Obama's Tax Mathemagic

By Kim Strassell - WSJ.com

And now, America, we introduce the Great Obama! The world's most gifted political magician! A thing of wonder. A thing of awe. Just watch him defy politics, economics, even gravity! (And hold your applause until the end, please.)

To kick off our show tonight, Mr. Obama will give 95% of American working families a tax cut, even though 40% of Americans today don't pay income taxes! How can our star enact such mathemagic? How can he "cut" zero? Abracadabra! It's called a "refundable tax credit." It involves the federal government taking money from those who do pay taxes, and writing checks to those who don't. Yes, yes, in the real world this is known as "welfare," but please try not to ruin the show.

For his next trick, the Great Obama will jumpstart the economy, and he'll do it by raising taxes on the very businesses that are today adrift in a financial tsunami! That will include all those among the top 1% of taxpayers who are in fact small-business owners, and the nation's biggest employers who currently pay some of the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world. Mr. Obama will, with a flick of his fingers, show them how to create more jobs with less money. It's simple, really. He has a wand.

Read the rest of the article here...

Here's a related video where Senator Obama tells a tax-burdened plumber that his plan is to "Spread the Wealth Around."

Investors Fear Socialism

From Investors Business Daily

The freeze-up of the financial system - and government's seeming inability to thaw it out - are a main concern, no doubt. But more people are also starting to look across the valley, as they say, at what's in store once this crisis passes.

And right now it looks like the U.S., which built the mightiest, most prosperous economy the world has ever known, is about to turn its back on the free-enterprise system that made it all possible.

It isn't only that the most anti-capitalist politician ever nominated by a major party is favored to take the White House. It's that he'll also have a filibuster-proof Congress led by politicians who are almost as liberal.

Throw in a media establishment dedicated to the implementation of a liberal agenda, and the smothering of dissent wherever it arises, and it's no wonder panic has set in.

What is that agenda? It starts with a tax system right out of Marx: A massive redistribution of income - from each according to his ability, to each according to his need - all in the name of "neighborliness," "patriotism," "fairness" and "justice."

It continues with a call for a new world order that turns its back on free trade, has no problem with government controlling the means of production, imposes global taxes to support continents where our interests are negligible, signs on to climate treaties that will sap billions more in U.S. productivity and wealth, and institutes an authoritarian health care system that will strip Americans' freedoms and run up costs.

All the while, it ensures that nothing - absolutely nothing - will be done to secure a sufficient, terror-proof supply of our economic lifeblood - oil - a resource we'll need much more of in the years ahead.

You can read the rest here...

Let me remind you of this exchange between Barack Obama and Charlie Gibson during the Democratic debate in Philadelphia back in April of 2008.

GIBSON: In each instance, when the capital gains tax dropped, revenues from the tax increased. The government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down. So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?

OBAMA: Well, Charlie, what I've said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.

You see, it's not about increasing revenues to the Treasury, it's about Marxism, wealth redistribution, and punishing those that make whatever Barack Obama believes is too much money.

Doctors and Socialized Healthcare

By Lee Wilson

I have always thought about socialized medicine from a consumer/patient/taxpayer's point of view. Lee Wilson recently did an impromptu interview with his doctor that's opened my eyes to an even more detrimental aspect of a government run health care system.

He started by telling me that if the government took control of the United States with system like Canada or the UK that there could only be a certain number of medical students (or dental, chiropractic, etc.) per year based on the perceived need. The government would choose who could go to medical school and force the others to pursue an alternate career or wait another year to see if the government would allow them to go to school (sounding like communism yet?).

He paused for a minute and said, "Doesn't sound much like the American dream, does it?" He mentioned that Canadian students who had dreamed of being doctors all their lives were coming to the United States to be educated because their government only allowed a certain number. And it wasn't the smartest and brightest that they allowed it. It was a selection similar to affirmative action where they picked a certain number of this color, gender, etc. instead of just taking the top x percent in terms of academics. So if your child is dreaming of being a doctor because he wants to help people...you'd better hope the government will allow him to go to school to learn how. If the U.S. adopts the Canadian/UK system, there's no where else he can go. The U.S. is the last free country in terms of pursuing that dream.

