Others Say Smart Stuff, Too - Part XLVII

From Victor Davis Hansen ("The Orphaned Middle Class"):

The problem with Obamacare is that its well-connected and influential supporters -- pet businesses, unions and congressional insiders -- have already won exemption from it. 

Others Say Smart Stuff, Too - Part XLVI

From Frank J. Fleming, on governmental gridlock:

Right now, politicians have the power to suddenly decide to tax us all at 100% and then spend the money replacing all of our roads with a high-speed rail system. What keeps them from doing that? Common sense? Come on, look at the morons we have in government — Congress is filled with idiots who couldn’t run a lemonade stand and who have grand visions to transform the nation. No, the only thing stopping them is that they’re divided into two parties who viscerally hate each other.

The Lap Dogs Become Attack Dogs

White House ventriloquist dummy Jay Carney suffers the wrath of the White House press corps over their lack of access, and manipulation of the news by the Obama administration.

Great news for Obama

The unemployment rate for November actually hit 7.0%, great news for Obama, because it's been a year since it's been that low. Even better is that the Labor Force Participation Rate, which affects the unemployment rate, ticked up to 63.0%. (The LFPR counts those in the workforce. Not in the workforce, you can't be counted as unemployed, whether you're working or not.)

As I've detailed often before, Obama has benefited from a drastic drop in the number of people who are counted in the workforce. It has kept his "official" government-reported unemployment rate below ten percent, even though millions of more people are not working than when he took office. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's what the LFPR has done under Obama:

Labor Force Participation Rate since January 2009

Now. Since some people will think Obama's drop in workforce participation is just a continuation of an ongoing trend, here's the LFPR for the last ten years.

Labor Force Participation Rate since 2003

Flat for several years, with a decline beginning in January 2009 that accelerated and continues to this day, giving Obama an artificially low unemployment rate that makes all the headlines.

Congratulations. If you've read this far, then you've seen something the majority of Americans have no clue about.

Obamacare,the hard sell

The Weekly Standard has a story detailing the adventures of members of "nonpartisan" Enroll America (a huge percentage of which are former Obama campaign staffers) as they try to give members of a Florida neighborhood information on Obamacare. "Hard Sell: Going door-to-door for Obamacare" finishes up with a seminar to help 100 people navigate the Obamacare website to enroll for insurance. (Spoiler alert: After three hours none of them are able to enroll.)

Worth reading to see the crumbling cogs in this Rube Goldberg machine.

Others Say Smart Stuff, Too - Part XLV

The Hoover Institution's Richard Epstein, writing about "Obamacare's Death Spiral":

"The tragedy remains that it is far easier to force people out of healthcare plans that they want than it is to enroll them in healthcare plans that they don’t."

Others say smart stuff, too - Part XLIV

Jack Kerwick citing Michael Oakeshott in his column "The Future of the Conservative Movement":

Conservatives have always preferred changes that are slight to those that are vast, changes that are necessary to those that are not, and changes that are gradual to those that are radical. Changes that are “fundamentally transformative” siphon the life out of a society by severing its present from its past.

How Obamacare Fails (but Democrats win)

Wouldn't it be nice...

More Gridlock, Please

Obama: "more flexibility"

What in the world

"Nope. Nothing wrong here."

In a surprise turnaround from their Liberal Lapdog misinformation campaign of the last two generations, the New York Times ran a critical story on the Obama administration's repeated assertions that Obama himself didn't know the Obamacare website was such a disaster until after it failed. Here, in a nutshell, is the rest of the Times story:

According to the White House:
Obamacare website fail? Obama didn't know.
NSA spying on allied leaders? Obama didn't know.
Operation Fast and Furious gets an American border agent killed? Obama didn't know.
IRS targeting conservative groups? Obama didn't know.
Obama Justice Department stealing phone logs from a reporter? Obama didn't know.

We can only assume that when Obama repeatedly told Americans "If you want to keep your doctor, you can. If you want to keep your insurance, you can" that he simply "didn't know." (But every other Democrat in Washington did.) 

Obama's economy - It's worse than we think

For several years I've pointed out how the "official" unemployment rate under Obama has been artificially low, due to the increasing number of people who are not counted as unemployed. Anyone who is unemployed and who has given up looking for a job is not counted as "unemployed." Yes, it's crazy. The percentage of people working or looking for work, known as "Labor Force Participation Rate," has dropped like a rock under Obama.

