That is one of the most important lines from this Jon Lovitz rant – which is a dangerous rant for this administration, for reasons which I will relate below – that is making the rounds:
Tag: taxes
Pssst! Maxine Waters (D, CA)!
Just thought I’d let you know: about this?
The CBC is trying to help by organizing job fairs across the country. [Congresswoman] Waters also wants to help by putting more pressure on the big banks to help with mortgages.
“If they don’t come up with loan modifications and keep people in their homes that they’ve worked so hard for, we’re going to tax them out of business,” Waters said.
Gov. Mark Dayton’s (D, MN) budget surrender ceremony.
The formal capitulation took place yesterday, and signals an end to Gov. Dayton’s ill-conceived, ill-timed, and ill-executed attempt to dominate the Minnesota legislature in the same way that predecessor Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R, MN) did during his term in office. The very short version, for those not following along: Minnesota Republican legislators wanted a $34 billion dollar, two-year budget with no new taxes; Dayton wanted $3 billion in business-killing tax hikes. Republicans told him no, and sent him a budget, which Dayton vetoed. The Minnesota government shut down – which meant, among other things, that Minnesotans were in critical danger of running out of beer and not being allowed to fish. Faced with such proven evidence of abject incompetence and idiocy on Dayton’s part, eventually the Governor was brought to heel like a whipped dog; his formal capitulation soon followed. Final score: $35.7 billion over two years with no tax hikes – and legislators in Minnesota have to pretend that Gov. Dayton was not savagely politically beaten. No, seriously… apparently this is supposed to be framed as being a ‘compromise.’
Interestingly enough, post-capitulation news articles on this don’t seem to mention Pawlenty nearly as much as they did, pre-capitulation. Although that may just be a sort of terrible pity towards Dayton, who did turn out to be a very slender, and trivial to break, reed…
Moe Lane (crosspost)
Continue reading Gov. Mark Dayton’s (D, MN) budget surrender ceremony.
#rsrh Raise your own damned taxes.
Nothing is stopping so-called ‘Patriotic Millionaires’ from doing it on their own. Well, nothing except the minor detail that it’s all the other rich people who should pay extra. Somehow not enough people are ever ready to voluntarily share in the sacrifice that they’re advocating. Think I’m being cynical? Check this out: Massachusetts has a feature where you can voluntarily pay more state taxes on your return. This dates back to 2000, when it was a compromise to get a reduction of the state income tax rate down from 5.85% to 5.3% (it was originally supposed to be 5%). As of the beginning of April 2011, the state has gotten 1,740,000 tax returns back this year. Guess how many people are paying the higher rate?
862.
How many Massachusetts residents are cheering on the idea of making the rich pay more? How many rich Massachusetts residents are cheering on the idea of making the rich pay more? I’m willing to bet that in either case the number is greater than 862; there are a lot of hypocrites in that state*.
Moe Lane
(Via Hot Air)
*Admittedly, there are a lot of hypocrites in every state, but right now we’re focusing on Massachusetts.
Alec Baldwin politics Senate taxes (placeholder post)
Just on the off chance that Alec Baldwin ever runs for political office in the near future… whoever is researching this, be sure to have your boss ask Alec how that residential status tax audit turned out. Or why he fought it in the first place, seeing as Baldwin was for raising taxes on… well, people as rich as him… back in 2006.
Deceiver.com. Doesn’t always have stuff that you can use – but when they do, it’s usually tasty. And they have the saving grace of bipartisan finger-pointing.
#rsrh What’s as permanent as a temporary entitlement?
A temporary tax cut, apparently. Peter Orszag has decided that the party doesn’t need to go down with the ship – or, more accurately, the ship’s captain:
In the face of the dueling deficits, the best approach is a compromise: extend the tax cuts for two years and then end them altogether. Ideally only the middle-class tax cuts would be continued for now. Getting a deal in Congress, though, may require keeping the high-income tax cuts, too. And that would still be worth it.
I’d feel bad about the way that the administration is grinding metal on this, if only… actually, I cannot conceive of a situation where I’d feel bad about watching the administration squirm as it realizes that it has to break yet another badly thought-out and hastily-made campaign promise. Although I suppose that we haven’t plumbed the depths of stupidity, at that: the depths of stupidity would be to impose a new tax of roughly the same amount to the average taxpayer and claim that this wasn’t breaking the huge albatross around his neck his most famous badly thought-out and hastily-made campaign promise:
Continue reading #rsrh What’s as permanent as a temporary entitlement?
Rasmussen: 9% of USA in coma.
I’m frankly impressed that Rasmussen was able to poll them anyway on tax policy. I’ve known for a while that pollsters would dearly love to be able to bypass the brain’s censor circuits and find out what the American voter really thinks; I’m just mildly surprised that research along those lines has paid off so early. Then again, if you’re in a coma you probably will see a tax decrease, at that – so are they even wrong?
Forty-four percent (44%) of U.S. voters still expect their taxes to increase under President Obama, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
Just nine percent (9%) think their taxes will go down, and 39% expect them to stay the same.
Better and better, the percentage of people who have made a rational assessment of this administration’s tax policy has risen by a third in just a year and a half (in 2008, only 31% thought that our taxes would go up). Nice to see that we’re having an impact. Or that the administration’s antics are. Hard to say, really.
If you drill deeper down, you’ll find that a majority of Mainstream (Rasmussen’s term for ‘normal’) class voters think that their taxes will go up, while a majority of Political (Rasmussen’s term for ‘self-identified elitist’) class voters think that their taxes will stay about the same. Hopefully, this will make you feel better about the 39% generally who expect their taxes to say the same; a large number of them are actually still reachable. The others… are not. Don’t worry about it over-much, mostly because there’s no point anyway.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
WH: Individual mandate now a tax.
Democrats, administration apologists hardest hit.
(H/T: Hot Air Headlines) If you are surprised at this… [deep breath] well. You should not be.
When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”
[snip]
Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.
Steny’s groundwork on raising taxes.
Quick: what does a video like this signify?
Yup, it’s a helpful warning that you’re about to be reminded that you shouldn’t believe Democratic politicians when they promise to not raise your taxes. Continue reading Steny’s groundwork on raising taxes.
You lie.
2008:
“I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”
2010 (bolding mine):
…since any Social Security plan would probably preserve benefits for those nearing retirement, it would not help the administration achieve its goal of reducing the deficit to 3 percent of gross domestic product, from 10 percent, within a decade.
One way to reach that 3 percent goal, by the calculations of Mr. Obama’s economic team: a 5 percent value-added tax, which would generate enough revenue to simultaneously permit the reduction in corporate tax rates Republicans favor.