He went on to say that the government would also determine how many doctors were allowed to practice in a certain area. And once that number had been met, no more doctors would be allowed to practice. So current doctors, if they didn't make the magic number (again, not based on performance but on the PC obsession of an affirmative action type of approach), would have to move to where they were allowed to practice. And a certain percentage will have to stop practicing completely because the government decides how many are needed. So if you've been a doctor all your life and the government says the country doesn't need you, I guess you have to find another career.

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A Conservative History of the American Left

By Daniel J. Flynn

I've had Daniel J. Flynn's blog in my conservative blogs listing for quite some time, and today, I found out he has just published a new book, "A Conservative History of the American Left."

Here's an excerpt from an interview he did with FrontPage Magazine.

The Left counts on Americans to forget history. When Americans don't, they whitewash their mistakes and crimes through attempts, usually successful, to rewrite history. I view it as my job to conserve the history the Left obscures. One needn't go back hundreds of years for successful rewrites of history by the Left. Let's get an example from our lifetime. In the late 1970s, Mother Jones and The Nation fawned over Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution in Iran . "What kind of state might result if Khomeini or his followers take power?," Mother Jones asked in 1979. The magazine answered by citing "democratic reforms, freedom for political prisoners, an end to the astronomical waste of huge arms purchases, and a constitutional government." The prediction couldn't have turned out more wrong. One can see from such examples, and there are many of them in "A Conservative History of the American Left," why radicals run from their own history.

Throwing history down the memory hole enables the Left to detach itself from past failures, appear forever fresh and new, and perpetuate an ideology that by virtue of natural selection should have perished long ago. The Left's amnesia is convenient, but it is also part of its makeup. Who has time to look back when there's a glorious future to be made?

The transition from the Old Left to the New Left is a perfect example of old wine in new bottles. Initially, with a pox-upon-both-your-houses Cold War sensibility, the New Left, through documents such as the Port Huron Statement, seemed to be blazing a separate trail from the Old Left. But by the end of the 1960s, the New Left--with its worship of foreign tyrants, factionalism, and Marxoid jargon insider language--merely re-enacted dramas that the Old Left had performed decades earlier. With the American Left, everything new is old again.

[...] The most enduring and dangerous delusion on the Left, and perhaps in all history, is a secularized religious idea--that it can be, as the Lord's prayer states, "on earth as it is in heaven." Only men narcissistic enough to see themselves as gods could dream of such nonsense. Soviets, Nazis, and jihadists all killed large numbers of people because they thought that they were ushering in the millennium, perfecting man, or instituting Allah's Kingdom in the temporal world. This is idealism run amuck. Americans witnessed such millennial delusions inspiring carnage thirty years ago, when one of San Francisco's most prominent left-wing activists, Peoples Temple "comrade leader" Jim Jones, embarked upon "revolutionary suicide"--Huey Newton's phrase--in which more than 900 people were killed or took their own lives. "Nobody's going to come out of the sky!," Jones had earlier told his flock. "There's no heaven up there! We'll have to have heaven down here!" Like Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, Jonestown never attained the glorious ends but instead suffered under the vile means.

I would never even begin to compare Barack Obama to any of these deluded idealists, but it's worth noting Obama's heaven-on-earth delusion to demonstrate how little the Left has learned from its most horrific errors. "We're going to keep on praising together," Obama preached from the pulpit of a megachurch in Greenville, South Carolina last fall. "I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on earth." I'm confident that people who truly believe they can create heaven on earth will harm people who impede their designs.

Read the full interview here. Buy the book "A Conservative History of the American Left" from Amazon. See also Flynn Files, Intellectual Morons and Why the Left Hates America.

A Tribute to Communism

A tribute to the glorious accomplishments of communist governments from around the world. By Blair Erickson