It’s Wednesday, April 11th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the mid-week edition, Conn Carroll’s Morning Examiner examines….

Buffett Rule Math

 

President Obama is going to deliver a speech in Boca Raton, Florida today about what The New York Times describes as, “a tax proposal that has become a centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s campaign for re-election.” They are, of course, referring to The Buffett Rule.

But going into the speech, the White House wants to make sure everybody knows that the Buffett Rule has nothing to do with reducing the debt. According to Politico, White House National Economic Council Deputy Director Jason Furman held a conference call yesterday where he explained to reporters that Obama’s Buffett rule, “was never our plan to bring the deficit down and get the debt under control.” This is a wise admission by the White House. A Joint Committee on Taxation report released last month showed that the Buffett Rule would only raise $47 billion over 11 years. That is .7 percent of the $6.4 trillion in debt Obama’s budget would create over the same time frame.

So if the Buffett Rule is not about lowering the debt, what is it about? “Fairness.” During a different Monday conference call with reporters, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said, “The Buffett rule will help make our system reflect our values as all Americans play by the same rules, do their fair share and get a shot at success.”

Problem is, the same math the proves the Buffett Rule fails to reduce the debt also shows it is even worse at redistributing wealth. Just think about it. The United States economy will allocate about $15.3 trillion worth of goods and services in 2012. The Buffett Rule would redistribute about $4.3 billion of that $15.3 trillion. That is .03 percent.

Vice President Joe Biden inaugurated his new twitter account yesterday by tweeting out, “I’m for the Buffett Rule because it just makes sense. Like the President says—it’s not class warfare. It’s math.”

The White House has already admitted that the math shows the Buffett Rule is a deficit dud. A quick look at the math of our nation’s gross domestic product shows it is a “fairness” failure as well. So if its not about the deficit, and its not about fairness, class warfare is the only explanation left.

For more on the subject of Team Tick-Tock’s fuzzy math, and brazen class warfare, we turn to a snippet from the WSJ describing….

The Obama Rule

He says taxation is about fairness, not growth or revenue.

 

….When President Obama first proposed this new minimum tax he declared that the rule “could raise enough money” so that we “stabilize our debt and deficits for the next decade.” Then he added: “This is not politics; this is math.” Well, remedial math maybe.

The Obama Treasury’s own numbers confirm that the tax would raise at most $5 billion a year—or less than 0.5% of the $1.2 trillion fiscal 2012 budget deficit and over the next decade a mere 0.1% of the $45.43 trillion the federal government will spend. When asked about those revenue projections, White House aide Jason Furman backpedaled from Mr. Obama’s rationale by explaining that the tax was never intended “to bring the deficit down and the debt under control.”

Okay. So what is the point?

The goal, Mr. Furman explained, is to establish a “a basic issue of tax fairness.” Millionaires should pay an effective tax rate no lower than a middle-class secretary or a plumber. But wait: IRS data show that middle-class workers on average pay just under 15% of their income in federal taxes, while the richest 0.1% pay almost twice as high a rate on average, or 26%.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303815404577336010655038338.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Speaking of The Great Prevaricator, the WSJ‘s Allysia Finley details one segment of the electorate that appears to be swallowing Tick-Tock’s lures like a hungry grouper:

All the President’s Women

 

Typical Female Obama Supporter

Could President Obama’s play for women voters get any more naked? (Or anyone who finds his lies believable any more ignorant?!?)

The White House hosted a forum on women and the economy on Friday. To summarize, the Obama administration is doing “everything it can to create an economy built to last for America’s women.” That includes defending entitlement programs and the Affordable Care Act from Republicans like Rep. Paul Ryan, who allegedly want to throw both seniors and women off a cliff. The Obama administration also warned that a Supreme Court ruling striking down ObamaCare “would be devastating for women.”

The president probably can afford to lose the male vote if he maintains a double-digit lead among women, as he has throughout his term. In March 2010, Public Policy Polling had the president leading Mitt Romney by 10 points among women. A year later, the president held a 17-point advantage. Last month it was down to 11 points. Recall also that women favored the president by 12 points in the 2008 election.