The labor report for September, which has been released very very quietly, shows a terrifying statistic. In the last six months, more than two-thirds of the increase in working-age population is not in the workforce. Our working-age population has increased by 993,000 but the workforce has only increased by 321,000.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Even though larger numbers of people are not working, because of government's imaginary numbers process, the official unemployment rate has gone down.

Others Say Smart Stuff, Too - Part XLIII

Derek Hunter's take on the problems with the October 1 implementation of Obamacare:

"The roll out of Obamacare has been a disaster that makes “New Coke” look like the iPad."

Liberal Answer to Everything: Reject Reality

The prime characteristic of Liberals -- their ability to twist reality to conform to their beliefs -- was dramatically illustrated to me a couple of days ago. In the film Hating Breitbart, a documentary about the conservative firebrand, several minutes are devoted to the John Lewis "n-word" controversy.

A refresher on the subject: At one point during the 2010 debates over the Obamacare legislation, Tea Partiers held a rally against the Democrat law in Washington. While approaching the building where Obama was to speak, several black Democrat congressmen, including Lewis, passed through the Tea Party protest. The congressmen subsequently reported that they were repeatedly called "n***er" and spat upon by Tea Partiers. The media, of course, ran with the story as an excuse to blast the Tea Party movement as racist.

Andrew Breitbart, deeply acquainted with the Tea Party movement and rallies, doubted the reports. He offered $10,000 -- later increased to $100,000 -- to anyone who could provide video or audio proof of the n-word being used just once.

In the sea of television cameras and microphones, hundreds if not thousands of cell phones and video cameras held by individuals that day, not a single instance of anyone using the n-word has turned up. Remember, this was not an incident that occurred in a room with a closed door and no one else present. This was as public as it gets.

The bounty is uncollected to this day.

Breitbart analyzed the situation, I think accurately. "I think the press release was written before they walked through the crowd, and the reality of it didn't materialize, but they went ahead with their plan anyway." Regardless of what happened (or didn't) they were claiming Tea Partiers called them names.

Despite the lack of a single shred of evidence or proof, Liberals still believe the story. In Hating Breitbart, Mediaite political editor Tommy Christopher says, "My assumption, especially for someone like John Lewis, uh, is that that guy's not gonna lie......about that." 

So the fact that he agrees with someone politically outweighs anything else, including reality. And that's why arguments against Liberals are essentially pointless. Liberalism is their religion, and anything that refutes or disproves that religion is to be ignored.  

In case you actually believe in math

The math of Obamacare explained.

Others Say Smart Stuff Too - Part XLII

The Democrats have made a lot of stew out of the supposed "unconstitutionality" of the Republican House's actions regarding funding the government. The Republicans have been described as anarchists, terrorists, hostage takers, and other names less savory. Critics say, "Obamacare was passed by both (Democrat) houses of Congress, signed into law by the (Democrat) President, and ruled Constitutional." (My notes added to improve accuracy.) The overall Democrat theme is "How dare Republicans use funding in this way?"

The answer lies in the words of James Madison, America's fourth President, and the man often referred to as "The Father of the Constitution." Here's what he had to say about the House of Representatives and funding (Some emphasis is mine):

"The House of Representatives can not only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of Government. They, in a word, hold the purse; that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British Constitution, an infant and humble representation of the People gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the Government.

"This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon, with which any Constitution can arm the immediate Representatives of the People, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure." - James Madison, Federalist Papers #58 (1788)

As the closest representatives of the people (the majority of whom oppose Obamacare) it is the House's duty to use the power of the purse to fulfill the people's wishes. Refusing funding, reducing the prerogatives ("excesses") of other branches of government, and redressing ("remedying") the grievances of the people are right in line with what the Founders had in mind when they wrote the Constitution.

Reality Bites

Barack Obama said in 2009 that under Obamacare " If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan." 

However, a study by the journal Health Affairs said more than half of Americans who had individual insurance in 2010 were enrolled in plans that would not qualify because they didn't meet all the new requirements. To add the benefits Obamacare requires, insurance companies have to raise premiums, so that sick people and those who are in good health pay the same amounts. Yes, you can keep your health care plan, but costs will go through the roof.

