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Cuba's new currency - The Obama 100 Peso!
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Will radical liberals ever stop reaching into the pockets of the middle class?
The middle class is the social and economic cement that has held our society together and given hope to aspirants.
Crushing the middle class is one of the most dangerous economic and social threats facing our nation and Obama's constantly targeting them for "pickings" to fund his desire for an ever expanding government must be resisted at all costs.
While he talks about doing everything to expand the middle class his policies and proposals do every thing to crush them. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Obama always needs and finds a convenient 'Pinata.' First it was G.W and then an entire series of perceived demons but Netanyahu enjoys a special place in Obama's troubled world of dragons.
Is Obama going nuclear along with Iran? (See 2 below.)
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It is easy to comprehend why Obama believes in big government. After all look what governments did for him and his wife? That said, can government do for others what it did/does for the Obamas and since it cannot one could argue that Obama's desire to expand government is an act of narrow minded selfishness as well as misplaced logic. (See 3 below.)
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Hillary - the personification of "The Peter Principle!"
Because she was married to Bill she got to live in The White House. While there she accomplished two notable things. First, she flubbed a health care program and second, suddenly produced Whitewater Documents after their equally sudden disappearance.
She then moved to New York and became a fan of their professional sports teams and got elected to The Senate. From there she was crushed by the Obama Typhoon and he appointed her Secretary of State where she proceeded to accomplish nothing of note except getting the Russian interpretation of reset button wrong and, by the way, she assisted in failing to protect her fellow workers.
She then wrote a book, went about selling it and made a fool of herself..
Prior to all of this, Hillary made an overnight killing in the cattle market, lied about her Whitewater involvement and lamented about the death of a close law partner who apparently killed himself. One can only speculate why but it was assumed he became distraught over being immersed in Clinton shenanigans.
What does Hillary have going for her?
a) She is female and voters are reluctant to appear sexist.
b) She has a husband who women are attracted to and that can rub off on Hillary.
c) The press and media deserted her and feel obligated to circle their wagons because it is pay back time.
d)Wall Street loves here because they know she is in their corner having already shoved tons of money her way when she was their Senator.
e) Finally, she is betting that Professor Gruber is right - Americans are stupid!
These may not be qualifications but then after Obama, Hillary gave us the response: "what difference does it make." (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)-Middle-class savings like blood in the water:
By Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Obama goes where the money is to pay for 'free' education programs - your savings account.
Bank robber Willie Sutton is said to have explained his career this way: "That's where the money is." Whether Sutton ever really said that, it's an aphorism that, according to Bloomberg's Megan McArdle, explains President Obama's plans to go after middle class assets like 529 college savings plans and home appreciation.
Though millions of Americans have been putting money into "tax free" 529 plans to save for their children's increasingly expensive college educations, President Obama would change the law so that withdrawals from the plans to fund college would be taxed as ordinary income. So while you used to be able to get a nice tax benefit by saving for college, now you'll be shelling out to Uncle Sam every time you withdraw to pay for Junior's dorm fees.
This doesn't hurt the very rich — who just pay for college out of pocket — or the poor, who get financial aid, but it's pretty rough on the middle– and upper–middle class. In a double-whammy, those withdrawals will show up as income on parents' income tax forms, which are used to calculate financial aid, making them look richer, and hence reducing grants.
Likewise, Obama proposes to tax the appreciation on inherited homes. When you sell property at a profit, you pay capital gains on the difference between the basis (what you paid) and what you sell it for. (Obama also proposes to increase the capital gains rate). That's not a big issue for most middle class people, because right now if your parents leave you their house, you get what's called a "step-up" in basis.
That means that the basis isn't what your parents paid for the house decades ago, but rather what it was worth when you inherited it. Thus, the appreciation your property experienced while your parents owned it comes to you tax-free. For many families, that appreciation is their biggest inheritance. Now, subject to some exemptions Obama plans to tax those gains, and other gains via inheritance.
Why would the White House even consider such a thing? As McArdle observes: "The very fact that we are discussing taxation of educational savings — redistributing educational subsidies downward — indicates that the administration has started scraping the bottom of the barrel when seeking out money to fund new programs. Why target a tax benefit that goes to a lot of your supporters (and donors), that tickles one of the sweetest spots in American politics (subsidizing higher education), and that will hit a lot of people who make less than the $250,000 a year that has become the administration's de facto definition of 'rich'? Presumably, because you're running out of other places to get the money."
