Story Of Obama

Romney Campaign Notes that Obama as a Boy Ate Dog Meat*


Much has been made about Mitt Romney, in 1983, putting his family dog Seamus in a kennel on top of his roof and driving from Boston to Canada, with said canine Seamus making his displeasure known in a rather scatological way.

Democrats have signaled they have every intention of making sure the American people — especially dog-lovers — know the tale. In January, senior Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod tweeted a photo of the president and Bo in a car, with the snide observation: “@davidaxelrod: How loving owners transport their dogs.”

The Romney campaign signaled Tuesday night that they are not about to cede any ground when it comes to a candidate’s odd past with man’s best friend.

And the Obama campaign shot back, with a spokesman suggesting the Romney team was attacking a child, since the Obama act in question took place when he was a kid.

The Daily Caller noted that in President Obama’s best-selling memoir, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” the president recalls being fed dog meat as a young boy in Indonesia with his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro.

“With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy),” the president wrote. “Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.”

 

The Quote of the Decade:

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America 's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government cannot pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America 's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that, "the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”
~ Senator Barack H. Obama, March 2006

 

Why High Taxes Will Never Soak Rich
by Daniel J. Mitchell - New York Post, April 16, 2012

Whether it’s through the Buffett Rule, higher income-tax rates or double taxation of dividends and capital gains, President Obama often demands that “rich” taxpayers and big corporations send more money to Washington.

But as Americans pay their taxes by today’s deadline, we might note that trying to get more money from upper-income taxpayers is like playing whack-a-mole. So long as tax rates are high, rich people will figure out ways to protect their income.

It doesn’t take a tax genius; any rich person can make a phone call or hit a few computer keys and shift his or her investments to tax-free municipal bonds. It’s not good for the economy when capital gets diverted to help finance the excess spending of Detroit or California, but it’s an effective way of stiff-arming the IRS.

Work, production, saving and investment are how we generate national income, so it doesn't make sense to discourage taxable income with higher tax rates.

Or the rich can play the green-energy scam, getting all sorts of credits to offset their tax liabilities. That’s one way General Electric made lots of money and kept it all for shareholders.

Statists often will respond by arguing that we should reform the tax code. But instead of a flat tax, which would rid us of loopholes and would lower tax rates, they just want to end the loopholes and keep tax rates high — or raise them even higher.

Even if lawmakers abolished the various tax-code distortions, they might still be disappointed. The one sure way for rich people to lower their tax bills is by generating less income.

Here’s a quick economics lesson for the class-warfare crowd: When the government taxes income, it raises the price of work compared to leisure. And because the tax code penalizes capital gains with higher rates, it also raises the price of saving and investment compared to consumption.

Yet work, production, saving and investment are how we generate national income, so it doesn’t make sense to discourage taxable income with higher tax rates.

This isn’t some sort of modern-day revelation. Andrew Mellon, a Treasury secretary during the 1920s, noted that “the history of taxation shows that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid. The high rates inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw his capital from productive business.”

Unlike the rest of us, the rich have a great ability to alter the timing, amount and composition of their income. That’s because, according to IRS data, those with more than $1 million of adjusted gross income get only 33 percent of it from wages and salaries. The super-rich (those with income above $10 million) rely on wages and salaries for only 19 percent of their income.

In 1980, when the top tax rate was 70 percent, rich people (those with incomes of more than $200,000) reported about $36 billion of income; the IRS collected about $19 billion of that amount. So what happened when President Ronald Reagan lowered the top tax rate to 28 percent by 1988? Did revenue fall proportionately, to about $8 billion?

Folks on the left thought that would happen, complaining that Reagan’s “tax cuts for the rich” would starve the government of revenue and give upper-income taxpayers a free ride.

But if we look at the 1988 IRS data, rich people paid more than $99 billion to Uncle Sam. That is, because rich taxpayers were willing to earn and report much more income, the government collected five times as much revenue with a lower rate.

To be sure, many other factors helped account for the explosion of taxable income, including inflation, population growth and other pro-growth policies. So we don’t know whether the lower tax rates on the rich caused revenues to merely double, triple or quadruple.

But we do know that the rich paid much more when the tax rate was much lower.