Residents in Liberal mecca San Francisco are finding this out. One Obama supporter reports that his premiums went up $10,000 a year. Suddenly he understand the point Republicans have been making for the last three years. Another woman's premiums increased by $1200, and she's bewildered. ""Of course, I want people to have health care. I just didn't realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally."

Nothing Successful About Obamacare So Far

Explaining Obamacare

The Obama administration is spinning like a dreidel in their attempt to make the implementation of Obamacare look like something less than the complete disaster it is. Some of the news we have so far:

The first week of enrollment for Obamacare, the website either crashed completely or ran so slowly that people played a complete game of Monopoly between pages. The administration had three years to get the website right (twenty times longer than they took to actually think about the legislation.) The Obama administration tries to write off the problems because of the "intense interest" in enrolling, but IT experts disagree. They say the problem is the architecture of the website itself.

Chad Henderson, the Obamacare "hero" who the media swooned over as one of the first enrollees, turned out to be fake. Backtracking on his earlier claim, he never enrolled in an insurance plan. "When I said 'enroll,' I guess I got the terminology wrong. I meant that I was able to actually get in and have access to compare the prices," Chad said.

They don't know how many people have actually enrolled in Obamacare. When asked about the actual number, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew hemmed, hawed, and stonewalled.

Others Say Smart Stuff, Too - Part XLI

To a Liberal commenter's repeat of the Democrat talking point "Obamacare is the law, upheld by the Supreme court," John Ransom replied:

"Obamacare may be the law, but it is a law that is enforced very unevenly. Whole classes of people have been exempted under the law because of the dislocation "the law" could have to the economy.If you have clout with the administration, you get a waiver. If you have clout with the administration- and enough lobbyists- you get the law postponed.But if you are some poor sucker living in Peoria, you get stuck with the bill."

UN's Global Warming group: "You gonna believe us, or your lying eyes?"

Breitbart (among others) writes that the United Nations climate panel's report may not be as objective as they want us to believe.

"An exhaustive United Nations report that claimed with 95% certainty that humans are responsible for global warming left out data that found the planet has stopped warming over the last 15 years, because it did not fit with the climate change agenda it wanted to advance." 

An earlier draft of the United Nations report, which was not used, acknowledged its climate models “do not generally reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10–15 years.” In other words, reality slapped their predictions in the face and took its lunch money.

As the UK's Sun News says, "The issue is important because if the Earth is not warming as greenhouse gas emissions rise, it strikes at the heart of the theory of man-made global warming and suggests natural factors may be the greatest influence on climate."

Obama's lips are moving again

Barack Obama, September 26, 2013: "There's no widespread evidence" that Obamacare is hurting jobs.

Unfortunately, real experts have already said otherwise.

Obamacare's secretly forcing you to pay for abortions

This article by Craig Bannister explains another up-to-now-unknown part of Obamacare. There's apparently actually a clause in the law that forbids consumers to know if their insurance plan includes an added "abortion surcharge" until they're about to enroll. In other words, abortion coverage is being kept intentionally secret from insurance customers until the last minute.

The HuffPo tried to rebut this information, but AUL offered a strong rebuttal of the rebuttal. Unless you (or your employer) pays attention, you'll pay extra so someone else can have an abortion on your tab.

That's another example of Obama's open government. Ask your Democrat neighbor for an apology and see what you get.

Others Say Smart Stuff, Too - Part XL

Pat Buchanan on Ted Cruz's filibuster and fight against Obamacare:

"His analysis is right, his instincts are right, his disposition to fight is right."

Because Obama

From Second City:

Obama's Unemployment Drop, Explained

For two years I've shown how the unemployment numbers under the Obama administration have been cooked. All it takes is a look at this chart showing the Labor Force Participation Rate for the last ten years.

Obama hates your privacy

Obama's recent justification of the federal government's spying on every American's private communications should come as no surprise to anyone. As Ann Coulter has said, unsealing private records is Obama's signature move.

In the 2004 Illinois Democrat primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was behind in the polls. A month before the election, his campaign managed to unseal the records of his opponent's divorce. The ex-wife's allegations of abuse became the story, killed his opponent's momentum, and Obama won.

In the general election for the Senate, Obama's opponent Jack Ryan had also been divorced, and the custody records over the couple's one were also sealed. Although both Ryan and his ex wanted the records kept sealed, the Obama campaign managed to have them made public, and salacious allegations once again became the story. Ryan, who had been the favorite to win the election, dropped out of the race, and Obama beat the Republican replacement candidate.