When a government is desperate for cash, it goes after the middle class, because that's where the money is. Yes, the rich are rich, but the middle class is far more numerous. And this has raised other fears. As McArdle also notes, if 529 plans aren't sacrosanct, what about Roth IRAs? People have worried for a while that the government might go after retirement accounts as another source of income — to the point that there have even been calls for Congress to make such grabs explicitly off limits. But, ultimately, no one is safe, as what is enacted by one Congress can be repealed by another.
The truth is, in our redistributionist system politicians make their careers mostly by taking money from one group of citizens that won't vote for them and giving it to another that will. If they run short of money from traditional sources, they'll look for new revenue wherever they can find it. And if that's the homes and savings of the middle class, then that's what they'll target.
For the moment, Americans are safe. With both houses of Congress controlled by the GOP, Obama's proposals are DOA. But over the long term, the appetite for government spending is effectively endless, while the sources of revenue are limited. Keep that in mind as you think about where to invest your money ... and your votes.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself.
1a)
1a)
Middle Class Shrinks Further as More Fall Out Instead of Climbing Up
In the late 1960s, more than half of the households in the United States were squarely in the middle, earning, in today’s dollars, $35,000 to $100,000 a year. Few people noticed or cared as the size of that group began to fall, because the shift was primarily caused by more Americans climbing the economic ladder into upper-income brackets.
The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century.
The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century.
But since 2000, the middle-class share of households has continued to narrow, the main reason being that more people have fallen to the bottom. At the same time, fewer of those in this group fit the traditional image of a married couple with children at home, a gap increasingly filled by the elderly.
This social upheaval helps explain why the president focused on reviving the middle class, offering a raft of proposals squarely aimed at concerns like paying for a college education, taking parental leave, affording child care and buying a home.
The Shrinking American Middle Class
How different demographic groups have fared as the middle class has declined.
“Middle-class economics means helping working families feel more secure in a world of constant change,” Mr. Obama told Congress and the public on Tuesday.
Still, regardless of their income, most Americans identify as middle class. The term itself is so amorphous that politicians often cite the group in introducing proposals to engender wide appeal.
The definition here starts at $35,000 — which is about 50 percent higher than the official poverty level for a family of four — and ends at the six-figure mark. Although many Americans in households making more than $100,000 consider themselves middle class, particularly those living in expensive regions like the Northeast and Pacific Coast, they have substantially more money than most people.
However the lines are drawn, it is clear that millions are struggling to hang on to accouterments that most experts consider essential to a middle-class life.
“I would consider middle class to be people who can live comfortably on what they earn, can pay their bills, can set aside something to save for retirement and for kids in college and can have vacations and entertainment,” said Christine L. Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, a left-leaning research and advocacy group.
Lisa Land, 49, is one of those who have dropped through the hatch. She gets by on her father’s $1,300 monthly Social Security checks and by having her adult daughter pitch in for groceries.
Her circumstances are a stark change from just a few years ago, when she considered herself firmly in the middle class. Despite a relatively modest salary, her pay and other resources went a long way in tiny Eden, N.C., where she worked for 13 years in customer service at a textile factory.
In 2008, however, Ms. Land was laid off. Faced with ailing parents and a recession that tore up the region’s economy, she moved in with her father to offer full-time care.
On the Decline
The middle class has shrunk consistently over the past half-century. Until 2000, the reason was primarily because more Americans moved up the income ladder. But since then, the reason has shifted: There is a greater share of households on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.
Share of households
by income range:
53
45
43
40%
34
31
25
22
7
Low
Middle
High
< $35,000
$35-100,000
> $100,000
’67
’67
’67
’00
’13
’00
’13
’00
’13
“We wouldn’t have a lot of money, but we had everything that we needed,” she said. “Now, there’s really no extra for anything. No vacation. No dining out. No stuff like that.”
Even as the American middle class has shrunk, it has gone through a transformation. The 53 million households that remain in the middle class — about 43 percent of all households — look considerably different from their middle-class predecessors of a previous generation, according to a New York Times analysis of census data.
