Thursday, February 26, 2009

WSJ: Obama's 2% Lie - Take everything they earn, and it still won't be enough.

Perhaps we should first notice that:

The New York Times wrongly reported that the [Wall Street] Journal's circulation growth is due to heavy discounting and that the use of this tactic had increased since the News Corp takeover.

From Moonbattery

So a news paper telling the truth goes up in circulation, and the lying corrupt and biased media falls to the abyss and lies through their teeth about the successful competitors.

Here's a prime example as to why people are willing to pay for wall-street-journal's content (and will never give a dime to NYT again):
The 2% Illusion
Take everything they earn, and it still won't be enough.
President Obama has laid out the most ambitious and expensive domestic agenda since LBJ, and now all he has to do is figure out how to pay for it. On Tuesday, he left the impression that we need merely end "tax breaks for the wealthiest 2% of Americans," and he promised that households earning less than $250,000 won't see their taxes increased by "one single dime."

This is going to be some trick. Even the most basic inspection of the IRS income tax statistics shows that raising taxes on the salaries, dividends and capital gains of those making more than $250,000 can't possibly raise enough revenue to fund Mr. Obama's new spending ambitions.

Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and "the wealthiest 2%." Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That's about 7% of all returns; the data aren't broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% -- about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 -- paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.

Note that federal income taxes are already "progressive" with a 35% top marginal rate, and that Mr. Obama is (so far) proposing to raise it only to 39.6%, plus another two percentage points in hidden deduction phase-outs. He'd also raise capital gains and dividend rates, but those both yield far less revenue than the income tax. These combined increases won't come close to raising the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Mr. Obama is going to need.

...

The bottom line is that Mr. Obama is selling the country on a 2% illusion. Unwinding the U.S. commitment in Iraq and allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire can't possibly pay for his agenda. Taxes on the not-so-rich will need to rise as well.

On that point, by the way, it's unclear why Mr. Obama thinks his climate-change scheme won't hit all Americans with higher taxes. Selling the right to emit greenhouse gases amounts to a steep new tax on most types of energy and, therefore, on all Americans who use energy. There's a reason that Charlie Rangel's Ways and Means panel, which writes tax law, is holding hearings this week on cap-and-trade regulation.

Mr. Obama is very good at portraying his agenda as nothing more than center-left pragmatism. But pragmatists don't ignore the data. And the reality is that the only way to pay for Mr. Obama's ambitions is to reach ever deeper into the pockets of the American middle class.

H/T to Hotair.

Ever had the feeling your leaders are trying to make a fool out of you?

2 comments:

  1. i think you are retarded.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Way to counter an argument 'Kate'. How very intelligent.

    The most puzzling part is where you chose to post this comment and when. On September 2009? To a post from Feb?

    Are you throwing empty insults because you disagree with the content I quote?! How very-very-very retarded of you.

    ReplyDelete