I received this in an email tonight and thought it bears discussion because, well, because some people…ok, Obama supporters just don’t get it.  Sure, this smacks like something that Snopes will eventually tackle, but what the alleged writer and the person who forwarded it (and that person will multiply exponentially over the next few days) just don’t understand is this.

From:
Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2009 1:36 PM
To:
Subject: Where can we find clients like this?

I’ve seen a lot of dumb news reports in my life, but I’m not sure anything can quite match this one from ABC News.  The premise of the report is this: Barack Obama plans to raise taxes on people who make more than $250,000, so the reporter has gone and found people who earn a little more than that sum who plan to decrease their income so that they come in underneath the magic line.

Now, the obvious objection here is that the tax code doesn’t work that way.  A tax increase affects the marginal dollar that a person gains.  That’s means only every dollar over $250,000 is taxed at a higher rate.  Obama is not proposing a tax system whereby somebody who goes from $249,999 to $250,000 suddenly becomes poorer.  Nobody has ever enacted a tax hike like that in the history of the United States.

That doesn’t stop ABC News’ intrepid reporter.  This story has to be read to be believed:

President Barack Obama’s tax proposal – which promises to increase taxes for those families with incomes of $250,000 or more — has some Americans brainstorming ways to decrease their pay, even if it’s just by a dollar.

A 63-year-old attorney based in Lafayette, La., who asked not to be named, told ABCNews.com that she plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law. …

“We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00,” she said.

“We have to find a way out where we can make just what we need to just under the line so we can benefit from Obama’s tax plan,” she added. “Why kill yourself working if you’re going to give it all away to people who aren’t working as hard?”

The attorney says that in order to decrease her income she’ll have to let go of clients, some of whom she’s been counseling for more than a decade.

“This means I’ll have to tell some of my clients we can’t help them and being more selective in general about who we help,” she said. “I hate to do it.” …

Dr. Sharon Poczatek, who runs her own dental practice in Boulder, Colo., said that she too is trying to figure out ways to get out of paying the taxes proposed in Obama’s plan.

“I’ve put thought into how to get under $250,000,” said Poczatek.  “It would mean working fewer days which means having fewer employees, seeing fewer patients and taking time off.”

Oh my God, the stupidity.  The article then quotes a financial advisor who explains the way that tax brackets rates work, but then quotes a right-wing business professor and the subjects of her article fulminating about class warfare.  Pretty clearly the reporter started off on her mistaken premise, found some subjects who shared her ignorance, and then came across a financial advisor who gently corrected her.  But, instead of nixing the collosally uninformed article, or writing a different kind of article (“Rich Morons Decreasing Own Income Due To Lack of Tax Code Knowledge”) she instead plowed ahead with her initial premise.

This article is obviously an outlier, but it is an extreme manifestation of a broader phenomenon.  Clay had a good post about how Politico’s Jeanne Cummings has turned into a sounding board for right-wing economic notions.  And Matthew Yglesias had a good point about how the media massively overrepresents the perspective of the rich in reporting and commentating on the tax debate.  (It has framed Obama’s plans as a tax hike when the vast majority of Americans will experience it as a tax cut.)  Sadly, I think the next few months are going to bring us a massive surge of sympathetic and/or uninformed coverage of the tax debate from the perspective of the wealthiest segment of America.

 

Someone is deliberately missing the point.  This is not about tax “stupidity”, it is a matter of principle.

Why would anyone work hard to increase their income only to be forced to give up an even bigger chunk of that hard-earned income to pay taxes for things they don’t want/need/approve of/benefit from?  If they have the luxury of keeping their income in a lower tax bracket, if they realize that life is more than having lots of “stuff” and are willing to make do with less, then may the gods, goddesses, Jesus, Buddha, and the Great Pumpkin all bless ’em.  Of course, these are often people who employ other people – like accountants, for example – so who’s really going to be hurt by a forced tax increase, even if it is a bracketed one?

