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Call for the straightjacket, SiriuslyWrong has gone bonkers. Hate will do it to you everytime. :)
Remember this is the guy who believes in Peter Schiff. Yes, that Peter Schiff. The guy who
has gotten almost every one of his predictions wrong for years. He said we would experience
hyperinflation in 2011 (not inflation, hyperinflation. lol). He predicted las year that the Dow will
drop to 1,400 or that gold will rise to $12,000 within the next 2 years.
If you believe in a guy that makes crazy economic predictions no wonder you believe a guy
like Peter Ferrara who calls President Obama a Marxist. Cuckoo for cocoa puffs.
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the...ama-a-marxist/
The Absurdity of Calling Obama a Marxist
ALEX KNAPP · MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2011
“It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”
The above quote is from notorious hardcore lefty Adam Smith, in his famous socialist tract On the Wealth of Nations, where he proposes a progressive taxation, that the government should protect workers from the predations of their employers, and that a government that serves only the interests of the wealthy will suffer economic collapse.
The point is, I’ve noticed a lot of people flinging the word Marxist at President Obama after his speech today proposing higher taxes on the wealthy. Those people need to be hit over the head with a copy of Das Kapital until some of it sinks in through osmosis.
Obama’s proposals are well within the republican tradition, well within the classical liberal tradition, and well within the free-market tradition. You might question the wisdom of particular aspects of his policies given current economic conditions. Or argue that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to raise taxes now when we can borrow cheaply.
But calling the President a Marxist only exposes the speaker’s ignorance of Marxism, the history of capitalist countries, and President Obama.
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Obama Previews A Double-Feature Horror Show For Taxpayers
As discussed yesterday, the most important number in President Obama’s budget is that the burden of government spending will be at least $2 trillion higher in 10 years if his is enacted.
But there are also some very unsightly warts in the revenue portion of the president’s budget. Americans for Tax Reform has a good summary of the various tax hikes, most of which are based on punitive, class-warfare ideology.
In this post, I want to focus on the president’s proposals to increase both the capital gains tax rate and the tax rate on dividends.
Most of the discussion is focusing on the big increase in tax rates for 2013, particularly when you include the 3.8 percent tax on investment income that was part of Obamacare. If the president is successful, the tax on capital gains will climb from 15 percent this year to 23.8 percent next year, and the tax on dividends will skyrocket from 15 percent to 43.4 percent.
But these numbers understate the true burden because they don’t include the impact of double taxation, which exists when the government cycles some income through the tax code more than one time. As this chart illustrates, this means a much higher tax burden on income that is saved and invested.
The accounting firm of Ernst and Young just produced a report looking at actual tax rates on capital gains and dividends, once other layers of tax are included. The results are very sobering. The United States already has one of the most punitive tax regimes for saving and investment.
Finish it here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielmi...capital-gains/
Hava-gafa-kasha is not only a tax avoider, but a denier of the obvious.
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Damn, I was hoping for more Marxist nonsense from SiriuslyWrong. So disappointing. ;)
I understand that you are embarassed by your embracing of Mr. Schiff. Sorry.
The last person anyone should come to for economic information and analysis is you. lol
Today, 09:00 PM #41
Havakasha
Senior Member
"Call for the straightjacket, SiriuslyWrong has gone bonkers. Hate will do it to you everytime.
Remember this is the guy who believes in Peter Schiff. Yes, that Peter Schiff. The guy who
has gotten almost every one of his economic predictions wrong for years. He said we would experience
hyperinflation in 2011 (not inflation, hyperinflation. lol). He predicted las year that the Dow will
drop to 1,400 or that gold will rise to $12,000 within the next 2 years.
If you believe in a guy that makes crazy economic predictions no wonder you believe a guy
like Peter Ferrara who calls President Obama a Marxist. Cuckoo for cocoa puffs."
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...fkE_story.html
Ezra Klein
Obama revealed: A moderate Republican
By Ezra Klein, Published: April 25, 2011
America is mired in three wars. The past decade was the hottest on record. Unemployment remains stuck near 9 percent, and there’s a small, albeit real, possibility that the U.S. government will default on its debt. So what’s dominating the news? A reality-television star who can’t persuade anyone that his hair is real is alleging that the president of the United States was born in Kenya.
Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.
If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal health care; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans have staked out before.
