IPI PolicyBytes

Barack Obama’s supposed tax cut for 95% of American workers is meant to draw attention from the real core of the Obama tax plan – proposed increases in every major federal tax:

--Obama proposes to raise the top two individual income tax rates by 25% or more, both through explicit rate increases, and the phaseout of personal exemptions and all itemized deductions for these upper income earners;

--Obama proposes to increase the capital gains tax rate by 33%;

--Obama proposes to increase the tax rate on dividends by 33%;

--Obama proposes to raise the top payroll tax rate by between 16%--32%;

--Obama proposes a new payroll tax on employers to help pay for national health insurance, estimated at around 7%; Read More...

Ferrara and Kemp write:

”Are Barack Obama's proposed tax increases adversely affecting our financial markets? We say yes, unambiguously. The senator has done a masterful job distracting attention from his tax increases with his $500-per-worker tax credit supposedly for 95 percent of Americans.

Mr. Obama has also set forth more than a half-dozen additional refundable income tax credits targeted to low- and moderate-income workers for child care, education, housing, welfare, retirement, health care and other social purposes. These tax credits are devised to phase out based on income, which will ultimately increase marginal income tax rates for middle-class workers. Read More...

Listen live online at leeandterryfrank.com. Read More...

Matthews writes in ‘Other Comments’:

“The National Taxpayers Union Foundation recently looked at the spending records of presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. During the first session of the 110th Congress John McCain sponsored or cosponsored 22 bills, which would have increased federal spending by $8 billion annually. Barack Obama, by contrast, sponsored or cosponsored 114 bills, increasing federal spending $75 billion annually. That's a little more than $9 of government spending for Obama for every $1 for McCain.”

Read ‘Other Comments’ in Forbes magazine, or at Forbes.com. Read More...

Ferrara writes:

“The issue of judicial philosophy has been mostly overlooked in this campaign, but the differences between the two candidates are stark: Obama has the most left-wing position of any presidential candidate in U.S. history.

Obama has said he would appoint Supreme Court justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter, two of the most liberal judges ever to serve on the Court. (Before her appointment, Ginsburg had served as general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, and as a member of the ACLU Board of Directors.) He openly criticized Justice Clarence Thomas. He said he would never appoint someone like Justice Antonin Scalia. Read More...

Wells writes:

“With the prospect of expansions and mergers threatened, banks settled cases and, significantly, increasingly made loans they would not have normally made. The net effect, as ACORN litigation increased, was that credit standards lowered.

At first, the GSEs resisted purchasing these risky mortgages. But eventually the Clinton administration instructed them to substantially increase the percentage of these mortgages in their portfolios. Government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac of the Clinton reforms became ‘a feeding trough,’ in the phrase of Peter Ferrara, director of budget and entitlement policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation... Read More...

Matthews writes:

“Almost every claim proponents make about single-payer health care systems—where the government taxes the public and then pays their health care bills—is wrong, or at least should be qualified.

They don’t cost less, but they do spend less. That’s an important distinction. The U.S. spends about 16 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care; most other developed countries with single-payer systems (or something close to it) spend between 8 percent and 12 percent of GDP.

The key distinction is that in the single-payer countries the government, not the market, decides how much will be spent on health care. Read More...

“Raising taxes, indeed sharply raising every major Federal tax, increasing government spending by unprecedented trillions of dollars, and increasing regulatory costs by over another trillion dollars through Obama's global warming energy plan, is not the way to restore the American economy to prosperity. This is the road to economic disaster... Read More...

Ferrara and Kemp write:

"Are Barack Obama's proposed tax increases adversely affecting our financial markets? We say yes, unambiguously. The senator has done a masterful job detracting attention from his tax increases with his $500-per-worker tax credit supposedly for 95 percent of Americans.

Obama has also set forth more than half a dozen additional refundable income tax credits targeted to low- and moderate-income workers for child care, education, housing, welfare, retirement, health care and other social purposes. These tax credits are devised to phase out based on income, which will ultimately increase marginal income tax rates for middle-class workers. Read More...

Pieler and Laurson write:

"With world financial markets plummeting and markets everywhere reflecting the certainty of a widespread recession, the only question is: why would any responsible person advocate further US restrictions on international trade? An economic downturn, with less buying power here and abroad, triggers less buying and selling across borders and within borders.