To think there’s anything even remotely fair about “forcing” people to earn more just so they can be taxed more – even through such thinly-veiled attempts to embarrass them by calling them “uninformed” and “morons” – speaks to some nasty sort of servitude mentality.  Which is right in lockstep with Socialism, don’tcha know?

Forget about sending these deliberately stupid, obviously Democratic accountants to the corner.  Let ’em go stand in the unemployment line with the rest of Obama’s supporters.

I’ve lost a lot of respect for the New York Times over the years; the last big drop came with their continual and unabashed sucking-up to the new administration in some lame attempt to keep themselves from the verge of extinction.  So rarely do I bother reading them any more.

But sometimes a link will lead me to peruse their electronic pages and today I found a truly pathetic article there.  It speaks volumes to me about the wicked state of the financial industry in this country when there is actually a company, DCM, that calls on the families of dead people asking them to pay the dead one’s debts.

Folks, these are debts which the families have absolutely NO legal obligation to cover.  Yet the saddest part is that a lot of well-meaning individuals do pay them. 

Now it’s no longer a secret.  If you die and there no estate against which a bill collector can file a claim, that’s their tough luck.  It’s one of the risks they take in doing business.

Let me type this really slowly one more time, just so we’re all clear on this:

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO PAY THE BILLS FOR A DEAD PERSON OUT OF YOUR OWN POCKET IF YOUR NAME ISN’T ON THEIR DEBT.

They say you can’t get blood out of a stone.  Remember, you can’t get money from a dead person, either.

Having failed to collect the money in his alleged deal to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat, impeached and ousted former Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, remains nonplussed and intends to use his failure to once more try to reap those tantalizing, big dividends by penning a “tell-all” for Phoenix Books.

Maybe he thinks he’ll gain some sort of Presidential favor by banking on the fact Americans will be stupid enough to help stimulate the economy by buying it.

And absolute power corrupts absolutely.  All you have to do is give someone a taste of it see the truth in this.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has got to be not only among the most annoying, but among the least professional employees I’ve witnessed in a while.  That his childlish bullying and spitefulness represents the President should give one pause.

That the President apparently condones this type of behavior is even more troubling.

In an article about his beligerence when it comes to the media and any sort of criticism of the President, Gibbs said Tuesday he did not actually get in a “lot of trouble” for singling out Santelli. 

“There are very few days that I’ve had more fun,” Gibbs said.

Failure is an interesting word.  Dating back to 1643, it has subtle layers of meaning but when all is said and done it means “The End”.

And when something reaches The End, there just ain’t no more.

The Democrats and left-wingers are still dripping angst from beating their chests in righteous indignation over Rush Limbaugh’s statement, “I hope he fails” and I personally fail to understand what’s so bloody unclear about it?  The word are so simple.  “He” means President Obama and his economic fantasies…errrr…economic stimulus policies; “fail” means those economic fantasies…errr…economic stimulus polices come to an end.

If you tell me that Kim Jong-il is planning to launch a missile at the United States and I tell you that I hope he fails, you would readily understand that the deeper meaning of those words is I hope our country remains safe from harm.  Well, here’s a little surprise.  What Rush Limbaugh said is no different.  It is opinion of many, many people, both those who hire decorators to frame fancy paper from Ivy League colleges and those who carry well-worn, creased Ph.D.s from the school of real life in their back pocket, that the economic policies of President Obama…well, ok, the economic policies that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid keep proposing and ramrodding through Congress are as harmful to the United States as anything Kim Jong-il would like to lob at us.  So to say that “we” want President Obama to fail means that “we” want this country to remain safe from harm.

When did wanting this country to remain safe from harm become unpatriotic?  Did Congress pass some law outlawing patriotism for all but card-carrying members of the Democratic party while we were all sleeping last night?  How can this even be up for discussion?  Yet so many Democrats are all over this like white on rice, even going out of their way to bait Republicans, using every bit of greasy guile to trick them into saying they want the country to fail. 

And then in the same breath they lay claim to being so “Reagan-esque” in their approach to economic restabilization.

Are they nuts?

You don’t need to answer that.  Through the blessing of free speech conferred upon us by our Founding Fathers, the Democrats and the mainstream media have made it quite clear.

They aren’t smarter than a 5th grader.

I keep trying to figure out how a nation such as ours, built on freedom and personal responsibility, can all of a sudden want the government to regulate their lives. Being somewhat a cross between a libertarian and conservative, I have the firm belief that I can manage my life and my money quite well on my own, thank you very much. Have I made bad decisions in my life?  Sure thing; and some have caused me some real unpleasantness.  But because the consequences weren’t much fun I learned not to do some things twice.

My mother told me two things that have always stuck with me.  One, you are now 18 and we, your parents, have done all we can to teach you right from wrong; it is now up to you. We will always love you and will always be here for you, but if you screw up, YOU and only YOU will pay the price.  Two, one time when I was being, to be perfectly honest, a real shithead, my mother told me I will always love you, but right now I do not like you as a person. WOW.  My growing-up years were far from perfect and my parents weren’t perfect either, but I did learn to stand on my own two feet.  And I learned that my actions had consequences, and whether sometimes good or sometimes not so good, those consequences were always mine. Oh yeah, and when signing a contract always read the fine print.  It’s binding and it’s yours.

What I see now are 24-year old “kids”, college-educated “kids” who are, in their parents words, “just kids who don’t understand.” Huh??? I’m not talking any complicated abstract idea, I’m talking simple things like respect for someone else’s personal property.  Yet these same helpless little darlings play their parents like fiddles; new cars as soon as they are old enough to drive, and every whizzbang new something that comes down the road.  These are not folks in the Obama “rich” category, but the oh-so-put-upon middle class who are having such a hard time making ends meet.  So while both parents work, the “kids” can’t even bestir themselves to mow the grass and as the home , yes, the actual home, falls down around their ears, the parents rail against the government that it just hasn’t done enough. The “kids” have the perfect example – in their parents – of the throw-away mentality.  Buy new and if it breaks, toss it and buy more new, and if we run out of money it’s the government’s fault.  I think what shocked me the most was the day one of my neighbors, the mom, called here about a potential problem in the neighborhood (which was nothing more than the meter reader and the high-tech “gun” used to read the meter; but I digress, and we do have some issues) and she said we would need to watch out for each other.  No worry for them since all they had was junk, but we had “lots of nice stuff” and the envy/jealousy was quite evident in her voice.  We are also part of the middle class that Obama wants to help, but really, really prefer he didn’t.

One other blurb I hear way too often is, “I always know where my kids are”; they are “at home playing games on the computer and I’m so proud of them, at least they aren’t out smoking, drinking and having sex”.  The smoking/drinking/sex thing must be the new “I’m a good parent” war cry. So what are they saying? That if the “kids” leave home to do “anything”, it will include smoking/drinking/sex? Is that the narrow world these parents live in?  Maybe it’s just me, but that whole concept seems just a bit unhealthy.  Funny, too, but a good portion of these folks are overweight, as are the “kids”.  And I mean quite a bit overweight; sex would at least provide some exercise.  Well, so would mowing the grass. Other kids are so pale and skinny they look like death warmed over; mowing the grass would help them, too.

One more bit before I sign off.  A couple years ago my state seemed to have a rash of accidents involving children and ATVs; really young children who, while on their own or riding with a parent, were injured or killed.  Hideous thing to happen and I truly feel for the parents…except for, and up to the point where, the hue and cry went up from the parents that the state needed to make a LAW to require all sellers of ATVs check and make sure that there were no young children in the family, and no young nieces or nephews who might at some point have access to the “big”  ATVs. All because the parents obviously couldn’t tell their 5-year old that, no, they did not need to be on the ATV alone – or at all, or couldn’t figure out that a 3 year old might not be able to hang on tight enough, or realize that said parent might screw up and roll the thing.  They, the parents, wanted to absolve themselves from any responsibility and put that responsibility – by government fiat – on to the sellers of said ATVs.  Such stupidity, thankfully, got voted down.