So it's pretty clear that other people's private records are simply tools to be used by Obama and his Democrat cohorts. Meanwhile, it's nearly impossible to discover many details of Obama's private life. (What were his grades in college? What did he actually do as editor of the Harvard Law Review?)

Obama's Foreign Influence

* Russia gives asylum to intelligence leaker Snowden. In retaliation, Barack Obama cancels a meeting with Putin.
* Mexico releases from prison a drug lord who ordered the killing of an American drug agent. U.S. officials are "outraged."
* While Barack Obama says al Qaeda is "decimated," they were involved in the Benghazi attacks and are said to be stronger than ever.
America doesn't seem to have the same influence with other countries 

Other People Say Smart Stuff, Too - Part XXXIX

Victor Davis Hansen wrote a column recently detailing the Obama administration's institutional deceptions ("When Untruth Undermines Democracy"). His point is summarized very succinctly with this one passage:

There is also Utopian arrogance in Washington that justifies any means necessary to achieve exalted ends of supposed fairness and egalitarianism. If one has to lie to stop the Tea Party or Fox News, then it is not quite seen by this administration as a lie.

A Conservative Shaggy Dog Story

From a piece on Roger Ailes. Ailes told this story:

It seems a liberal in a hot-air balloon is lost and late for an appointment and descends to ask a conservative for directions. The conservative pulls out a GPS device and tells him exactly where he is.

“You must be a conservative,” the balloon man says. The man on the ground asks how he knows that. The reply: “Everything you’ve told me is technically correct, I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is, I’m still lost. Frankly, you haven’t been very much help so far.”

The conservative replies that the balloon guy must be a liberal. How does he know? The punch line: “You don’t know where you’re going or where you’ve been, you’ve risen to where you are on hot air, and you made a promise that you have no idea how to keep. Now you expect me to solve your problems. The fact is, you’re in the same place you were before we met and now it’s my fault!”

Obama's Work (?) Force

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the unemployment numbers for May, and the official unemployment rate has ticked back up to 7.6%. The data provide a bleak employment picture of Obama's term in office. For example, 1.7 million more Americans are considered "not in the labor force" (and therefore not considered "unemployed") than a year ago. After 4+ years under Obama, the percentage of the population working shows a trend that is frightening, and receives little attention. Here's a graphic display of it.

It's a simple equation: Fewer people working = bad for the economy. That the official unemployment rate doesn't count these people doesn't change the reality of our situation. Obama and the Democrats are driving the American economy into the ground. And Obama has almost a full term to continue his damage.

Other people say smart stuff, too - Part XXXVIII

Keith Riler recently wrote a column in American Thinker. The column, "Obama's Shrinking Unit of Account," paints a devastating portrait of Barack Obama and his reduced accountability -- using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). The "unit of account," according to Riler, is a GAAP concept that refers to an entity for which results can be clearly distinguished and accountability logically required.  It might be an operating segment, a reporting unit, the whole company, or all of the above.  Whether a company comprises one unit of account or several, in the business world, executive management is responsible for them all."

For example, in 2008 when Obama connected himself with "receding oceans," his unit of account was the whole planet. When Michelle Obama said, after her husband was elected, "for the first time I'm proud of my country," that was a national unit of account.

Read Riler's article to see how small Obama's "unit of account" is in connection to Benghazi, the IRS, etc.

Democrat culture

One aspect of the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups is worth mentioning. With Democrats, no direct orders for such things have to be given. It’s part of their culture. When they’re in power, everything the government touches, Democrats own, and what they own they use for political gain. (Imagine what they’ll be able to do with Obamacare.) Private files and independent agencies don’t exist. Remember Hillary Clinton and the FBI files in 1993-94. (“Filegate”) Obama will punish the ones who got caught (although cushy spots in other Liberal organizations likely await) and replace them with different operatives who will continue the process. 

Benghazi for Dummies

Mark Baisley has written a great column, "Benghazi for Dummies," which provides a clear explanation of the confusing details surrounding the September 11, 2012 attack on the Benghazi diplomatic outpost and the deaths of four Americans. The story has been muddled, perhaps purposely, so much that it's difficult for a regular person to get a grasp on what happened. Baisley's column helps.

