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Do social security and medicare taxes count?

Posted by zapdoodat on Monday, December 28, 2009 7:48:51 PM
Let's take a look at a document at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2007/pdf/hist.PDF

On page 30 of the document (page 34 of 329 of the pdf file) look at Table 2.1 RECEIPTS BY SOURCE.

Let's look at the row for fiscal year 2009. You will see that income tax collections was $1.26 trillion and social security receipts were $981 billion.

Just because Republicans constantly tell the lie that only 50% of Americans pay taxes doesn't make it true. Wasn't it Adolf Hitler who said that a BIG lie is more believable than a small lie? Can't all my fellow conservative friends here at townhall.com agree that $981 billion is quite a big lie?

Let's answer the following questions. Are social security taxes, taxes? Are Medicare taxes, taxes?
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Clinton did leave surplus's as far as the eye could see.

Posted by zapdoodat on Monday, December 28, 2009 7:44:52 PM
Many Republicans here say Clinton did not have budget surplus's. In fact, Clinton did run a surplus and Alan Greenspan and the CBO predicted in 2001 that the entire national debt could be paid off by 2009. Now, look at what your precious Republican party hast wrought.

Please look up the info at; http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2007/pdf/hist.PDF

On page 22 of the document (page 26 of the pdf file) is Table 1.1—SUMMARY OF RECEIPTS, OUTLAYS, AND SURPLUSES OR DEFICITS (–): 1789–2011.

Fiscal years 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001 all had surpluses in the Total column. The Republican president (George W. Bush) and the Republican controlled Congress pisssed this away as fast as they could. (one big teat suck for them) Republicans can lie my friends but they can not hide.


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Republicans and abortion, part deux

Posted by zapdoodat on Wednesday, December 23, 2009 4:25:05 PM
Republicans are the experts at 'framing' the issue.  Remember how the estate tax became the 'death' tax?  Pure genius, my friends.

Unfortunately, a glaring weakness of the Republican party is that using lofty rhetoric is more important than actually getting anything done. Let's take a closer look.

Republicans love to say that abortion is murder. These Republicans fancy that each abortion is caused because some group of liberals drive around in a car, spot a pregnant woman, seize her, take her (against her will) to a clinic to force an abortion on her.

Friends, nothing could be further from the truth. Every abortion has occurred because the mother of the unborn child has paid and/or signed the death warrant of her unborn child. The mother is the prime initiator for this ghastly act. The Republicans will say that she has committed first degree murder.

Can any Republican here tell me how the signer of the death warrant should be put to death, herself? How many life sentences should she serve in jail? Let's hope these Republican believers in the law can articulate an answer.

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Republicans and abortion

Posted by zapdoodat on Wednesday, December 23, 2009 4:14:38 PM
Republicans have pretend values.  Take abortion for example,  this issue is purely a fundraising tool for them, nada mas.

Republicans often say "over 40 million humans have been killed" and "You are despicable, right up there with Hitler and Mao" when talking about so called "pro-abortion" people.

These are tough words, indeed. Can we not agree that each abortion is of an unwanted child?  However, is anyone really "pro-abortion?"  Perhaps, these "pro-abortion" people think it just should not be criminalized?

Let's ask a few other tough questions. Who will take care of this child if the mother refuses to? Are you willing to pay more in taxes to take care of these 40 million human beings? I suspect most Republicans believe that the revenue can be raised with an appropriate set of tax cuts.  A cowardly approach I dare say.

When push comes to shove I suspect all card-carrying members of the Republican party will not bothered to pony up for the care of these children.  Look at what these Republicans do, not what they say.


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George 'W' bush's DEBT bomb.

Posted by zapdoodat on Wednesday, January 28, 2009 4:20:59 PM
A damming indictment of George 'W' bush and the Republican Party's 'cut taxes and spend even more' philosophy.

And now for some quotes from the 2001 era from Mr. Alan Greenspan's book, 'Age of Turbulence.'

We start on page 213, enter George 'W' Bush.

