Sowell: Taxing the Poor

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With all the talk about taxing the rich, we hear very little talk about taxing the poor. Yet the marginal tax rate on someone living in poverty can sometimes be higher than the marginal tax rate on millionaires.

While it is true that nearly half the households in the country pay no income tax at all, the apparently simple word “tax” has many complications that can be a challenge for even professional economists to untangle.

If you define a tax as only those things that the government chooses to call a tax, you get a radically different picture from what you get when you say, “If it looks like a tax, acts like a tax and takes away your resources like a tax, then it’s a tax.”

One of the biggest, and one of the oldest, taxes in this latter sense is inflation. Governments have stolen their people’s resources this way, not just for centuries, but for thousands of years.

Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life’s savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all. The Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1920s had thousands of printing presses turning out vast amounts of money, which the government could then spend to pay for whatever it wanted to pay for.

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$1.92B Settlement for ‘Too Big to Fail’ Bank Busted for Laundering Terrorist and Drug Cartel Money

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HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA), Europe’s largest bank, agreed to pay $1.92 billion to settle U.S. probes of money laundering in the largest such accord ever.

The settlement includes a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, the London-based bank said today in a statement. HSBC expects to complete an undertaking with the U.K. Financial Services Authority soon, it said, without providing specifics.

Chief Executive Officer Stuart Gulliver’s attempts to reduce costs and improve profitability have been hurt by the U.S. probes and by compensation claims from U.K. clients. A Senate committee said in July that lax oversight by top HSBC executives gave terrorists and drug cartels access to the U.S. financial system.

“This has removed an uncertainty, though it doesn’t clear the path completely for HSBC,” Lewis Wan, Hong Kong-based chief investment officer at Pride Investments Group Ltd., said by telephone today, adding that his company doesn’t hold HSBC shares. “Regulators have been tightening oversight of banks. Lenders like HSBC will have to continue to strengthen their compliance.”

In a deferred prosecution agreement, the government allows a target to avoid charges by meeting certain conditions — including the payment of fines or penalties — and by committing to specific reforms, either under the guidance of a monitor, or the creation of an internal compliance panel.

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Liberalism’s ‘Anti-Science’ Problem

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photo credit: curiousexpeditions

Millions of Americans born around the time of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision are about to turn 40. They don’t realize what it was like to live before the Supreme Court ruling. Back then, most liberals had an open-minded view of abortion due mostly to a lack of medical knowledge. Early-term fetuses were thought to be hardly more than cellular formations, which doctors called “products of conception” or “blobs of tissue.” Lacking any real science on early fetal development, the main arguments against abortion tended to be religious. Things have changed.

Now four decades later, anyone can own beautiful videos that show every stage of the gestation process. Thanks to state of the art 4D Ultrasound scans, scientifically accurate special effects and microscopy footage, we can witness the unborn child forming fingers and toes. We can learn how science knows its gender, when its heart starts to beat, when it smiles, when it feels pain and much, much more. Plus, we can watch it all happen from the comfort of our living rooms.

I don’t think the abortion debate has caught up with the moral significance of this cataclysmic shift. The science of the unborn child isn’t just settled – it’s on TV!

And yet, there is still a great deal of ignorance on the meaning of it all. Liberals say they’re personally against abortion but believe that once impregnated, women have the right to decide whether or not to keep the child. But here’s the logical problem: An unborn child cannot be two things at once. It cannot be something precious and at the same time something worthless. When the British Royals announce a pregnancy, people celebrate “the baby”; they don’t celebrate “the choice.”

Common sense and reason tell us that a mother’s decision can’t change her baby’s reality any more than she can change a chair into a table just by wishing it so. This presents another problem for liberals: They know an unborn child isn’t worthless, but if they call it precious, that compromises their “abortion rights” position.

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California Pastor: Democrats ‘Adopted The Sins of Romans 1 As Their Platform’

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(CNSNews.com) – Evangelical pastor and author John MacArthur said that the Democratic Party has “adopted the sins of Romans 1 as their platform.”

“And as you know,” MacArthur told his Southern California congregation on Sept. 30, “I’m not one to talk about politics as such, but I was essentially amazed that one of the historic parties here in the United States adopted the sins of Romans 1 as their platform. This is a new day in our country. Parties which used to differ on economics now differ dramatically on issues that invade the realm of God’s law and morality.”

MacArthur is an author, pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, Calif., president of The Master’s College and Seminary, and a teacher at Grace to You media ministry.

“In an ideal situation, their platform would mean that the government passes out condoms so people can fornicate at will,” said MacArthur. “For those who happen to get pregnant in the process, the platform advocates that you kill the baby at the will of the mother, up and including the ninth month.”

“At the same time,” he said, “it advocates homosexual marriage, which is an oxymoron, an utter impossibility, and a gross violation of the law of God. And then, to add to that, the murder of abortion and then the platform originally leaving God out. All of that is Romans 1.”

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Smith and Epson: Congressman Urges Legislation to Renew Ban on Printer-Made Plastic Guns That Don’t Exist

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New York Democratic Rep. Steve Israel is calling for legislation to renew the federal ban on plastic guns, according to his official congressional website.

“Recent reports have pointed to the new possibility of building guns at home using a 3-D printer,” Israel’s website states. “Right now, plastic guns are illegal under the Undetectable Firearms Act, but this law is set to expire next year.”

3-D printers, which have been available since the 1980s, take two-dimensional plans and convert them to three-dimensional objects, which are then usually made from plastic.