While it’s too late to change the near-term trajectory of the economy, recovery will be slower if the US signals that it is no longer interested in championing free trade (not that we do so perfectly). Read More...

In his recent conversation with Joe the Plumber, Barack Obama said, "We've cut taxes a lot for folks like me who make a lot more than 250 [thousand], but we haven't given a break to folks who make less." This statement completely misrepresents our nation's tax policy.

The latest numbers from the IRS and the Congressional Budget Office show that the top 1% of income earners now pay 40% of all federal income taxes, almost twice their share of income. Read More...

• The Dow has fallen more than 2,000 points.

• Wall Street has collapsed and banks are closing.

• Consumer confidence surveys have been cut in half.

• Gasoline prices have risen from about $2.20 a gallon to over $4.00.

• And the economy has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Better Off

Today, these same vote fraud schemes are being conducted nationwide under the auspices of the far left extremist group ACORN, the Left's equivalent of the John Birch Society. ACORN is a rogue organization growing out of the 1960s that openly flouts the law as a matter of strategic policy, engaging in physical intimidation, trespass, threatening behavior, even outright violence. It has taken over meetings, throwing out speakers, invaded and occupied businesses, demanding payoffs, and seized unoccupied homes and apartments, forcibly claiming the right to stay.
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"The American democratic experiment will succeed until the people realize they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. Then it will collapse." - Alexis de Tocqueville, 1848

"Barack Obama says he plans to cut taxes for 95 percent of American workers. That sounds terrific, but there are three problems. One, it is meant to draw attention from the real core of the Obama tax plan: proposed increases in every major federal tax. Two, the structure of the cuts will create perverse incentives. And three, many of the people receiving ‘tax cuts’ don’t pay taxes to begin with, meaning they’ll be in effect getting welfare.
Read More...

“There are at least three necessary ingredients for jumpstarting a faltering economy. John McCain embraces all three; Barack Obama shuns them. It's just that simple.

Free Trade -- Economist Milton Friedman once said that of all the pro-growth policies a government should adopt, free trade is the most important. Former Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan has said that taxing trade between countries makes no more economic sense than taxing trade between states...”

"Although the nation's attention is focused on the financial crisis it is worth thinking about how this mess will affect attitudes toward government intervention.

The July issue of The Atlantic magazine, published before the meltdown began, looks at the ‘11 1/2 Biggest Ideas of the Year.’ The return of regulation is one of them. After nearly three decades of growth-enhancing deregulation and regulatory reform, The Atlantic observes, ‘a major rethink is underway. ... Regulation is back.’

Not only is regulation back in vogue, but regulatory competition also appears to be on its way out of fashion…”

"The need to achieve technological breakthroughs to provide cleaner, more efficient, cheaper and more abundant sources of energy is not just a campaign issue for the next two weeks, but a paradigm-shifting challenge for an entire generation of Americans.

John McCain and Barack Obama have issued long lists of policy objectives to address America’s energy challenges and stimulate the nascent clean-energy technologies that will provide the answers.
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AIG collapsed because it sold CDS's [credit-default swaps] on a Lehman (LEH) bankruptcy or default; in other words, it sold insurance to other firms in case LEH would ever go bankrupt or into default. The LEH bankruptcy happened over the September 13-14 weekend. Take a look at the stock chart of AIG & LEH, both steadily decline into that weekend and then fall off the cliff Monday, September 15. Because of the new "precedent", that major financial firms were going to be allowed by the Fed & Treasury to fail, CDS prices sky-rocketed that Monday morning and the next 4 weeks. Read More...

”The economic crisis has brought harmony to trans-Atlantic affairs. Europeans might secretly blame the calamity on US “Casino Capitalism,” but they know they are rowing in the same boat and so cooperation is the order of the day. The stock markets treat this as good news now, but it could easily do more harm than good.

Economic crisis management by the state can be necessary, as it is now, to restore trust in the markets and the facilitators of commerce - the lenders. Mis-trust in its psychological aspects sometimes trumps rational behavior. Read More...

Ferrara writes:

“Not all deregulation hurts, and not all regulation helps. Republicans and Democrats alike supported a 1999 deregulation that has actually made this crisis easier to handle, for example…

The aforementioned 1999 legislation, pushed through Congress by then-Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm, repealed the 65-year-old Glass-Steagall Act. In late September, Obama was blasting Gramm as “the architect in the United States Senate of the deregulatory steps that helped cause this mess.” Read More...

