The Stafford Voice

Our little place to talk about and share about life.

economy

Taxing the Rich

by

by John Stossel

Progressives want to raise taxes on individuals who make more than $200,000 a year because they say it’s wrong for the rich to be “given” more money. Sunday’s New York Times carries a cartoon showing Uncle Sam handing money to a fat cat. They just don’t get it.

As I’ve said before, a tax cut is not a handout. It simply means government steals less. What progressives want to do is take money from some — by force — and spend it on others. It sounds less noble when plainly stated.

That’s the moral side of the matter. There’s a practical side, too. Taxes discourage wealth creation. That hurts everyone, the lower end of the income scale most of all. An economy that, through freedom, encourages the production of wealth raises the living standards of lower-income people as well as everyone else.

A free society is not a zero-sum game in which every gain is offset by someone’s loss. As long as government keeps its thumb off the scales, the “makers” who get rich do so by making others better off. (When the government allocates capital or creates barriers to competition, all bets are off.)

Of course, this is not the prevailing view among the intelligentsia. Columbia University Professor Marc Lamont Hill tells me, “Those who have more should pay more.”

But is there a point where they stop producing wealth or leave altogether?

Continue reading . . .

Politics vs Gold

by

by Thomas Sowell

One of the many slick tricks of the Obama administration was to insert a provision in the massive Obamacare legislation regulating people who sell gold. This had nothing to do with medical care but everything to do with sneaking in an extension of the government’s power over gold, in a bill too big for most people to read.

Gold has long been a source of frustration for politicians who want to extend their power over the economy. First of all, the gold standard cramped their style because there is only so much money you can print when every dollar bill can be turned in to the government, to be exchanged for the equivalent amount of gold.

When the amount of money the government can print is limited by how much gold the government has, politicians cannot pay off a massive national debt by just printing more money and repaying the owners of government bonds with dollars that are cheaper than the dollars with which the bonds were bought. In other words, politicians cannot cheat people as easily.

Continue reading . . .

Obama’s Disconnect

by

A big defining moment for any president and their administration is foreign policy. It can either make or break them. It’s impact is greater than many people give credit to. And, for the Obama administration it is proving to be a very difficult task to manage.

With the yet to be released book by Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars, it is a telling picture as to the lack of direction, understanding and experience. Namely the quarrelling back and forth between members and even Obama, also show a lack of leadership within the administration.

The direction Obama displays for his foreign policy is shady to say least. It appears that every decision is made to foster his image. Many comments and statements point only to a ME mentality. Even when he has said that he would rather be a great one term president, saying that he wants to get out of Afghanistan quickly to so not to loose all the Democrats support say another thing.

If Obama was to really campaign his first term through, he would really focus on his foreign policy. Foreign policy impacts everything from the economy to national security. Our national security is impacted when we are deploying troops in excess of 100 other countries. It also impacts it in a way that opens the nation to other terrorist threats. Something that Obama has said we could absorb like we did with 9-11.

The arrogance in making a statement like that shows a total disconnect from reality. It is that very attack that has pushed us to the edge. The occupying of the Middle East region, in some opinions, is the very reason we were attacked. An attack that has put a heavy strain on the economy by trying to fund the war efforts. That isn’t to focus all of America’s economic woes on war funded efforts, but it certainly hasn’t helped.

The Battle for the Future

by

by John Stossel

For most of the life of America, and when it grew fastest, government spent just a few hundred dollars per person. Today, the federal government alone spends $10,000. Politicians talk about cuts, but the cuts rarely happen. The political class always needs more.

I see the pressure. All day, Congress listens to people who say they need and deserve help.

The cost of any one program per taxpayer is small, but the benefits are concentrated on well-organized interest groups. It’s tough for a weak politician to say no.

But maybe things are changing. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., believes that “more and more people in America are beginning to wake up to the fact that this thing is coming unglued.”

I asked Ryan why his colleagues say it’s OK to spend more. Are they just stupid? Don’t they care? Or are they pandering for votes?

Continue reading . . .

Fools Money

by

by Thomas Sowell

Seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes said that words are wise men’s counters, but they are the money of fools.

That is as painfully true today as it was four centuries ago. Using words as vehicles to try to convey your meaning is very different from taking words so literally that the words use you and confuse you.

Take the simple phrase “rent control.” If you take these words literally– as if they were money in the bank– you get a complete distortion of reality.

New York is the city with the oldest and strongest rent control laws in the nation. San Francisco is second. But if you look at cities with the highest average rents, New York is first and San Francisco is second. Obviously, “rent control” laws do not control rent.

If you check out the facts, instead of relying on words, you will discover that “gun control” laws do not control guns, the government’s “stimulus” spending does not stimulate the economy and that many “compassionate” policies inflict cruel results, such as the destruction of the black family.

Do you know how many millions of people died in the war “to make the world safe for democracy”– a war that led to autocratic dynasties being replaced by totalitarian dictatorships that slaughtered far more of their own people than the dynasties had?

Warm, fuzzy words and phrases have an enormous advantage in politics. None has had such a long run of political success as “social justice.”

Continue reading . . .

2012 Groundwork of Hillary Clinton

by

by Dick Morris

Has the Democratic presidential primary of 2012 started already? Is Hillary Clinton beginning to position herself for a challenge to her boss? Yesterday, Hillary fired what may have been the first shot:

She said:

“I think that our rising debt level poses a national security threat, and it poses a national security threat in two ways: It undermines our capacity to act in our own interests, and it does constrain us where constraint may be undesirable. And it also sends a message of weakness, internationally.”

