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Can someone do a fact check on this?

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Can someone do a fact check on this?

Postby GabonX on Tue Apr 13, 2010 11:26 am

Income tax day, April 15, 2010, now divides Americans into two almost equal classes: those who pay for the services provided by government and the freeloaders. The percentage of Americans who will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009 has risen to 47 percent.

That isn't the worst of it. The bottom 40 percent not only pay no income tax, but the government sends them cash or benefits financed by the taxes dutifully paid by those who do pay income tax.

The outright cash handouts include the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which can amount to as much as $5,657 a year to low-income families. Other financial benefits can include child tax credits, welfare, food stamps, WIC (Women, Infants, Children), housing subsidies, unemployment benefits, Medicaid, S-CHIP and other programs.

This is both a massive transfer of wealth and a soak-the-rich racket. The top 10 percent pay 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has become the congressional leader in explaining details of the recently passed Health Control Law. He says that, based on Congressional Budget Office figures, taxes to pay for Obamacare will have to skyrocket to an 88 percent income tax rate within 30 years.

Although all wage-earners help fund their own Social Security and Medicare benefits, only federal income taxpayers pay the costs of running the federal government, and are responsible for paying off our $12.8 trillion national debt and for bailing out Social Security, Medicare, and Fannie and Freddie when they collapse.

Even the recently passed Health Control Law contains financial subsidies to unmarried couples that are denied to married couples. This rewards the unmarried women who were the second largest demographic constituency that voted for Barack Obama for president in 2008.

When Obama told Joe the Plumber he wanted to "spread the wealth around," Obama wasn't kidding. That's exactly what he is now doing: taking money from taxpayers and spreading it around to non-taxpayers.

Nor was Obama kidding when, on the eve of his election, he threatened, "We are going to fundamentally transform the United States of America." Converting the earnings of American workers into handouts for those who voted for Obama in 2008 is certainly a fundamental transformation.

Obama's promise not to raise taxes on middle-Americans is already down the drain. Obama brought former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker out of obscurity to serve as chairman of an Economic Recovery Advisory Board and announce that we need to raise taxes.

Volcker was blunt in predicting that the new tax increase will be a Value-Added Tax (VAT). That's the tax European socialists love because its rates can be hidden and frequently raised, while producing rivers of revenue for the bureaucrats.

Volcker claimed that a VAT is "not a toxic idea." It really is -- Charles Krauthammer called it "the ultimate cash cow" because it transfers so much money from individuals to the government.

Having already co-opted the executive and legislative branches of government for his fundamental transformation, Obama now wants to use the judiciary, too. The retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens gives him this opportunity.

On Jan. 18, 2001m on Public Radio WBEZ-FM, Chicago, Obama complained that the Earl Warren Court "wasn't that radical" because "it didn't break free from the essential constraints placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution. ... The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and serve more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society."

Calling for the Supreme Court to participate in the "redistribution of wealth" is shockingly revolutionary. Any judicial nominee who agrees with Obama's theory should be rejected.

Obama's game plan to "fundamentally transform" America is based on both Saul Alinsky's modus operandi for community organizing and on the Cloward-Piven spending strategy. Saul Alinsky was a famous Chicago radical, and Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were less-well-known Columbia University sociologists.

The goal of all three of these agitators was the overthrow of the private enterprise system. The Alinsky strategy is to use community organizing and mass demonstrations by those he labeled the "Have Nots," and the Cloward-Piven strategy is to overload the bureaucracy with enormous demands for entitlements, thereby causing a financial crisis.

Obama used Alinsky methods by taxpayer financing of ACORN and subprime mortgages. Obama used Cloward-Piven methods by massive deficit spending for entitlements for more and more millions of people.

Fortunately, hardworking, taxpaying Americans are beginning to understand how they are being ripped off and rushed into bankruptcy. The one way to save ourselves and our country is to elect a Congress in November pledged to stop the spending.
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Re: Can someone do a fact check on this?

Postby Timminz on Tue Apr 13, 2010 11:36 am

GabonX wrote:The top 10 percent pay 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.

Sounds like a good deal for them, considering they most assuredly control more than 73% of the wealth.
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Re: Can someone do a fact check on this?

Postby GabonX on Tue Apr 13, 2010 11:43 am

Here's another one to look at. I really want to know if this is right wing propaganda, or if things really are this bad..

Incentives Not to Work


"The second way government assistance programs contribute to long-term unemployment is by providing an incentive, and the means, not to work. Each unemployed person has a 'reservation wage'—the minimum wage he or she insists on getting before accepting a job. Unemployment insurance and other social assistance programs increase [the] reservation wage, causing an unemployed person to remain unemployed longer."