In recent years, the fastest-growing component of the new middle class has been households headed by people 65 and older. Today’s seniors have better retirement benefits than previous generations. Also, older Americans are increasingly working past traditional retirement age. More than eight million, or 19 percent, were in the labor force in 2013, nearly twice as many as in 2000.
As a result, while median household income, on average, has fallen 9 percent since the turn of the century, it has jumped 14 percent among households headed by older adults.
Obama: ‘Middle-Class Economics Works’
The president laid the groundwork for middle-class economics during his State of the Union address on Tuesday.
Video by AP on January 21, 2015. Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times.
The growing prominence of older people in the middle class reflects, in part, the way Social Security and Medicare — originally set up as safety nets to protect seniors from falling into poverty after retirement — have provided a substantial cushion for them against hard times.
Married couples with children — who make up a category that is shrinking over all — are diminishing even faster as a share of the middle class. In the late 1960s, about 45 percent of all households included married adults and their offspring. But among middle-class households, more than 60 percent had that traditional family arrangement.
Today, married couples with children at home make up just a quarter of households. But even as they diminished as a share of the population, these families surged up the economic ladder as more married women went to work in the paid labor force. By 2000, 42 percent earned more than $100,000 in today’s dollars.
The most recent recession put a halt to the advances of even that generally successful group. Its share in the middle class has fallen by three percentage points and the share earning less than $35,000 has increased.
The New Middle Class
As the middle class has shrunk, its composition has changed, with people 65 and older making up the fastest-growing segment. Meanwhile, married couples with children, who have seen their incomes grow, have diminished as a share of the middle class.
Representation in the middle class
Overrepresented
Underrepresented
<30 old="" p="" years="">
30-44
45-64
65+
Share of
middle class
40%
20%
Share of population
0%
’67
’13
’67
’13
’67
’13
’67
’13
Married couple
with children
Married couple
with no children
Single
parent
Single adult
with no children
60%
40%
20%
0%
’67
’13
’67
’13
’67
’13
’67
’13
“In the Great Recession, we lost a lot of middle-income jobs and we gained a lot of low-paying jobs,” said Michael R. Strain, resident scholar at the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute. “That’s a slower-burning thing, but it increased in ferocity during the recession, and people are feeling it.”
For more than two decades, John D’Amanda, 54, earned about $30,000 a year running a window-washing service in Oakland, Calif. He had a car and an apartment. Then, in 2009, the calls stopped coming in. His customers no longer had the luxury of paying for someone to wash their windows.
2)
White House going nuclear on Netanyahu
Thou shall not cross Dear Leader.
With their guttersniping failing to stop Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned March speech before Congress, White House aides are unloading their full arsenal of bile.
“He spat in our face publicly, and that’s no way to behave,” one Obama aide told an Israeli newspaper.
“Netanyahu ought to remember that President Obama has a year and a half left to his presidency, and that there will be a price.”
It is pointless to say petty threats do not become the Oval Office. Trying to instruct this White House on manners recalls what Mark Twain said about trying to teach a pig to sing: It wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Still, the fury is telling. It reminds, as if we could forget, that everything is always about Obama.
How dare Israel be more concerned with the existential threat of Iranian nukes than with Obama’s feelings? And what do members of Congress think they are, a separate branch of government or something?
Yes, the presidency deserves respect, even when the president doesn’t. Although Obama routinely ignores lawmakers and their role in our constitutional system of checks and balances, there is an argument afoot that Congress should have taken the high road and consulted him before inviting Netanyahu.
The argument has a point — but not a compelling one. To give Obama veto power over the visit would be to put protocol and his pride before the most important issue in the world.
Outside the president’s yes-men circle, nobody believes the mad mullahs will voluntarily give up their quest for the bomb. International sanctions made life difficult for the regime, especially with oil prices cratering, but Obama relaxed restrictions with nothing to show for it except negotiations where he keeps bidding against himself.
He is desperate for a deal, and the Iranians know it, so they want to keep talking. They are gaining concessions and buying time, which means a reversal of their weapons program becomes much harder to achieve.
The ticking doomsday clock is what led to the remarkable comments by Democrat Robert Menendez. After Obama warned that more sanctions, even if they would not take effect unless the talks collapsed, could scare off the Iranians, the New Jersey senator said Obama was repeating talking points that “come straight out of Tehran.”