"The other issue looming large for the Fed was the disappearance of the national debt.  Strange as it may seem in hindsight, in January 2001 the possibility was real.   Nearly a decade of rising productivity and growth and budget discipline had put the U.S. government in a position to generate surplus's 'as far as the eye could see,' to borrow the phrase coined by President Reagan's budget director David Stockman in projecting deficits nearly two decades earlier.  Even allowing for the recession that might now be setting in, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was getting ready to raise its projection of the surplus to a stunning $5.6 trillion over ten years.  This was $3 trillion higher than the CBO had forecast in 1999, and $1 trillion more than it had predicted just the previous July."

Folks, look at what Republicans have done to our mighty and proud nation.  Another excerpt from Alan Greenspan's 'Age of Turbulence' on Republican malfeasance in the 21st century.

"But now the projected surpluses were so large that debt repayment would be completed within a very few years. Yet the surpluses would continue.  The CBO statisticians now envisioned the surpluses under current policy at $281 billion in 2001, $313 billion in 2002, $359 billion in 2003, and so on.  Assuming no major shift in fiscal policy, the CBO expected the reducible debt to be fully paid off by 2006; any surpluses thereafter would have to be held in some form of non-federal assets.  In 2006 the surplus would break $500 billion.  Thereafter, more than a half trillion extra dollars would flow into Uncle Sam's coffers each year."

And now, the last and most insightful quote of them all. It shows the Republican Party's ideological philosophy in the 21st century according to lifetime Republican, Alan Greenspan, in his book 'The Age of Turbulence', from page 217.

"Little value was placed rigorous economic policy debate or the weighing of long-term consequences."


Tags: debt  
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Repulicans worship at the Temple of DEBT

Posted by zapdoodat on Wednesday, January 28, 2009 3:55:30 PM
Let's explore Republican fiscal policy using Alan Greenspan's book 'The Age of Turbulence.'

From page 102, we have the following tidbit of his thoughts at the end of 1988.

"The economic indicators, meanwhile, were far from encouraging.  Huge government deficits under Reagan had caused the national debt to the public to almost triple, from just under $700 billion at the start of his presidency to more than $2 trillion at the end of fiscal year 1988.  The dollar was falling, and people were worried about America losing its competitive edge."

and from page 112, a quote taken from the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency.

"When George Bush won that fall, I hoped the Fed and his administration would get along.  Everybody knew that whoever came in after Reagan would face huge economic challenges: not just an eventual downturn in the business cycle, but whopping deficits and the rapidly mounting national debt."

Then Sir Greespan takes a walk down memory lane with his concerns for 'Bubba' Clinton

On page 143,

In 1993, "Clinton had outlined a broad, ambitious economic agenda during his campaign.  He wanted to cut taxes on the middle class, halve the federal deficit, stimulate job growth, increase U.s. competitiveness through new education and training programs, invest in the nation's infrastructure, and more."   

and

"If he wanted to address the economy's long-term health, the deficit was by far the most pressing concern.  I'd made that argument at the start of Bush's term, and now the problem was four years worse.  The national debt held by the public had risen to $3 trillion, causing interest payments to become the third-largest federal expense after Social Security and defense."  

and on pages 184-5, some quotes from the middle of Bubba's presidency from Mr. Alan Greenspan's book.

"Almost overnight, the Clinton administration found itself facing a budget surplus that was expanding as fast as the budget had dwindled."

"Not a single Republican had voted for the milestone deficit-reduction budget in 1993."

"My longtime involvement in Social Security reform had made me all too aware that, in the not-too-far-off-future, Social Security and Medicare would face demands in the trillions of dollars as the baby-boom generation aged.  There was no practical way to pay those obligations in advance.  The most effective policy would be to pay down the debt, creating in the process additional savings, which in turn could increase the nations productive capacity and federal revenues at existing tax rates by the time the boomers hit retirement age."



Tags: debt  
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Just say NO to socialism

Posted by zapdoodat on Thursday, October 09, 2008 2:54:06 PM

Too many Republicans now want the government to give American taxpayer's money to nuclear power companies which makes government bureaucrats  the deciders about who are going to be the 'winners' in the energy supply marketplace.