Any guess who wrote that? Milton Friedman, perhaps. Simon Legree? Sorry.

Full credit goes to Lawrence H. Summers, the current White House economic adviser, who wrote those sensible words in his chapter on "Unemployment" in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, first published in 1999.

Mr. Summers should give a tutorial to the U.S. Senate, which is debating whether to extend unemployment benefits for the fourth time since the recession began in early 2008. The bill pushed by Democrats would extend jobless payments to 99 weeks, or nearly two full years, at a cost of between $7 billion and $10 billion. As Mr. Summers suggests, rarely has there been a clearer case of false policy compassion.

Mr. Summers is merely reflecting what numerous economic studies have shown. The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee put it this way in its January minutes: "The several extensions of emergency unemployment insurance benefits appeared to have raised the measured unemployment rate, relative to levels recorded in past downturns." It continued: "Some estimates suggested it could account for 1 percentage point or more of the increase in the unemployment rate during the recession." That's more than one million jobless workersAlan Reynolds of the Cato Institute has found that the average unemployment episode rose from 10 weeks before the recession to 19 weeks after Congress twice previously extended jobless benefits—to 79 from 26 weeks. Even as initial unemployment claims have fallen in recent months, the length of unemployment has risen. Mr. Reynolds estimates that the extensions of unemployment insurance and other federal policies have raised the official jobless rate by nearly two percentage points.

Or consider the Brookings Institution, whose panel on economic activity reported this March that jobless insurance extensions "correspond to between 0.7 and 1.8 percentage points of the 5.5 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate witnessed in the current recession."

Or perhaps the Senate should listen to another Obama Administration economist, Alan Krueger of the Treasury Department, who concluded in a 2008 study that "job search increases sharply in the weeks prior to benefit exhaustion." In other words, many unemployed workers don't start seriously looking for a job until they are about to lose their benefits.

And, sure enough, the share of unemployed workers who don't have a job for more than 26 weeks has steadily increased, reaching a record 44.1% in March. The average spell of unemployment is now 31 weeks, even though the economy is once again creating more new jobs than it is losing. Democrats are slowly converting unemployment insurance into a welfare program.

Despite all of this evidence, Democrats seem to think that extending jobless benefits for another 20 weeks is a big political winner. Iowa Senator Tom Harkin recently roared, "Is there any compassion at all left with Republicans for people whose checks are going to run out?" New York's Chuck Schumer calls Republicans "inhumane."

But do these Senators really think it's compassionate to give people an additional incentive to stay out of the job market, losing crucial skills and contacts? And how politically smart is it for Democrats to embrace policies that keep the jobless rate higher than it would otherwise be? How many Democrats share Mr. Harkin's apparent desire to defend a jobless rate near 9% (today it is 9.7%) in the fall election campaign.

We should add that Republicans would rather not fight on these incentive grounds and are instead opposing the new benefits only because Democrats refuse to pay for them and want to add to the deficit. In other words, the GOP is merely asking Democrats to live up to their own "pay as you go" fiscal promises, since the total bill for these jobless benefits has now hit nearly $90 billion.

If Republicans were really cynical, they'd let the new benefits pass and run against the higher jobless rate in the fall. In any case, no one should be surprised that when you subsidize people for not working, more people will choose not to work.

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Re: Can someone do a fact check on this?

Postby Gypsys Kiss on Tue Apr 13, 2010 11:50 am

GabonX wrote: The one way to save ourselves and our country is to elect a Congress in November pledged to stop the spending.


The other option is for you to commit suicide. That way not only would the freeloaders not get their dirty little hands on your tax dollars, but we at CC wouldnt have to see your scare mongering.
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Re: Can someone do a fact check on this?

Postby saxitoxin on Tue Apr 13, 2010 11:56 am

While I'm not certain there's something here to fact-check as the OM seems like a policy statement, a warm kudos to GabonX! While he and I may be on opposite sides of the political spectrum I echo his frustration and disgust of the Obama puppet and the puppet's masters.

GabonX, as an unrepenting capitalist, is upset with Obama.

Saxitoxin, as a diealectic socialist, is upset with Obama.

These polarities can only be reconciled and understood by identifying the pig-whore Obama as a Fabian, which he is. In Chapter 4 (The Fabian Theory of Socialism) of Trotsky's seminal work "Writings on Britain" he identified the Fabian as even worse than the imperialist. The Fabian, such as Obama, uses the outward guise of economic equality to move even larger strands of wealth and power into his own hands by preaching "collaboration." These "drawing room radicals and church socialists" demand economic equality only so long as the process to that goal enriches themselves.