Homemade plastic firearms are difficult for airport X-ray machines to detect. They also cannot be registered or traced, because they lack identification numbers.

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Video: Glenn Beck Spoofs Bob Costas, Blasts ‘Beer Drinking and Car Driving Culture’

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During his show on TheBlazeTV Monday, Glenn Beck spoofed NBC’s Bob Costas after he failed to address the tragic death of Dallas Cowboys linebacker Jerry Brown the same way in which he addressed the gun-related murder-suicide involving Washington Redskins linebacker Jovan Belcher. Beck didn’t cut corners either as he fully embraced Costas’ character with a brown wig.

During a Sunday Night Football halftime show earlier this month, Costas infamously blasted the “gun culture” in the U.S. and read a portion of sports columnist Jason Whitlock’s column, saying if “Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.”

“I’m filling in for Bob Costas today,” Beck began. “And we are going to do our best to continue his tradition of exceptional sports analysis along with exceptionally idiotic and logically flawed current events commentary.”

See video below:

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Full-Court Press: Global Warming Hysteria Pushed by National Intelligence Council and Department of Defense?

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A new U.S. intelligence community report finds that climate change will fuel new conflicts and competition for resources in coming decades.

The federal National Intelligence Council’s “Global Trends 2030” report issued Monday follows Defense Department analyses that have similarly called climate change an emerging security risk.

“Demand for food, water, and energy will grow by approximately 35, 40, and 50 percent respectively owing to an increase in the global population and the consumption patterns of an expanding middle class. Climate change will worsen the outlook for the availability of these critical resources,” the report states.

Elsewhere, it notes that climate change is among the factors that will drive conflict in some regions.

“[M]any developing and fragile states — such as in Sub-Saharan Africa — face increasing strains from resource constraints and climate change, pitting different tribal and ethnic groups against one another and accentuating the separation of various identities,” the report states.

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Egyptian Reporter Given a Disturbing Look Inside the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Torture Chambers’

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A chilling report recently published in the Egyptian newspaper, al-Masry al-Youm, reveals that the torture chambers once utilized by the Hosni Mubarak regime to tamp down protesters are being put to the same if not greater use by the country’s new, self-proclaimed dictator, Mohammed Morsi.

Despite the Obama administration and worldwide media’s insistence that the election of the Muslim Brotherhood leader was a watershed moment for democracy in the Middle East, it would seem those hopes are on a rapid downward trajectory as reports of savage beatings and brutality against Egyptian protesters, abound.

This disturbing revelation came to light just days ago when an al-Masry al-Youm reporter, with the help of a Brotherhood-owned and operated television station, was given an exclusive tour of the torture chambers. While one might think the decision to grant a journalist access to such a chilling look into the way the Muslim Brotherhood treats its critics as counter-intuitive, it makes perfect sense. After all, what could possibly ever serve as better warning for those even thinking of resisting Morsi’s push for a totalitarian regime based on sharia law than to know what will happen to them if they do?

Al-Monitor reports that the central torture chamber is located near the Ittihadiya Palace, just opposite the gates facing the Omar Ibn Abdel Aziz Mosque. The street is reportedly “secured with a cordon and iron barriers, where the Central Security Forces (CSF) barr any and all access without the authorization of the Brotherhood.

During the three-hour visit, the al-Masry reporter explained that “protesters suspected of working against the Muslim Brotherhood are tortured and beaten with the knowledge of the police before being handed over for formal detention.”

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Majority of Democrats Like Socialism

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Photo credit: DonkeyHotey

On the strength of a capitalist economic system, America created a material standard of living for the world to envy while providing its citizens with high levels of personal freedom. But today capitalism, and attendant freedom, are being systematically dismantled in America (and being depth-charged in Europe), while understanding and appreciation of these things are receding. Gallup provides proof of this, and confirms conservatives’ fears and suspicions.

Loyal elves in the media wing of the Democratic Party establishment — aka the mainstream media — hyperventilate when Barack Obama is identified as a socialist, or the Democratic Party is accused of promoting socialist policies. “Vile and unfair accusations,” they wail, before retiring to their fainting couches.

But if a survey released last week by Gallup is any indication, it’s hard to see what all the indignation is about. A majority of people — 53 percent — who describe themselves as Democrats or leaning Democrat, admit to Gallup’s pulse takers that they have a positive image of socialism. Only two percent more — 55 — say they are positive about capitalism. A robust 75 percent of Democrats say they have a positive image of the federal government.

These numbers should not surprise anyone who has talked to a Democrat over the last couple of decades. A majority of the political party currently in the ascendancy in America holds a positive view of an economic system that has been tried countless times in countless places, has never delivered prosperity, but has always diminished personal and economic freedom.

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Boehner Must Go

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It’s not possible for Republicans to dump Barack Obama in the next four years. They have blown their opportunity to do that. But the next best thing they can do right now is to dump John Boehner as speaker of the House.

Though Boehner has been portrayed in the media as some kind of hardliner who is intransigent and unwilling to compromise, the truth is that he is the opposite. He is an appeaser. He is an enabler. He is an accommodationist.

Boehner began waving the white flag of surrender to Obama soon after Republicans made him speaker in 2011. Since all spending bills need to originate in the House and because the Republican majority in the House has had absolute power to freeze spending, Boehner was dealt a powerful hand to keep Obama in check. Instead, he folded. Not only did he fold repeatedly, he even signaled before negotiations about spending ever began that he intended to fold.

He has repeatedly dismissed the idea that freezing the debt limit was a political option. That’s like unilaterally disarming before one’s enemies.

But it gets worse.

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