Clipping blog

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• Clearing the Browser Tabs – Back to the Grind Monday Edition
• Hey, Small Business Owners. Better Brace for that Death Tax Compromise.
• White House: Let Us Spend More Money Or The Economy Gets It!

Clearing the Browser Tabs – Back to the Grind Monday Edition Posted: 03 Jan 2011 03:10 AM PST Okay, everyone, enough end of the year shirking. Back to work! Blogging will be light for me on Mondays and Wednesdays this month. I’ve been roped into one of those “Other Duties as Assigned” things at work, which is going to suck up pretty much my entire day, including any break times. I won’t be near an internet connection until the evening, when I get home and settled in. So, blogging then! And now, links! Uh oh: “European nations begin seizing private pensions”. It’s Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria right now, but Ireland and France are not far behind. I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that people inside the Obama administration are watching what happens in those countries very carefully. If you’re going to claim the Bipartisan Champion label, shouldn’t you attempt to not actually lie while doing it? Rep. Darryl Issa (R-Calif.) has been champing at the bit to begin several investigations into “one of the most corrupt administrations” ever. I question his eagerness, though, given that he apparently has no interest at all in the Joe Sestak/White House bribery case, though the evidence is relatively strong that the President committed at least one felony. Maybe he wants to be bipartisan too! Was Erin Brokovich wrong? It’s time for another installment of Troglopundit’s This Week in Automotivators. File under “No Kidding”: Babies need their mothers from the very moment they’re born. I do occasionally hear folks, usually progressive-leaning folks, claim that any sort of loving parent will do, but that’s not the case. One day we’ll realize how wrong and silly-headed we’ve been, but I fear that day will come far too late.

Hey, Small Business Owners. Better Brace for that Death Tax Compromise. Posted: 02 Jan 2011 04:47 PM PST When the most recent tax deal passed, one of the great triumphs Republicans claimed was that the “death tax” would be only 35 percent on estates of more than 5 million dollars. The Democrats wanted a rate of 55 percent and a much lower exemption. What wasn’t widely reported by either Republicans or Democrats was that the estate tax was zero for the entire year of 2010. So, what Republicans claimed as a triumph was actually a massive tax increase on the lifetime earnings of hard-working people who spent years and countless hours of their lives building a business or farm they could pass along to their children. I’ve caught heat for opposing the tax deal. The argument from the Republican party stalwarts is that we weren’t really talking about a tax increase on a small percentage of people from zero to 35 percent but an increase from zero to 55 percent. Perhaps that’s true in a political, theoretical sense. What we got, however, was a 35 percent tax increase that won’t simply punish those mean old rich people who hoard their money like Smaug inside his lair in the Lonely Mountain. This tax increase is going to hammer tens of thousands of small businesses and farms (via Instapundit). With family businesses and farms accounting for a significant percentage of the "wealth" of elderly Americans (those 65 years of age or older), the return of the estate tax starting on January 1st will force many families to divert resources into measures to minimize the tax, rather than grow their businesses, according to a new report released today and authored by Duquesne University Economist Antony Davies. Published by the American Family Business Foundation (AFBF), the report finds that up to 67% of estates subject to the estate tax in 2011 would own small business assets, with more than 22,000 farms, 29,000 private corporations and 14,000 real estate partnerships likely to be affected if the owner dies. Guess what’s going to happen when those tax bills come due? At best, the inheritors will have to divert money from the business to pay the tax that would have otherwise gone to hiring new people, giving employee raises, and buying new buildings and equipment. At worst, they will sell the businesses and fire all the employees. Is that likely to help the economy? Is that fiscally-responsible? Does that even make a lick of sense? Of course it doesn’t. Democrats wanted a big, fat death tax because they can’t stand people who have money they don’t control. That’s their nature and we can hardly expect them to change even after we gave them a spanking the likes of which none of them have ever experienced. Republicans compromised on a job-killing tax that will without question hurt the economy because they were too timid to put up a real fight. That, also, has become their nature even though they know they’re on notice. The politics of the situation was very straightforward. In the real world, however, where people are still struggling mightily to dig themselves out of the hole into which our leaders — Republican and Democrat — have sunk them, we were hung out to dry. That’s going to have to change, and soon. If it doesn’t, we’re going to hand out a lot of pink slips in November of 2012.

White House: Let Us Spend More Money Or The Economy Gets It! Posted: 02 Jan 2011 04:16 PM PST If you listen very closely, you can hear the administration’s utter desperation. The top White House economic adviser on Sunday warned against what he called “playing chicken” with the need to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said on ABC’s “This Week” that refusing to raise the debt ceiling would push the country into default — and a far greater economic crisis than Americans saw in 2008. [...] Mr. Goolsbee also said the administration wants to juice the economy and get it going faster amid signs of a continuing recovery in the new year. The President’s desire to raise the debt ceiling, which will allow him to try to pile more trillions of dollars of debt onto our grandchildren, has nothing at all to do with improving the economy or some fictitious “crisis”. We know very well the administration’s penchant for inventing crises any time they want a reason to shove through yet another pre-failed progressive economic program. What President Obama wants is another vote-buying act stimulus, like the two he has already gotten. He can’t win in 2012 without it. I say we ignore the threats of the progressives who have been so spectacularly wrong over the past two years and listen to a few conservatives for a change.

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