The contrast with her husband’s presidency is implicit: He balanced the budget and reduced the debt to the point where Wall Street fretted that there would be no more federal debt instruments to buy, leaving them without a safe place to park their money.

Hillary does nothing — nothing — without forethought. She plans every word, particularly when the words are critical of her president. By framing the “debt level” as a “national security threat,” she gives herself jurisdiction over budget policy and makes her comments about it appropriate for a secretary of state. And by criticizing the debt level that her president has amassed, she sets up the basis for a fiscal/economic critique of his presidency.

Continue reading . . .

Barack Obama’s 5 Cacophonous Notes

by

by David Limbaugh

I never expected President Barack Obama to be promoting my new book, “Crimes Against Liberty,” but that’s virtually what’s happened with his recent speeches on the economy. It’s as if he’s determined to validate every premise I assert in “Crimes Against Liberty.”

All the elements are there: his thin-skinned narcissism, his deceit, his militant partisanship, his bullying and his dogged adherence to his disastrous policy agenda against all evidence of its failure and against the express will of the American people.

His full-throated class warfare was on clear display. With him, it’s always us against them. He praised “Wisconsin’s working men and women,” that is union members, as if no one else works or contributes to the economy or society.

Expanding on this theme, he paid homage to the middle class — the people whose taxes “in any form” he promised he would never raise — before signing the excise tax on tobacco, trying to pass the cap-and-trade bill, shoving through Obamacare and its 14 to 19 new taxes, which will total some half a trillion dollars over the next decade and fall hardest on middle-income groups. A value-added tax is even on the table.

He claims to be the middle class’s greatest champion but fails to explain why his economic policies — not George W. Bush’s, not John Boehner’s — are devastating that very group and bankrupting our children’s futures.

No, the acceptance of personal accountability is not in his makeup. It’s still Bush’s fault that our unemployment rate hovers between 9 and 10 percent despite Obama’s promise that it would not exceed 8 percent if he passed his stimulus bill. Now he says “there’s no silver bullet” to fix these problems. But that’s not what he said during the campaign. He was the silver bullet who would cause the oceans to subside and whose policies would “jump-start this economy again.”

He ratcheted up his class warfare theme with this assertion that only those at the top of the economic ladder are doing well, while the middle class is being left behind. If that’s true, does it mean he will finally acknowledge the failure of his policies? After all, the middle class (and all groups) fared far better under President Bush. But don’t hold your breath.

Continue reading . . .

The Union Boondoggle

by

by Michelle Malkin

President Obama calls his latest attempt to revive the economy a “Plan to Renew and Expand America’s Roads, Railways and Runways.” I’m calling it “The Mother of all Big Dig Boondoggles.” Like the infamous “Big Dig” highway spending project in Boston, this latest White House infrastructure spending binge guarantees only two results: Taxpayers lose; unions win.

The plan would add at least $50 billion more to the nearly $230 billion already allocated in the original trillion-dollar stimulus law for infrastructure. Less than one-third of that infrastructure stimulus money has been spent, but the urgency to pile on has increased exponentially as the midterm elections approach and unemployment hovers near 10 percent. So, the president says he wants to “put people back to work” through a new “upfront investment” in surface transportation, airports and the air-traffic control system paid for by repealing tax incentives for the oil and gas industries — followed by massive, unpaid-for expenditures on pie-in-the-sky high-speed rail, “environmental sustainability” and “livability,” whatever that means.

Obama spoke emotionally at an AFL-CIO rally on Labor Day about unemployed construction workers. A “lot of those folks, they had lost their jobs in manufacturing and went into construction; now they’ve lost their jobs again,” he said. “It doesn’t do anybody any good when so many hardworking Americans have been idled for months, even years, at a time when there is so much of America that needs rebuilding.”

But here’s the rub: Not all workers are equal in Obama’s eyes. And most of them will remain “idled” by the Democrats’ own design. The key is E.O. 13502, a union-friendly executive order signed by Obama in his first weeks in office, which essentially forces contractors who bid on large-scale public construction projects worth $25 million or more to submit to union representation for its employees.

Continue reading . . .

Time to Put Up or Shut Up

by

by Thomas Sowell

When people learn that you are an economist, they often want you to predict which way the economy is going. There seem to be more than the usual number of calls for such predictions lately. But an economist should be more aware than others are of how hazardous such predictions can be.

One reason is that what happens in the economy is affected by what politicians do in Washington– and who can predict what politicians will do?

However, let me go out on a limb, and try to predict what politicians will not do.

What would probably get the economy recovering fastest and most completely would be for the President of the United States and Congressional leaders to shut up and stop meddling with the economy. But it is virtually impossible that they will do that.

Think about telling all the millions of people who have lost their jobs, their homes or their businesses: “I really messed you up but, hey, nobody’s perfect. So I’m going to leave things alone now.” In fact, that would be hard even to tell yourself.

Continue reading . . .

The Union Movement’s New Face

by

A Heritage Foundation Report:

Unions have been a familiar part of American working life for more than 70 years. Less familiar is the state of the union movement today: More union members now work for the government than for private employers. The above-market salaries and benefits that government employees receive are paid for by taxpayers. So, the union movement that began as a campaign to improve working conditions and salaries for workers in the private sector, now pushes for ever-higher taxes to increase the generous compensation that government employees enjoy. Heritage Foundation labor policy expert James Sherk details the changes in the union movement, and explains how Congress can react to this new reality.

Read report

Download PDF report