Posts Tagged ‘taxes’

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Steve Wynn Blasts Obama

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

On Wynn Resorts’ Feb 25th’s earnings call, CEO Steve Wynn blasted the Obama administration and Congress for anti-business policies and destructive tax policies. A professional CEO’s atypical engagement in political discourse on an earnings call speaks to the extent of the problem with the Obama-Pelosi-Reid leftist triumvirate.

Here is an excerpt of the call. It’s one of Wynn’s answers to an analyst question.

[A - Stephen Wynn]: …. Job formation and the kinds of companies that make jobs are under attack in the United States of America.

You know, MGM aside for a moment. Last year we created almost 5,000 jobs and immediately became the target of the administration. Businesses that created jobs, let alone gaming companies that created jobs, had to be no good. I mean, it is preposterous that businesses are under attack in the United States of America. Anybody that makes over $250,000 in the form of a personal income tax return is now, by Washington definition, a rich person, when everybody who has got a college degree knows that the personal income tax rate in the United States of America is the business tax of America. Every subchapter S, every individual proprietorship and every partnership in the United States of America files tax returns as individuals, and when they do, and they show that they made 2 million or 3 million or, God forbid, 4 million, they pay the income tax rate; they deduct their working expenses, their living expenses; and then they invest in a new store, a new shop, and most of the time 25% of their profits, quote, unquote, are tied up in accounts receivable or inventory. But all of the sudden, all of those people who make over 250,000 are rich folks to be fleeced. And if that’s job formation stimulation in America, I’m Mary Poppins. And if I sound angry about it and disgusted, I am disgusted and angry at the apparent ignorance of the administration and the Congress to recognize the fact that the individual tax rate in the United States of America is, in fact, a business tax of America. And if you keep banging on that, you will destroy the incentive for job formation in the United States of America. And that’s simple truth, simple truth. And whether politicians like it or don’t like it means nothing to me. And that’s why I’m pessimistic about Las Vegas because those are our customers.

Those people out there hustling their business, and God forbid, showing that they made a million dollars as a partnership or as an individual. Yes, they’re the enemy now. They’re the rich folks. Well until we get over this, America’s in for hard times because what’s going to happen is the people that are going to suffer from what’s going on are the working class of America. My 15 or 20,000 employees, they’re the ones that are in trouble. The reason they’re in trouble is this demolition of the dollar is going to reduce the buying power of the working class of America as sure as we gave them a salary cut of 25%.

And that’s another thing that doesn’t seem to be clear to the brilliant people in Washington, D.C. They’re not just our customers, they are my employees. And until my employees get the drift of what’s being done to them, America’s in trouble. Next question.

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Big Government Big Problems

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Behind Door Number One, we have tickets to the fabulous “Suddenly Chavez” starring everybody’s favorite socialist, President Hugo Chavez. Tell ‘em what they won, Hugo!

“I call on the whole country: ‘Switch off the lights.’”

The wonders of state-owned enterprise and the fruits of socialism.

TRINIDAD-AMERICAS-SUMMIT-CHAVEZ-OBAMA

And, behind Door Number Two, we have tickets to D.C.’s very own “Global Warming on Ice” starring everybody’s not-so-closet socialist, President Barack Obama. Tell ‘em what they won, Barack!

Please excuse the interruption, President Obama had to stay home today because it was a snow day. He and the other 230,000 Federal employees working in Washington D.C. have the day off. Cost to you and me: $100 MILLION (for the day). I’ll save you the time of doing the math — that works out to about $90K average annual comp (before benefits and payroll taxes) per Federal employee.

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Yeah, I’m the taxman

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Let me tell you how it will be;
There’s one for you, nineteen for me.
‘Cause I’m the taxman,
Yeah, I’m the taxman.
- The Beatles

Here are some of the new taxes Obama has proposed so far. Note that these tax increases exclude the hundreds of billions worth of new taxes that would be part of Obamacare. Of course, they also exclude what could be trillions of dollars from every good socialist’s wet dream, Cap and Tax (a dream perhaps shared by Bin Laden).

