When Was the Word "Taxes" Replaced with the Word "Revenues"?

Taxes used to be called precisely what they are - TAXES or the plunder forcibly extracted from citizens to fund government and all that government does. However, lately the word TAXES seems to have disappeared from the discourse and the hot new media term is REVENUES. Moreover, the raising of taxes (revenue) is now dubbed comprehensive tax reform by Democrats and progressives because the accurate and meaningful term "tax increase" tends to cause folks to angrily freak out. But heck, so long as the debate is camouflaged in deceptively benign terms like revenue and comprehensive tax reform, the folks just aren't deemed smart enough to notice the truth about what is really going on.

The Huffington Post  had a big blazing headline.

NO MORE REVENUE!

The headline links to an article complaining about how Sen. Mitch McConnell proclaimed that there will be no more new taxes.

Mitch McConnell On Future Debt Deals: 'The Tax Issue Is Finished'

There will be no more increases in tax revenues as part of any debt or deficit-reduction deal, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared in several interviews on Sunday.

“[T]he tax issue is finished, over, completed,” said the Kentucky Republican, during an appearance on ABC’s "This Week."....

The comments represent a deep line in the sand as Congress and the White House approach the debates over replacing the $1 trillion in sequester-related cuts, the raising of the debt ceiling, and the passage of a continuing resolution to fund the government. And they foreshadow another major showdown between congressional Republicans and the administration.

The president has said that he will not make major entitlement reforms or spending cuts during those negotiations unless it is part of a balanced approach. On Sunday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi echoed that view.

“No, no, it is not,” she said, when asked by CBS’ Bob Schieffer if the revenue side was now taken care of. “I mean, the president had said originally he wanted $1.6 trillion in revenue, he took it down to 1.2 as a compromise in this legislation. We get $620 billion dollars, very significant, high-end tax, changing the high-end tax rate to 39.6 percent, but that is not enough on the revenue side.”

The hope, among Democrats, is that another $600 billion in revenue may be raised through comprehensive tax reform.

There can be no question that the Dems are bitterly complaining about how unhappy they are because they didn't get $1.6 trillion in new taxes.  Clearly, the crusade to plunder Americans of every cent they ever earned will continue unabated because the thought of reducing government spending is just too horrifying a thought for the confiscating totalitarian thugs who thrive on folks being forcibly impoverished by the government and reduced to pathetic beggars.

Meet FATCA, it Turns Every Financial Institution on the Planet into IRS Agents

Meet FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, not to be confused with FACTA, The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003.  At a time when many Americans are literally leaving America and venturing to foreign shores that are hospitable and welcoming to wealth building productivity, FATCA is an overt act to forever hunt them down like criminals and seize their assets.

What is FATCA?  FATCA was described by Center For Freedom and Prosperity as:

 ...an effort by the US to conscript foreign banks as agents for the IRS, and to have them pay for the pleasure....

As lawmaker fantasy runs aground on the rough shores of reality, the Treasury Department is stuck trying to implement a bad law full of dangerous ambiguity. So poorly conceived was the legislation that Treasury has repeatedly delayed its full implementation. Moreover, realizing that the legislation is largely unenforceable as written, they’ve begun negotiating directly with governments in hopes that they’ll preemptively sign away their fiscal sovereignty in exchange for promises of reciprocity. But Treasury has no authority to make these promises. 

Today the Treasury Department is negotiating with more than 50 countries in an effort to implement FATCA… But governments are doing themselves and their financial industries a disservice by contemplating entering into FATCA agreements with the U.S. Backlash against the law is growing, and Treasury is in a race against time to lock it into place before a repeal effort can gain steam.

Hong Kong Stands Up to FATCA Menace

FATCA is a grand global scheme to churn every financial institution on the planet into IRS agents with the absolute authority to seize and plunder the assets of every account holder. FATCA fits nicely with the implementation of global governance schemes where nobody will be safe the plunderers.

Forbes accurately summarized FATCA

Coerced Foreign Tax Compliance Is Killing American Jobs

The economy is not recovering as it should. Unemployment remains high and post-recession growth has been tepid at best. As Americans look to their elected officials for solutions, lawmakers are spurning pro-growth policies and seeking instead to squeeze more revenue from an already beleaguered private sector.

To be blunt, Washington, D.C. is fixated on diverting as much money out of the economy as possible in order to fund ever more bloated government. An especially egregious example of this misguided approach is the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, which, in pursuit of what even government estimates acknowledge to be a paltry increase in tax revenue, threatens to drive billions in foreign investment from the U.S.

FATCA was included as a provision of the 2010 HIRE Act, a government jobs bill that clearly didn’t deliver. It was inserted to help pay for the bill’s gimmick tax break provisions, but while the HIRE Act has come and gone without much notice, Americans are continuing to pay the economic price for the FATCA monstrosity.

The legislation was intended to crackdown on illegal tax evasion, but in reality places heavy burdens on law-abiding Americans living abroad, plus the foreign financial institutions (FFIs) and U.S. withholding agents that service them. The law essentially conscripts FFIs as deputy tax collectors for the IRS, forcing them to report the assets of and any income earned by American clients regardless of where it originated.

Every institution deemed by the U.S. to be an FFI is expected to undertake the costly process of determining who among their clients are American citizens for U.S. tax purposes, and then enter into an information sharing agreement directly with the IRS. Compliance costs for each and every FFI could reach upwards of $100 million, with the looming threat of a 30% withholding tax on U.S. source payments in the case of non-compliance. One estimate by the European Banking Federation and the Institute of International Bankers places the total cost for just the top 30 foreign banks at $7.5 billion. Another predictable consequence of the law is that many institutions choose to avoid the costs of compliance by refusing to service Americans. Major banks like HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and Commerzbank are dropping their U.S. clients. This not only causes a huge inconvenience for Americans living and working overseas who can’t even find an institution where they can deposit their paychecks, but because these banks are also avoiding the penalties for non-compliance by disinvesting in U.S. assets, it is a hit to the economy as well.

Still another predictable result of the law is that the FFIs and their clients will pull capital from the U.S. even if they have to invest in smaller and less lucrative markets. This is because FFIs and/or their clients want to avoid increased compliance costs. Even more important, they can’t take the risk that withholding might occur for whatever reason – since withholding is not only on periodical payments but also gross proceeds.

Thanks to low domestic savings rates and profligate government spending, the U.S. economy is reliant on continuous influxes of foreign investment to provide the capital necessary for growth. Yet no doubt thanks in part to FATCA, foreign direct investment in the US for the first half of 2012 declined by 39.2% over the prior year, and China surpassed the US as the world’s largest recipient of global foreign direct investment for the first time since 2003. At a time when Washington should be pursuing policies designed to attract foreign investment capital to American shores, politicians seem intent on driving it away.

The FATCA law is emblematic of Washington’s inability to face budget reality. Rather than do the hard work of getting America’s fiscal house in order, politicians convince themselves that if they can only catch a few more tax cheats, then they won’t have to reduce or even slow runaway spending. This is a fantasy for two reasons.

First, the U.S. already has one of the highest tax compliance rates in the industrialized world. Compliance rates aren’t determined primarily by how onerous the enforcement regime, but instead by the complexity of the tax code itself and the size of its burden on individuals and the economy. Unsurprisingly, convoluted tax rules combined with extortionate rates tend to encourage non-compliance.

