Certainties in Life - Death and Obama's FY2012 Budget: Taxes, Taxes, and More Taxes

There's a certain irony that POTUS released his Fiscal year 2012 Budget today....It was his "love letter" to our money.....as he intends to try & take more of it from us for his spending.

You'll hear a lot of political wrangling about the subject BUT when the deficit runs to an all-time high on his watch, he OWNS this one.

The subject of Death & taxes is nothing new....here is some history on the phraseology:

Meaning

A rather fatalistic and sardonic proverb. It draws on the actual inevitability of death to highlight the difficulty in avoiding the burden of taxes.

Origin

Several famous authors have uttered lines to this effect. The first was Daniel Defoe, in The Political History of the Devil, 1726:

"Things as certain as death and taxes, can be more firmly believed."

Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) used the form we are currently more familiar with, in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, 1789, which was re-printed in The Works of Benjamin Franklin, 1817:

"'In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."

Another thought on the theme of death and taxes is Margaret Mitchell's line from her book Gone With the Wind, 1936:

"Death, taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them."


SO....let's look at the updated version of this game, courtesy of the "Empty Suit" who presently resides in the Oval Office. Just for reference, here's a shot of the clock that keeps track of it for you from this weekend....the totals are higher (as you read this)

Obama's FY2012 Budget:
Taxes, Taxes, and More Taxes
From Ryan Ellis on Monday, February 14, 2011 12:00 PM
WWW.ATR.ORG

President Obama released his budget this morning. Rather than focusing on Washington’s over-spending problem, the budget calls for higher taxes on families and small businesses to pay for even more government spending. Under the Obama budget, tax revenues will grow from 14.4% of GDP in 2011 to 20% of GDP in 2021. By comparison, the historical average is only 18% of GDP.


Tax hike lowlights include:

•Raising the top marginal income tax rate (at which a majority of small business profits face taxation) from 35% to 39.6%. This is a $709 billion/10 year tax hike

•Raising the capital gains and dividends rate from 15% to 20%

•Raising the death tax rate from 35% to 45% and lowering the death tax exemption amount from $5 million ($10 million for couples) to $3.5 million. This is a $98 billion/ten year tax hike

•Capping the value of itemized deductions at the 28% bracket rate. This will effectively cut tax deductions for mortgage interest, charitable contributions, property taxes, state and local income or sales taxes, out-of-pocket medical expenses, and unreimbursed employee business expenses. A new means-tested phaseout of itemized deductions limits them even more. This is a $321 billion/ten year tax hike

•New bank taxes totaling $33 billion over ten years

•New international corporate tax hikes totaling $129 billion over ten years

•New life insurance company taxes totaling $14 billion over ten years

•Massive new taxes on energy, including LIFO repeal, Superfund, domestic energy manufacturing, and many others totaling $120 billion over ten years

•Increasing unemployment payroll taxes by $15 billion over ten years

•Taxing management capital gains in an investment partnership (“carried interest”) as ordinary income. This is a tax hike of $15 billion over ten years


•A giveaway to the trial lawyers—not letting companies deduct the cost of punitive damages from a lawsuit settlement. This is a tax hike of $300 million over ten years

•Increasing tax penalties, information reporting, and IRS information sharing. This is a ten-year tax hike of $20 billion.

Add it all together, and this budget is a ten-year, $1.5 trillion tax hike over present law. That’s $1.5 trillion taken out of the economy and spent on government instead of being used to create jobs.

The “tax relief” in the budget is mostly just an extension of present law, and also some refundable credit outlay spending in the tax code. There is virtually no new tax relief relative to present law in the President’s budget.

Read more: http://www.atr.org/obamas-fy-budgetbr-taxes-more-a5844##ixzz1DxwOe04i

Stimulus Spending Wasteful...no kidding.

And the " Captain Obvious" award goes to the media for reporting on something the average taxpayer had figured out long ago.... Sen. McCain has been valiantly trying to rein in the Pork Barrel spending for the past 20 years.....

Anyone could have told you that the Stimulus Plan was a huge waste of tax dollars that we will be paying for for the rest of our lives....Too bad the Congress and POTUS don't have a clue.

Stimulus Slammed: Republican Senators Release Report Alleging Waste
Sens. Coburn, McCain Rip Stimulus Spending 'Waste'
By JONATHAN KARL, MATTHEW JAFFE and GREGORY SIMMONS
Aug. 3, 2010

The Obama administration has credited its $862 billion stimulus program with pulling the economy out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. But a new report by two Republican senators argues the stimulus is riddled with wasteful projects that do not create jobs.

