Obama Unveils Deficit Plan Containing $1.5T in Tax Hikes, GOP Cringes

WASHINGTON – President Obama, drawing immediate condemnation from congressional Republicans, unveiled a new deficit reduction plan Monday anchored by $1.5 trillion in new taxes, including an end to Bush-era rates for upper income earners making $250,000 or more and additional taxes on millionaires.

Keying in on a populist message that millionaires and billionaires should pay more in taxes than their secretaries, the president announced a plan in the Rose Garden that includes more than $2 trillion total in entitlement cuts and tax increases over the next decade.

Together with spending cuts enacted last month and projected savings from interest payments, the savings in the president’s plan total more than $3 trillion. The Obama administration is also adding on another $1 trillion in savings over 10 years from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, though that kind of accounting has been dismissed in past debates as a gimmick.

The $4 trillion effort is tied to his American Jobs Act, aimed at putting nearly 14 million unemployed back to work. Critics have stated that targeting job creators — the top 1 percent pays 38 percent of the tax burden, according to 2008 estimates — won’t help the jobless find employment.

House Speaker John Boehner last week warned that tax hikes should be off the table as a newly formed bipartisan committee meets to extract long-term deficit savings.

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 Read More at Fox News   FoxNews.com


 

Greece is imploding but US debt crisis is worse

By Laurence J. Kotlikoff (CNN):

Our government is utterly broke. There are signs everywhere one looks. Social Security can no longer afford to send us our annual benefit statements. The House can no longer afford its congressional pages. The Pentagon can no longer afford the pension and health care benefits of retired service members. NASA is no longer planning a manned mission to Mars.

We’re broke for a reason. We’ve spent six decades accumulating a huge official debt (U.S. Treasury bills and bonds) and vastly larger unofficial debts to pay for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits to today’s and tomorrow’s 100 million-plus retirees.

The government’s total indebtedness — its fiscal gap — now stands at $211 trillion, by my arithmetic. The fiscal gap is the difference, measured in present value, between all projected future spending obligations — including our huge defense expenditures and massive entitlement programs, as well as making interest and principal payments on the official debt — and all projected future taxes.

The data underlying this figure come straight from the horse’s mouth — the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO’s June 22 Alternative Fiscal Scenario presents nothing less than a Greek tragedy. It’s actually worse than the Greek tragedy now playing in Athens. Our fiscal gap is 14 times our GDP. Greece’s fiscal gap is 12 times its GDP, according to Professor Bernd Raffelhüschen of the University of Freiburg.

In other words, the U.S. is in worse long-term fiscal shape than Greece. The financial sharks are circling Greece because Greece is small and defenseless, but they’ll soon be swimming our way.

To grasp the magnitude of our nation’s insolvency, consider what tax hikes or spending cuts are needed to eliminate our fiscal gap. The answer is an immediate and permanent 64% increase in all federal revenues or an immediate and permanent 40% cut in all federal noninterest spending.

Such adjustments go miles beyond anything Congress and the president are considering.

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Read more at CNN.com HERE.

Long-time ACORN affiliate secures $350,000 in new taxpayer funding

An organization affiliated with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) received a new cash infusion from U.S. taxpayers in early September, amounting to $350,000.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded the Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA) $350,000 in early September. This newly discovered funding is in addition to the $300,000 AHCOA secured in August, as The Daily Caller reported last week.

The new grant was part of a $10 million HUD funding package announced on September 2. Unlike the $300,000 from early August, HUD specifically awarded this $350,000 to AHCOA Pennsylvania, a local affiliate of the national group based in Chicago.

Critics say each time the Obama administration funds an ACORN-related group, greater sums of money are involved and the result is more troubling.

“HUD’s September 2, 2011 grant obligation is the latest instance of federal dollars being improperly steered to an entity with a history of financial mismanagement and election activities paid for by the American taxpayer,” Freedom Through Justice Foundation executive director Dan Epstein told TheDC.