Take health-care reform. The individual mandate was developed by a group of conservative economists in the early ’90s. Mark Pauly, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was one of them. “We were concerned about the specter of single-payer insurance,” he told me recently. The conservative Heritage Foundation soon had an individual-mandate plan of its own, and when President Bill Clinton endorsed an employer mandate in his health-care proposal, both major Republican alternatives centered on an individual mandate. By 1995, more than 20 Senate Republicans — including Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Dick Lugar and a few others still in office — had signed one individual mandate bill or another.
The story on cap and trade — which conservatives now like to call “cap and tax” — is much the same. Back then, the concern was sulfur dioxide, the culprit behind acid rain. President George H.W. Bush wanted a solution that relied on the market rather than on government regulation. So in the Clean Air Act of 1990, he proposed a plan that would cap sulfur-dioxide emissions but let the market decide how to allocate the permits. That was “more compatible with economic growth than using only the command and control approaches of the past,” he said. The plan passed easily, with “aye” votes from Sen. Mitch McConnell and then-Rep. Newt Gingrich, among others. In fact, as recently as 2007, Gingrich said that “if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur . . . it’s something I would strongly support.”
As for the 1990 budget deal, Bush initially resisted tax increases, but eventually realized they were necessary to get the job done. “It is clear to me that both the size of the deficit problem and the need for a package that can be enacted require all of the following: entitlement and mandatory program reform, tax revenue increases, growth incentives, discretionary spending reductions, orderly reductions in defense expenditures, and budget process reform,” he said. That deal, incidentally, was roughly half tax increases and half spending cuts. Obama’s budget has far fewer tax increases. And compared with what would happen if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire in 2012, it actually includes a large tax cut.
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Barack Obama’s Arrogant Marxist Rhetoric
So far, the analysis of President Obama’s deficit speech has focused largely on its vagaries, obfuscations, and outright lies. Charles Krauthammer rightly blasted Obama’s speech as “shallow … hyper-partisan … intellectually dishonest.” He cited Obama’s “numbers suspended in mid-air with nothing under them with all kinds of goals and guidelines and triggers that mean nothing.” Krauthammer wasn’t alone – many commentators ranging from David Limbaugh to Larry Kudlow have targeted Obama’s woefully un-mathematical statistics, his fiscal magical thinking, and his utter inability to move to the center with regard to deficit reduction.
But the true heart of Obama’s speech wasn’t the faulty budgetary analysis or the demagoguery of attacking Paul Ryan personally. It was Obama’s soaring rhetoric.
Obama is an odd politician. Most politicians see the cloudy phraseology of their speeches as mere throwaway stuff, cotton candy for the simple-minded. Obama sees such gibberish as the soul of his agenda. If we want to examine where Obama truly stands, we must delve into his soaring rhetoric.
And the soaring rhetoric is unvaryingly drawn directly from Saul Alinsky.
As Andrew Breitbart makes clear in his fantastic new book, Righteous Indignation, the father of the contemporary left is Saul Alinsky. Alinsky was an intensely clever fellow with no compunction about exploiting popular sentiment to achieve his ends. One of his favorite methodologies was to use America’s founders to back his own Marxism. As Breitbart writes, “Alinsky’s clever merging of fake founding philosophy with his own Marxism led him to internal contradictions that would have sunk a lesser ego. While championing ‘freedom,’ for example – he hated the idea of individual freedom the Founders loved – he [pushed for] ‘communal freedom,’ which is to say tyranny led by the government.”
Obama was raised in the Alinsky tradition, and he speaks with Alinsky’s forked tongue. Thus, for example, Obama opened his speech by stating that Americans have historically “put our faith in free markets and free enterprise as the engine of America’s wealth and prosperity … we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government.”
So far, so good. But Obama continues: “But there has always been another thread running throughout our history – a belief that we are all connected; and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation.” This is un-American, and it is a lie. American unity doesn’t occur in opposition to free markets, but in defense of them.
This is typical Alinsky. By purposefully confusing principled individualism with principled communitarianism, suggesting that Americans are characterized by both, Obama begins the slow march to fascism. In this section of his speech, Obama essentially turned Americans into corporatists – free marketeers ready, willing, and able to turn over that free market to a well-organized state.
Page 2: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/04/18/b...st-rhetoric/2/
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Is President Obama Truly A Socialist?
Pew Research finds that sixty percent of Americans respond negatively to “socialism.” It is clear why President Barack Obama must avoid that label. Words are important. Political candidates who control the language of political discourse win elections.
Most of our elites would certainly not entertain the question: “Is Obama a socialist?” Only irresponsible fanatics carelessly throw around such epithets, they say. Polite circles ignore such goofiness.
