Thursday, May 14, 2009
Brass
You have to admit, this takes balls so huge he must have to push them around in a wheelbarrow.*
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*The late, great, Bill Hicks
10 Comments:
By 
JPMcT, at
Thu May 14, 11:24:00 PM:
Yeah, a pretty stunning statement. I'm certainly happy that Mr. Obama's handlers are letting him read the Wall Street journal.
By 
, at
Fri May 15, 12:55:00 AM:
Made my jaw drop when I read it, boggling my feeble mind. The man seems to have an ample supply of effrontery.
By , at
Fri May 15, 01:05:00 AM:
Read what he said carefully ... Obama is softening us up for the next round of The Plan.
Obama now admits that his deficits are "unsustainable" and that they will result in intolerable higher interest rates unless reined in ... and so Obama says we face "tough choices."
The only possible choices to cut the deficits Obama & Co have just created are --
1) cut government discretionary spending,
2) cut entitlement benefits,
3) reduce health care spending, and/or
4) raise taxes.
Obama won't do #1 -- he's actually doing the opposite by increasing spending to unprecedented levels -- his efforts at cutting waste are a joke.
Could Obama do #2 -- by raising the retirement age, etc? It's possible ... as part of our "collectively sharing the pain" ... but I doubt it'd be drastic enough to be more than 10% of a solution.
Obama just gave us his proposal for #3 -- a promise from the health care industry to rein in costs ... not very compelling ... while Obama wants to add 50 million people to the public health-care rolls.
So we have to expect #4 is coming -- higher taxes. Expect Obama to raise payroll taxes for openers -- once again with an emphasis on the top 5% -- probably by removing the ceiling. Once this precedent is set, we can expect increasing rates and decreasing thresholds ... all in the name of fiscal responsibility.
So where is this going? Obama's budget projects permanent structural deficits greater than $600 billion per year. The CBO projects these will be even higher ... increasing past $1 trillion annually ... as the CBO expects lower GDP growth rates than Obama. Personally, I expect that after a cranked-up 2010, our actual growth rates will be lower still ... because of the cumulative adverse affects of Obama's many growth-killing proposals ... so that deficits will be higher still.
What's the bottom line: The total federal income taxes paid by the top 5% is about $600 billion per year ... so you'd need to double the federal income taxes on the top 5% to balance Obama's budget, using his own numbers. If instead you used the CBO's numbers, you'd need to either 1) raise taxes on the top 5% by 150%, or 2) double the federal income taxes on the top by 50%.
Re-read what I just wrote, slowly.
It's not about 95% - 5%. Even if you wanted to kill the rich, the numbers don't work. Forget that the truly rich will skate above this anyway.
We've been seeing such staggering numbers that it's easy to lose perspective. A trillion is a million million. You can start a small business for less than a million ... so a trillion is easily the start-up capital for a million small businesses.
Gates and Buffett are our two greatest business success stories ... but you could expropriate both their entire net worths ... built over a lifetime of hard work and luck ... and you'd only be a tenth of the way to a trillion.
The magnitude of the financial debacle Obama is leading us to is simply staggering. When billions become trillions, it's beyond the simple politics of Democrat v Republican. It's Wagnerian.
I've suspected for some time that Obama-Axlerod are doing this by design. Know I know for sure. It won't end in Utopia.
Can I scream any louder.
Link, over
ps ... I'm usually a mild mannered guy, and am not especially political... until now.
By , at
Fri May 15, 01:13:00 AM:
Link ... correction ... I dropped a key word
"you'd need to ... double the federal income taxes on the top half by 50%."
By , at
Fri May 15, 01:37:00 AM:
Link, correcting again:
"you'd need to ... double the federal income taxes on the top half"
By , at
Fri May 15, 08:35:00 AM:
Where's the outrage? Has the government been issuing Soma to everyone and I just missed my dose?
By Elise, at
Fri May 15, 11:28:00 AM:
This is really pretty clever. The economy was in crisis so we had to spend lots of money even though we didn't have it. Now we're in a deficit-spending crisis so we will have to raise taxes even though we said we wouldn't.
Nicely played but I wonder how we're going to complete the next sentence: Now we've raised taxes on everyone so we will have to ...
Sigh. It really would have been much smarter to just let people not pay any income tax for a year or two. It would have run up the same amount of debt and at least we'd have saved the administrative costs associated with collecting the money and then sending it back out into the world again.
By Charlottesvillain, at
Fri May 15, 12:18:00 PM:
He's certainly right about the sustainability. I would not want to be holding longer dated US Treasuries.
There are three options long term for handling the huge and growing US debt. 1) pay it back through government surplus. 2) Inflate and pay it back with huge amounts of worthless currency. 3) default.
Clearly #1 is politically beyond the realm of possibility at this point. Obviously this administration has no interest in cutting spending. Taxes will be raised, but the level of austerity required to pay down debt is too large for any politician to recommend, particularly if the Chinese are seen as the beneficiary. That leaves inflate or default, and the Fed and Treasury seem hell bent on inflating. Everyone ought to be considering how to prepare for the coming double digit inflation and loss of purchasing power of the $USD. It won't be overnight but its coming.
By Dawnfire82, at
Sat May 16, 12:23:00 AM:
Hmm... that makes my student loans look like a much better deal in hindsight, doesn't it?
Hurray for the One! He's looking out for me! Of course, my son is probably screwed...
By Georg Felis, at
Sat May 16, 06:38:00 PM:
Five bucks says if we hit hyperinflation, your student loan interest rate will track right along with it.