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Read More at The Daily Caller  By Matthew Boyle, The Daily Caller

Banality of evil: The dirty secrets of Abortionist Tiller’s millions and Obama’s HHS Director Sebelius

“When Republican Attorney General Kline made serious efforts to hold Tiller to the law, Tiller invested a reputed $2 million in the 2006 election alone. This election assured the defeat of the incumbent Kline and the re-election of Democratic Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, now the secretary of health and human services. While still under criminal investigation, Tiller celebrated the victory with Sebelius at the governor’s mansion.”

By Jack Cashill (WND):  On Monday of this week, the Kansas Board of Healing Arts launched an inquiry into the medical practice of one Dr. Ann Kristin (Kris) Neuhaus.

If ever a civil procedure captured the essence of Hannah Arendt’s memorable phrase “the banality of evil,” it is surely this one.

Still, in its own anodyne way, this hearing is showing those who care to look what a stone cold serial killer was Neuhaus’ patron, the late abortionist, George Tiller. As such, it deserves much more attention that it has been getting.

For several years, Neuhaus made an unhealthy chunk of her income by providing Tiller the second opinion required under Kansas law for a third-trimester abortion.

According to that law, a doctor could abort a fully viable baby only if he and a second independent physician agreed that the abortion would prevent the mother from suffering a “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” or save her life.

Neuhaus was paid to rubber stamp Tiller’s opinion. In that late-term abortions do nothing positive for a woman’s physical health, Tiller almost always diagnosed an impending mental-health breakdown. As a result, all of Neuhaus’ second opinions under review concern the mother’s mental health.

Although Tiller claimed 60,000 late-term abortions over his long career, the Board focused its investigation on just 11 of them from 2003, all involving girls 18 and under whose babies had lived more than 25 weeks in the womb.

In the course of its first few days, the hearing shed more light on Tiller’s practices than had been shed in the seven or so years Tiller and/or Neuhaus had been under scrutiny.

Indeed, Tiller and the local media branded intrepid Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline as “Snoop Dog” for daring to probe into Tiller’s practice, and he had revealed nowhere near the information introduced by day two of the hearing.

Expert witness Dr. Liza Gold of Georgetown University withheld names but little else. Having reviewed the files, she shared the symptoms that led Tiller and Neuhaus to declare a “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”

One 15-year-old girl, for instance, had stated, “Horses are my life, and having kids would mess that up for barrel racing.”

Unwilling to diagnose RDS, “rodeo derivation syndrome,” Neuhaus chose “major depression, single episode.”

This thoroughly corrupt diagnosis allowed Tiller to take the life of a healthy baby fully capable of living outside the womb and a $6,000 fee to ease his conscience.

The transaction, however, was allowed to take place in Kansas only because Tiller had bought off the Democratic and moderate Republican establishment.

When Republican Attorney General Kline made serious efforts to hold Tiller to the law, Tiller invested a reputed $2 million in the 2006 election alone.

This election assured the defeat of the incumbent Kline and the re-election of Democratic Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, now the secretary of health and human services.

While still under criminal investigation, Tiller celebrated the victory with Sebelius at the governor’s mansion. The pictures are priceless.

Even with Sebelius’ help, in a deep red state like Kansas Tiller needed the media to hold off reform and keep his practice alive. This he did not even have to pay for.

In 2006, for its repeated slander of the “anti-choice extremist” Kline, the Kansas City Star won Planned Parenthood’s top media honor, the “Maggie Award,” named for its eugenicist founder, Margaret Sanger.

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Read more at WND HERE.

While the Economy Burns, Washington Fiddles

By JIM MCTAGUE (Barron’s):

America, get shovel-ready: There’s an onslaught of words heading your way from both Congress and the White House about the best way to repair our tottering fiscal edifice. President Obama is skipping about the country talking up his $447 billion jobs plan. Congressional Republicans have responded with high-sounding talk about “Liberating America’s Economy.”