It’s almost certain that Mitt Romney will lose the female vote for the simple reason that many more women are Democrats than Republicans. The president needs to focus more on ensuring that his support among women voters doesn’t drop too much and that they turn out in large numbers, which is probably his bigger concern. The real purpose of the contraception mandate—and Democrats’ ballyhooing that Republicans want to take away women’s reproductive rights—is to get women to the polls in the fall.

Here’s the juice: anyone ignorant enough to vote for Obama, regardless of race, sex, religion or political viewpoint cannot be won over by facts.  They’re voting based on “feelings”; and Dimocrats….

….have a strong influence over the weak-minded.

The GOP needs to energize not only its base, but far more importantly, the disinterested masses, be they male or female, black, white or brown, with a message which sets in stark, unambiguous terms what’s at stake this election: the future of their children, their children’s children….and every generation beyond.

As we’ve noted before, The Obamao’s given them the rope with which to hang him: his own words; on ObamaScare….on the Stimulus….on energy and oil.  They need to use them relentlessly, remorselessly and continually between now and November.

Next up, Byron York offers yet another example of The Great Prevaricator’s stunning hypocrisy….and the MSM’s refusal to report it:

To Obama, Legal Precedents Are All About Politics

 

In 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act by huge bipartisan votes — 342 – 67 in the House and 85 – 14 in the Senate. President Bill Clinton signed the measure into law.

Now, the Obama administration says DOMA, which permits states to refuse to recognize gay marriages from other states and creates a federal definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, is unconstitutional. In Boston recently, Stuart Delery, an attorney for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, urged the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals to find DOMA violates the Constitution by discriminating against gays and lesbians. “I’m not here to defend (the law) on any standard,” Delery told the court.

What was striking about Delery’s request that a federal court strike down DOMA was that at virtually the same time, President Obama was railing at the very notion that a federal court would strike down any law passed by Congress.

“I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” Obama said about the arguments over Obamacare before the nation’s highest court. The danger presented in the health care case, the president continued, is that “an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.”

Obama immediately ran into a barrage of questions. How can the Supreme Court overturning a law be “unprecedented” when the court has done it more than 150 times in U.S. history? And does the president even recognize the court’s authority to rule on the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress?

Backtracking, Obama said the next day that “the Supreme Court is the final say on our Constitution and our laws, and all of us have to respect it.” He also claimed, without convincing many people, that he called the Obamacare case “unprecedented” because it’s been awhile since the court overturned “a law that was passed by Congress on an economic issue, like health care.”

But what about that “strong majority”? When reporters pointed out that Obamacare passed the House by a narrow margin of 219 – 212, White House spokesman Jay Carney quickly revised “strong majority” to simply “majority.”

But all that backing and filling — including Carney’s claim that Obama was misunderstood “because he is a law professor” — was before the DOMA arguments made news. If the president was so concerned about a court overturning a duly constituted law passed by a democratically elected Congress, why was he urging a small group of unelected judges to strike down DOMA, a measure that won passage by a far greater margin than Obamacare?

The answer is, of course, that the administration is making a political argument for its positions, not a legal one. And perhaps counterproductively, the president’s decision to bring up Obamacare’s history in Congress could end up reminding the public of the tangled circumstances of its passage. Even with a huge majority in the House, Democrats barely passed the bill in the face of bipartisan opposition. And in the Senate, Obamacare succeeded as the result of a set of freakish circumstances that allowed Democrats to pass an unpopular measure into law.

Those circumstances included the wrongful prosecution of a Republican senator (Ted Stevens), resulting in his seat going to a Democrat; the defection of another Republican senator (Arlen Specter) to the Democrats; and a change in one state’s laws (Massachusetts) to allow a Democratic governor to immediately appoint a Democrat to succeed the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and give the Senate a 60-vote Democratic supermajority. And then there were the policy payoffs to some Democratic senators who were undecided about the bill. Even then, Democrats held a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for just 134 days before Massachusetts elected a Republican senator, Scott Brown, who ran specifically on the platform of stopping Obamacare. But in those 134 days, Democrats managed to pass an unpopular bill into law without a single vote to spare.

Now, the timing of the arguments over Obamacare and DOMA has revealed the flexibility of the administration’s arguments over constitutionality. And the flap over Obama’s remarks is just a preview of what is coming when the court issues its decision on Obamacare this June.