And while the U.S. tax code is hardly a model, it’s generally less bad than other industrialized nations. Second, even government estimates predict FATCA will bring in meaningless sums of revenue. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates FATCA will raise less than one billion annually, which means that even after ten years the total new revenues – should they materialize – won’t even pay for a single day of government operations at today’s spending levels.

As lawmaker fantasy runs aground on the rough shores of reality, the Treasury Department is stuck trying to implement a bad law full of dangerous ambiguity. So poorly conceived was the legislation that Treasury has repeatedly delayed its full implementation. Moreover, realizing that the legislation is largely unenforceable as written, they’ve begun negotiating directly with governments in hopes that they’ll preemptively sign away their fiscal sovereignty in exchange for promises of reciprocity. But Treasury has no authority to make these promises.

Without authorization from Congress, Treasury has embarked in setting a new course for international tax policy and relations. They are selling promises to deliver for foreign governments the same information FATCA demands from foreign institutions – meaning Treasury wants American banks to comply one day with the same onerous rules that Congress placed on FFIs, only instead of monitoring and reporting on citizens from one country our institutions would have to do so for all. This means imposing many billions in compliance burdens on domestic institutions, in hopes that the IRS may extort less than one billion in new annual revenue from the rest of the world. As bad a job as Congress has done in initially crafting the legislation, Treasury’s unrelenting effort to hammer a square legislative peg down the round hole of reality has only made a bad situation worse.

Today the Treasury Department is negotiating with more than 50 countries in an effort to implement FATCA. It’s entirely understandable that FFIs are encouraging their home governments to shoulder the burden of negotiating with Treasury. After all, the law in many cases arrogantly requires them to violate domestic human rights laws regarding privacy, placing FFIs between a legal rock and a fiscal hard place. But governments are doing themselves and their financial industries a disservice by contemplating entering into FATCA agreements with the U.S. Backlash against the law is growing, and Treasury is in a race against time to lock it into place before a repeal effort can gain steam.

As Treasury continues to set new policy behind the backs of Congress, and further drag domestic banks into the FATCA crosshairs, opposition to the law will hopefully grow. But it is necessary for financial institutions, both foreign and domestic, to stand up against the law, and for Congress to step in, rein in the Treasury Department, and undo a mess that they are ultimately responsible for creating.

The worse thing industry can do is meekly accept FATCA’s dictates as so many consultants and compliance industry experts are advising. They are interested in feathering their nests, as one compliance company’s representative revealed when stating that, “Everyone’s trying to make money on FATCA.” FFI’s and their governments should ignore self-serving advice and instead resist this arrogant U.S. foray into fiscal imperialism by demanding respect for their sovereign rights. U.S. lawmakers in turn should immediately repeal FATCA and replace it with a pro-growth agenda to simplify the tax code and lower rates. In so doing they can achieve the original FATCA goals of increasing both tax compliance and revenues, but in this way will do so by growing the economy instead of smothering it.

Andrew F. Quinlan is co-founder and president of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity (www.freedomandprosperity.org and @cfandp).

That a job destroying bill was attached to a jobs creation bill, the 2010 HIRE Act, renders the legislation a farce and exposes the true intent of the bill - coerce foreign financial institutions into becoming IRS agents.  The American Thinker called FATCA:  A Ticking Time Bomb for the Economy.

Buried in an ostensible jobs bill signed by President Obama last year is a little-noticed job-destroying government regulation that threatens to trigger a massive outflow of capital from the American economy.

FATCA was passed by a Democrat controlled Congress in 2010 (HR 2847).  The House vote is here and the Senate vote is here.

It's an appalling and despicable act of treachery that the job destroying HR 2847 was named the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act.

BRING BACK THE 91% TAX RATE

A Drudge Headline with the above Paul Krugman photo.

  BRING BACK THE 91% TAX RATE

The headline links to a New York Times article written by Paul Krugman titled:

The Twinkie Manifesto

Astoundingly, Krugman argues for the restoration of the 91% tax rate. It's epic! Apparently, Krugman is trying to 'out Hollande Hollande the French socialist' who is praised for raising taxes on the wealthy to 70%. Forget that money and businesses are fleeing France as the French economy continues to sink into the dark abyss of statism and socialism. Krugman writes:

Yet in the 1950s incomes in the top bracket faced a marginal tax rate of 91, that’s right, 91 percent, while taxes on corporate profits were twice as large, relative to national income, as in recent years. The best estimates suggest that circa 1960 the top 0.01 percent of Americans paid an effective federal tax rate of more than 70 percent, twice what they pay today.

Krugman the diehard Keynesian statist economist conveniently leaves out highly relevant issues and facts including:

1.  The US did not have a giant welfare-warfare state in the 1950's and 1960's,
2.  Tax rates were lowered because WW II debts were being paid off.
3.  The dollar was still tethered to gold and the purchasing power of the dollar was strong.
4.  Free markets, relatively speaking, and an absence of the draconian regulatory state were delivering middle class prosperity and economic growth.

Nowhere in Krugman's incomprehensible and infantile rant does he even address the wars, foreign policy, the militarized police state, corporatism, rent seeking cronyism or the fact that entitlements now exceed tax receipts, here.

The era of middle class prosperity that Krugman so longs for had nothing whatsoever to do with high tax rates because America didn't have an economy killing re-distributionist state in the 1950's and 1960's.  The middle class was prosperous because of low taxes, a stable gold backed dollar with strong purchasing power, post WW II peace, a massive winding down of military spending and a high level of economic freedom.

The nation that Krugman opines for never existed and is pure 100% fiction.  So the only thing that Krugman's pathetically weak mind can latch onto is the raw emotion of the tired old class warfare drama.

Today, of course, the mansions, armies of servants and yachts are back, bigger than ever — and any hint of policies that might crimp plutocrats’ style is met with cries of “socialism.”

For starters, building mansions creates jobs, servants are voluntarily and gainfully employed and it takes a lot of knowledgeable high tech engineering and labor talent to build a modern yacht!  Shall we outlaw mansions, servants and yachts because Mr. Krugman clearly finds these things offensive? 

The GOP Panics and Shows a Spine that Resembles Cooked Spaghetti

OKAY, I'm not going to scream one more time "Just Cut the Damn Spending!". Disturbingly, Politico is reporting that the GOP is ready to give in on Obamacare and higher taxes.

 How red-state governors are opening the doors to Obamacare

Bobby Jindal’s got a funny way of showing how much he hates Obamacare and Washington bureaucracy: The Louisiana governor’s about to invite the feds to set up a health insurance exchange right in his backyard. So is Rick Perry in Texas. Ditto for John Kasich in Ohio. And Scott Walker in Wisconsin. These Republican governors, and more than a dozen others in red states around the country, have decided it’s better to have Obamacare forced on them than to legitimize it by setting up their own exchanges, even if that means empowering the federal government at the expense of the states.

Whatever happened to all the Republican talk about nullifying Obamacare and refusing to comply with the implementation of the healthcare exchanges? On the tax front, the situation is equally bad.