Other People Say Smart Stuff, Too - Part XXXVII

This certainly explains a lot:

"It is not enough for the insecure left to deem a position wrong; if it’s merely wrong, it needs to be argued about, and it can’t survive that. It must instead be morally abhorrent, so that the zealot reacts to the toxin of questioning much like a jogger coming across a decomposing body on the side of the road — it must be internalized that the correct response to such a horror is to retch, and faint, and call the authorities post-haste.

This is how the leftist faith protects itself from the infection of doubt. (Meanwhile, of course, patting itself on the back for being so open-minded…)" - John Hawkins

Many Uncertainties

"Climate scientists struggle to explain warming slowdown" was the headline for a recent Reuters story. It turns out that almost none of the climate scientists predicted the lack of warming that has occurred in recent years.

Climate science has something in common with horoscopes and fortune tellers. Confidence in their predictions is higher when the results are either so vague, or so far in the future, that accuracy can't be measured. For example, we had predictions of arctic ice melting, raising the sea level by anywhere from three to twenty feet, flooding coastlines and destroying cities. When this didn't happen, predictions got fuzzy. It turns out that "global warming" can manifest itself by extremely hot weather, or by extremely cold weather. Extreme precipitation or extreme drought. More violent hurricanes, or fewer violent hurricanes. Climate scientists making predictions covered all their bases. Except now they're struggling to come up with an explanation for the lack of global warming. And, the article says, "some experts say their trust in climate science has declined because of the many uncertainties." 

"The climate system is not quite so simple as people thought," said Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg.  

"My own confidence in the data has gone down in the past five years, said Richard Tol, an expert in climate change and professor of economics at the University of Sussex in England.

The Liberal Mantra

The Liberal Mantra.

Can I choose a large drink? No, it is not good for you
Can I choose an incandescent bulb? No, it is not good for the environment
Can I choose low cost coal? No, it is not good for the planet
Can I choose to honor God? No, that's offensive 
Can I choose to eat fast food? No, it is unhealthy
Can I choose to own a gun? No, think of the children.
What can I choose? An abortion

(Hat tip to Human Events commenter TripleA60.)

Well, here's a good sign

Joe Klein, the not-Conservative political columnist for Time magazine recently wrote a column entitled "Obamacare Incompetence." Some quotes: "We are now seeing weekly examples of this Administration’s inability to govern....the notion of activist government will be in peril—despite the demographics flowing the Democrats’ way—if institutions like the VA and Obamacare don’t deliver the goods." 

And I think we'll all agree that there's little chance of that. It's a shame we're only getting these stories after last November's elections.

Where does the buck stop?

Obama has been in office for more than four years. At what point is he held responsible for anything? For years it was "blame Bush." Now it's "blame Republicans," or "blame insurance companies" or "blame oil companies." Obama's policies, endorsed and rammed through during Democrat control of Congress, have created an economic environment where businesses have been terrified of moving because of mistrust of how the Obama administration would punish them for something.

Now the reports are that Obamacare -- Obama's flagship "accomplishment" -- will cost nearly a trillion dollars more than we were told, more people will pay higher insurance premiums than we were told, businesses will pay more fees than we were told, fewer people will be covered than we were told, and hidden provisions -- e.g., forcing the Catholic Church to cover birth control and abortions, against their religious teaching -- have wider and deeper impacts than we were told. 

Bush & co. were wrong about Iraq's WMDs -- but so were 99.9% of Democrats and the rest of the civilized world. Much more evidence exists that the Democrat party, and Obama in particular, have repeatedly deceived and lied to the American public than that the Bush administration ever did. It's about time for Obama to face his "proper comeuppance" (to quote the Washington Post.) 

I hate to say I told you so, but...

The "Beige Book," the report of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on current economic conditions, confirms a lot of what Republicans and other opponents predicted about Obamacare. The Governors report economic trends from their various Districts around the country, usually centered around a large city such as Kansas City, San Francisco, Minneapolis, etc.

From the section "Consumer Spending and Tourism" -- "Many District contacts commented on the expired payroll tax holiday and the Affordable Care Act as having restrained sales growth." 

From the section "Labor" -- "Employers across the District continued to cite the Affordable Care Act and its unknown impacts as reasons for planned layoffs and reluctance to hire more staff."

