"They keep saying Chicago by the way, have you noticed? They keep saying Chicago. That's another thing that sends that message - this guy's helping the poor people in the bad neighborhoods, screwing us in the 'burbs."
Hielemann helpfully interpreted Matthews statement, presumably for those too challenged to understand basic words (or as we in the business refer to them - Hardball viewers), by making this jaw-dropping statement:
"There's a lot of black people in Chicago."
Chris Matthews, Lawrence O'Donnell, and the whole brain trust at MSNBC seem to be playing some warped version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon called Six Degrees of Racial Dog Whistle. Give them any word a Republican says, and they will free associated it with other words to get to the "racist" claim they want to make.Pretty much.
One of the women in the Obama campaign's new video of Republicans supporting the president because of GOP positions on women's rights appears not to be a Republican at all.
Maria Ciano who is featured in the web video has been a registered Democrat since October 2006 according to voter registration records.
"People like me and my family have realized that the Republican Party once was inline with our views, but are no longer," the Colorado resident says in the video.Ed Morrissey at Hot Air opines:
It’s certainly possible that Ms. Ciano had at one time been Republican. Her conversion to Democrat had nothing to do with Mitt Romney, or even Barack Obama, however. And it’s difficult to ascertain exactly what about Romney would have driven the rest of them off, either. One woman cites Romney’s desire to see Roe overturned, as if she’s never heard that argument in the fourdecades that Republicans have been making it. George W. Bush made it just as much of an issue when running for President, if not more; every Republican nominee for President since Reagan has taken that position, as have most of the candidates who failed to get the nomination. This must be one of the most low-information groups of voters ever featured in a national campaign.
It’s easy to understand why Team Obama wants to run a Republican Women for Obama ad. Is it too much to ask that they check first to see if the women are actually Republican first?
Team Obama has cut another ad. This one features Republican women showing their support for Obama. Not only does it bizarrely claim that "if you're a woman that favors small government, you should vote for Obama", but naturally it turns out they lied and the ad features a registered Democrat posing as a Republican.Naturally the MSM is trotting out it's old 'both sides do it' moral equivalency defense. Right - Mitt's run ads in which he demands to see Obama's tax returns, hints he's a felon, accuses him of causing people to die, and proffered fake Democrats who will vote for him.
Just as the Akin crisis was reaching a crescendo, the Democrats on Wednesday announced that three starlets of the pro-choice movement will be featured at the convention, an event that will now drive the liberal charge that the Republicans are anti-women.
Democrats said that they will feature Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parent Action Fund, Nancy Keenan, president of the NARAL Pro-Choice America and Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University student whose plea for federal birth control funding drew the ire--and a subsequent apology--from Rush Limbaugh.
What's more, the Democrats are expanding their list of women ready to assail the GOP on women's issue, adding Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski and actress Eva Longoria to the list that already includes Sen. John Kerry and Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren.AWESOME.
| A Salinas car manufacturing company that was expected to build environmentally friendly electric cars and create new jobs folded before almost any vehicles could run off the assembly line. The city of Salinas had invested more than half a million dollars in Green Vehicles, an electric car start-up company. All of that money is now gone, according to Green Vehicles President and Co-Founder Mike Ryan. The start-up company set up shop in Salinas in the summer of 2009, after the city gave Ryan a $300,000 community development grant. [Wait - anyone want to bet this was stimulus money? So they started this thing up with taxpayer money. There was no private sector involvement at the start.] When the company still ran into financial trouble last year, the city of Salinas handed Ryan an additional $240,000. Green Vehicles also received $187,000 from the California Energy Commission. [Ah, yeah. More government money to prop this thing up and keep it going. Still no private sector demand or involvement.] Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue said he was "surprised and disappointed" by the news. City officials were equally irked that Ryan notified them through an email that his company had crashed and burned. [Yes, this is exactly how some green jobs pioneer who took over $500,000 of your city's money should inform you it's all gone and he's closing shop.] Salinas Economic Development Director Jeff Weir said Green Vehicles flopped because of a lack of investors. [From the beginning he never had any private sector investors. He had government money handed to him to 'start up' and when the government money ran out, the business folded.] Donohue said he will work with the state to try to get at least $240,000 back from the now-defunct company. Last year, Salinas city officials said they were excited about Green Vehicles moving from San Jose to Salinas because they wanted to turn Salinas into a hub for alternative energy production. City leaders wooed Green Vehicles to jump-start the sputtering local company and turn Salinas into an "electric valley." Donohue and Weir both voiced their high hopes for Green Vehicles. [Oh boy. You mean you went out to court a business that was starting up with no funds of it's own, so you gave them over $300,000 to move to your city? Followed by another $240,000 when the initial funds ran out? There was no private money involved, no private investors coming in? Now I don't feel so sorry for these guys.] The start-up company promised city leaders that it would create 70 new jobs and pay $700,000 in taxes a year to Salinas. [I'm sure they were very big on the vision thing, envisioning a never ending supply of government money to keep them afloat.] Green Vehicles was supposed to be up and running by March 2010 inside their 80,000-square-foot space at Firestone Business Park off of Abbot Street. Ryan had lofty goals, listing his company's mission as: "To make the best clean commuter vehicles in the world; To manufacture with a radical sense of responsibility; To engage in deep transparency as an inspiration for new ways of doing business." [But apparently making sure there was a demand for the ugly looking 3-wheeled vehicles he wanted to make wasn't part of his mission. No demand = no private investors looking to put their money into this.] Green Vehicles designed two vehicles, the TRIAC 2.0 and the MOOSE, which it planned to manufacture. [Take a look at the 'clean commuter vehicles' Mike Ryan wanted to make: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs7cr...layer_embedded No wonder he couldn't attract any private investors.] On July 12, Ryan wrote a blog post announcing that his company was closing. "The truth is that not realizing the vision for this company is a huge disappointment," Ryan wrote. [I'm sure the disappointment of the people who gave you over $600,000 is greater.] Ryan outlined three mistakes he made while steering his company into a brick wall. All three reasons boiled down failing to generate enough capital. |
| You notice he was unable to attract real investors (ie - private money) but he scored over 1/2 million tax dollars by saying he'd generate $700K in tax revenues for the city. |
These tax policies enjoy a history of bipartisan success. JFK proposed legislation to reduce income tax rates across the board by 30 percent, explaining.
It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today, and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the tax rates….[A]n economy constrained by high tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget, just as it will never create enough jobs or enough profits.
Kennedy's proposed tax cuts were adopted in 1964, and pulled the top rate from 91 percent down to 70 percent, while reducing the lower rates. The next year, economic growth soared by 50 percent, and income tax revenues increased by 41 percent! By 1966, unemployment had fallen to its lowest peacetime level in almost 40 years. U.S. News and World Report exclaimed: "The unusual budget spectacle of sharply rising revenues following the biggest tax cut in history is beginning to astonish even those who pushed hardest for tax cuts in the first place." Arthur Okun, the administration's chief economic advisor, estimated that the tax cuts expanded the economy in just two years by 10 percent above where it would have been.
Reagan and succeeding Republicans abolished federal income taxes on the working poor and on what the Left calls the working class, and they almost abolished them on the middle class.
It began with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which grew out of then-Governor Ronald Reagan's famous testimony before the Senate Finance Committee in 1972. Reagan proposed exempting the working poor from all Social Security and income taxes as an alternative to welfare, with the credit serving as a way to offset payroll taxes for low-income workers. As president, Reagan cut federal income tax rates across the board by 25 percent. He also indexed the tax brackets to prevent inflation from pushing working people into higher rates.
In the Tax Reform Act of 1986, President Reagan reduced the federal income tax rate for middle- and low-income families all the way down to 15 percent. That law also doubled the personal exemption, shielding a higher proportion of income from taxation for lower income workers than for higher income workers.
After the Reagan tax cuts were fully implemented, the economy took off on a 25-year economic boom (from 1982 to 2007). It was interrupted by two short, shallow recessions, but it is widely recognized in the economic literature, and by the National Bureau of Economic Research, as one long boom. During the first seven years alone, the economy grew by almost one-third, or the equivalent of adding an entire West Germany, the third largest economy in the world at the time, to the U.S.
Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" adopted a child tax credit of $500 that also reduced tax liabilities for low-income people more than high earners. President Bush doubled that credit to $1,000 per child, and made it refundable so that low-income people can get the full credit even if they do not pay $1,000 in federal income taxes. Bush also adopted a new 10-percent tax bracket for the lowest income workers, which reduced their federal income tax rate by one-third.
