May, 2015, Part 2, Why No American Should Pay An Additional Penny In Federal Taxes

Hundreds of times we have shown in this blog how the Federal government and the Washington political class have wasted untold trillions of dollars of taxpayer wealth over the years. This has left the taxpayers nothing in return to show for their money except a whopping $18 TRILLION national debt. Many times the money was spent on one time, wasteful projects:

• The Navy built two new ships almost to completion at a cost of $300 million only to spend another $10 million to junk them immediately.
• Hillary Clinton’s State Department spent $40 million to build a U.S. consulate in the hinterlands of Afghanistan only to find out after spending the money that it had to be abandoned because it could not withstand a terrorist attack.
• The TSA purchased hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment for airport security in order to get a bigger discount but ended up not using a high percentage of the equipment anyway, leaving it stacked in a warehouse never to be seen or used.
• The National Science Foundation has spent millions and millions of dollars on such inane projects as building a video game to simulate prom week, studying when dog became man’s best friend, determining of dating sites were racist and other equally useless projects.

But many of these one time wastes of money pale in comparison to the money that is consistently wasted in the same manner year in and year out:

• Medicare and Medicaid lose upwards of $100 billion every year due to inefficiencies and outright criminal fraud.
• Social Security loses upwards of $100 billion every year due to inefficiencies and outright criminal fraud.
• Other welfare programs such as Federal housing support and food assistance lose billions and billions of dollars every year due to inefficiencies and outright criminal fraud.
• The IRS loses billions of dollars every year to identity theft in the income tax filing system every year.
• The IRS is so inept that it admits that it fails to collect almost $400 billion a year from tax evaders.
• The President’s debt reduction commission easily identified $100 billion a year that could be removed from the Pentagon’s annual budget without endangering national security.

Thus, it is pretty obvious that no American, no matter how rich or poor, should [pay a penny more in taxes given that the Federal government and the Washington politicians that operate it easily waste or fail to collect a whopping $800 billion or so EVERY YEAR.

But this reality is apparently lost on a Georgia Congressman. 

Hank Johnson recently stated that when it comes to taxes, “we [Washington politicians] don’t have enough [taxes] to do what the government - and do what the country needs the government to do and that’s the problem.”

The Congressman went on: “If everyone is paying their fair share of taxes than we certainly should and can live within our means. But our problem now is that taxes are being paid by the middle class. The rich, the wealthy and the corporations are not paying their fair share and so therefore we don’t have enough to do what the government and do what the country needs the government to do and that’s the problem.”

Note: before you consider whether the Congressman’s position has any merit, remember that this is the same Congressman who claimed in public:

• That the island of Guam might tip over in the middle of the ocean if too many U.S.military resources were placed on the island. That’s right, he actually stated in a Congressional committee meeting that an island could tip over.
• He also lamented the possibility that there would not be enough helium gas to blow up birthday balloons if Congress stopped funding a Federal storage facility for helium.

Yesterday we focused on how much the Federal government and the Washington political class wastes of taxpayer money every day of every year and how inane and out of touch politicians like Hank Johnson are when they ignorantly claim that more Americans need to pay more taxes. 

We reviewed any number of credible sources and analyses that constantly show that a very small percentage of people in this country pay a very high percentage of the Federal tax bill. And with more and more of these wealthier people renouncing their citizenship every year and moving away, taking their tax payments with them, that means that the rest of us will end up paying more and more in taxes unless our politicians finally get a handle on wasteful spending.

But the odds of that happening are probably pretty slim, given that they have no even tried despite being shown where the wasteful and useless spending is within the budget. Obama actually commissioned a blue ribbon commission to identify the waste, which they did and which he promptly ignored. 

Today, let’s explode another Congressman Johnson fantasy by showing that no matter how much you tax the high earners and the wealthy in this country, it will make absolutely no difference in the quality of life for every citizen or the financial chaos of the Federal government.

Our proof of this last assertion rests on some simple logic and math:

• The Federal government spends about $4 TRILLION a year.
• Let’s round it off and assume that the Federal government spends about $11 billion a DAY.
• According to the latest Forbes analysis, Bill Gates is the richest American with a net worth of about $81 billion.
• Congressman Johnson and other politicians want to tax people like Bill Gates more.
• But let's assume that Johnson et al get the ultimate politician wish and do not just raise taxes on a wealthy person’s income but that they confiscate EVERYTHING that the wealthy person owns.
• In the Gates case, if the Washington political class took everything Bill Gates owns, it could use that wealth to operate the Federal government for a grand total of … about seven days, just over one week.
• It could pay off only .45% of the national debt, less one half of one percent.
• Not only that, whatever Federal income tax Gates would have paid in the following years would now be equal to zero since it is doubtful he would ever work again, knowing that the Federal government could come along and take everything he owns. This would force the rest of the taxpayers to make up the difference.

Taking everything the richest American owns could support the Federal government bureaucracy for only a week or so. So taking less than that, something that Congressman Johnson and others would like to do would be even far smaller. 