Now Obama wants to run the experiment in reverse. He hasn’t proposed to push the top tax rate up to 70 percent, thank goodness, but the combined effect of his class-warfare policies would mean a big increase in marginal tax rates.

That might be good for workers in China, India or Ireland, because American jobs and investment would migrate to those places. But it’s not the right policy for the United States.

 

My brother, a die hard union worker, and one who voted for Obama just sent me this.
Me thinks the president is losing ground fast.
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I had seen this before, it's great and funny too

 

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Perfect!

 

Reagan predicted it 30 years in advance..... This is another great video.

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Natural and Forced Inequality
by Roger Pilon - The European, April 19, 2012

In modern American politics, complaints about “economic inequality” have long been a staple of the Democratic Party. During the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt perfected the complaint, purporting to speak for the “little guy.” Barack Obama today champions the “middle class,” ironically undercutting the complaint — apparently, the “little guy” has moved up. But the unquestioned premise endures: out of fairness, economic inequality is a problem government must address. Really?

We inherited a much narrower sense of equality. Indeed, it’s the premise of our founding document. The Declaration of Independence, rejecting the political inequalities of the Old World, proclaims that “all Men are created equal.” But in so writing, Jefferson meant simply that we all have equal rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” plus the right to secure those rights — the right of self-rule — through governments whose just powers are grounded in “the consent of the governed.”

If self-rule is to be enjoyed equally, however, government must be limited. It can pursue neither equality of result nor equality even of opportunity through redistributive schemes — not if people are to be free to pursue happiness as they wish, alone or in association with others. We’re born with equal rights — to pursue happiness, not to happiness. What we do with those rights is up to us. We can be industrious, or not; beneficent, or not — indeed, we may be lucky, or not.

That's freedom: nothing more, nothing less.

Our history, the work of mere humans, has reflected that vision imperfectly, of course. With the Constitution's oblique recognition of slavery, made necessary to ensure union, equality got off to a bad start. The Framers knew the institution was inconsistent with their principles. It didn't die naturally, as they'd hoped, but only after a civil war. Segregation followed in the South, until the 1960s, all of which still colors our conception of equality, often for the worse: affirmative action, for example, treats people unequally in the name of equality.

But slowly, that kind of unequal treatment is receding. Not so with the unequal treatment that flowed from the Progressive Era, as instituted by the New Deal, which has increasingly infused American politics with the idea that government's role is not simply to secure our rights and provide certain public goods like infrastructure and clean air, but to provide all manner of private goods, like education, retirement security, health care, and housing, all of which requires massive tax and regulatory redistribution, reducing us ineluctably to dependents on, if not servants of the state.

In fact, a recent Heritage Foundation study found that in the first two years of the Obama administration, dependency on the federal government alone rose 23 %, with 67 million Americans now relying on federal programs. To pay for those, the Bureau of Economic Analysis tells us, total government spending has risen from 27 % of GDP in 1960 to 37 % today.

That in turn requires more taxes — but, under the modern view, not equal taxation. In fact, the Tax Foundation reports that the “1 %” that Obama and the “occupy” crowd have so demonized pay 37 % of federal income taxes, while the share paid by the top 5 % of earners rose from 43 % in 1986 to nearly 60 % in 2008. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who pay no or negative federal income taxes has increased from 18.5 % in 1986 to 51 % today. Is that fair? It certainly isn’t the equal treatment that our founding principles plainly require.

But it’s not only equality that suffers when we move from private to public welfare — including the “corporate welfare” that inevitably arises when those best able to work the redistributive system do so. Over time, the set of incentives that such a system establishes saps the moral fiber of a nation. We can live, mostly, with the envy that accompanies natural inequalities. Inequalities created by government are altogether different. The incentive to “get mine” that such unfairness unleashes has brought us, collectively, to borrowing 40% of what we spend and to a federal debt approaching $16 trillion and growing. That will not be reversed by still more collectivism in the name of equality — or fairness. Obama claims that “We’re all in this together.” We’ll see, come November.

 

Life, Sweet Life

http://www.dickmorris.com/obamas-lavish-lifestyle-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/

 

Two Different Strategies

http://www.dickmorris.com/big-difference-in-campaign-strategies-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/