 Some Republican governors soften on taxes

Some Republican governors are softening on the party’s hard-line toward tax increases for the wealthy, suggesting that GOP congressmen at least be open to rate hikes in exchange for a comprehensive fiscal agreement on taxes and entitlements. “The people have spoken, I think we’re going to have to be [flexible] now,” said Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, when asked if his party would now have to be open to taxes on the highest earners. “Elections do have consequences. The president campaigned on that.”

McDonnell, the outgoing head of the Republican Governors Association, made clear that raising taxes isn’t his first choice. But he said that the political reality of a Democratic president and Democratic Senate makes it unlikely that a grand bargain can be struck without some compromise on raising revenues.

Such spineless statist rhetoric isn't going to win over the conservative voters who have been opining for less government, less spending and lower taxes for years. Quite frankly, the Republicans are admitting that they are scared of the Democrats and even more scared of raising the issue of spending cuts.

Republicans are Crazy but Democrats and Liberals are Crazier

I tend to read just about everything that I can from the left, the right and everything in between simply because I so enjoy learning how folks think or, more precisely, don't think. Obviously, America is suffering a profound economic calamity; therefore, just about every ideological group has its own stance on how to solve the problem. Invariably, the position on the left almost always congeals to the same faux fix and progressives are fairly consistent in identifying what they perceive as the root cause of the problem.

 Jonathan Turley has a blog worth following because of its primary focus on civil liberties but on occasion other folks show up as guest bloggers on a variety of issues.

Selling Out Middle Class America

Submitted by: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger

I will mention two, among many, of the major factors in the decline of the American Middle Class laid out by the authors. The first is that until the 1970’s our Income Tax was really graduated to the point that government had ample revenue to do its job. The second is that one of the major revenue sources for the Federal Government was tariffs. It was the dismantling of the graduated Income Tax and the proliferation of trade agreements reducing tariffs (and tariff revenue) that have been major pieces in the shipping of jobs overseas, increasing our national debt and destroying what was the greatest industrial economy in the World.

That's it folks - the progressive solution to the economy: restore tax rates to pre-1970's levels and impose huge tariffs on foreign goods to drive up the protectionist price of everything. A history of federal tax rates is here.  There are a lot of years with tax rates in the 60%, 70%, 80% and even 90% plus percent tax rates.

According to progressives, government can only adequately do its job when those historically high tax rates are restored.  But in the 1940's, 50's and most of the 60's, American didn't have a welfare state where entitlement payments exceeded tax revenues. In fact, we barely had any personal entitlements at all.

It was LBJ's Great Society that spawned the gargantuan growth in socialism and entitlements that continue to this day, albeit on steroids.  LBJ also bankrupted the nation with the Vietnam War and a combination of progressive engineered entitlements and costly wars left the US in one pickle of a financial mess by the time Nixon arrived.  Creditors demanded payment for debt in gold.  Rather than wipe out whatever gold reserves we had backing the dollar, Nixon opted to just devalue the dollar by de-tethering it from gold which, of course, constituted a form of default.  Nixon also greatly expanded the size of government and entitlements.  Once the dollar was freed from the constraints of gold that forcibly instituted some measure of fiscal sanity, America rapidly descended into its 100% pure paper fiat monetary system.

Nixon also created the Environmental Protection agency (EPA) and other new government agency bureaucracies.  The EPA has become a noose around the neck of the US economy and many federal agencies wield so much authoritarian and dictatorial agency power that they have literally become power mad fiefdoms that aren't accountable to anybody, least of all the Congress that created these monsters.  The Nixon presidency did more damage to America and the American middle class than all presidents combined because his actions resulted in:

There are several factors that squeezed the middle class with devastating results.  1.  The loss of purchasing power of the dollar because working class wages never rose as fast as the decline in the purchasing of their wages and 2. The outsourcing of US manufacturing jobs that once paid the high wages that produced a strong middle class.  To further complicate the outsourcing problem, Congress did pass legislation that taxed US corporate profits earned on US soil at higher rates than profits earned on foreign soil.  The American middle class was betrayed by the very Congress Critters they elected.  What kind of elected officials literally pay companies to move offshore?  Traitors!

On the free trade issue, the liberals hardly have a legitimate grip because liberals don't understand the difference between true free trade agreements and corporatist protectionist agreements.  US trade agreements are nothing but corporatist written schemes and scams wherein spheres of influence and protectionism are divided up among rent seeking multi-national corporations.

The Kleptocracy of Cannibal Crony Capitalism. Bill Clinton and his Republican NAFTA Baby Co-Conspirators

Photo: America's favorite modern progressive Signing NAFTA: Clinton signed NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), an agreement with Canada and Mexico.

As liberals and progressives opine for higher taxes and more corporate protectionism, they sound like the regurgitated version of Francois Hollande, the French socialist prime minister who recently raised taxes on the wealthy to 70%.  Meanwhile, France is experiencing substantial capital flight as the French economy plunges into even more misery under the weight of statism, socialism and taxes.

The global economy is a whole lot more complicated than it was in the the 1950's, 60's and 70's when Americans were prosperous and hardworking producers in a relatively free economy.  A return to those days requires sound money, the substantial downsizing of government, a massively reduced tax burden, a huge reduction in draconian regulatory powers and PEACE instead of chronic war, something liberals and progressive would never allow.

I'm always beating up on the left when they claim they oppose wars.  Yeah, the GOP currently has the label of War Party but who got us into WW I, WW II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Balkan Wars - all progressive, liberal Democrats, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson and Clinton.

Progressive wars vaporized over 100 million folks and that doesn't include another 100 million folks who died under communism, mostly by starvation.

At the end of the day, liberals and progressives oppose freedom and prosperity because to them the great vat of humanity is nothing more than a human zoo that must be managed and controlled like  other members of the animal kingdom or even exterminated like cockroaches if humans are perceived as a common nuisance.

How Statism and the NWO Will Crash and Burn

If anything, government is an optimistic entity that automatically assumes that the economy will always do well, and perpetually and generously fill government coffers with an abundance of tax revenues. However, the decline and fall of the global economy has badly dinged tax collections. If folks aren't prosperous and making money, the plundering government's cut shrinks and shrinks substantially.

Government survives by either brute force or with the voluntary consent of the people because they perceive a value. But what happens when folks no longer perceive a value in government? Well, folks just opt out of the system, go underground and/or overtly or covertly indulge in non-compliance. When this happens, we see headlines and stories like this:

Island authorities denounce attack on tax police

ATHENS, Greece -- Local authorities on the Greek island of Hydra have denounced an attack by a local crowd on tax police after they detained a restaurant owner who did not provide receipts to clients.

The Friday incident happened after the inspectors wanted to transport the restaurant owner to Athens, an hour's ride away by fast boat. They were set upon by a local crowd, which also attacked the boat's crew.

The police, along with the restaurant owner, had to retreat to the island's police station, which was besieged until riot police arrived Saturday morning. Locals cut off the station's electricity and water supplies.

The Greeks have a long history of refusing to pay taxes to its corrupt and thieving government. However, the Greeks are far from the only folks indulging in a tax revolt. In Germany, statist socialists are alleging that Germans who put their money in Swiss banks are tax cheats who should be imprisoned.