American taxpayer's wealth was redistributed in the 1950's. The promise was that electrical power would be so cheap, that a wattmeter wouldn't even be needed on a house. Pay a flat fee of $2 a month and take as much 'juice' off the grid as you want. That's what was promised.

The only problem was that the nuke power industry got fat, lazy, and stupid sucking off the teat of the government sow.

Now, Republicans are planning the same 'great' idea. Once these companies get their taxpayer money, then a multi-million dollar bonus will be given to just too many power company executives. Remember the Wall Street handouts?  All they have done is garnish some taxpayer's monies and have produced nothing in the dreaded free market.
Slovenliness and stupidity will surely follow.

It's time to get the US government out of the picture when it comes to deciding who will be the winners and losers in the 'free' market.

When Republicans want to emulate Socialist/Marxist France, then you know they have shown their true stripes.

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Blame for the Bailout

Posted by zapdoodat on Tuesday, September 30, 2008 3:33:15 PM
Time to blame the private mortgage lenders and Wall Street investment banks. All those re-fi letters you got in the mail, the past few years(one a day, no?) came from organizations outside the government regulatory process.

Wall Street would accept a mortgage from anyone with a pulse, bundle into a Collateral Mortgage Obligation and sell it for a lot of money. Unfortunately, they saddled these CMO's with credit default swaps and other heavily over-leveraged financial derivatives that they themselves didn't understand. The real estate market sunk which their quant models had NOT predicted. Oops!!

Did you see last Monday in the WSJ that JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs volunteered to go into the regulatory US banking system? They figured the government could run their business better than their own business plans. It has all been a big disgrace!
 
Though Fannie and Freddie have a share of the blame, I can't really put any of the blame on the Community Re-Investment Act.

It seems that for the past fews years, that I had heard a lot about 'Predatory Lending'. A situation where, instead of the government forcing lenders to lend more, that their could have been some rules to slow down too much lending.

According to the WSJ there were many states that wanted to institute their own rules, protecting their state's citizens, but the Bush administration opposed this, due to their core belief in democratic centralism, otherwise known as the Unitary Executive Theory and also known 100 years ago as Bolshevism.
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The United States needs to leave South Korea now.

Posted by zapdoodat on Friday, April 04, 2008 3:36:00 PM
Five years ago, I worked as a software engineer at Varian Semiconductor Inc.  We developed the next generation, high-current, serial ion implanter.  Ion implanters are used to make the semiconductor wafers that will be cut into microprocessors, memory and logic chips.  These machines cost about $5 million each.  In the first year, three were shipped to South Korea, three went to Japan, three to Taiwan, two to Europe and one to Micron in the United States.

All neo-cons, like Charles Krauthammer, say that Japan and South Korea reimburse the United States for our costs to defend them.  I don't believe it.  Japan spends 1% of GDP and South Korea spends 2% of GDP on defense.   The United States is spending 8% of GDP on defense. 

The U.S. defeated Japan in 1945 and came to south Korea's rescue in 1950.  A half century ago, Japan was a devastated country and South Korea was destitute.  Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao were universally feared by the free world.  However, the Berlin Wall fell almost 20 years ago and many believe in the United States, that the Cold War is still on.

Instead of paying for their own defense, the South Koreans are brilliantly letting the American taxpayer do it.  They are plowing their money into consumer electronics, automobiles, microprocessors, computers, steel, shipbuilding, cellphones and hi-speed internet access. They spend their money on R&D to prepare themselves to meet the manufacturing and technological competitive needs for the 21st century.  

The dollar is falling and will continue to fall.  America has lost millions of hi-tech and manufacturing jobs and will continue to lose them.  In the past 7 years, the national debt has gone from $4 to $9 trillion.  We are the world's biggest debtor nation.  My God, we owe China $1.4 trillion, Japan and South Korea another trillion dollars.  This picture will not get prettier any time soon.

The South Koreans hosted the Olympics 20 years ago and Tokyo hosted them 40 years ago!    South Korea and Japan, both, need to saddle up and do their share of the heavy lifting for their own defense.  They have the economies and manpower to do it themselves.