The verbiage is intended to obscure the fact that hardly anyone here in the nation’s capital is actually rolling up his sleeves and tackling the underlying problem.

Politicians of all stripes are shirking responsibility—because to do otherwise might irritate one or another interest group; and the politicians are so unpopular already that they are loath to step on any toes, even if in the interest of doing the right thing. Collectively, the politicians are kicking their work loads down the proverbial road, well past the next election, in a craven strategy for political survival.

EVIDENCE OF THE DUCK-AND-COVER policy is everywhere. Rather than continuing the good fight last week against pork-barrel projects in both the highway bill and the Federal Aviation Administration appropriations bill, House Republicans folded under a hail of negative headlines and agreed to extend existing funding levels for a number of months. No doubt they will extend the funding several more times. They see no advantage in fireworks now that the election season has commenced.

The GOP partially shut down the FAA for two weeks this summer, in a fruitless attempt to get a leaner appropriations package passed. Paychecks failed to go out to some 75,000 workers and contractors. Senate Democrats opposed the FAA-reform measures because the GOP-led House had added antiunion language to the bill. Democrats also objected to a GOP call for the end of shockingly high subsidies to some rural airports. The poster child for the “Essential Air Service” subsidy: an airport in Ely, Nev., which receives $3,700-per-passenger annually from the federal government. The FAA bill has been extended 22 times since its authorization expired in 2007.

Meanwhile, neither party wants to trip up the highway bill, even though the highway-transportation trust fund is taking in less revenue from taxes than it is paying for road work. Balancing that budget would have caused the immediate loss of some 4,000 highway construction jobs. Few politicians want to cut jobs, even if it makes fiscal sense.

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Read more at Barron’s HERE.

Your tax dollars at work: GM workers to get thousands in bonuses

By Dee-Ann Durbin and Tom Krisher:

DETROIT (AP) — The United Auto Workers union won $5,000 signing bonuses and the possibility of sweeter profit-sharing checks as part of a new four-year contract with General Motors Co., two people briefed on the talks said Saturday.

The deal, which was reached late Friday, also includes a $2- to $3-per-hour pay raise for entry-level workers over the life of the contract and guarantees more union jobs, the people said.

Both persons asked to remain anonymous because the details of the contract haven’t been reviewed by all local union leaders.

The GM deal will serve as a template for contracts that still must be negotiated with Chrysler Group LLC and Ford Motor Co. It would set the pay and benefits for 112,500 U.S. auto workers. It also sets the bar for pay and benefits at nonunion auto companies and other industries across the country.

The contract is the first since GM and Chrysler received government bailouts to make it through bankruptcy protection in 2009. GM earned $4.7 billion last year.

Workers have to approve the deal before it can take effect. A vote is expected within 10 days.

In addition to the bonuses, workers could get profit-sharing checks that exceed the $4,000 that workers earned last year.

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Read more at Yahoo Finance HERE.

Constitution Day: Join the Revolution

By Joe Miller:  On this day, 224 years ago, our Constitution was signed by delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.  Just a few years after its ratification, the Founders’ vision of a limited central government composed of coequal branches came under a sustained attack from the judiciary, an attack that has dramatically increased in its intensity over the past century.

As the self-proclaimed final arbiters of the meaning of the Constitution, the judiciary has shamelessly expanded the scope of federal powers by making up new roles for the government.  The Commerce Clause is now interpreted in ways that were never intended by the Founders, giving rise to never-ending regulations and controls from DC.  And where no clause can be found to even remotely justify federal involvement, the judiciary has no problem with making one up.

That’s how the right to abortion was ginned up.  First in Griswold vs. Connecticut and later in Roe vs. Wade,  the Supreme Court employed an astronomical term, “penumbra,” to divine the hidden meanings in the Constitution that were not even apparent to the drafters themselves!

