Within two hours of the bill’s passage by the Congress, President Barack Obama signed the Debt Limit Increase Bill into law on August 2nd, averting by several hours the dreaded possibility of national default.
The president then ran to the microphones outside the Oval Office to thank the American people for keeping the pressure on the Congress to ensure the continued solvency of the government.
The president went on to add a few personal observations to his remarks. He stated as an accepted fact his supposition that, “We can’t close the deficit with just spending cuts.” Without pausing to consider the mendacity of that comment, he went on to suggest that the only way to accomplish “closing the deficit” would be to have the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations pay their fair share.
Then he went on to say something he may come to regret if anyone in the neutered American press would take him to task. The president said, “Everyone is going to have to pay their fair share. It’s only fair.”1
As it stands today, the president is correct; everyone does not pay their fair share of taxes. Today, 47 percent of the wage earners in the country do not pay any federal income tax at all. Either due to low income, tax credits, or deductions, these workers, numbering over 110 million people, have zero federal income tax liability. It is possible for a family of four earning $50,000 a year to owe no income tax. But even if all those individuals paid an average of $2500 in federal taxes, it would only total about $275 billion, enough to run Mr Obama’s administration for just over three weeks. 2
So, if 47 percent of wage earners pay no federal income taxes, who does? The top 10 percent of all income earners, the evil rich, those earning more than $113,000 per year, pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes collected by the government.3
President Obama is simply using class warfare as a straw dog to deflect attention from the actual problem: outrageous federal spending. To turn Mr Obama’s original statement around, we cannot “close the deficit” by taxing the rich or corporations. As indicated in the very entertaining video at the Heritage Foundation web sight (narrated by Bill Whittle), if we were to confiscate 100 percent of all the profits earned by the Fortune 500 companies ($357 billion) plus 100 percent of the assets of the rich ($1.412 trillion), we could only run Mr Obama’s government for about six months. After that, we’d be out of money with no way to produce more.
While the rich are a tempting target for the socialists and communists of the world, they are not the solution to the budget problem we are facing. Mr Obama’s declarations to the contrary notwithstanding, the only way to eliminate the budget deficit and the resulting increase in the national debt is to stop the runaway federal spending.
The idea that there are no areas of the federal budget that can be cut without harming children or the elderly is preposterous. Examples of federal profligacy are well known, but some of the more ridiculous are catalogued at Darwin’s Money.com where some of the more foolish examples of spending from Mr Obama’s Stimulus spending are documented.4 Examples like the California Academy of Sciences receiving $1.9 million to send researchers to the islands of the Southwest Indian Ocean to capture and photograph exotic ants, or the $90,000 in stimulus money that the town of Boynton, Oklahoma received to replace a five year old length of sidewalk.
In normal times, these expenditures would be thought unnecessary and perhaps even somewhat amusing. But in a time when the economic future of the planet may be in jeopardy if we do not get our fiscal house in order, they are a travesty. Spending trillions of dollars of money we do not have should not be a political issue; it should be a criminal issue. The days of using the endless flow of taxpayer money to ensure the re-election of politicians is over. We need someone in Washington D.C. who can be trusted to act in the best interests of the nation. In years gone by, that’s what we elected the president to do. Sadly, the current occupant of the White House seems unable, or unwilling to do so.
1- http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/60503.html
2- ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat3.txt
3- http://blog.heritage.org/2011/07/14/video-eat-the-rich-liberals-will-still-be-hungry/
4- http://www.darwinsmoney.com/dumb-stimulus-bill-spending/
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