German opposition leader attacks Swiss banks

Gabriel, whose Social Democrats (SPD) have blocked a deal between the German and Swiss governments to levy taxes on German assets in Swiss bank accounts, told Deutschlandfunk that Swiss banking practices in Germany were comparable with organised crime.

"It's a serious crime," said Gabriel, the chairman of the SPD who may run against Chancellor Angela Merkel in the 2013 election. "We're talking about organised crime in Swiss banks (operating) in Germany."

Gabriel, who plans to make criticism of banks a centrepiece of the SPD's 2013 campaign, added the sentence for large-scale tax evasion in Germany could be as long as 10 years in prison.

In Italy, another nation quite notorious for tax avoidance, the desperately broke Italian government is beefing up tax collection efforts.

Italy's tax hunters target super-rich and their yachts off the Sardinian coast

There used to be a time when Italy's super-rich gravitated to the smartest enclaves of Sardinia for a summer of relaxation and luxury. Not any more. In an increasingly austerity-conscious country, the yacht-owning classes are coming under increasing and unwelcome scrutiny, some of which would not look out of place in a scene from the film Apocalypse Now.

"We first spotted the targets with the helicopter's radar and closed in to identify about 50 boats off the two islands," said Italian coastguard captain Pietro Mele, describing a recent raid on yachts suspected of straying too close to the coast.

Although these are only a few examples of governments' insatiable appetite for other peoples money and how people fight back, the stone cold reality is that western governments have been indulging in unsustainable spending sprees for decades. Now that the massive pile of unsustainable debt is evidenced everywhere, another stone cold reality that directly impacts the people is the austerity of cutting public services because bigger and bigger percentages of national income are diverted to debt service. Tax receipts are going to the banksters and not the people.

In a bad and worsening economy, such a situation is the sum of all fears for the government. Not only do governments lack the resources to fund entitlements and public services, they've lost the trust of the people who are waking up to another reality, namely, that a big spending corrupt government wasn't such a good idea after all.

As the world unwinds according to the laws of financial physics and the fictitious fiat monetary paradise implodes, folks will be forced to plunge into raw survival mode as they seek and invent new paradigms of survival that most assuredly won't include trust in government and its army of bureaucratic goons. .

Meanwhile, folks accustomed to feeding off of everybody else will indeed clamor for a more violent and draconian government that will militarily plunder everybody and everything. But there comes a point when there is nothing left to plunder.

The only difference between the murderous and ruthless tactics of Mao/Stalin and Gang who killed 100 million folks during the 20th century alone, and the so-called soft socialism of the west is that the former didn't have the luxury of a wealthy economy to plunder. Well, the plundering class is rapidly running out of options because there isn't much left to plunder which is why the hysteria is now focused on 'tax the rich'. In France, the socialists have passed a law imposing a 75% tax on the rich. What will happen is that what productive capital that remains in socialist France will simply pack up and move to friendlier abodes. The French economy will be deprived of scare financial resources to reboot its ailing economy, the economy will worsen and French misery will intensify. Socialists never think about the future and merely dwell on the immediate and politically expedient that invariably includes class warfare.

At this juncture, it's safe to assume that the west (Europe and America) are going down and it won't be a soft landing. Things are about to get a whole lot worse, it's won't be a pretty sight, there will be massive human suffering and probably violence and massive civil unrest.

However, if folks can just resist the temptation to implement more bad government and thieving central banks, they will finally acquire a bright and prosperous future out of the pile of statist rubble.

Simply put, the glutenous beast that is devouring us must be starved if folks are to survive in peace, liberty and prosperity.  

Taxmageddon, the Bush Tax Cuts, the Middle Class and the AMT

The House of Representatives passed an extension of the Bush tax cuts and it will meet stiff opposition in the Democrat controlled Senate. The Democrats have defined the Bush tax cuts as exclusively being tax cuts for the rich or the 1%. It's simply not true. Because of inflation, the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), was created to close tax loopholes for high income earners.  However, the AMT has ensnared millions of middle class taxpayers into its orbit.

According to Forbes, the AMT is a middle class nightmare that Congress just refuses to fix.

Alternative minimum tax. This shadow tax system, created in 1969 to ensure a small number of rich folks paid at least some tax, afflicted 4.3 million upper middle class households in 2011 and in 2012 is menacing an additional 27 million...Of course it is Congress itself that created this peril. First, as part of the 1981 Reagan tax cuts, it indexed regular tax brackets, but not the AMT, for inflation. Then, in 2001, it made the Bush tax cuts look cheaper than they really were by cutting regular tax rates but not the AMT rate. Without those two bits of politically expedient tax writing, fewer than half a million families would now be paying the AMT, according to calculations by researchers at the Tax Policy Center. Those who owed AMT for 2011 had to wrestle with the 54-step Form 6251, Alternative Minimum Tax and possibly the 57-step Form 8801, Credit for Prior Year Minimum Tax, too. Sure, using software like Intuit’s TurboTax or H&R Block’s At Home makes the calculations manageable. But the AMT still makes planning difficult and punishes innocent folks with no more exotic “tax shelters” than high state and local tax deductions or lots of kids. It also raises real money—$39 billion in 2011...

The term Taxmageddon is no exaggeration.  This is how it will impact ordinary wage earners according to an Education News article titled Taxmageddon: Tax Tsunami Could Hit January 1, 2013

Roberto and Juanita have an Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) of $70,662. They are concerned about the looming Taxmageddon tax hikes and want to know how it will affect them. Their taxes will go up $4,138 next year due to Taxmageddon. After 2013, they will see a somewhat higher level of taxation (higher than the $4,138 tax hike for 2013).

2. Example #2 — Baby Boomer (AGI = $95,099)

Charles and Janet have an Adjusted Gross Income of $95,099. Due to the Taxmageddon, their taxes in 2013 will be $4,223 higher than in 2012. Each year after 2013, they will pay at least $4,200 more in taxes than they will pay in 2012. The later years will be higher than 2013 as Obamacare taxes are fully implemented. Of course, their tax bill will depend on their income in future years. 3. Example #3 — Low-Income Worker (AGI = $24,757)

Frank has an Adjusted Gross Income of $24,757. He does not consider himself a “low-income worker.” He works hard and earns a steady living but he is on a tight budget. He cannot afford a tax increase of any kind. Unfortunately, Frank will have to pay an additional $1,207 in taxes next year because Congress did not address the Taxmageddon nightmare. He will have to pay at least $1,200 each year thereafter to the IRS.

4. Example #4 — Millenial (AGI = $23,917) Teasha has an Adjusted Gross Income of $23,917. She has just started her career and is glad she was able to find a job. (Many of her friends have not been as fortunate and are living with their parents.) Teasha is also on a tight budget and wants to know what impact Taxmageddon will have on her. She will face a tax hike in 2013 of $1,099. She must pay similar tax amounts in subsequent years. 5. Example #5 — Retiree (AGI = $42,553)

Su Lin and Jun have an Adjusted Gross Income of $42,553. They are retired and live on a fixed income (mostly from Social Security and their retirement account). Because their income is fixed, it increases only slightly with cost-of-living adjustments. For their situation, they will see an increase of $857 in their 2013 tax bill. They will pay about $860 more in subsequent years than they pay in 2012.