From Breitbart:

  • Raise the top two income tax rates for individuals, from 33 percent and 35 percent, to 36 percent and 39.6 percent, respectively. Unless Congress intervenes, those rates will rise next Jan. 1 when Bush’s tax cuts expire. That government would reap $365 billion over the next decade.
  • Limit the itemized tax deductions high earners can claim for charitable donations, mortgage interest and state and local taxes, raising about $210 billion for the next decade.
  • Increase the top capital gains tax rate from 15 percent to 20 percent for families making more than $250,000 a year and individuals making more than $200,000. The proposal would raise about $105 billion.
  • Impose a “financial crisis responsibility fee” on large financial institutions, raising $90 billion over the next decade.
  • Restrict the ability of international companies to defer taxes on profits made overseas, raising about $26 billion over the next decade.
  • Impose a total of about $39 billion in tax increases on oil, gas and coal companies over the next decade.
  • Change the way profits made by investment fund managers are taxed, raising an additional $24 billion over the next decade.

To be fair, there are a few tax cuts. However, note that none of these qualify as effectively new tax cuts.

From Breitbart:

  • Make the research and experimentation tax credit permanent, saving businesses about $83 billion over the next decade.
  • Extend a provision allowing businesses buying equipment such as computers to speed up depreciation through 2010, saving them $20 billion over the next decade.
  • Repeal a widely ignored law that taxes the personal use of company-issued cell phones like other fringe benefits, saving taxpayers $2.8 billion over 10 years.

Now, there are a few real tax cuts. However, always the good class warrior, Obama Zedong saved all those for his primary constituent class.

From Breitbart:

  • The Making Work Pay tax credit provides families with up to $800 a year and individuals up to $400 a year . Extending the tax credit through 2011 would save them $31 billion.
  • The capital gains tax hike does NOT apply to families making less than $250,000 or individuals making less than $200,000.

So, the worst part of all this is that Obama is still projecting not just a deficit for 2011, but a massive deficit of a whopping $1.3 TRILLION. THAT’S ALMOST 10% OF GDP!!!!

Could I interest you in a nice shiny new Treasury bond? We have an extensive selection.

if you drive a car, car; – I’ll tax the street;
if you try to sit, sit; – I’ll tax your seat;
if you get too cold, cold; – I’ll tax the heat;
if you take a walk, walk; – I’ll tax your feet.
- The Beatles

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U.S. Debt: Tick Tock Tick Tock

Friday, January 29th, 2010

I haven’t yet read the New York Times best seller, This Time is Different by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, but I plan to. Reinhart and Rogoff, two well-pedigreed economists, have analyzed over 250 financial crises in 66 countries over 800 years.

One of their key conclusions:

“But highly leveraged economies, particularly those in which continual rollover of short-term debt is sustained only by confidence in relatively illiquid underlying assets, seldom survive forever, particularly if leverage continues to grow unchecked.

This time may seem different, but all too often a deeper look shows it is not. Encouragingly, history does point to warning signs that policy makers can look at to assess risk – if only they do not become too drunk with their credit bubble – fueled success and say, as their predecessors have for centuries, ‘This time is different.’”

Sound familiar?

jm012210image001_5F00_5FD82FE4
Chart from John Mauldin’s redistribution of work by Van Hoisington and Lacy Hunt.

Are we there yet?

How can we as a nation possibly contemplate spending trillions of dollars on some convoluted new government handout when we haven’t even figured out how to pay for social security and medicare AND have a national debt of ~$12 trillion that is rapidly approaching our GDP of ~$14 trillion? We quite literally cannot afford our own government. When will somebody say when? When will bond investors say when?

Do Obama and his socialist brethren truly believe “this time IS different”? Do they just not care? Or, worse, do they want to topple America?

When Obama stands in front of the country and deceitfully proclaims that it’s time for Republicans to do what’s right for the country, just what exactly does he mean? When Nancy Pelosi says that she will pass Pelosicare for the American people, what does she mean?

Do they want us to take direction from the government debt gluttons of Japan who continue to lead their country out of its own debt crisis 20 years after the fact?

I for one will not willingly choose to live the life depicted below nor the one that will likely follow in the years ahead for the Japanese.

commentary010510

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Obama Freezing Federal Budget – The Truth

Monday, January 25th, 2010

So Obama says he’s going to freeze the Federal budget. That would be a great start. Unfortunately, Obama’s not telling us the whole truth. What he really means to say is that he will ask Congress to freeze 16% of it.

2009 Federal Budget Breakdown

Worse, that 16% shrinks to an even more insignificant number once you add in Obama’s $787 billion of “stimulus”. And then, of course, there’s the nearly $800 billion of TARP and the literally hundreds of billions we’re giving to Fannie and Freddie.

