As I think about the election in November, I can’t help but think about Matt Ridley and his outstanding book “The Rational Optimist – How Prosperity Evolves”. In it he chronicles the evolution of human society and demonstrates a perfect understanding of why nations fail:
We probably don’t need to worry about the long term effect of Obamacare. America is dying under Obama.
Manufacturing is slowing to a crawl.
Have you ever seen one of those movies where a car is speeding towards a cliff and just before it heads over the edge the driver jumps out and the car flies into the abyss and maybe crashes and ignites into a ball of flame?
If you haven’t don’t worry, you’re about to live one… and unfortunately for you, you’re not the driver who escapes, you’re a passenger strapped in for the excitement. President Obama is the driver and the way he’s running his campaign, it looks like he’s getting ready to jump…
John Boehner can take a hit on this one too. You know that wonderful payroll tax cut? Guess who’s going to pay for it?
Just before Christmas, American workers got a rare gift from Washington politicians – the current payroll tax cut would be extended for two more months.
He and Pelosi and Hoyer and Waxman and the rest of the execrable democrats.
Much has been made about Mitt Romney’s income tax rate and it’s all the same. Sure he’s done nothing illegal but shame on Romney for paying what he owes. It’s his fault. He’s hiding something.
Steve Jobs passed away earlier this month with an estimated fortune of $8 billion. I have yet to see a single report about one single dollar that he gave away to charity. How is it possible that a person who was lucky enough to be born and grow up in the United States and take advantage of our laws, schools, infrastructure and patent protections could be so selfish? Compare his lack of philanthropic giving with that of other similarly rich types, past and present. Andrew Carnegie gave away virtually his entire fortune, over $350 million dollars during his lifetime – $5 billion in today’s dollars.
Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan is imperfect, but it’s by far the best plan on the table. As such, criticism of 9-9-9 comes from all quarters.
The left is unhappy that its egalitarian nature is the opposite of the progressive tax structure we’ve had for a century. I suspect however that it is not simple tax policy that drives their antipathy, it’s revenge. You don’t have to listen very long to one of President Obama’s “fair share” speeches to recognize it. Or watch much of the “Occupy your city here” demonstrations going on around the country to see the envy. The notion of those fat cat Wall Street bankers paying the same tax rate as a single mother of three who works two jobs to support her children is simply unacceptable.
How much do you earn per year? $25,000? $75,000? How about $150,000? Maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less. Whatever you earn, you probably wish your check was just a little bit bigger.
>Many of us look at guys like Alex Rodriguez earning $30 million a year or Johnny Depp earning $50 million or Larry Ellison earning $130 million and wish we could exchange paychecks with them. But then of course we’d have to do what they do in exchange for those paychecks, something which most of us are unlikely to be able to accomplish. That is of course the beauty of free markets, where what you earn is relative to not just the value you bring to an organization, but the relative scarcity of potential replacements who can provide that same value.
It’s still a year out from the election, but Rasmussen’s most recent poll makes one start to wonder. It shows President Obama at 46% of the vote against GOP frontrunner Rick Perry’s 39%. That was a flip from the previous week’s Obama 41% vs. Perry’s 44%.
The Perry part of that poll is not really of consequence. President Obama tends to perform about the same against various other challengers and against the “generic” Republican candidate. The ebb and flow of a weekly news cycle has an impact on the fringes, but not so much on the core. And that core is the thing that one has to wonder.
Late last year we got notice from the IRS that we owed back taxes for the 2008 tax year of more than $1400. The number comes from money I take …