How much smaller? Let’s assume that Bill Gates earns $8 billion a year, a totally made up number, 10% of his current net worth. And that Johnson raises his Federal income tax rate by 10% which yields an additional $800 million a year to the Federal government. In this case, taxing Bill Gates income at a 10% higher rate could result in tax revenue that could operate the Federal government for...about an hour and 45 minutes. This would pay off .004% of the national debt.

Don’t these politicians ever do any simple math before opening their simple mouths? You cannot fix what is wrong with this country by raising taxes, there are not enough rich people to get it done.You have to cut spending, starting with the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted every year by Washington.

Let’s take this imaginary confiscation example and extend to other rich Americans, first assuming that the Washington political class took EVERYTHING they earned and somehow turned it into cash:

Bill Gates $81 billion - could operate the Federal government for just over 7 days.

Warren Buffet $67 billion - just over 6 days.

Larry Ellison $50 billion - about 4 and a half days.

Charles Koch $42 billion - just under 4 days.

David Koch $42 billion - just under 4 days.

Christy Walton $38 billion - about 3 and a half days.

Jim Walton $36 billion - about 3 and a quarter days.

Mike Bloomberg $35 billion - not even 3 and a quarter days.

Alice Walton $35 billion- not even 3 and a quarter days.

Robson Walton $35 billion - not even 3 and a quarter days.

Mark Zuckerberg $34 billion - just over 3 days.

Sheldon Adelson $32 billion - just under 3 days.

Larry Page $31.5 billion - just under 3 days.

Sergey Brin $31 billion - just under 3 days.

Jeff Bezos $30.5 billion - about 2 and three quarters day.

Total - $620 billion which could operate the Federal government for only 56 days, less than two months, about eight weeks or pay off only 3.6% of the national debt.

As with the Bill Gates example above, you cannot make this work even if you take EVERYTHING the richest 15 Americans own in their lives. You could only operate the government for two months in only one year because in the following years these people would have nothing to contribute Federal tax wise. Which means that everyone else would have to make up the difference.

If we continue the Gates example with the 15 richest Americans, than that $620 billion becomes $62 billion which could not operate the Federal government for even a week. And, if you used that money to operate the government, you still have not paid off any part of the growing and dangerously high national debt.

No matter what people like Hank Johnson say, taxing the wealthy even more cannot overcome the out of control spending and government waste of people like Hank Johnson. All this kind of rhetoric does is divide America, waste more wealth, allow the debt to soar, and get nothing accomplished. And remember, this economic wisdom is coming from a man who was worried a Pacific island would tip over take anything he says with a huge grain of sand.

Note: we have already shown how to take trillions of dollars out of the Federal government’s budget without negatively impacting government operations and returning trillions of dollars to pay down our debt and pay back taxpayers. That analysis can be seen at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/12/day-7-eight-days-of-logic-and-sanity.html

The analysis was developed by someone who knows that Pacific islands cannot tip over.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

The Failed Presidency of Barack Obama, Part 9: The Latest Lies, Incompetencies, and Law Breaking

Over the past week or so we have been reviewing the many ways and perspectives on how the Obama Presidency has been an abject failure:

• We reviewed the many, many lies and deceptions of this administration and this President, from cutting the annual budget deficit in half to promising that you could keep your doctors under Obama Care to many others.
• We reviewed the many high ranking Obama administration officials that have illegally and immorally conducted government business, and likely government shenanigans, using personal, unofficial computers and email accounts, undermining the spirit and letter of the Freedom of Information Act, other laws, and Obama's own promise to operate the most transparent administration ever
• We reviewed the many instances where this administration has either allowed government functions and departments to continue to overspend but under deliver or allowed them to get even worse than when he took office.
• We also reviewed some past posts that we had done previously that laid out numerous reasons and actions that should have already led to the impeachment of this Presidency, based on violations of existing law, judicial rulings, and the Constitution.

Today we will update these transgressions, lies, failures, illegal actions, etc. that have occurred more recently. I will let you decide if they are moral, impeachable, criminal, etc. They are certainly numerous, when considered with the many failures we have already discussed, and are probably not over, given that this administration might actually be in power for another 21 months or so.

Thus, in no particular order, the latest failures of the Obama administration:

1) The administration is trying to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, bypassing existing laws, bypassing Congress, and bypassing the will of the American people, the majority of whom, via polling studies, reject the concept of amnesty for those that entered this country illegally. 

2) In fact, he may also be violating recent judicial rulings, given that an administration lawyer was recently admonished in Federal court by a Federal judge. The administration may have ignored the judge’s previous order that ordered the administration to not move forward with any amnesty activity. Judge Andrew Hanen showed his displeasure about the Obama attorney’s, Kathleen Harnett, explanation of what she said was confusion over the amnesty order and its implementation by telling her, while chiding himself, “Like an idiot I believed that.”

The Judge Hanen then asked the rather extraordinary question concerning President Obama’s integrity. “Can I trust what the president says? That’s a yes or no question.” 

“Yes, your honor,” Hartnett replied.

When a Federal judge questions our integrity, something is very amiss.