That’s a zinger for the ages — and has the added advantage of being true.
Any deal that leaves Iran with a capacity to make a nuke in weeks or months will ignite a regional arms race. As I have noted, American military and intelligence officials believe a nuclear-armed Iran will lead to a nuclear exchange with Israel or Arab countries within five years.
Israel has the most to lose from an Iranian nuke, and Netanyahu can be expected to articulate a forceful argument against Obama’s disastrous course. That’s why House Speaker John Boehner invited him, and it’s why the president is so bent out of shape and refuses to meet with Netanyahu. He doesn’t want Americans to hear the other side.
But we must. And Congress must not shirk its duty to demand a meaningful agreement with Iran, or none at all.
An extra layer of sanctions waiting in the wings is good backup, but another pending bill is more important. It would demand that any agreement come before the Senate for a vote.
Naturally, Obama opposes it, but that’s all the more reason why it is needed. As Ronald Reagan famously said about Soviet promises, “Trust but verify.”
So must it be with Iran and, sadly, our own president.
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3) To Obama, the State Can Still Solve Every Problem
By Nick Gillespie
If you want to get a sense of why Barack Obama alienates not just libertarians but large and growing swaths of basically apolitical Americans, consider how he treated day care in Tuesday’s State of the Union Address (SOTU).
It’s bad enough that he even talked about the issue in the first place. As the father of two kids whose mother has always worked, I know how difficult, frustrating, and anxiety-inducing it is to find good, affordable day care. But come on already, this issue just doesn’t rate as a national concern to be dealt with in “the only speech a modern president can expect all of the networks to cover.”
But it’s not just that he talked about an issue as small-ball as day care, it’s how he talked about it that helps explain why so many have soured on the guy (indeed, his SOTU ratings over the years have tanked, with Tuesday’s speech the worst yet). For all his yammering about how “tonight, we turn the page” and that we need to be “looking to the future instead of the past,” Obama is stuck in the dreariest, 20th-century liberal mindset when it comes to problem solving.
After falsely claiming that the federal government provided “universal childcare” during World War II (in fact, the feds provided child care for a peak of 130,000 kids in 1944, Obama laid out his grand plan for fixing this problem: Give “working Americans” tax cuts and subsidies to buy child care. In fact, that’s pretty much his answer to everything, whether we’re talking college (whose cost he pledged to “lower...to zero”), health care (Obamacare is built around subsidies for insurance premiums), or home ownership (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are back to requiring just 3 percent down on home loans).
The one thing you’ll never hear Obama talk about is increasing the supply of just about anything. But that’s precisely how prices really come down and increasingly higher-quality goods and services become affordable and ubiquitous. We didn’t get to cheap hamburgers by subsidizing their purchase through targeted tax breaks to working Americans. Fast-food chains drove down prices and upped quality in their desperate attempts to grab and keep customers.
The same thing is true of all sorts of consumer products and services. When VCRs, home computers, and cell phones first hit the markets, only wealthy people could afford them. Prices tumbled because manufacturers increased the supply and variety, not because the government gave us money to go purchase them. As the economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote in 1942’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, “The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens [but] in bringing [silk stockings] within the reach of factory girls.”
That same dynamic holds true for day care and health care too. Yet Obamacare does essentially nothing to grow the supply of health care, just as the president has shown no interest in growing the supply of day care. Why not work to get rid of the sorts of occupational licensing rules and other regulations in both areas that rarely accomplish any goals other than driving up prices and keeping incumbents happy?
The Obama administration is instead throwing up more obstacles to day care options by requiring providers in federal programs to have college degrees. That’s even though there’s no evidence that such a requirement has any effect on the quality of care. Similarly useless constraints on the possible supply of health care exist. “Certificate of need” laws, which essentially let existing health care providers veto new entrants into the marketplace, are just one example.
In the 1950s, just 5 percent of jobs required occupational licensing of some sort. Today, says the liberal Progressive Policy Institute, the figure is closer to one-third. “Many worry,” writes Dane Stangler, “that this growth, while salutary to a point, has now become a structural rigidity and a drag on economic vitality.” Think about Uber in this context, which has radically increased transportation options for many urban Americans in spite of local government regulations. When supply increases, prices come down.