As someone who has professionally studied and written about comparative economics, capitalism, and socialism for almost fifty years, the reticence to probe the core beliefs of a political leader seems odd. The question is perfectly legitimate in both an academic and political context as long as we define terms and place the discussion in proper context.
By “socialist,” I do not mean a Lenin, Castro, or Mao, but whether Obama falls within the mainstream of contemporary socialism as represented, for example, by Germany’s Social Democrats, French Socialists, or Spain’s socialist-workers party?
By this criterion, yes, Obama is a socialist.
The socialist parties of Europe trace their origins to reform Marxism. After Marx’s death in 1883, Europe’s Marxists rejected the Bolsheviks’ call for socialist revolution and worked within the political system for Marxist goals. Marxists, such as Karl Leibknecht, August Bebel, Paul Lafargue, Leon Blum, and others, formed the socialist parties that we know today. Most emerged from the trade-union movement, and they retain close ties with organized labor today, as does Obama’s Democrat Party.
Whereas, the eighteenth century liberalism of John Locke and Adam Smith gave us our constitution and limited government, Marxism provided the intellectual foundations of the European welfare state.
The European socialists have their welfare state. Even their conservative opponents no longer question the “social state,” despite rising concern about its affordability. In the United States, we are fighting the battle of the welfare state, and we do not know what the outcome will be.
The European welfare state takes one half of national output to provide state health care, pensions, extended unemployment benefits, income grants, and free higher education. Failed nationalizations taught European socialists to leave enterprise in private hands and coerce it through taxation and regulation to contribute to what the state deems the “social welfare.”
The November 2011 Declaration of Principles of the Party of European Socialists (PES) summarizes the European socialist agenda. I condense its main points and compare them with Obama’s statements and legislative initiatives:
PES: The welfare state and state-provided universal access to education and health care are society’s great achievements.
Obama: Favors universal access to health care and associated benefits as a critical expansion of the welfare state.
Page 2: http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulrode...a-socialist/2/
What comes first, this thread gets 1000 hits or the debt exceeds $16,000,000,000,000?
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Is obama a socialist?
Socialism, according to Karl Marx, is the transition between capitalism and communism. To achieve communism, Marx says, there must be continuing revolution in which the fundamental principal is: The end justifies the means.
For more than half a century, capitalism in the United States has taken a beating from the socialist revolution. Despite the best efforts of conservatives since the Roosevelt era, socialists have made great strides toward converting the nation to socialism. Apparently, the majority of Americans either fail to recognize the transition, or welcome it. The enthusiastic support for Barack Obama, especially among young people, is abundant evidence.
Obama has declared that he believes every person has a “right” to health care. The Socialist Party USA believes every person has a “right” to health care.
Obama believes that labor unions should be allowed to organize without a secret ballot. The Socialist Party USA calls for unions to be recognized without a secret ballot. (Hear Obama’s words here.)
The Socialist Party USA recognizes the “right” of adequate housing for everyone. Obama trained ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) workers to secure mortgages for unqualified people in sufficient numbers to collapse the housing and home-financing industries.
The Socialist Party USA believes that “capitalism is fundamentally incompatible” with socialism. For years, Obama worked in Chicago through the Annenberg Challenge, along with Bill Ayers, to funnel more than $50 million to anti-capitalist education projects. In November 2006, Ayers traveled to Venezuela to speak at Hugo Chavez’s Education Forum where he railed against “the failings of capitalist education,” and praised the “Bolivarian Revolution and the profound reforms in education made by Hugo Chavez.”
The Socialist Party USA believes in open borders and six-months residency as the only requirement for U.S. citizenship. Obama marched with illegal aliens in Chicago in support of “comprehensive” immigration reform. Listen to Obama’s promises to La Raza in 2007.
The Socialist Party USA calls for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Obama says, “I will end this war,” with never a reference to “winning” or “victory.”
The Socialist Party USA calls for the “unconditional disarmament” by the United States. Obama has promised to dramatically reduce defense spending. Listen to his words here.
The Socialist Party USA calls for a “livable guaranteed annual income.” Obama trained ACORN members to conduct “Living Wage” campaigns in cities around the country.
The Socialist Party USA calls for a “steeply graduated” tax policy to redistribute wealth. Obama has promised to increase the tax burden on the rich to redistribute wealth to the poor. He revealed his philosophy when answering a question from Joe the plumber, who complained that he was being taxed for his success. Obama said:
It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance for success too. My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.
Click here to read the rest and see the what the hyperlinks offer: http://www.wnd.com/2008/10/78330/
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You can stand with oil companies, or you can stand with the American people
Oh, this isn't divisive........................... then again, Lloyd thrives on this exact tactic..............