3) If Obama had his way, there would be a law that force everyone to vote: “If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country,” Obama said, calling universally mandated voting “potentially transformative.” He apparently is not smart enough to realize that everyone does vote. Those that do not physically go to the polls to vote actually vote their opinion by not formally voting: they are saying that the political class, of which Obama is a prominent member, are not worthy of any effort of voting. 

The solution to low voter turnout is to provide worthy candidates and people who deserve our votes, not putting forth the same, old, tired politicians and then demand that we vote for them. Again, Obama does not understand the root causes of yet another problem.

4) Despite his promise to operate the most transparent Presidential administration ever, the Associated Press recently reported:

• The Obama administration set another record in 2014 for censoring government files or outright denying access to them under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
• The administration took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more often that files could not be found, and refused, a record number of times, to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.
• The administration even admitted that in nearly 1 in 3 cases that its decisions to withhold or censor records were improper under the Freedom of Information.
• The backlog of information requests grew remarkably by 55% to more than 200,000. 
• Despite the backlogs and violations of Federal law, the Federal government reduced headcount by 375, or about 9%, the number of full-time employees across the Federal government paid to look for records. That was the fewest number of employees working on the issue in five years.

So much for transparency, so much for obeying the law, so much for integrity.

5) A recent study by the Brookings Institute shows how the Obama administration, and those that came before his, have failed the American middle class over the past dozen years or so, according to the Bankrupting America website:

• According to the Washington Post, “Two-thirds of American households are headed by someone who did not earn a college degree. From 2002 to 2013, those households, even as they aged, saw their median incomes fall by 9.4 percent (for those headed by high school graduates) and 17.3 percent (for those headed by high-school dropouts).” Now, obviously, Obama has not been President over all of these years. However, he was at least a Senator for many of these years and a President for the past six years so at least some of the responsibility for this negative trend rests with him. This is especially true since average household income has continued to fall during his administration despite the end of the recession five years ago.
• According to the Washington Post, “The older workers built incomes for much longer, and their peak incomes were higher. The workers who came of age in the 1990s tech bubble and the 2000s housing bubble saw incomes rise faster, but level off much earlier. The 1975 cohort saw its median household incomes rise by 60 percent before it peaked. For the 1982 cohort, it was 70 percent. For the ’91 cohort, it was 50 percent; for the 2001 group, it was just over 20 percent.

According to a recent poll conducted by Pew Research, “72% say that, in general, the government’s policies since the recession have done little or nothing to help middle class people, and nearly as many say they have provided little or no help for small businesses (68%) and the poor (65%). These opinions have changed little in recent years, and differ only modestly across demographic and income categories.”

Obviously, Federal government economic policies in general and Obama's economic policies in particular have done no good for most Americans over recent years.6) Many times this past week we pointed out how Obama has not fixed the many, many operational problems of the Federal government, an obese monster that now provides very little added value to Americans while wasting hundreds of billions of dollars a year. One of the biggest wastes of taxpayer wealth is the Social Security Administration, wasting over $100 billion a year. This is not a surprise since a recent inspector general audit found that over 6.5 million Americans are somehow over the age of 112. The report identified 6.5 million number-holders aged 112 and older for whom no death date has been entered in the main electronic file, called Numident.The inspector general audit concluded that government lacks the controls necessary to affix death information on the records of number-holders who exceed "maximum reasonable life expectancies.""We obtained Numident data that identified approximately 6.5 million number holders born before June 16, 1901 who did not have a date of death on their record," the report states. This inability to determine when a holder of a SSN dies allows criminals and illegal aliens to milk the American taxpayer long after the SSN holder has passed. Just another in a long list of operations problems that have gone unresolved under this administration.7) According to recent reporting by CNN’s Jake Trapper, the Obama administration has prosecuted government workers for talking to journalists more than all other Presidencies combined. So much for transparency.8) The President continues to spout that we have a deep heritage of Muslim influences in our history when that is a totally inane and false premise, recently insisting that: “Here in America. Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding.” Ah, no it hasn’t, as witnessed by the fact that the President, or any history book, has never provided any set of examples, no matter how small, to back up this false claim.9) Back in February when ISIS brutally beheaded 21 Christians on videotape, the President could not immediately reply since since he was golfing on a Sunday at a private golf course owned by billionaire Larry Ellison.Back in 2014 when an American journalist was brutally beheaded by ISIS, the President spent a few awkward minutes addressing the beheading and then rushed off to play golf.Back 2012 while a U.S. consulate in Libya was under attack and the lives of about two dozen Americans were at risk, the President went to bed early in order to get to a Las Vegas political fundraiser the next day.When an American general was killed in action in Afghanistan, Obama sent no one to his funeral but sent three administration officials to the the funeral of a young man who was killed when he attacked a police officer in Missouri.When Obama traded five dangerous Guantanamo prisoners for one Army deserter, he invited the deserter’s family to visit with him and have a photo op at the White House but did nothing for the soldiers, or their families, who died and were wounded searching for the deserter.Are we seeing a serious problem with moral priorities here with this Presidency?Enough failures for today, be they economic, moral, operational, or others, more to follow tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w