Supply doesn’t always create its own demand, but we really have little idea as to what goods, services, and technologies are going to emerge and stick around (do you still have a VCR, or even a DVD player?). Which makes it hard as hell to plan to subsidize demand via government programs. It's far better to reduce barriers to innovation and entrepreneurship than to use slow-moving, lumbering subsidy programs to move into the 21st century.If
Obama was really interested in looking to the future and shaking off the past—not to mention jump starting economic innovation and growth—he’d do well to think about growing the supply of goods and services rather than trying always to manage the demand side. Not only would that be smarter, it would be easier, too, because it doesn’t involve trying to figure out how many widgets, day care slots, or hip operations people will want in 10 or 20 years.
Who knows? Articulating such future-oriented policies might even mean that more people would tune into Obama’s final State of the Union Address in a year’s time.
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4) What, exactly, is Hillary Clinton’s strategy to get voters excited about her candidacy?
By PhilipBump
With the necessary caveat up front -- it is very, very, very, very early -- 2016 is shaping up to be an awful lot like 2012, not 2008: a Democrat facing no real opposition who will sit back and watch an eccentric mixture of Republicans battle it out for the right to be on the ballot in November. Unlike 2012, though, that's not great news for Democrats.
First the big (non-)news: Hey, Hillary Clinton is going to run for president.Who knew? There are few likely presidential candidates with better pedigrees for the position than Clinton. She has White House experience (arguably more useful White House experience than Vice President Biden), she has been in the Senate, she has been secretary of state. It's not as though this is a surprise, of course. Everyone knows all of this. Everyone knows everything about Hillary Clinton, from her favorite style of outfit (pantsuit) to her default posture on international issues (hawkish-ish) to her mannerisms, staffers and family members.
Therein lies the risk. For a Republican to win in 2016, he or she needs to surmount one bar: be better than Hillary Clinton. And it's not clear, from a political standpoint, that this is a very high bar.
Campaign theory often suggests that competitive primaries in one party and a clear path in the other serves the latter party. After all, the competitive primary party spends months tearing its candidates apart, while the other gets to simply sit back and cash checks. But consider the last time there was an open presidential contest on each side. Sen. John McCain of Arizona (relatively) quickly locked up the Republican nomination; Barack Obama and Clinton battled for months (thanks, in part, to Clinton's refusal to acknowledge the inevitable). So much hand-wringing over the damage done to the party! But the end result was a romp.
That election is instructive in other ways, too. What more do we know about Clinton now than we did then? She was leading by a healthy margin that year (although not as healthy as she does now), only to be overtaken by Obama as the primaries approached. A clear reason why: He was exciting. There's a benefit to being a political blank slate, as Obama was: Voters can inscribe whatever motivations or philosophies they see fit. But there's more benefit to being someone people get excited about. This was partly McCain's (and Mitt Romney's) problem. Who, really, was terribly excited about either? McCain's campaign got a jolt with the introduction of Sarah Palin, but that . . . offered mixed benefits.
But, you're thinking, the Republicans lost in 2012, the race to which you're comparing this one! And, yes, your close reading has been rewarded with an insight. The problem with assuming that 2016 will therefore see a Republican loss is that Obama and Clinton are very different candidates -- and it's possible (although not certain) that the GOP will pick someone with a bit more panache than McCain or Romney this time around. That's really the question. Can, say, Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) survive the gauntlet (and his last name) to compel independents in a general? Can former Florida governor Jeb Bush overcome his name problems and engage voters? Or Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) or Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) or Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker or [list continues for 1,600 names]? Republican voters tend to be, well, conservative in their choices, but it's certainly possible that someone electrifying could emerge -- or be sculpted -- over the next 12 months.
How will she overcome this? Reinvent herself, a la Romney in 2012 and Romney in 2016? Learn how to say "secretary of state" in other, more interesting-sounding languages? Clinton is what she is, which serves her very well for locking up the Democratic primary. Then what?
Clinton has a huge head start in the race to 2016. But without the jolt of a primary, the pace will continue: slow, steady, deliberate. Meanwhile, the Republicans are doing their best to breed a jackrabbit.
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