The above cited examples are not rich folks but they are indeed middle class folks who will get clobbered with higher taxes.

The Tax Foundation did a study on the state by state impact of failing to renew the Bush tax cuts.

How the States Would Be Affected by Extension of the Bush Tax Cuts and Other Provisions

Generally, high-income states would receive the largest tax relief, because they pay the most taxes under our extremely progressive federal income tax code. They are also the states most affected by the AMT. New York, for instance, would save about $51 billion in taxes, or 8.05 percent of income, if these tax cuts were extended, including the AMT patch. That amounts to $5,452 per tax filer. More than half of that (62 percent) is due to the AMT patch. California would save about $71 billion in taxes, or 6.89 percent of income, if all tax cuts were extended. That amounts to $4,242 per tax filer. Again, more than half of that (60 percent) is due to the AMT patch.

The Bush tax cuts included a built-in temporary fix for the AMT nightmare but this temporary fix will expire if the Bush tax cuts expire on 12/31/12.

Meanwhile, we've got the liberal media claiming that the Bush tax cuts only benefitted the 1% as they clamor for more taxes on the rich when in fact they are advocating for massive taxes on the middle class. The anti-middle class Huffington Post let loose with an emotionally charged and blatantly inaccurate assessment of the Bush tax cuts while calling for higher taxes.

Expiration of Bush Tax Cuts for the 1 Percent Are a Step Forward, But Not Enough

President Obama is currently confronting mostly Republican opponents over whether to extend the Bush tax cuts to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers. Between 1979 and 2007, the richest 1 percent received three-fifths of all the income gains in the country. Most of this went to the richest 10th of that 1 percent, people with an average income of $5.6 million (including capital gains).

While it may be true that the 1% are indeed the primary recipient of income gains, that's because of the corrupt financial system, the corrupt political system, crony capitalism, corporatism, the scourge of the regulatory state and the determination of the left to forcibly impose a Soviet styled command and control economy upon America.  For the Huffington Post to deceptively assert that the Bush tax cuts only apply to those with an average annual income of $5.6 is beyond disingenuous, it's outright journalistic fraud.

The solution to our economic and fiscal nightmare is economic liberty and sound money, something shunned by both the Republicans and the Democrats.  The Republicans may be advocating for an extension of the Bush tax cuts simply because it's politically expedient in an election year but they hardly have the moral high ground on the issue.  The Republicans love cutting taxes to appease its base but they also has a severe spending disease.  Republicans truly believe that spending doesn't matter!

Republican have an Incurable Spending Disease

The Tea Party Republicans Spent More Than the Dems They Replaced.

A logical and sane person would conclude that Congress Critters should be motivated to fix the AMT problem.  However, such is not the case and the middle class routinely gets pounded with taxes despite all the spin of both parties.

Olympic Gold and Geithner's Cut of All That Glitters!

Olympic gold medals haven't been 100% pure gold since the 1912 Olympics, one year before the Federal Reserve was created. But what are the medals worth besides the obvious value of prestige, achievement and national honor?

What the 10 Biggest 'Gold' Medals Would Be Worth, If They Were Gold

The price of gold has soared from roughly $1,000 an ounce during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing to $1,584 an ounce by mid-July of this year.

If an Olympian or the average Joe tried to cash in a medal from this year's games by means other than an auction or a sports memorabilia dealer, they'd be parting with 92.5% silver, 6.16% copper and 1.34% percent gold. International Olympic Committee rules dictate that gold medals need to contain at least 550 grams of silver and at least six grams of pure gold coating. That adds up to a medal worth roughly $800 for "gold" medal winners in London, which is a huge discount from a medal worth its weight in gold.

Since the actual medal weight of gold and silver has significantly declined over the years, Olympics medals have a whole lot less gold and silver value than they used to have. More interestingly, while the weight of the gold and silver in the Olympic medals is shrinking, the government's claim via taxation is also quite significant.

Go for the Gold! (Pay the IRS.)

Even by the standards of our government, the numbers are insane.

For instance: Americans who win bronze will pay a $2 tax on the medal itself. But the bronze comes with a modest prize—$10,000 as an honorarium for devoting your entire life to being the third best athlete on the planet in your chosen discipline. And the IRS will take $3,500 of that, thank you very much.

There are also prizes that accompany each medal: $25,000 for gold, $15,000 for silver, and $10,000 for bronze. Silver medalists will owe $5,385. You win a gold? Timothy Geithner will be standing there with his hand out for $8,986.

So as of this writing, swimmer Missy Franklin—who's a high school student—is already on the hook for almost $14,000. By the time she's done in the pool, her tab could be much higher. (That is, unless she has to decline the prize money to placate the NCAA—the only organization in America whose nuttiness rivals the IRS.)

ATR notes that the real twist of the knife is that most other Olympians won't pay any taxes on their medals because America is one of only a handful of countries which taxes "worldwide" prize income earned overseas.

So much for American exceptionalism! About the only thing America is exceptional at is plunder.

America Tax Slaves Work 6.5 Months Every Year to Pay for Government

Every year, Americans for Tax Reform publishes its annual study called the Cost of Government Day. It's an incredibly researched and detailed study because it factors in the cost of all government at the federal, state, city and local level.

The Cost of Government Day for 2012 is July 15 which means that folks who work and produce must turn over 6.5 months worth of their wages and earning to various government entitles. It's a fascinating study worth reading.

COST OF GOVERNMENT DAY

Highlights from the report are as follows:

Federal Spending

The average American worker will have to labor 88 days just to pay for federal spending, which consumes 24.04 percent of the national income. This is a small improvement from last year, when individuals had to work 91 days, and the previous year, when taxpayers worked 93 days.

State and Local Spending

In 2012, the average American labored 40.04 days to fund state and local spending. This is roughly the same as the number of days worked in 2011; but it is one day more than 2010.

Regulatory Costs

The average American must labor 69 days in 2012 just to cover the costs of government regulations. In 2010 and 2011, laborers had to work 71 days to cover the same costs. 2012 regulations consume about 19 percent of gross domestic product. In 2001, regulations consumed 14 percent of gross domestic product; the gap between 2002 and 2012 represents the largest increase of regulatory burdens yet.

No citizen who has to toil for 6.5 months of the year just to pay the thieving government can possibly call themselves free. In fact, they are government slaves.

Why Americans Need to Just Starve the Beast

Governments only survive so long as the people confer legitimacy upon them and it's very much an issue of trust. Once trust flies out the window and governments are perceived as corrupt and unjust, folks start seeking ways to stiff the government with the goal of ultimately collapsing the government.

The Greeks are notorious for not paying taxes to its corrupt and thieving government and it is estimated that 40-50% of all Greek economic activity is underground and beyond the tax collectors reach, here.

If you think there's been a tax revolt in the U.S. -- or even California -- consider Greece. The estimates we've heard, from the sources that seem the most reliable: 40-50 percent of the Greek economy is underground. i.e., untaxed. When we were in Spain, people there were embarrassed that the estimate was as high as 25 percent. In the U.S., the usual estimates are less than 10 percent.

