits could then be bought and sold. The theory behind this convoluted scheme is that it will somehow miraculously increase energy efficiency and renewable energy development.
Rather than focus on available technological solutions, let's burden hard working American consumers with another ill-conceived regressive tax! Who…
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Only one industrial country in the world has significantly reduced its carbon footprint, and that country is France. France, the sixth largest economy in the world, ranks 15th in
carbon dioxide emissions, behind pre-industrial economies like Iran and Indonesia. France has simultaneously, reduced its dependence on foreign sources of fossil fuels, coal, natural gas and oil. While we dither with small-scale experimental intermittent technologies like
solar and
wind in the United States, France has gone nuclear and clean. In 2008
wind and solar accounted for 1.1% of US energy needs and even if we meet President Obama's objective of doubling the amount by 2012, its contribution will still be inconsequential. In the best-case scenario for wind and solar, they might together generate 20%-25% of our clean…
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During the Bush years, the national outlays rose from $1.9 trillion in 2001 to $3.0 trillion in 2008, and the country went from enjoying a surplus of $128 million in 2001 to suffering a deficit of $459 million in 2008. We called Bush irresponsible. Perhaps the fiscal 2009 deficit of $1.75 billion should be viewed as an anomaly since it's the direct result of the $700 billion Bush TARP plan and the $800 billion Obama Stimulus Plan, both implemented to ameliorate the effects of the financial crisis and recession. But how do we justify an average deficit of
$700 billion annually from 2010 to 20019, which according to the
Obama budget, will be boom times? GDP will be likely rise to an eye-popping $23 trillion in 2019…
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In the United States we spend more, per capita on healthcare than any other country in the world. We spent $7,421 per capita as compared to about $3,500 in countries with universal
national healthcare systems such as France and Germany. We don't receive better care in the US than the French or Germans; we just pay a lot more for it. In fact, according to the latest data, we spent $2.2 trillion in 2007 on
healthcare, or 16.2% of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Even more worrisome is that expenditures continue to rise at an alarming rate of 6% annually.
Here's a radical idea: Why don't we fix the current system before the administration throws another
$634 billion federal dollars into this sinkhole? We appear to be focused…
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