The sycophant Obama cares about one thing: seeking and maintaining power for power's sake. He preaches wealth redistribution because it is, for him, the path of least resistance. But, he exhibits a willingness to sell the people down the river into even greater poverty and misery as he and his boorish wife, Mitch, line their pockets with corporate grift.

It is time for all America's pacifists, radicals, nuclear-free activists and anti-racists to join together and deliver a stunning defeat to Obama's whorish, sycophantic and self-serving servility to the corporations that paid for him - such as big coal and HMO PAC's like that of UHC - at the next election.

- Saxitoxin!
:) Unofficial CC Happiness Ombudsman :)
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Re: Can someone do a fact check on this?

Postby GabonX on Tue Apr 13, 2010 12:04 pm

Gypsys Kiss wrote:
GabonX wrote: The one way to save ourselves and our country is to elect a Congress in November pledged to stop the spending.


The other option is for you to commit suicide. That way not only would the freeloaders not get their dirty little hands on your tax dollars, but we at CC wouldnt have to see your scare mongering.

I don't know if you noticed, but things haven't been going so well lately.

We are at a tipping point where things will either start to improve, or we are going to be facing very serious problems. When I say serious problems, I mean problems that are on par with the worst of what occurred in the last century. We've had a lot of failure in the last few decades and we don't have room for much more..

You can call m a "scare monger" if you want. It seems kind of ridiculous to me seeing as I'm asking people for counter points, but if you think that you've taken the high road in making a personal attack on me because I want to talk about issues that make you uncomfortable so be it.

Personally I think that such discussions on substantive issues (aka "scare mongering") are sane and necessary if we want to avoid very serious problems.
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Re: Can someone do a fact check on this?

Postby saxitoxin on Tue Apr 13, 2010 12:05 pm

Gypsys Kiss wrote:
GabonX wrote: The one way to save ourselves and our country is to elect a Congress in November pledged to stop the spending.


The other option is for you to commit suicide. That way not only would the freeloaders not get their dirty little hands on your tax dollars, but we at CC wouldnt have to see your scare mongering.


reported for inciting suicide
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Re: Can someone do a fact check on this?

Postby Doc_Brown on Tue Apr 13, 2010 1:00 pm

Timminz wrote:
GabonX wrote:The top 10 percent pay 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.

Sounds like a good deal for them, considering they most assuredly control more than 73% of the wealth.


Actually, this is demonstrably false. The highest income earners are in a higher tax bracket, meaning they pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes. Therefore, their combined income constitutes a significantly smaller portion of the total wealth gain than the 73% that their taxes would suggest.

To use some real numbers as an example, suppose that the top 10% have an average tax rate of 35% while the remaining 90% pay an average of 10% of their income in taxes. Total tax revenue collected by the government is T. Since the top 10% pay 73% of that, they're paying 0.73T, and with a 35% tax rate, they are earning 0.73T/0.35 = 2.09T. The remaining 90% are paying a total of 0.27T at a 10% average rate, which means they're earning 2.7T. Under this example, the top 10% are collected only 44% of the total wealth gain in the country while paying 73% of the taxes.

We can also do that symbolically to get an equation for the percentage of total income the richest 10% are receiving as a function of the tax rates and percent of tax revenue they pay:
Let P be the fraction of the total tax revenue paid by the richest x percent (73% when x=10%).
Let R1 be the average tax rate paid by the richest x percent (35% in my above example which should be fairly close).
Let R2 be the average tax rate of the remaining 1-x percent of the people (10% in my above example, though it's probably anywhere between 5% and 20%).
The percentage of the total wealth increase experienced by the richest x percent is:
W = P*R2 / (R1*(1-P) + R2*P)
Notice that R1 is always larger than R2, and therefore, R1*(1-P) > R2*(1-P). Or, R1*(1-P) + R2*P > R2. This means that W < P in all cases.
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Re: Can someone do a fact check on this?

Postby Phatscotty on Tue Apr 13, 2010 1:48 pm

Timminz wrote:
GabonX wrote:The top 10 percent pay 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.

Sounds like a good deal for them, considering they most assuredly control more than 73% of the wealth.

wow. how do you even begin to form your own opinions when your facts are so far off?
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Re: Can someone do a fact check on this?

Postby Phatscotty on Tue Apr 13, 2010 1:50 pm

GabonX wrote:Here's another one to look at. I really want to know if this is right wing propaganda, or if things really are this bad..

Incentives Not to Work


I do not work or buy anything on April 15th. I do my damnedest not to pay 1 single tax. It's the only thing thats get's me thru the next 364 tax days.

The harder I work, the harder I feed the beast with tax money. Push the workers too far, you don't get shit!

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These are not quotes, they are ways of life
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Re: Can someone do a fact check on this?

Postby pimpdave on Tue Apr 13, 2010 2:02 pm

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