Unlike Europeans, the American people have a very long history of being obedient and tax compliant citizens because Americans have a far higher degree of trust when it comes to the government. However, that paradigm is changing as folks wake up to the stone cold reality that American isn't the land of the free and the home of the brave but the land of the slave and the home of the fee. All centralized governments ultimately fail and the bigger they are, the harder they fall. The US government at all levels has grown so large, so powerful and so oppressive that Americans are finally beginning to notice.

Gary North writes, here.

Americans are learning how to beat the system, cheat the system, and outfox the system. As the bureaucrats tighten their many nooses, Americans are finding ways to slip the noose....The heart of every legal system is legitimacy. If the government — family, church, or civil — is viewed as legitimate, people who are under its jurisdiction cooperate. They add self-government to external systems of sanctions. If they refuse to do this, the government’s enforcement system cannot force them to obey consistently. The system does not have enough resources to enforce compliance.

At some point, the government loses its ability to gain its goals. Collecting more taxes in Greece is not possible. The Greek government can promise austerity, but it can gain this only by reducing spending, not by collective more taxes. The same is true of Spain. The same is true of Italy.

If the people who live under the regime think the regime is corrupt, they cheat. They feel no guilt. If they think a law is immoral or stupid, they refuse to cooperate. The government can do little to change this outlook, other than shrink. No government does this voluntarily.

The federal government is now at the limit of enforcement. The bureaucrats write 83,000 pages of new rules every year, yet the country changes only slowly. The bureaucrats think they are in charge. They are not.

Governments understand that compliance must be voluntary, based on fear and despite the size and draconian powers of the US government, it really doesn't have the raw and absolute power to police and control the activities of 310 million folks.  Americans are finally becoming a nation of vigorous tax cheats because they fully comprehend that the system is designed for plunder.

It seems to be that as the United States federal government and the Presidency in particular have gradually morphed into something more like a European monarchy, our attitude towards its sovereignty has shifted.

We have a Treasury secretary who cheated on his taxes. But he is not the only one. There are probably more people who buy goods and services via the internet and catalogues who don’t pay sales taxes than people who do. We’ve been rehabbing our 132-year-old home for several years now, and I can tell you, some subcontractors expect to be paid in cash under the table. We follow speed limits when we think they are being enforced only. Dads let their teenaged kids drink beer. People cross the state line to buy fireworks, or any good when the sales tax is lower. People on unemployment compensation stretch it out so they can work on their eBay business.

Retirees buy discount drugs from Canada. Families share prescription antibiotics with other family members for whom they have not been prescribed....

And most people have absolutely no moral compunction about any of these violations of the either the spirit or the letter of the law, because deep down they no longer believe that the law, especially the tax code, represents any compelling moral principle, nor do its dictates seem any longer to be fair.

Read the rest here

Forbes 

. The liberty and prosperity of the American people will depend on their willingness to reject this hideous monster called government. Americans need to stop feeding the monster because that's the only way to kill the monster - we need to just starve the beast. The beast will not voluntarily relinquish its absolute power nor is it suicidal. The beast is a ravenous, thieving and murderous glutton that voraciously consumes everything in its path.

Americans started a Revolution in 1776 on a British Stamp Act tax so puny that no one in America today would even notice the tax. The Declaration of Independence is an indictment against King George because of his taxation policies. The language contained in our historical Declaration of Independence aptly describes the tax tyranny Americans experience today as inflicted upon them by their state and federal governments.

“..when a long train of abuses and usurpations…evinces a design to reduce them…under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

“He has made judges dependent on his Will alone”

“He has erected a multitude of New Offices and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their acts of pretended Legislation”

“For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent”

“He has…..destroyed the lives of our people.”

“A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people”.

As the government confiscates more and more of earned income from those who produce to fund its massive redistributionist schemes, nonstop wars, pork and fascist corporate welfare state, Americans keeps sinking further into poverty and misery.

Government is out of control, corrupt and unaccountable at both the federal and state level. Government power grabs come at the expense of personal liberty and the prosperity of its citizens. Government monetary and fiscal incompetence are robbing us blind.

Even worse, a nation once renowned for its extraordinary civil liberties is being churned into a Nazi style police state.

Democrats and Republicans are notoriously bipartisan when it comes to hacking away at civil liberties and economic liberties. Once a proud, strong and wealthy creditor nation, American is now a pathetic debtor nation marching toward extinction.

America is at a critical intersection in its history – we either reject the almighty state as the cornucopia of plenty and we demand our constitutional liberty or we just surrender to totalitarian slavery.

Something for Conservatives to Think About: Obamacare Really Was a Republican Initiative

Obamacare really was hatched by the Heritage Foundation in the late 1980's, supported by Republicans during the 1990's, tested in Massachusetts by a Republican governor and finally passed as Obamacare. Newt Gingrich got rich promoting the healthcare mandate. Despite campaigning against Obamacare, Gingrich was one of the godfathers of the healthcare mandate. The Nation Review disclosed some of the details of his healthcare mandate business.

Gingrich Health-care Think Tank Raked in $37 Million

A think tank founded by GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich collected at least $37 million over the past eight years from major health-care companies and industry groups, offering special access to the former House speaker and other perks, according to records and interviews.

The Center for Health Transformation, which opened in 2003, brought in dues of as much as $200,000 per year from insurers and other health-care firms, offering some of them “access to Newt Gingrich” and “direct Newt interaction,” according to promotional materials. The biggest funders, including firms such as AstraZeneca, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Novo Nordisk, were also eligible to receive discounts on “products and workshops” from other Gingrich groups.

The health center advocated, among other things, requiring that “anyone who earns more than $50,000 a year must purchase health insurance or post a bond,” a type of insurance mandate that has since become anathema to conservatives.

The problem with Republicans is that they fail to hold their elected leaders accountable and they also have a high level of trust in the GOP, its leaders and elected officials. It's the responsibility of the Republican voting base to know what Republicans actually do. Republicans are notorious for talking the talk and never walking the walk.

Still, Obamacare won't solve our healthcare nightmare. Rather than Republicans and Democrats constantly playing the blame game with each other, America needs leadership that will solve some of our big problems, including heathcare.

Medicare and Medicaid is costing us about $1 trillion annually, or nearly half of the $2.2 trillion or so collected in federal taxes.

Medicare and Medicaid spending rose 10% in the second quarter from a year earlier to a combined annual rate of almost $992 billion, according to new data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The two programs are on track to rise $90 billion in 2011 and crack the $1 trillion milestone for the first time.

Medicare. The insurance program for the elderly and disabled grew 8.3% from a year earlier to a $554 billion annual rate in the past three months, the BEA reports. Enrollment will grow from 49 million today to 60 million in 2018.

Medicaid. The federal-state cost of medical care for the poor and nursing homes for the elderly rose 12.3% to a $438 billion annual rate. The expiration of the stimulus law will cut the federal share of the program from about 70% to 60% in the last half of this year, shifting about $40 billion in annual costs back to the states.

Read the rest here, USA Today

Earth to America:  We already have a socialist healthcare system and it's very, very expensive.

Solutions anybody?

Taxes are US. The Biggest Tax Increases in US History.

With all the hysteria over the Supreme Court upholding what the federal government is already constitutionally empowered to do, namely to tax, the Obamacare tax is far more relevant when viewed in the context of historical tax increases. The Washington Post has an interesting piece on the issue of taxation along with the biggest taxes in US taxing history. Actually, the Washington Post used research compiled by others, who made the above chart, to make an important point.

