Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Here's a happy song about an English Sheepdog... or Jane Asher... take your pick!
Sorry about no newsbites yesterday; I was hangin' with my bud Phil as his lovely wine drinking, meat pie baking wife had a bit of her lower intestine cut out.
She's fine; and as an added bonus the hospital bought Phil and I lunch!
(*HUGE FRIGG'N GRIN*)
Oh... and Phil's sister Susan brought me some tasty bakery treats as a reward for being a good friend!
(*SMILE*)
I do love a good bakery treat...
(*CONTENTED SIGH*)
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703954004576089963912388314.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
For months, some political leaders and commentators have argued that failure to raise the debt ceiling would necessarily cause the U.S. to default on its debt.
* AND THEY'VE BEEN LYING. EITHER THAT OR THEY SIMPLY DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT. (*SHRUG*)
President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors...
(*SMIRK*)
* 'NOUGH SAID.
In fact, if Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling, the federal government will still have far more than enough money to fully service our debt.
(*NOD*)
Next year, for instance, about 6.5% of all projected federal government expenditures will go to interest on our debt, and tax revenue is projected to cover about 67% of all government expenditures. With roughly 10 times more income than needed to honor our debt obligations, why would we ever default?
* EXACTLY...!!!
To make absolutely sure, I [,Senator Pat Toomey,] intend to introduce legislation that would require the Treasury to make interest payments on our debt its first priority in the event that the debt ceiling is not raised. This would not only ensure the continued confidence of investors at home and abroad, but would enable us to have an honest debate about the consequences of our eventual decision about the debt ceiling.
(*CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/257433/no-surrender-debt-ceiling-michael-tanner
As Congress prepares for a vital debate over debt, deficits, and government spending, there is reason to be concerned that the GOP is engaging in a bit of unilateral disarmament.
Over the weekend, several Republican spokesmen, including House majority leader Eric Cantor and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, indicated that they would, in fact, support increasing the nation’s $14.3 trillion debt limit when it comes up for a vote in March.
[T]hey also said that they would use the vote as “leverage” to demand spending cuts. But how much leverage is there likely to be if they have already conceded the final vote?
Of course the Obama administration is already warning of Armageddon if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling.
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
While Congress has never before refused to raise the debt ceiling...
* WHICH IS NOTHING TO BE PROUD OF!
...it has in fact frequently taken its time about doing so.
In 1985, for example, Congress waited nearly three months after the debt limit was reached before it authorized a permanent increase. In 1995, four and a half months passed between the time that the government hit its statutory limit and the time Congress acted. And in 2002, Congress delayed raising the debt ceiling for three months.
Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s have warned that our credit rating might be reduced unless we get a handle on our national debt.
We’ve heard a lot recently about the European debt crisis, but, as one senior Chinese banking official recently noted, in some ways the U.S. financial position is more perilous than Europe’s. “We should be clear in our minds that the fiscal situation in the United States is much worse than in Europe,” he recently told reporters. “In one or two years, when the European debt situation stabilizes, [the] attention of financial markets will definitely shift to the United States. At that time, U.S. Treasury bonds and the dollar will experience considerable declines.”
* KICKING THE CAN DOWN THE ROAD - YET AGAIN - IS THE COWARDS OPTION... THE IRRESPONSIBLE SCUMBAG'S OPTION.
[F]ederal spending is on course to consume 43% of GDP by the middle of the century. Throw in state and local spending, and government at all levels will take 60 cents out of every dollar produced in this country.
* NAH... NO "SOCIALISTS" IN WASHINGON. (*SMIRK*)
If the debt ceiling is not increased, the Treasury can prioritize interest and debt payment to avoid a default and essentially put the government on a stringent pay-as-you-go basis.
* AND THAT WOULD BE GOOD...!!! GOOD! VERY, VERY GOOD...!!!
Would that involve extreme cuts in government spending? Certainly.
* AGAIN... (*GRITTING MY TEETH*)... GOOD...!!! GOOD! VERY, VERY GOOD...!!!
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=560155&p=1
Keeping a campaign vow to bankrupt [America's coal] industry, the administration revokes the permit for an approved, working coal mine in West Virginia.