Our largest security threat from Asia is economic and technological.  We are squandering our resources.  America needs to return to its core values, namely, promoting economic growth, innovation and small government.  

Tags: defense  
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The United States real cost of defense

Posted by zapdoodat on Tuesday, April 01, 2008 11:04:00 AM
Too many Neo-cons like suppressing the real cost that America spends for its defense or national  security.  The number, often heard, is that the U.S. spends only 4% of GDP for defense.  This number represents only the budget for the Department of Defense.  Other departments in the US government also spend money for defense. 

To name a few, the Veterans Administration spends $73 billion per year.  The Department of Energy, annually,  spends $20 on nuclear weapons.  Other departments responsible for national security are the National Security Agency ($30 billion),  the CIA ($40) and one could even include the Coast Guard ($8 billion).  These are all yearly costs.  I'm tired of Neo-cons saying that the National Security Agency has nothing to do with national security.

Oh.  Let's add on the cost of the War on Terror.  The war in Iraq costs $120 a year and the war in Afghanistan costs $30 billion a year.
All this added up means that the U.S. spends double or about 8% of GDP on defense.  We conservatives can agree that honest assessments are needed to plan for the future, can't we?



Tags: defense  
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The dollar will have a long, slow decline

Posted by zapdoodat on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 5:13:33 PM
I took the 'red-eye' back to Boston Wednesday night and gladly read the Wall Street Journal I adroitly scooped up at the terminal before boarding the plane.

In the 'Letters to the Editor' section, a Professor of Finance from Texas responded to an article titled "Dollar's Value Fundamental to Our
Economy."

He writes, "It is the dollar if we wish to look only at symptoms, but it is high taxes and and regulatory costs if we look at causes."

Now I was half asleep, as usual, at the time when I read this but I know the dollar has lost about half its value the past six years or so.  Not too long ago it took 75 American pennies to equal the one euro, now it takes about 156 pennies. I rapidly did the math while slurping my diet coke and discomfitting the turbulence of the aerodynamically designed airplane.

On Neil Cavuto's conservative, Republican business show on Fox News, his panel constantly derides Europe as being socialist, having way too high taxes and way too much regulation.  If the Euro is getting stronger, and we want the dollar to get stronger then it seems to me that we need to emulate Europe.  I think this means higher taxes and more regulations are needed to make the dollar stronger.

Many people think the U.S. government or the Fed can implement some solution to this problem.  I don't think so.  The problem of the declining dollar is much deeper and a longer term problem that can't easily be fixed.  Simply raising interest rates or having a government official signaling that they support a 'strong' dollar just will not fundamentally change anything.
 
The declining dollar is has three impetus's.
 
1.) The U.S. government spends more than it collects in taxes, to the tune of $5 trillion the past eight years.
2.) The United States imports more than it exports and has the largest trade deficit in the history of human civilization.
3.) Americans have become accustomed to spending more than they earn, resulting in a negative savings rate.
 
The dollar will decline until this stops.
 
The American people and their government could have been proactive to avoid these three items.   Unfortunately we haven't.  We have been living beyond our means for some time now.  Either the U.S. will decide to fix these problems or it will be decided for us.
 
The pendulum is swinging the other way, it's global markets at work. 
 
 
 
 
 

 
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Missile Defense = Maginot Line (21st century)

Posted by zapdoodat on Thursday, February 21, 2008 5:50:02 PM
 In the late 1930’s France was desperate to protect itself from Germany.  Millions of French soldiers were killed in World War I, these dead soldiers were known as the ‘lost generation.’

World War I was fought in the trenches.  The French thought the best way to protect themselves in the future was to make the ultimate trench, the Maginot Line.  The Maginot Line was made of cement, big guns, and fortification and was a ‘virtual’ battleship on land for the entire length of the French-German border.  For each armoured division that Nazi Germany added to its arsenal the French poured another 1000 tons of concrete.

Those who believe in missile defense are like the French who believed that the Maginot Line would protect them.  The French wanted to protect their country after winning World War I, with General Blackjack Pershing's help.

