FOD 2012.12.31

I'm prepping for New Year's Eve, so I'm going to borrow today's material from one of the most astute commentators on economics and politics around - Thomas Sowell. He exposes obama for the economic lightweight and liar that he is.

One of the big advantages that President Obama has, as he plays “chicken” with congressional Republicans along the “fiscal cliff,” is that he is a master of the plausible lie, which will never be exposed by the mainstream media — nor, apparently, by the Republicans.

A key lie that has been repeated over and over, largely unanswered, is that President Bush’s “tax cuts for the rich” cost the government so much tax revenue that this added to the budget deficit...

What is remarkable is how easy it is to show how completely false Obama’s argument is. That also makes it completely inexplicable why the Republicans have not done so.

There is a serious lack of common sense and leadership at the top levels of the republican party, but that's a whole different problem. Let's just stick with obama for today.

The official statistics that show plainly how wrong Barack Obama is can be found in his own “Economic Report of the President” for 2012, on page 411...

... (1) Tax revenues went up — not down — after tax rates were cut during the Bush administration, and (2) the budget deficit declined, year after year, after the cuts in tax rates that have been blamed by Obama for increasing the deficit...

The bottom line is that Barack Obama’s blaming increased budget deficits on the Bush tax cuts is demonstrably false.

Of course, it would help if we had anything remotely approaching a 'fair and balanced' media. God forbid they should do any reporting that includes an unbiased presentation of the facts.

In another column, Sowell goes on to demolish obama's fixation on raising taxes for "the rich." (FWIW, my wife and I don't make anywhere near $250,000 annually. But we also don't think that taking more money from anyone who does will help get us out of the mess we're in.)

...despite all the melodrama about raising taxes on “the rich,” even if that is done, it will scarcely make a dent in the government’s financial problems. Raising the tax rates on everybody in the top 2 percent will not generate enough additional tax revenue to run the government for ten days.

All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting “the rich” to pay “their fair share” is part of a big charade. This is not about economics, it is about politics. Taxing “the rich” will produce a drop in the bucket when compared with the staggering and unprecedented deficits of the Obama administration.

As the chart below shows, even if the government confiscates every single penny from everyone who earns more than $1 million, it would only cover about half the current deficit. (click to embiggen)

No previous administration in the entire history of the nation ever finished the year with a trillion-dollar deficit. The Obama administration has done so every single year. Yet political and media discussions of the financial crisis have been focused overwhelmingly on how to get more tax revenue to pay for past and future spending.

As so many others have said, we don't have a revenue problem - we have a spending problem.

The very catchwords and phrases used by the Obama administration betray how phony this all is. For example, “We are just asking the rich to pay a little more.”

This is an insult to our intelligence. The government doesn’t “ask” anybody to pay anything. It orders you to pay the taxes it imposes, and you can go to prison if you don’t.

Obvious lies and staggering incompetence, aided and abetted by his accomplices in the media. We've seen it for the past four years. Why should we expect anything else over the next four?

And it's gonna be a loonnngggg four years...