Economy & Budget

What do Mitt Romney, Donald Trump and Ron Paul have in common? They all steadfastly support policies and practices that promote layoffs and firing people. Mitt Romney has said he enjoys firing people and doesn't care about the poorest who lack jobs. Donald Trump, who supports Romney, hosts a TV show about firing people. Ron Paul, who supports Romney on his layoffs at Bain Capital, opposes jobs programs and advocates an extreme laissez-faire that gives a green light to financial corruption by opposing any government role to prevent the crimes, punish the guilty and protect the citizenry.

Our congressional members’ plan for a serious budget reduction in the future does not work without a big initial down payment in spending cuts.

Today's Congress cannot bind future Congresses, and Congress has been notoriously unreliable with respect to the fiscal management of the country's finances.

Only a naive observer of today's political environment could believe that Congress will constrain spending to bring the deficit under control when the economy improves. The only point that the left might have is that fiscal stimulus might have a small temporary benefit when the money is originally spent, but the extent of the benefit depends on how the money is spent, e.g., infrastructure, tax rebates, government program, etc., and technical arguments about the multiplier effect of the spending. However, it has a negative impact when it is finally paid for.

Tax fairness is the campaign theme for the State of the Union political theater, yet what is being proposed doesn’t seem very fair.
 
According to the Census Bureau, 48.6 percent of all Americans live in a household that receives some sort of taxpayer assistance, and USA Today reports that only 54 percent of the people who file tax returns end up paying any taxes at all.
 
It seems to me that those of us who don’t receive government handouts, and are foolish enough to pay income tax, have been handed a pretty raw deal.
 
Those of us who pay taxes get to work our butts off, take risks, create jobs for others, make sacrifices that take us away from our families and spend 50, 60, 70 or even 100 hours some weeks trying to make our living.

I wrote this last year and thought it was pretty good, so I am reposting it this year.


Barack Obama. Oprah Winfrey. Robert Johnson. Dick Parsons. Bill Cosby. Michael Jordan. Tiger Woods.

It goes without saying that all of these individuals owe a great deal to Martin Luther King Jr., who is remembered today on the anniversary of his birth.

Milton Friedman. Friedrich Hayek. Ayn Rand. Adam Smith. Ronald Reagan. Jack Kemp. Arthur Laffer. Dick Armey.

It might be less obvious that this second group owes every bit as big a debt to King’s legacy.

The black community currently faces, collectively, a series of problems, each related to the others, intertwined, each compounding one another, and we must face them all together; we as a nation cannot ignore any of them.

Interest groups, fundraisers and politicians would like most to believe that circumstances can be changed with retooling underprivileged areas, as though people were robots, without any study of behaviors and free choices, which is about as effective as bringing a tennis racket to a baseball field.

I believe businesses are not investing today because they feel or fear that the demand for their products or services is not there or not there in a large enough quantity to merit investment. Obviously this varies from business to business and from industry to industry.
 
Uncertainty in national leadership (especially the White House) sows continuous seeds of doubt and confusion: If combined with the well-established fact that the leader is desirous of punishing the financially innovative to benefit and enrich the financially slovenly, it is only a matter of time before it wreaks havoc on the productivity of the economy. Consequently, businesses will cease to grow and future generations of entrepreneurials will wither away. When this happens, self-doubt and confusion become the order of the day and a once-great economic engine slowly disintegrates into a bygone era.

One of the foundations of the American Dream has always been the hope of someday purchasing one's own home. In the past, however, it took nearly a lifetime of sacrifice before most people could afford to do so.

The first decade of the new millennium in America bore witness to a viral explosion in real estate investment, fueled by low mortgage rates and an abandonment of the equity markets. The nation created a new market overnight to continue the necessary growth in the United States and with one simple key: home mortgage debt.

The No. 1 issue next year will be that President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Democrats will be fighting for working people while Republicans will be fighting for millionaires who they believe should make no sacrifice for America.

Immediately after Congress passed the payroll tax cut and jobless benefits extension, Harry Reid renewed the battle for a surtax for those making a million bucks a year to join the rest of America in being part of the solution.

When House Republicans turned off C-SPAN cameras to prevent Democrats being seen championing the payroll tax cut for 160 million Americans, it was a pathetic GOP confession of humiliation and defeat. This is how Vladimir Putins runs Russia. This is not the way we do business in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Obama and his cronies are good at one thing — telling a lie consistently enough so that it is continuously reported and eventually believed. They know that the only reality in politics is what people believe to be true, not what actually is true.

The payroll tax issue is a perfect example of this axiom.

For better or worse, the House of Representatives passed a yearlong extension of the payroll tax cut well before the Senate ever brought the issue up.