From the section "Nonfinancial Services" -- "Some contacts noted concern that client companies are hiring the absolute minimum to get by due to uncertainty about the Affordable Care Act."

Remember how before the Obamacare legislation was passed, Democrats mocked opponents' predictions as "doom and gloom?" When you add the slowdown in consumer spending and business hiring to the already-more-expensive-than-Democrats-promised cost of Obamacare, it's not much of a leap to believe 1) Obamacare is going to cripple the American economy; and 2) The quality of our health care is just as likely to decline as it is to improve. So far Democrats have proven clueless in their predictions about its effects.

Not-so-painful cuts

Daniel J. Mitchel wrote a column ("Earth to New York Times: Please Show Us These "Deep Spending Cuts" You Keep Writing About") that points out the absurdity of calling the budget adjustments resulting from sequestration "cuts."

I have to read the same nonsense day after day about “deep spending cuts” even though I keep explaining to journalists that a sequester merely means that spending climbs by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years rather than $2.5 trillion.

For those more visually oriented, here's Mitchell's chart illustrating the budget "cuts."

Who owns sequestration?

Sequestration is the group of automatic budget cuts that go into effect if Congress and the White House are not able to reach a budget deal. It's part of the 2010 Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act.  

What's really funny is Obama railing against the sequester even though it's a Democrat rule signed into law by Obama. The bill passed the Senate 60-40 on strict party lines. It passed the House 233-187, with 233 Democrats and no Republicans voting Aye and 172 Republicans (and 15 Democrats) voting No. Republicans opposed the sequestration, saying it was just an excuse for Democrats to raise taxes. Lo and behold, look at what Obama insists on.

When you think of politicians who want to raise taxes, which party is it that automatically comes to mind?

Who's the bully?

Associated Press writer Connie Cass, in her story "Why can't Washington compromise? They're too human," chides House Republicans for "bullying" Obama and Democrats over the cuts scheduled if and when sequestration takes effect. She even quotes Barbara Coloroso, an expert on bullying. 

"Bullying is about contempt for the other person," Coloroso said. "Do you see how that fits with some of the people in Congress? Utter contempt, bullying, wanting to bring somebody down. You cannot resolve a major issue like a budget with name-calling, with disdain for the person you're supposed to be working with."

Some thoughts: 

• Barack Obama to Republicans questioning his stimulus plan, 2009: "I won." 
• Barack Obama to Republicans, 2009: "Shut up and get out of the way." 
• Republican input into the Obama stimulus plan and Obamacare, orchestrated behind closed doors and rammed through by Democrats when they controlled both houses of Congress: Zero.

Obama's and other Democrats' contempt and disdain -- bullying -- of Republicans was on fine display the last four years. Like "bipartisanship," such terms only get tossed around in the media when Democrats don't automatically get everything they want.

Gripey Blog Readers

Both the readers of this blog have griped at me about not posting. I'm gonna start posting the webpages I write for the drug treatment center I'm working with. 
That'll show 'em.

A Political Solution

Here's a thought: 

Why don't we take all the proposed solutions such as thorough background checks, mental health screening, severe penalties for providing false information, etc., and apply them equally to both gun ownership and voting? 

1. More harm has been done with votes than with guns. 
2. Law-abiding, honest citizens would have nothing to fear.
3. What's good enough for one constitutional right ought to be good enough for another.

Paying for tax cuts

Just a thought: In recent years, politicians have argued about tax cuts having to "pay for themselves." In this view, people keeping more of their own money is considered an "expense" to the government.  Every nickel of their own money that  taxpayers get to keep constitutes a debit on the government's account sheet.  What we get to keep ("take-home pay") adds to the federal deficit, so anyone who wants to keep more of what they earn must want to increase the national debt. This philosophy comforts politicians who insist on raising taxes to pay for government spending. It's much easier than dealing with the paradox of telling Americans they have to get by on less money because the politicians refuse to.   

I hate always being right

FoxNews headline, January 11, 2012: "Millions noticing paychecks lighter today, due to payroll tax hike"

Whattaya know, two months after the election, and almost two years before the next one, our taxes go up. Remember that "nobody making under $200,000 will pay more in taxes" promise? Remember how many of us were saying that was just a flat-out lie? 

For anyone who voted Democrat in the last four years, congratulations, you're reaping what you sowed.