No, ‘Obamacare’ isn’t ‘the largest tax increase in the history of the world’ (in one chart)

Since the Supreme Court decision, Republicans have been calling the Affordable Care Act “the largest tax increase in the history of the world.” Politifact rates this false. Kevin Drum’s got a table of the 15 significant tax increases since 1950, and the Affordable Care Act, which amounts to a tax increase of 0.49 percent of GDP, comes in 10th. Austin Frakt took Drum’s table and made a chart...

The tax increases are instructive on many levels, especially in how taxes are raised to fund the insane wars (welfare for defense contractors).

The largest tax increases were imposed by Truman (Revenue Act of 1950, Revenue Act 1951 and Excess Profits Tax of 1950)  to fund the Korean War. Johnson's two taxes, the Temporary Surcharge of 1968 and the Tax Increase of 1966, were imposed on the American people to fund the Vietnam War.

Reagan, revered by Republicans for his extensive taxation and spending, piled on 5 new and substantial tax increases and is probably the biggest taxing president in US history.   Reagan taxes:

Tax Increase of 1983
Deficit Reduction Act of 1984
Tax Reform Act of 1986
Budget Reconciliation of 1987
The largest Social Security Tax Hike in US history - the Reagan Social Security Tax of 1983.

Of the 15 top tax hikes, the scorecard is: Truman 3, Johnson 2, Carter 1, Nixon 1, Reagan 5, George H.W. Bush 1, Clinton 1, Obama 1 (of the 15 biggest tax hikes, Obamacare ranks 10th).

For more on the Social Security Tax, see:

Yes My Fellow Americans, Congress Really Did Steal Your Social Security

For more on war expenditures, see:

Yes, America really does spend over 50% of all tax receipts on wars

Clearly, both the Republicans and Democrats are responsible for vastly increasing federal taxes and most of that tax revenue has been spent on the empire and damn wars.  But the real issue is that America is broke and bankrupt and we need to make some tough decisions.  We can't continue to spend $3.7 trillion on tax revenues of about $2.2 trillion.  Something's got to give.  Medicare and Medicaid already eat up about $1 trillion a year and it's been reported that entitlements now exceed total federal revenues.

Yes, America is already a socialist nation and has been for decades,despite Republicans who screech their opposition to socialism while actually clamoring for more social spending (Medicare Part D comes to mind).  For the Democrats, America just isn't socialist enough and won't be until the government has the power to expropriate 100% of everything from wages to assets and property.

We can continue to blame the governments we elect or we can act responsibly and demand less spending and a balanced budget.  After all, we are well on the road to becoming Greece.  When the SHTF, life really does become quite miserable.

One final note.  Yes, the Republican socialists who sailed into Congress after the 2010 GOP general election sweep actually spent more money than the Dems they replaced.

The Tea Party Republicans Spent More Than the Dems They Replaced

And let us not forget that while Republicans are suddenly screaming about the debt, the Republicans were in fact responsible for most of the debt until Obama arrived to level the playing field in the never ending game of "Who can bankrupt America the fastest?".

Yes, America really does spend over 50% of all tax receipts on wars

The above photo is from a very disturbing Rolling Stone magazine photo collection of US soldiers celebrating their kills, here.

WAR. WAR. WAR.  It's all America ever does.  America has been at war with somebody ever since I can remember and I can remember as far back as the early 1960's.  What is wrong with America?  Should we change our name to Murder, Inc.?  America is the only nation on the planet that murders folks all over the world for defense contractor profits.

How many folks has America been involved in killing?

Let’s Do War by the Numbers Because We Love to Kill

Liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, Americans are addicted to the fantasy that war is noble, that murder is moral and that righteous people kill in the name of their flag.

WW I, 35,000,000 dead

WW II, At least 50,000,000 dead

Since the end of WW II, another 20,000,000 to 30,000,000 folks have died as a direct result of U.S. foreign interventionism.

American politicians love to talk about American Exceptionalism and the flag waving voters eat it up. We are exceptional all right – exceptional in the art of war and murder.

What has our lust for blood cost us? It’s cost us ‘Shock and Awe’ economic destruction. We are now barely a shadow of our once free and prosperous republic and we’ve morphed into Nazi Germany. America is now the Evil Empire that threatens life, peace and prosperity everywhere.

What is the annual cost of our perpetual non-stop wars? Let’s start with the federal budget. From the website of the White House, here’s the budget.

                            2011               2012
 Spending             3,603              3,796 Trillion
Tax Receipts         2,303              2,469
 Deficit                 1,300              1,327 

Source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assets/tables.pdf

More astounding, entitlement payouts exceed tax revenues. In April, 2011 Fox News reported in an article titled Government Cash Handouts Now Top Tax Revenues  that tax receipts no longer even cover entitlement costs. The figures quoted in the Fox News article are now a few years old and if anything, the entitlements have increased while revenues have remained flat as a result of the miserable economy.

U.S. households are now getting more in cash handouts from the government than they are paying in taxes for the first time since the Great Depression.

Households received $2.3 trillion in some kind of government support in 2010. That includes expanded unemployment benefits, as well as payments for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and stimulus spending, among other things.

But that’s more than the $2.2 trillion households paid in taxes, an amount that has slumped largely due to the recession, according to an analysis by the Fiscal Times. Also, an estimated 59% of the 308.7 million Americans in this country get at least one federal benefit, according to the Census Bureau, based on 2009 data. An estimated 46.5 million get Social Security; 42.6 million get Medicare; 42.4 million get Medicaid; 36.1 million get food stamps; 12.4 million get housing subsidies; and 3.2 million get Veterans' benefits.

How much are we spending on the never ending wars, the foreign policy machine and the Empire? 

In a piece titled Tomgram: Chris Hellman, $1.2 Trillion for National Security and  posted at Tomsdispatch.com, Chris Helman, one of the few foreign policy analysts to put the true cost of the Empire into focus, writes:

Normally, in media accounts, you hear about the Pentagon budget and the war-fighting supplementary funds passed by Congress for our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That already gets you into a startling price range -- close to $700 billion for 2012 -- but that’s barely more than half of it. If Americans were ever presented with the real bill for the total U.S. national security budget, it would actually add up to more than $1.2 trillion a year….

For 2012, the White House has requested $558 billion for the Pentagon’s annual “base” budget, plus an additional $118 billion to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. At $676 billion, that’s already nothing to sneeze at, but it’s just the barest of beginnings when it comes to what American taxpayers will actually spend on national security. Think of it as the gigantic tip of a humongous iceberg.

To get closer to a real figure, it’s necessary to start peeking at other parts of the federal budget where so many other pots of security spending are squirreled away….

Missing from the Pentagon’s budget request, for example, is an additional $19.3 billion for nuclear-weapons-related activities…

So, even though we’re barely started, we’ve already hit a total official FY 2012 Pentagon budget request of: $703.1 billion dollars For starters, that $117.8 billion war-funding request for the Department of Defense doesn’t include certain actual “war-related fighting” costs. Take, for instance, the counterterrorism activities of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development….

$711.8 billion.