(*SIGH*)
[Obama's politicized] EPA has revoked the coal mining permit for Arch Coal's Spruce Mine No. 1 in West Virginia's Logan County. The permit was issued four years ago and since then Arch Coal, which provides 16% of America's coal supply, has followed every jot and tittle of the rules it was to operate under. As West Virginia's coal industry has found, it matters not even if you follow the rules. In pursuit of this agenda, the rules can be changed on the fly.
Arch invested $250 million in the mountaintop mining operation...
* DOESN'T MATTER...
When fully operational, it would have employed 215 miners directly, with another 300 jobs in support services.
* DOESN'T MATTER...
EPA said it was acting under the authority of the Clean Water Act, saying the mine employed "destructive and unsustainable mining practices that jeopardize the health of Appalachian communities and clean water on which they depend." Funny, the EPA didn't think so four years ago, when a Section 404 permit was issued...
(*SIGH*)
As if business and energy weren't already operating in an uncertain regulatory climate, this action essentially renders worthless every government permit, approval or promise, particularly in an energy industry the administration seems determined to shut down.
"According to the EPA, it doesn't matter if you did everything right, if you followed all of the rules," said West Virginia's [new] Democrat senator, freshman Joe Manchin. "Why? They just change the rules."
Democrat Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia [notes] Revocation of the "vigorously reviewed and lawfully issued permit" has a ripple effect and "needlessly throws other permits into a sea of uncertainty at a time of great economic distress."
* OH, WELL... TOUGH SHIT.
In promising a cap-and-trade system during the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama stipulated: "If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted."
Hey, guys, President Obama and Vice President Biden are merely being true to their word.
Unable to get [actual legislation] through Congress, President Obama [is misusing] the EPA as a regulatory bludgeon to implement cap-and-trade by stealth, bankrupting the fossil fuel industry and causing energy prices to "necessarily skyrocket."
We have an oil drilling moratorium in parts of the Gulf of Mexico and off both coasts. ANWR and other energy-rich areas in and off Alaska are off-limits, as are vast areas in the West. Nuclear power is stalled and even natural gas is under attack for its use of so-called "fracking" technology.
* FOLKS... (*SIGH*)... THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION IS WAGING ECONOMIC WARFARE AGAINST... er... US.
http://www.smartmoney.com/personal-finance/taxes/tax-system-too-complex-to-be-constitutional-1295026434475/
Douglas Shulman says he uses a hired tax preparer because the U.S. tax code is so complex. That's a bad sign. [Douglas Shulman is] the I.R.S. commissioner.
* AND SHULMAN'S BOSS IS TAX CHEAT TIM GEITHNER!
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
* FOLKS... SERIOUSLY... THIS ISN'T FUNNY...
The tax system has clearly gotten too complicated. The code itself holds about 3.8 million words, nearly five times as many as the King James Bible. There's also a much larger body of regulations, which carry the weight of law, written by the Internal Revenue Service, along with court precedents going back at least a century. Add to that the IRS's published opinions on its regulations.
Even if someone could read all of it, the rules would be obsolete by the time he finished. There have been more than 4,400 changes to the tax code over the past decade, or more than one a day.
Can the tax system become too complicated to be constitutional? Consider the following two sentences from different sources:
1. "[A] statute which either forbids or requires the doing of an act in terms so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and differ as to its application, violates the first essential of due process of law."
2. For purposes of paragraph (3), an organization described in paragraph (2) shall be deemed to include an organization described in section 501(c)(4), (5), or (6) which would be described in paragraph (2) if it were an organization described in section 501(c)(3).
The first sentence comes from a 1926 Supreme Court decision that helped establish the right of citizens to known what laws mean.
The second comes from the tax code.
(*SIGH*)
If the average person can't fully read or understand the rules, the rules no longer seem fair. Why don't the courts force tax simplification?
"You'd never get that argument in front of a judge," says Daniel Pilla, a tax litigation consultant and the author of 11 books, including "The IRS Problem Solver."
"Not a day goes by that I'm not stuck in some book trying to figure out what the hell the tax code means," says Pilla. "Judges admit it's too complicated in their rulings when they refer to it with words like 'Byzantine.' Everyone knows it's unfair, but you'd never be allowed to argue that in court."
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