A decision on DOMA, which has not yet arrived at the Supreme Court, lies in the future. But if those arguments come when Barack Obama is president, perhaps DOMA’s defenders will remind the administration of the president’s respect for duly constituted and passed laws.

And since we’re on the subject of willful ignorance of the Constitution and laws the nation’s highest law enforcement officials are sworn to uphold and protect:

Holder’s DOJ: Evidence of Voter Fraud ‘Manufactured’

 

The Department of Justice is in full-on spin mode over the James O’Keefe Project Veritas tape in which a young white man is offered Attorney General Eric Holder’s ballot. Desperate to prove that voter ID should not be presented in order to obtain a ballot, the DOJ fired back at O’Keefe and Project Veritas today, with a DOJ official telling tried-and-true media ally Talking Points Memo, “It’s no coincidence that these so-called examples of rampant voter fraud consistently turn out to be manufactured ones.”

This is nonsensical. Obviously this wasn’t an actual case of voter fraud—O’Keefe and Project Veritas didn’t want to break the law. And obviously the situation is manufactured—it’s the only way to show that voter fraud is easy and plausible, since we presumably don’t know when voter fraud takes place. That, in fact, is the point of the video: that voter fraud in this way is virtually undetectable and bears almost zero risk.

But the DOJ isn’t interested in the real point of the video. They know full well that voter fraud is simple when nobody has to show identification. They just don’t care, since they’re happy to watch political allies take advantage of the loopholes. Instead of targeting O’Keefe and Project Veritas for showing the American public the dangers of the current voter identification system, the Department of Justice and Holder are apparently interested only in preserving the absence of voter ID, no matter how many fraudulent ballots are actually cast.

No….The Dear Leader’s Department of Injustice cares deeply; their continued grip on power will likely depend upon them manufacturing every vote they can get counted.

And in International News of Note, the AEI‘s Danielle Pletka questions Team Tick-Tock’s assertion….

Obama will totally know when Iran is going to build a bomb

 

Saturday’s Washington Post brought us another salvo in the Obama administration information wars against… Israel. Yes, the article was entitled “U.S. intelligence gains in Iran seen as boost to confidence,” but the article is intended to convey Obama’s certainty that he will know — let’s underscore that: know – with ample warning once Iranian leaders make the decision to go for the bomb. “There is confidence that we would see activity indicating that a decision had been made,” a “senior U.S. official involved in high-level discussions about Iran policy” tells the Post. “Across the board, our access has been significantly improved.” And so Obama will have lots of time to think about what to do once he knows Iran is determined to build itself a nuclear weapon aaaaaaaaaaaand as a result, Israel should not strike Iran until, you know, after the U.S. election.

Are we the only one’s amazed the crowd that claimed “Bush lied, people died!” now utilize information from the same sources to claim certainty regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons program?

Then there’s Thomas Sowell’s latest….

Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene:

 

How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on, and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?

Why should being in a professional sport exempt anyone from prosecution for advocating deliberate violence? Recent revelations of such advocacy of violence by an NFL coach should lead to his banishment for life by the NFL, and criminal prosecution by the authorities. If you are serious about reducing violence, you have to be serious about punishing those who advocate it.

Have you noticed that what modest economic improvements we have seen occurred during the much-lamented “gridlock” in Washington? Nor is this unusual. If you check back through history, doing nothing has a far better track record than that of politicians intervening in the economy.

With all the talk about people paying their “fair share” of income taxes, why do nearly half the people in this country pay no income taxes at all? Is that their “fair share”? Or is creating more recipients of government handouts, at no cost to themselves, simply a strategy to gain more votes?

Some people are puzzled by the fact that so much that is said and done by politicians seems remote from reality. But reality is not what gets politicians elected. Appearances, rhetoric and emotions are what get them elected. Reality is what the voters and taxpayers are left to deal with, as a result of electing them.

Instead of following the tired old formula of having politicians and bureaucrats give college commencement speeches, in which they say how superior it is to follow a career as politicians and bureaucrats — “public service” — why not invite someone like John Stossel to tell the graduates how much better it is to go into the private sector, supplying what people want, instead of imposing the government’s will on them?