The White House has also requested $71.6 billion for a post-2001 category called “homeland security”… 

$765.3 billion.

The U.S. intelligence budget was technically classified prior to 2007, although at roughly $40 billion annually, it was considered one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington. …

$818.4 billion.

Veterans programs are an important part of the national security budget with the projected funding figure for 2012 being $129.3 billion…

$947.7 billion.

If you include the part of the foreign affairs budget not directly related to U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other counterterrorism operations, you have an additional $18 billion in direct security spending. Of this, $6.6 billion is for military aid to foreign countries, while almost $2 billion goes for “international peacekeeping” operations. A further $709 million has been designated for countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction… This leaves us at:

$965.7 billion.

As with all federal retirees, U.S. military retirees and former civilian Department of Defense employees receive pension benefits from the government. The 2012 figure is $48.5 billion for military personnel, $20 billion for those civilian employees, which means we’ve now hit:

$1,034.2 billion. (Yes, that’s $1.03 trillion!)

When the federal government lacks sufficient funds to pay all of its obligations, it borrows. Each year, it must pay the interest on this debt which, for FY 2012, is projected at $474.1 billion. The National Priorities Project calculates that 39% of that, or $185 billion, comes from borrowing related to past Pentagon spending. Add it all together and the grand total for the known national security budget of the United States is:

$1,219.2 billion. (That’s more than $1.2 trillion.)

Chris Helman isn’t the only person to expose the true cost of the wars that are bankrupting us. Ron Paul said in one of the Republican  debates "I'm not sure I can get anybody to agree with me on this panel, but we spend $1.5 trillion overseas in wars that we don't need to be in and we need to cut there.".

Ron Paul: Time to stop spending trillions on war

The Washington Post, a pro-war and pro-interventionist mouthpiece of the elites, even whined that the current Iraq War alone would cost us more $3 trillion and that was back in 2008. 

The Iraq War Will Cost Us $3 Trillion, and Much More

If $3 trillion bucks sounds like an insane amount of money, apparently the Washington Post vastly underestimated our war costs. Steve Chapman in a Real Clear Politics piece titled “The Unaffordability of Endless War” said “Scholars Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia and Linda Bilmes of Harvard published a book in 2008 called "The Three Trillion Dollar War," which gives a more realistic estimate. But that, too, is an understatement. They figure that when all long-run costs are factored in, the tab will be at least $5 trillion and could reach $7 trillion, or nearly twice as much as this year's entire federal budget.” And that was two years ago. I asked Bilmes for an update, and she said some obligations, like veterans' medical and disability compensation costs, "have exceeded our earlier projections." Do I hear $8 trillion?”

$8,000,000,000,000 and counting? That was back in 2010 and since then Obama and Gang have escalated the war in Afghanistan, extended it into Pakistan, waged war on Libya, now wants to go to war with Syria and is sending troops to Africa. 

Yet, Americans continue to wave the flag and vote for more warmongers. Romney has vowed to increase military spending by $3 trillion. Will American bloodlust ever be satiated?

But by far the worst manifestations of military powers and maintaining a bankrupting empire transgress beyond the horrifying spectacle of the physical and human carnage of war because those same folks who deceptively internalized that war is noble also become its ultimate victims. Sooner or later the flag waving stops when folks realize that they have been systematically shorn of their own liberty and prosperity. The film clips of euphorically happy flag waving Germans idolizing Hitler and his evil is a stark contrast to the starving, homeless and terrified Germans in bombed out and burned out cities after WW II.

Worshiping the flag is most dangerous when folks fail to even realize what precisely the flag stands for. For Americans, they will eventually come to the frightening realization that they put their faith and trust in a government that betrayed them as they are forced to accept that they have been nothing more than pawns on the financial chessboard of empire wherein the wealth and power of the nation has been viciously concentrated into the hands of the ruling few – Banksters and their power brokers who delivered unto the people unemployment, economic misery, fiat currency, wars and grim futures.

Yet, the people cannot be absolved of responsibility.  They voted for everything they got and will get.  They delivered themselves into a totalitarian impoverishing hell.

At this point, what does the flag stand for? Nothing but the tens of trillions poured down the scary black hole of dark nothingness and militarism gone mad as the people ponder the failures of an evil debt ridden empire that bankrupted a once great, glorious, free and prosperous nation.

By the way, America really is spending over half of its $2.3-2.4 trillion in tax receipts on the wars, the foreign policy machine and the Evil Empire that is stretched around the entire planet.

We may as well rename our federal taxes the Military Tax or the War Tax or the Empire Tax because it's very appropriate.

The American people simply made the decision to relinquish their liberty and squander their prosperity on senseless wars and empire.  That's not something that sane folks do.  In many ways, our elected leaders mirror the souls of the people and it's clearly evident that the people and their leaders are in sync - both are psychotically bat shit crazy.

The price of empire is quite steep.  It crushes nations and brings them to their knees.  Every empire in history ultimately bites the dust.  The American Empire will be no different.  

How Apple Sticks It to High-Tax States

The apple of the taxpayers eye? Apple Computer is notoriously good at legal tax avoidance which is a sound business strategy. But Apple also shakes down states and cities for taxpayer dollars and that's corporate welfare.  Gary North at The Tea Party Economist has the highest praise for Apple's ability to avoid taxes.

Apple serves its customers well by cutting its costs. Taxes are a cost.

Apple serves its shareholders well by increasing profits. Cutting taxes increases profits.

By setting up divisions in Nevada, where there is mo state income tax on corporations, Apple avoids the grasping hand of California, which taxes corporations at 8.8%

I love it!

Across the nation, Apple stiffs states that impose income taxes.

When companies sell ideas or digits, they can operate anywhere. They should go where taxes are low.This is what they are doing.

The politicians grind their teeth. “How dare these firms go where we can’t get at their bank accounts?” It’s so easy when you know how.  

Apple knows how.

Read the rest here

The Tea Party Economist

In Texas, Apple is robbing the taxpayers and Texas is a low tax state.  

The state of Texas has promised Apple $21 million. The City of Austin has promised Austin $8.6 million.

Now it’s Travis County’s turn to pay up. Apple executives will meet with Travis County Commissioners Monday to hammer out a tax incentive package the county will offer the computer giant.

The commission will vote Tuesday on whether or not to give Apple $6 million in tax incentives. It’s not thought that the commission will put up any opposition to the deal.

Apple is looking for a total $35.6 million in tax breaks in order to expand its operations in Austin. Apple is supposed to hire 3,500 people and expand its North Austin campus as part of the deal.

No one is government has outlined just how the taxpayers who are bankrolling the deal will benefit from their investment.

But city and county leaders are already handing out goodies to special interest groups and have politicized the Apple deal.

Read the rest here

The Digital Texan 

Just how rich is Apple?

Apple (AAPL) is a cash cow. In its latest quarterly report , Apple listed $10.1 billion in cash, $18.4 billion in short-term marketable securities, and $81.6 billion in long-term marketable securities. In total, Apple is carrying $110 billion in cash and investment securities on top of 929,277,000 shares outstanding....

Right now, Apple is the largest corporation in the world and boasts a $560 billion market capitalization.

Read the rest here

Seeking Alpha

Judy Morris