The report, released by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and John McCain, R-Ariz., highlights 100 stimulus projects that they say have "questionable goals," are "being mismanaged or were poorly planned" and are even "costing jobs and hurting small businesses."

The Coburn-McCain report takes issue with stimulus spending on projects like one that entailed research on how cocaine affects monkeys. The Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center was awarded $71,623 to study what the report calls, "Monkeys Getting High for Science."

Bonnie Davis, a spokeswoman for The Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, said the "small grant has helped protect very important research that will have significant impact on public health in regards to cocaine addiction and the issue of relapse."

Go a little further down the list and you'll find even bigger spending. The California Academy of Sciences is receiving nearly $1 million in stimulus funds to send researchers to the Southwest Indian Ocean Islands and East Africa to capture, photograph and analyze thousands of exotic ants.

There's also funding for yoga and hot flashes. Researchers at Wake Forest University have received nearly $300,000 to study whether integral yoga "can be an effective method to reduce the frequency and/or severity of hot flashes" in breast cancer survivors.

"I think all of them are waste," McCain told ABC News. "I think none of them really have any meaningful impact on creating jobs. And, of course, some are more egregious than others but all of them are terrible."

In perhaps the most eye-popping instance, the report says oil giant BP, the company behind the worst oil spill in the nation's history, is benefiting from $308 million given to Hydrogen Energy California -- a company it owns -- to build a California power plant that won't even break ground for another two years.

The funds were given to BP by the Department of Energy. While the natural gas electricity plant in Kern County would generate enough low-carbon electricity for 150,000 family homes, according to the company, construction will not start for another two years and the plant is not set to become operational until the end of 2014.

"It's nice to have BP investing in environmentally friendly anything, much less a power plant," McCain quipped.

The White House Recovery Office maintains Recovery Act funding for the project was offered in June 2009 and officially awarded in September 2009, long before the Gulf spill, and that the award went to a joint venture that is a 50/50 cost-share between Rio Tinto and BP -- so BP is not the primary awardee.

In addition, it turns out the $308 million awarded is only made up of $175 million in stimulus funds, with the remaining portion coming from other sources. In fact, the private sector has given the project seven times as much funding as the government has.

"The project directly and indirectly employs more than 150 people to date and $14 million stimulus funds received to date has created or preserved 47 of these jobs, as reported on recovery.gov," Jordan Feilders of Hydrogen Energy California told ABC News.

The project is projected eventually to create more than 1,500 jobs.

According to Feilders, however, construction is not slated to begin until 2012, a year later than the Coburn-McCain report indicated.


Another eyebrow-raising endeavor involves the U.S. Forest Service in Washington state, which is spending more than half a million dollars to replace the windows on a visitor center at Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument that today sits closed with no set re-open date.

The U.S. Forest Service frames the window replacement as a necessary investment.

"The Forest Service is actually in the process of repurposing the visitors' center and plans to reuse the empty space," a U.S. Forest official told ABC News. "This window replacement is necessary to maintain the facility so they are in a position to do so. It's a critical step to protect the original investment and ensure continued good use of taxpayer dollars."

The list goes on, although some of the administrators and recipients of stimulus funds say the report doesn't get all the facts straight.

In Newark, Ohio, Pastor Greg Sheets already has lost his front yard and could lose his entire home as a $1.8 million road project comes right up to his doorstep. Sheets is only one of 25 homeowners whose houses are threatened by the project.

However, the Ohio Department of Transportation told ABC News that plans for the project began in 2005, well before the stimulus bill was even conceived of. The ODT also maintains the acquisition of the property is being handled by the City of Newark's city attorney, who has followed all state and federal procedures for purchasing the property.

Meanwhile, the town of Boynton, Okla., is spending nearly $90,000 to replace a quarter-mile stretch of sidewalk that's only five years old.

However, officials in the Oklahoma Department of Transportation say the $90,000 was a part of a $16 million grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and was focused on sidewalks for a reason: Sidewalks have to be compliant with the American Disabilities Act as a mandatory precursor to receiving any funding from the Federal Highway Administration. This particular sidewalk in Boyton was too narrow and too sloped to accommodate individuals in wheelchairs.

"It's a major help because now small communities, like Boynton, can receive federal funding for their roads," Casey Shell of the Oklahoma Department of Transportation told ABC News.

However, to Sens. McCain and Coburn's point, Shell admitted he could not point to any jobs created by the project.

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