In politics, few talents are as richly rewarded as the ability to convince parasites that they are victims. Welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic have discovered that largesse to losers does not reduce their hostility to society, but only increases it. Far from producing gratitude, generosity is seen as an admission of guilt, and the reparations as inadequate compensations for injustices — leading to worsening behavior by the recipients.

Some people say that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. But the runaway taxes of our time are the price we pay for being gullible.

Whatever the ideology or rhetoric of the political left, their agenda around the world has been preempting other people’s decisions and regimenting their lives.

People who believe in evolution in biology often believe in creationism in government. In other words, they believe that the universe and all the creatures in it could have evolved spontaneously, but that the economy is too complicated to operate without being directed by politicians.

The United States now has the dubious distinction of having the highest corporate tax rate in the world. And people wonder why American corporations are expanding overseas, providing jobs to foreigners. The left may get their jollies attacking “the rich,” but the real victims are other people, who want the jobs that are sent overseas to escape a hostile business climate at home.

Different people prefer different exercises. The Republicans’ favorite exercise is running for the hills. The Democrats’ favorite exercise is kicking the can down the road.

When politicians say, “spread the wealth,” translate that as “concentrate the power,” because that is the only way they can spread the wealth. And once they get the power concentrated, they can do anything else they want to, as people have discovered — often to their horror — in countries around the world.

In an old Western movie, John Wayne encounters a black man. Wayne tells him, “I don’t have a prejudiced bone in my body. I would shoot you as quick as I would shoot any white man.” That is what equality is supposed to mean.

Next up, Steven Heyward, writing in AEI‘s Enterprise Blog, reports the….

Energy Fact of the Week: Why Obama deserves little credit for U.S. oil and gas boom

 

President Obama and Vice President Biden are taking victory laps for the unforeseen (by government, that is) increase in domestic oil and gas production over the last three years, dodging and weaving as best they can to disguise the Administration’s relentless hostility to fossil fuel production and use.

If you need any more confirmation that this energy story is overwhelmingly a tale of private sector innovation taking place mostly on private land, check out a report from the Energy Information Administration released late last month entitled Sales of Fossil Fuels Produced from Federal and Indian Lands, FY 2003 through FY 2011. The data tables in the report make clear that oil production on federal lands has been more or less flat for most of the last decade, though with a slight bump in 2010 that disappeared in 2011, mostly because of falling offshore production in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.  The red line in Figure 1 shows that oil production on federal lands as a proportion of total U.S. production has remained flat at around 30 to 35 percent.  Most of the increase seen between 2008 and 2010 is likely attributable to leases finalized during the Bush Administration.

The story of natural gas is more interesting. While the gas sector is booming, total production on federal land has fallen more than 30 percent over the last decade, and as the red line in Figure 2 shows, the proportion of gas produced on federal land has fallen from 35 percent in 2003 to just above 20 percent today.  Anyone think the gas deposits being unlocked with directional drilling and fracking somehow stop at the federal property line?

Two more points Mitt Romney and Reince Priebus (“Reince Priebus”….seriously, does anyone think about the effect names like this will have upon the unwashed masses before placing them in public party positions?!?) need to drive home like nails in a coffin.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s a picture which explains why Dan Feeney gave up going for the fence on St. Paddy’s Day:

Finally, we’ll call it a day with the “Your Tax Dollars at Work” segment, courtesy of the GSA!

Federal employees got bonuses for planning agency’s lavish 2010 event, investigation reveals

Awarding bonuses for wasting taxpayer dollars? That appears to be incentive offered by the federal agency under fire for spending lavishly on a 2010 conference held near Las Vegas. The latest details from an inspector general report on the conference reveal 50 employees were given cash awards of $500 and $1,000 for their work arranging the now-infamous conference. “It would also appear that a number of GSA bureaucrats who helped arrange the Las Vegas junket were handed cash bonuses for their work in wasting the better part of a million dollars,” Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., said Tuesday.

In light of the the scandal in the General Services Administration over the more than $800,000 spent on the 2010 event, the agency has made a shrewd decision about where to hold its next conference: not Vegas.

We don’t question the location of the next conference; we question there might be another conference….AT ALL!

Magoo