How about cutting the 57% of the budget for socialist welfare and wealth redistribution programs (depicted in cheery tones of gray)? A good place to start would be the $80+ billion we’ll be shelling out this year for Federal employee pensions. I don’t know about you, but I ain’t got no stinking pension.

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Good to be a Friend of the King

Friday, January 15th, 2010

As people say, it’s good to be king. It’s also good to be a friend of the king.

Obama caved into unions’ demands that they be exempt from “doing their fair share” to finance Obamacare. That means that those individuals who aren’t one of Obama’s Facebook fans, will have to pay the $60 billion the unions just dodged.

Score this as another case of one of Obama’s many broken promises — no dealing with special interest.

Remember, Obama’s interest in taxing the “Cadillac” plans was not just a means of financing, but also to help “bend the curve” on healthcare costs by reducing demand. That was presented as a fundamental feature of Obamacare, but is now largely gone.

Unfortunately, for some, it’s not gone entirely. In Obamatopia, there will be two groups of people: One group that are NOT members of unions and are taxed and another group that ARE members of unions and are NOT taxed. Now, yes, some individuals in the first group are loaded bankers, but some aren’t. Some of those people in that first group earn the same amount of money as their union counterparts in the second group. Solely on the basis of that absence of union membership, they will have to a pay an extra tax. This isn’t collective bargaining or negotiation with an employer, this is the United States Federal Government. Apart from being horribly offensive, I don’t even understand how this sort of unequal application of the law is constitutional.

There are many articles on this, but here is one.

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Insider’s View on Obamacare

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

This is from a friend of mine who’s a senior staffer in the House. It’s his report on what’s behind the facade reported by the liberal mass media.

Begin Quote:

I wrote up three reasons why the health care bill doesn’t really reduce the deficit. And I managed to complete the entire analysis without calling Obama a Nazi.

First, there are the much-discussed cuts to Medicare providers, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars over 10 years. It’s very telling that Democratic congressional leaders, supported by the White House, have simultaneously pushed through these health care bills while also advancing legislation to reverse permanently very similar Medicare cuts to doctors that were enacted back in 1997 – paid for by additional borrowing. How Democrats can, with a straight face, claim these new provider cuts will survive while at the very same time they are trying to reverse previously-enacted cuts is beyond my sense of shame.

Second, more than half of the 10-year deficit reduction in both bills ($72 billion of the net $105 billion in the House bill and $130 billion in the Senate bill) comes from inclusion of a new long-term care (read: nursing home) entitlement program called the CLASS Act. Even Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) has described CLASS as “a Ponzi scheme”. To understand the budget gimmick, consider that the government uses the cash method of accounting, not the accrual method. Because in the first 10 years, the program will pay out very little in benefits, Democrats get to count the premiums being paid into the program as “deficit reduction”. But both CBO and the CMS Chief Actuary have found that the CLASS Act is not actuarially sound – in the long term when it starts paying out large benefits, premiums will be insufficient and it will require massive borrowing to meet its obligations. The cost, however, falls outside the budget window and therefore effectively gets ignored, while the initial premiums get counted. It is a fiscal catastrophe, and the mother of all budget gimmicks.

Third, although CBO estimates that the two bills probably will not increase the deficit beyond the 10-year window, this is only because both bills include large tax increases on high-income individuals, with income thresholds that are not indexed for inflation. The only reason these revenues will grow at a rate as fast as the subsidies is good old-fashioned bracket creep. But as the annual exercise in “patching” the Alternative Minimum Tax has proven, Congress will not allow these tax increases to creep down into the middle class, which in turn means the revenues will not grow at nearly as fast a rate as CBO projects — or as fast as the spending in the bill. Democrats made a conscious decision to disallow inflation indexing of these tax brackets, so that they could claim the bill is something other than what it is.

End Quote.

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Join the beast: Feds make 75% more than private employees

Monday, December 14th, 2009

From USA Today (www.usatoday.com):

“The growth in six-figure salaries has pushed the average federal worker’s pay to $71,206, compared with $40,331 in the private sector.”

If that doesn’t turn your stomach, this will:

  • 19% of federal employees make salaries of $100,000 or more.
  • Worse: That number jumped from 14% in the summer of 2008 when the recession was just getting rolling.

    • All those stats are before overtime pay and bonuses are counted. How much do you make?

    Perhaps a more important question, how many jobs do federal employees create? How much economic growth do they create? What’s the ROI on the 1,690 employees at the Transportation Department getting paid more than $170,000?

