PrintThe Baehr Essentials
Rick Richman responds to the argument that America's tax system is not progressive enough. In fact, it is the most progressive in the world - 1% of taxpayers pay 40% of all federal income taxes, and half of Americans pay no federal income tax at all. Of course, that is not nearly progressive enough for several progressive groups, who are about to offer their own ideas for deficit reduction. This may come as a shock to you, but they have modeled their program on the recent proposal of that deep economic thinker, Jan Schakowsky-much higher taxes on people with higher incomes, big cuts in defense spending, and much more domestic spending. What is also of interest, is that the progressives argue that there can be no cuts on essential programs (entitlements) for the middle class. At one time, the left pretended to care about the poor. Now they stand for middle class entitlements, and defend lavish spending on some of America's least needy- the public employee unions. Richman also correctly identifies the ponzi schemes now at work for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
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Maybe if the SEIU did not spend $75 million every cycle on campaigns to elect Democrats, they could afford to provide health care coverage to the children of their union members. The alternative explanation is that the policies they back are leading to ruinous inflation in the health care premiums they have to pay.
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Portland, Oregon is coming up strong on the outside, but still trails San Francisco, as the most politically correct city in America. When I visited there several years back, the park on the west bank of the river where the homeless slept, had been renamed by the Mayor "Dignity Field". Mohammed Mohammed Mohammed, (sorry if I got the name wrong), hoped to kill many people in Portland this past week, presumably in a dignified fashion.
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Pamela Geller gets it right in discussing how the IRS is now treating the applications for tax exempt status of various Jewish groups, including Z Street.
Jim Ceaser, Professor of Political Science at the University of Virginia is a fellow alum of Kenyon College, and preceded me by one year in the first ever U.S. Yugoslav exchange program in Slovenia. In the article below, he describes the 2010 midterm elections as the great repudiation (note this is a word with a p, and not an f).