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/01/politi...ss_igoogle_cnn
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Now that you "proved" that President Obama is a Marxist, i think its time you took up the matter of his birth certificate. :)
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmem...ref=fpnewsfeed
Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio dove head first into the birther movement on Thursday, arguing at a news conference in Phoenix that President Obama’s birth certificate is a fake and that crimes were committed in its creation.
By doing so, the Republican joined a fringe group of activists and writers who believe in a conspiracy theory that has been debunked several times over by numerous independent investigations.
“It’s not over,” the sheriff said during the hour-long event. “This investigation is not over.”
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Obama and Marxism: A Legitimate Question
By Guest Author on June 13th, 2009
By Victor Morawski
Whether or not Barack Obama is a Marxist is one of the most prevalent philosophically-related questions asked about him. Yet, if we are to go bythe reaction of current Vice President Joe Biden when he was confronted with the question on the campaign trail by Orlando television reporter Barbara West—“Are you joking? Is this a joke?”—the question isn’t even legitimate and is a “ridiculous comparison.”
But the Vice President never gave that particular reporter a good reason why the question is ridiculous. He merely attacked her for asking it.
Many studied philosophers, including myself, think the question is far from ridiculous and can not be dispensed with by mere Ad Hominem attacks against those who ask it. We will deal with it by asking two more questions over the course of the next two Philosopher’s Stone columns: “Can we tell that he is a Marxist from his associations?” and “Can we tell that he is a Marxist from the principles he adopts?”
Attempts to argue that Barack Obama himself is a Marxist, given his past connections with known Marxists, have abounded on the Internet and on conservative talk radio, especially prior to the November election. That those connections do exist is hardly a matter for debate.
Abundant evidence has been cited to show that his long-time mentor and father figure in Hawaii, Frank Marshall Davis, was a full-blown, active member of the Communist Party. After coming to Chicago, Obama for years attended the church of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, an ardent and vocal advocate of Black Liberation Theology, a movement with its roots planted firmly in Marxism.
Obama also had extensively documented contact in Chicago with Bill Ayers, former member of the Marxist-influenced Weather Underground, and a self-identified Marxist:
In an interview published in 1995, Ayers characterized his political beliefs at that time and in the 1960s and 1970s: “I am a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist … [Laughs] Maybe I’m the last communist who is willing to admit it. [Laughs] We have always been small ‘c’ communists in the sense that we were never in the Communist party and never Stalinists. The ethics of communism still appeal to me. I don’t like Lenin as much as the early Marx.”
Obama’s defenders characterize the above charges as mere “guilt by association.” They contend that his connections with known Marxists do not necessarily imply that he shares their views. They claim we can draw no legitimate conclusions about Obama’s own beliefs from the above facts concerning his associations.
In so doing, they are in effect charging his detractors with committing a reasoning error logicians call a “Circumstantial Ad Hominem Argument.” They thus gainsay his opponents’ claims that because of his own special circumstances—in this case that Obama has had ongoing relationships with many known Marxists—he must share certain specific views (namely, Marxist). They argue that these relationships are, in fact, utterly irrelevant to his actual beliefs and should not be cited as evidence of them.
One who commits the above fallacy wrongly assumes that there is a necessary logical connection betweenBeing an A and advocating a particular view. As a textbook example, I would be doing so were I to contend that, because you are a Democrat, you cannot be Pro-Life. Here, I would be assuming wrongly that being Pro-Abortion (or as they would prefer, Pro-Choice) is a necessary aspect of being a Democrat, when it in fact is not. There is no necessary logical connection between your being a Democrat and your abortion views, and it would be wrong for me to assume that there is just because so many with whom you associate are Pro-Abortion.
But, in philosophical terms, the connection claimed to exist between Obama and his Marxist associates is not merely logical, but causal. His life-long, self-selected connections with known Marxists are claimed to have had a causal influence on his own beliefs. And that is a vital distinction when examining one’s resultant behavior patterns.
It is probabilistic, not deductive, reasoning that best deals with causal relationships. While we cannot conclude with certainty from the truth of documented facts concerning his Marxist associations that Barack Obama himself is a Marxist, it is reasonable to conclude that there is a significant probability that he is and doing so commits no logical fallacy. So his associations are not, as his defenders maintain, irrelevant as evidence of his own beliefs. They are, in fact, determinant
Finish it here: http://www.dakotavoice.com/2009/06/o...mate-question/