Ferrara writes:

“Under the McCain plan, if your employer pays for your health insurance, what the employer spends would be included in your taxable income. But then your family would get the $5,000 tax credit to offset any resulting tax. Suppose you are a middle class family in the 25% income tax bracket, and your employer pays $1,000 a month for your health insurance, $12,000 for the year. The resulting tax would be only $3,000, which would be more than covered by the $5,000 tax credit. So there would be no tax coming out of your paycheck due to the McCain plan. Read More...

Pieler and Laurson write:

"When the Georgian-Russian war broke out on August 8, reports of attacks on official Georgian Web sites gave the impression of a coordinated cyberattack from Russia.

The source of the attacks is still a subject of debate among cyberwar experts because of the difficulties involved in tracing a distributed attack back to a government agency or sponsor. That gives potential state sponsors of cyberattacks the advantage of plausible deniability, analysts note.

The U.S. government is apparently concerned about the possibility of such attacks on the United States. Read More...

1. I admit that I have become powerless over spending taxpayers’ money—and so my political promises have become meaningless.
2. I have come to believe that only a power greater than myself—the U.S. Constitution, and maybe voter rebellion—can restore me to sanity.
3. I have made a decision to turn my life over to the guidance of sound economic and fiscal principles. Read More...
   
   

“When Congress and Hank Paulson agreed government should relieve financial firms of bad assets, the world of global finance breathed a sigh of relief. Socializing the cost of liquidating ‘toxic assets’, mostly bad-mortgage paper, is supposed to get credit flowing again and prevent things from getting worse.

Will it? When the House voted ‘no’ on this exceptional experiment in bipartisanship, the market went way down. When the Senate voted ‘yes’ on its heavily sweetened version of the same thing, the market went way down. When the House finally approved the behemoth… the market went down. Since then the Dow Jones has dropped over 1,000 points. Read More...

“Congress is currently debating a bill that would establish new rules for one of the most promising fields of medical technology this country has ever seen. The Pathway for Biosimilars Act includes new rules for intellectual property protection for "biologics," pharmaceutical drugs derived from living organisms.

Most of what you think you know about traditional prescription drugs doesn't apply to biologics. They usually come in a vial, not a pill. They are as effective as they are complex; indeed they are effective because they are complex. Read More...

“Obama promises across the board tax increases, America's corporate tax rates are already the second highest in the industrialized world, prices are already rising and the dollar is declining, America is turning its back on free trade, the federal budget is already spiraling out of control and entitlements threaten far worse, regulations already strangle energy production, producing high energy costs for the economy, cap and trade global warming regulations threaten to shut the economy down, unions calling for legal powers to force unionization, the left campaigns for costly but low quality socialized medicine, these are all indicators of a fatal Read More...

“Under this proposal, Americans could file their income taxes under the existing tax code or they could choose instead to pay taxes under a simpler code with fewer deductions but lower tax rates. Building on work already done by Steve Forbes and House Budget Committee member Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, Mr. McCain could propose an optional tax system with just two rates, 10% and 25%, compared to the six rates of the current code ranging from 10% to 35%.

What's more, such a proposal would include a cut in income taxes, and tax rates, for every American who pays taxes. Read More...

”Most jobs in America are created by small businesses. Let’s look at the impact of Obama’s tax increases on a small business family. The husband has a steady job of his own, but the wife runs an unincorporated small business that stumbles for several years then starts doing quite well, employing five people. Together their family income reaches just over $250,000.

Under the Obama tax plan, their marginal income tax rate alone climbs to 39.5%. The payroll tax increase would add as much as 4 percentage points more, raising the total to 43.5%. Read More...

"Let's hope Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama understands more about financial markets than he does about health-insurance markets. But the initial evidence isn't promising.

A recent kerfuffle between Mr. Obama and Republican presidential candidate John McCain concerned the interstate purchase of health insurance. Mr. McCain wants to allow people to buy health insurance across state lines. Read More...

Peter Sunde is now arguing that they were breaking the law by scraping the site multiple times without permission. “The Pirate Bay actually owns the copyright to its own database of torrents,” Sunde writes on his blog. Sunde further refers to the Pirate Bay’s Usage Policy, which the book publishers organization has violated.

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