This is how we reached the point at which, by 2007, after 25 years of Reaganomics and before President Obama was even elected, the bottom 40 percent of earners, on net and as a group, paid less than 0 percent of federal income taxes, according to official IRS data, as reported recently by the Congressional Budget Office. Instead of paying at least some income taxes to help support the federal government, the federal government paid them cash through the income tax code. That same year, the middle 20 percent, the true middle class, paid less than 5 percent of all federal income taxes.
The Bush tax cuts quickly ended the 2001 recession, despite the contractionary economic impacts of 9/11, and the economy continued to grow for another 73 months. In the four years after the rate cuts were fully implemented, the economy created 7.8 million new jobs, and the unemployment rate fell from over 6 percent to 4.4 percent. Real economic growth over the next three years doubled from the average for the prior three years, to 3.5 percent.
Business investment, which had declined for nine straight quarters, reversed and increased 6.7 percent per quarter. That is where the jobs came from. Manufacturing output soared to its highest level in 20 years. The stock market revived, creating almost $7 trillion in new shareholder wealth. From 2003 to 2007, the S&P 500 almost doubled. Capital gains tax revenues doubled by 2005, despite Bush's 25 percent rate cut!Cut the tax rates, collect double the revenue you were getting at the higher rate - just 3 years later. Imagine that.
At Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate on foreign policy, for example, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked the candidates for the one-millionth time if they would agree to raise taxes in exchange for spending cuts 10 times larger than the tax hikes.
Terrorism can wait — first, let me try to back you into a corner on raising taxes.
Amazingly, Blitzer cited Ronald Reagan’s statement in his autobiography, “An American Life,” that he would happily compromise with Democrats if he could get 75 or 80 percent of what he wanted — implying that today’s Republicans were nuttier than Reagan if they’d refuse a dollar in tax hikes for $10 in spending cuts.
Wolf should have kept reading. As Reagan explains a little farther in his autobiography: He did accept tax hikes “in return for (the Democrats’) agreement to cut spending by $280 billion,” but, Reagan continues, “the Democrats reneged on their pledge and we never got those cuts.”
Maybe that’s why Republicans won’t agree to raise taxes in exchange for Democratic promises to cut spending.
For Americans who are unaware of the Democrats’ history of repeatedly reneging on their promises to cut spending in return for tax hikes, the Republicans’ opposition to tax increases does seem crazy. That’s why Republicans need to remind them.
From the moment President Reagan succeeded in pushing through his historic tax cuts in 1981 — which passed by a vote of 323-107 in the House and 89-11 in the Senate, despite Democrats’ subsequent caterwauling — he came under fantastic pressure to raise taxes from the media and the Democrats.
You will notice it is the same culprits pushing for tax hikes today.
So in 1982, Reagan struck a deal with the Democrats to raise some business and excise taxes — though not income taxes — in exchange for $280 billion in spending cuts over the next six years. As Reagan wrote in his diary at the time: “The tax increase is the price we have to pay to get the budget cuts.”
But, of course, the Democrats were lying. Instead of cutting $280 billion, they spent an additional $450 billion — only $140 billion of which went to the Reagan defense buildup that ended the Evil Empire.
Meanwhile, Reagan’s tax cuts brought in an extra $375 billion in government revenue in the next six years — as that amiable, simple-minded dunce Reagan always said they would. His tax cuts funded the entire $140 billion defense buildup, with $235 billion left over.
Unable to learn from the first kick of a mule, President George H.W. Bush made the exact same deal with Democrats just a few years later.
Pretending to care about the deficit — created exclusively by their own profligate spending — Democrats demanded that Bush agree to a “balanced budget” package with both spending cuts and tax increases.
In June 1990, Bush did so, agreeing to tax hikes in defiance of his “read-my-lips, no-new-taxes” campaign pledge.
Again, Democrats, being Democrats, produced no spending cuts, and within two years the increased federal spending had led to a doubling of the deficit.So yes, let's hope Republicans fall for a third attempt to kick that football, shall we? No, this time Dems will actually have to do the spending cuts and after we actually CUT THE TAX RATES to get the economy moving again, we'll talk about what taxes to raise a few years down the road.
George W. Bush and his congressional allies pushed through tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, added more than $2 trillion to the deficit over 10 years.Beinart must not have noticed the federal revenues climbing from 2003-2007 after the economy expanded and grew after the taxcuts took effect:
