One of the most despicable elements regarding either campaigning or governing is the encouragement and exploitation of class-warfare; yet, this is precisely the anchor of the speech that President Obama used to brainwash vulnerable public-school students in his speech on 06 December in Osawatomie, Kansas. As has been the case throughout his presidency in various parts of the world, he used the occasion to apologize to children for the sorry United States of America, which he described as eroding.
He left the students with the impression that greedy rich folks are the reason for the sorry state of affairs, notwithstanding that he’s rich himself and that he and his wife have profited greatly from the system he routinely excoriates on his campaign junkets described as doing the nation’s business and paid for by the taxpayers, while other candidates for office must hustle the cash to do the same. This is blatant dishonesty, which, if they had any incentive (or maybe enough intelligence), the teachers would remark to the students, thus nullifying Obama’s bona fides as a role model or mentor.
The thing that rankles most, though, is his outright lying in that speech. Here is part of what he said: “We all know the story by now: Mortgages sold to people who couldn’t afford them, or sometimes even understand them. Banks and investors allowed to keep packaging the risk and selling it off. … Regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this, but looked the other way or didn’t have the authority to look at all.”
Rich people had nothing to do with the fact that people who couldn’t afford houses nevertheless were given the privilege of buying them anyway, with the certain outcome being that they would be foreclosed. This stupidity was the result of something that came out of the Congress mostly under the auspices of the Clinton administration.
This is from Bloomberg Business Week by Peter Coy of 27 February 2008: “Add President Clinton to the long list of people who deserve a share of the blame for the housing bubble and bust. A recently re-exposed document shows that his administration went to ridiculous lengths to increase the national homeownership rate. It promoted paper-thin downpayments and pushed for ways to get lenders to give mortgage loans to first-time buyers with shaky financing and incomes. It’s clear now that the erosion of lending standards pushed prices up by increasing demand, and later led to waves of defaults by people who never should have bought a home in the first place.”
For Obama to use his class-warfare position on this subject is beyond dishonesty… .it approximates the furtherance of fraud. It incites class-envy, something so graphically illustrated in the recent Occupy Wall Street movement, protesters demanding that the government set the wages of everybody so that equity is established without any reference to education, risk-taking, incentive or even work-habits. This is the socialist model or, even worse but applicable, the communist model, the very approach turned down by the Great Depression citzens of the 1930s, even though the unemployment rate averaged about twice what it is now. They were determined that government would not run their lives.
This is from the Glenn Beck Web-site of 23 September 2008: “President Bush publicly called for GSE reform 17 times in 2008 alone before Congress acted. Unfortunately, these warnings went unheeded, as the President’s repeated attempts to reform the supervision of these entities were thwarted by the legislative maneuvering of those who emphatically denied there were problems.” For those who claim bias, Beck listed the warnings, beginning with 2001 and ending with 2005, and this site can be easily googled for verification.
The regulators dissed by Obama were part of the Bush administration and, instead of being part of the problem, were part of the answer, except that people like Obama didn’t listen, including republicans as well as democrats. Obama was a senator, though rarely in the saddle, from 2005 until 2009. All one has to do is check the times the regulators appeared before the appropriate Congressional committees to see where the fault lay. It was not with the regulators but with the supposed “fixers,” which proved that incompetents have no trouble being elected to Congress.
These are the average top-bracket tax-rates for the following decades: 1930s – 57.5%; 1940s – 85.4%; 1950s – 91.3%; 1960s – 78%; 1970s – 70%; 1980s – 48%; 1990s – 37%; 2000s – 36%. There was a time(s) when the legislators decided to finance the government on the backs of the rich. This was never fair, though it’s arguable that a progressive system, with the rich paying somewhat more than others since they have more materially to protect, might be fair. Currently , there are six tax brackets, with appropriate earnings-limits – 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33%, 35%, the latter for incomes over $379,150. Additionally, 47% of households pay no taxes, meaning that little more than half the workers/producers of wealth pay the whole freight.
Those in the top bracket pay 250% more of their income than those in the lowest bracket. When a lowest-bracket tax-payer remits $100 in taxes to the government, his counterpart in the top bracket pays $25,000. The lowest payer’s top earnings-limit is $8500, so he pays $850. The top payer’s lowest limit is $379,150, so he pays $132,702.50 at the same time. If he makes a million bucks, the government gets $350,000, or well over a third of his income. The president doesn’t think this is fair, says so, and, ipso facto, plays the class-warfare card. On a percentage basis, it is more than fair, but he intends to put the government’s back on a tiny number of people, letting them support in many cases those who live on welfare because its a way of life.
Make no mistake. Obama intends to drive the tax rates up on the rich this time and on everybody else next time. This levels the playing field and kills incentive.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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