We won the ‘Cold War’, against the Soviet Union and its fearsome weapon's systems.  Everyone thinks the next war will be fought like the last one with the same weapons.

Too bad it's not so simple.  There are many ways to get a nuclear bomb onto an American city.  Most likely it will be smuggled in.  How many illegal aliens are in the United States?  How hard it is to smuggle in illegal drugs?  What about a bomb in any container, on any ship, that is being imported?

Another method would be to sail a boat from Europe right into an American harbor, tie it up, walk away and..... Few ships coming into American waters are challenged, boarded and searched.
  
How about an enemy submarine coming within 50 miles of our coast, popping up, and firing a short range rocket or cruise missile in the general direction of a city.  This scenario is more likely too happen, and in my view, more accurate than an ICBM.

It's convenient thinking that the enemy threat posed will be the most convenient for us to defend against.  It just wont happen.

There were dozens of French generals with decades of experience.  And it was all the wrong kind of experience.

A better value than a missile defense system would be to simply beef up the Coast Guard.
 
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Do Tax Cuts really increase revenue?

Posted by zapdoodat on Tuesday, February 12, 2008 7:23:00 PM

All the borrowing and spending, borrowing and spending and more borrowing and spending during the George Bush years has, in itself, had the ability to raise tax revenues.

Here's how,

For example, borrow $400 million from China, then, Congress decides we need a critical infrastructure investment project like "a bridge to some island, populated with 40 people, somewhere in Alaska."

The U.S.A. borrows the money, pays the workers, and the workers pay income tax. If the construction company is unlucky, it may have to pay some corporate tax too.   This is one project, now multiply all the above by 14,287. Feel free to pick another country to borrow from.

Feel free to double the size of the Department of Education. Feel free to increase entitlement spending with Medicare Prescription (part D), and free to spend $150 billion on two wars, every year, and, in general, feel free to increase domestic spending across the board. Well, sorry, I lied, cut Amtrak, but who needs mass transit when the President tells us, "we are addicted to foreign oil as never before."


The USA went from a deficit of $4 to $9 trillion the past seven years. It only took 200 years to get to $4 trillion. This total outstanding debt works out to about $33,000 per person in the USA. Now those tax cuts do feel good at the moment, but is there any upper limit to our nation's credit card?

Tags: tax  
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Cotton farmers sucking

Posted by zapdoodat on Tuesday, February 05, 2008 2:07:03 AM
Talk about sucking from the teat of the government sow!!
Cotton Subsidies by year, Texas
1995      $11,326,513
1996     $192,005,776
1997     $177,186,203
1998     $335,010,715
1999     $511,405,328
2000     $488,484,785
2001     $707,989,054
2002     $583,405,392
2003     $807,291,334
2004     $475,324,635
2005   $1,036,033,167 
Total  $5,325,462,901
That's five billion dollars!
Cotton subsidies skyrocketed under the Republican controlled Congress.  Does this represent free markets or small government? 
Does everybody know that most of the cotton grown in the USA is exported.  Just look at the label on your clothes for that information.  Guess what country is the number one importer of US cotton? 

You got it. China.

The US taxpayer is subsidizing t-shirt manufacturing in China.  Go Figure!  Tom Delay’s district gets a lion’s share of the handouts.  Great work, Tommy Boy!

Check out these figures for farm welfare handouts from www.mulchblog.com.

Cotton subsidies for Texas

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I want to be a Supply-Sider too!

Posted by zapdoodat on Friday, February 01, 2008 12:23:52 AM
It came up in the Republican debate a few nights ago that HillaryCare would cost about $110 billion per year.   

Considering that the Bush administration and the Republican congress has expertly financed the Iraq war since 2003 with tax cuts and coincidentally moving the war's costs completely off-budget (not sure what that means)  then here's a good idea to pay for HillaryCare.   Let's double down on the tax cuts.    We double the Bush  tax cut  and spend all the money that's supply-sided on health care for the uninsured.   It seems like a Win-Win solution to me.
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