The Founders never intended the Constitution to be molded into whatever shape the judiciary of the day intended.  Rather, they drafted a document that even non-lawyers could understand.

The first three articles of the Constitution describe the three branches of government, delineating their respective powers.  In the Bill of Rights, language was adopted to guard against the expansion of these limited powers.  The 10th Amendment couldn’t be clearer:  “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

So, on this Constitution Day, take the time to read through your Constitution.  As you do so, I challenge you to find authorization for the federal Department of Education, Obamacare, or even EPA controls over wood smoke in my hometown of Fairbanks, Alaska.  If you find none, join a local tea party and help fan the flames of constitutional revival across America.

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Top female Obama adviser: “I felt like a piece of meat”

Allegations of sexism, hostile work environment in White House

By David Gardner (Daily Mail):

Top female advisers felt left out by a boy’s club in the White House where rampant infighting sabotaged the administration’s economic decisions, according to a controversial new book.

Sidelined and ignored in the West Wing, some women aides reportedly complained to President Obama about their treatment in 2009.

In an excerpt obtained by the Washington Post, a female senior aide is quoted as calling the White House a hostile environment for women.

A new book alleges the White House can be a hostile environment for women to work in. President Obama, who goes home to a wife, two daughters and a mother-in-law at night, is not personally cited for any mistreatment

Former Communications Director Anita Dunn calls the work environment ‘hostile’ in the book, which she now denies having said

According to the Post, former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn says in the book: ‘This place would be in court for a hostile workplace because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.

Dunn denied to the Post that she made the remark, adding: ‘The president is someone who when he goes home at night he goes home to a house full of very strong women. He values having strong women around him.’

But Suskind’s book insists many women felt outmaneuvered by male colleagues such as former Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel and, Larry Summers, former chairman of the National Economic Council.

‘I felt like a piece of meat,’ Christina Romer, former head of the Council of Economic Advisers, said of one meeting with Summers.

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Read more at Daily Mail HERE.

Obama team pushes back at suggestions he’s in trouble

President Obama and his closest advisers are pushing back at the notion Obama is a one-term president doomed for defeat in 2012.

Obama’s top political adviser on Friday issued a memo to the Sunday news show producers and other reporters that concludes Obama is in strong shape for another four years in the Oval Office.

The memo from Obama guru David Axelrod noted that the president has strong support from Hispanics, the fastest-growing segment of the population, and that GOP approval numbers are in the dumps.

Obama himself took aim at the doubts while speaking at a Democratic fundraiser on Thursday night. He insisted his odds of winning reelection are better than what his chances were for winning the White House in 2008.

“Now, I know that, over the last couple of months, there have been Democrats who voiced concerns and nervousness about, well, in this kind of economy, isn’t this just — aren’t these just huge headwinds in terms of your reelection?” Obama said.

Read More at The Hill By Sam Youngman, The Hill

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FBI raids Solyndra to bury evidence of Obama’s criminal dealings

When it comes to cronyism, fraud and conspiratorial criminality, Barack Hussein Obama has no peer. Having learned his trade in the city of Chicago, where the theft and divvying up of taxpayer dollars among the politically connected is an art form, Obama’s new gig as President finds him performing the same scams, just on a larger, more lucrative playing field.

In 2010, solar panel manufacturer Solyndra Inc. received $535 million in government backed loan guarantees from Barack’s 2009 stimulus fund.

Of course, according to a Price Waterhouse audit filed earlier that year with the SEC, Solyndra had lost $558 million during its first 5 years in business, boasted negative cash flow, no profitable years and featured a “seriously flawed” business model.

But the company did have one very important attribute, a far greater asset than any operating report or profit history–Texas billionaire George Kaiser.

Kaiser was a major Solyndra investor who had personally donated $53,500 to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. In fact, Kaiser had bundled even larger amounts of money for Obama’s bid for the White House.

Read More at Coach is Right By Doug Book, Coach Is Right

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