Are all “kids” and parents like the ones I described above?  No, but there are enough of them for this to be more than just a little bit scary.

In honor of Nadya Suleman, the mother of the octuplets, Denny’s is offering a new breakfast meal:  14 eggs, no sausage.

And the guy next to you has to pay the bill.

Someone, please, make up my mind.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Consumer spending rebounded in January, snapping six months of declines, and incomes rose unexpectedly, “boosted by salary increases for government employees“, a government report showed on Monday.

“The [Commerce] department attributed the rise in incomes to pay raises for federal civilian and military employees, as well as cost-of-living adjustments to several government transfer payments programs.”

“The income numbers were certainly higher than expected, but a lot of that was the Social Security payment adjustment,” said Scott Brown, chief economist, Raymond James & Associates in St. Petersburg, Florida.

“There was a big increase in the savings rate to 5 percent.  It is good that people save but it is not good that everybody saves at the same time.  That makes the current downturn more severe and long lasting.”

I can’t recall exactly how very long ago it was that I received this little ditty in an email.  Probably way back when Windows 95 was the latest and greatest thing since sliced bread.  But like cliches, humor often has a way of transcending time, and since this has never shown up in my Inbox again, I figured its timeless truths were once again fair game for sharing.

To me, democracy means placing trust in the little guy, giving the fruits of nationhood to those who built the nation.  Democracy means anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn’t grow up can be vice-president.

Democracy is people of all races, colors, and creeds united by a single dream:  to get rich and move to the suburbs, away from people of all races, colors, and creeds.  Democracy is having time set aside to worship — 18 years if you’re Jim Bakker.

Democracy is buying a big house you can’t afford with money you don’t have to impress people you wish were dead.  And, unlike communism, democracy does not mean having just one ineffective political party; it means having two or more ineffective political parties.  Democracy means freedom of sexual choice between any two consenting adults; Utopia means freedom of choice between three or more consenting adults.  But I digress.  Democracy is welcoming people from other lands, and giving them something to hold onto – usually a mop or a leaf blower.  It means that with proper timing and scrupulous bookkeeping, anyone can die owing the government a huge amount of money.  Democracy means a thriving heartland with rolling fields of Alfalfa, Buckwheat, Spanky, and Wheezer.  Democracy means our elected officials bow to the will of the people, but more often they bow to the big butts of campaign contributors.

Yes, democracy means fighting every day for what you deserve, and fighting even harder to keep other weaker people from getting what they deserve.  Democracy means never having the Secret Police show up at your door.  Of course, it also means never having the cable guy show up at your door.  It’s a tradeoff.  Democracy means free television; not good television, but free.

Democracy is being able to pick up the phone and, within a minute, be talking to anyone in the country, and, within two minutes, be interrupted by call waiting.

Democracy means no taxation without representation, and God knows we’ve just about had the hell represented out of us.  It means the freedom to bear arms so you can blow the “o” out of any rural stop sign you want.

And finally, democracy is the eagle on the back of a dollar bill, with 13 arrows in one claw, 13 leaves on a branch, 13 tail feathers, and 13 stars over its head – this signifies that when the white man came to this country, it was bad luck for the Indians, bad luck for the trees, bad luck for the wildlife, and lights out for the American eagle.

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at this one.

Just in time to help President Obama with his health-care reform efforts, a 2-year federal study has just released its findings that eating less is the best way to lose and keep off weight.  Thereby lessening the risk of obesity-related illnesses.

All together now:  DUH!

Should be easy for Americans to follow this new “diet” advice now since most can’t afford to buy food.