    Seems like there should be people protesting outside the homes of these federal “fat cats”.

    Oh, one more thing:
    “Federal workers owe more than $3 billion in income taxes they failed to pay in 2008.”

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    Good investment: $400,000 per job “created/ saved”

    Monday, December 14th, 2009

    Obama has a fancy website for his stimulus plan at www.recovery.gov. It’s quite nice and very web 2.0. The recovery.gov site and the “Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board” even have their very own presences on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and YouTube. Really! I’m serious! Go see your hard-earned tax dollars at work and become a “fan” of the Recovery Act on Facebook. It may not provide a good ROI on our money, but at least it’s cool. Or is it?

    Moving on, this is an interesting piece of propaganda. Obama signed the beast on February 13, 2009. According to the site, ten months later, the Feds have gotten around to spending 31% of the $787 billion, or $241.9 billion. That quarter trillion dollars of new debt has “created or saved” thousands of jobs – 640,329 as of October 30, 2009. Wow. That’s a lot of jobs.

    Unfortunately, it’s a pretty horrible deal: each job has cost us $378,000. With the average private sector worker earning about $40,000 one might expect to see 6,047,000 jobs. That’s almost 10 times more jobs! Looks like we’re being set up for some more stimulus. Will see more Federal spending on jobs when there is still half a trillion dollars of the Recovery Act left to spend?

    It Gets Worse
    As reported at www.usnews.com, according to South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson:

    “The reality of the situation is that Recovery.gov, the official administration website charged with reporting abuse, was its own worst offender. It is full of fake stimulus jobs in fake congressional districts. The Government Accountability Office says that one out of every 10 jobs created by the stimulus are also fake.”

    Yep, so that would mean that each job “created or saved” actually cost us $420,000. A bargain at twice the price. How many more jobs can we afford to create or save?

    Of course, there was also Obama’s pledge that the Recovery Act would hold the country at 8% unemployment instead of 9%. Last I checked, we were above 10%. Strong work all around.

    One fundamental problem with the Act is that it’s largely income redistribution disguised as stimulus. Based on data from the Act’s sponsors, it appears that income redistribution does not create jobs.

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    Senator Specter’s thoughts about healthcare

    Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

    I contacted my senator, Arlen Specter, to represent my interests regarding Obama’s “healthcare” legislation. In so doing, I clearly expressed my opposition to such legislation on the grounds that it has (at best) little to do with either healthcare or even health insurance and everything to do a government takeover of individuals’ private healthcare and even more to do with a massive wealth redistribution.

    Following is the great senator’s personal response to my concerns. I attempted to reply to inquire about the source of the “savings” for the federal deficit that the senator cites, however, Senator Specter does not seem to accept replies from his constituents. I suspect with confidence that the savings are of course taxes (and penalties).

    BEGIN QUOTE

    Dear Mr. pries:

    Thank you for contacting my office regarding health care reform. I appreciate hearing from you.

    The Congress is continuing its work on healthcare reform legislation, and I believe the prospects are reasonably good that we will produce a bill. We need to move ahead, and doing nothing is not an option. The problems of so many millions of uninsured Americans and the problems of the rising healthcare costs makes it imperative that action be taken.

    I think that the bill which has been proposed is a very, very good start. It is obviously subject to amendments and some modification. But the total cost has come in at about $850 billion over 10 years and is projected to save about $130 billion to reduce the deficit. In the second decade it is projected to save even more, up to as much as $650 billion. President Obama has committed not to sign a healthcare bill which adds to the deficit, and I’m committed not to vote for a healthcare bill that adds to the deficit.

    It is my hope that the bill will emerge with very strong provisions on preventative care. That includes annual examinations without additional costs and encouraging people to have the annual exams to catch many problems at their early stages, like heart disease or ailments, before they develop into debilitating and expensive chronic diseases. I think that early detection is vital. I can tell you from my personal experience: an MRI detected a brain tumor the size of a golf ball between my skull and my brain back in 1993. It could have been a very, very serious matter had that early detection not occurred.

    Healthcare reform is vital and we’re determined to get a good bill. I look forward to working with my colleagues on this landmark legislation. Again, thank you for contacting me. If you have any further questions on this issue or any related matter, please do not hesitate to contact me or visit my web site, http://specter.senate.gov.

    Sincerely,

    Arlen Specter

    END QUOTE

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