Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Pete Stark: Pro-Illegal Alien Traitor

Is there any way to un-elect this sack of human waste? Sadly, he gets re-elected time and time again by overwhelming margins. He has mouthed off many times before, and gotten away with it.

Perhaps this is because there is no little or no local press coverage of him at all. The lamestream media don’t report on his creepy statements, and they only barely touched – and quickly dropped - his residency issue, so he just blends in and now has major seniority in Congress. (He was actually next in line to be Chair of the Appropriations Committee when John Murtha kicked off, but his fellow Democrats wouldn’t allow Pelosi to promote him, believe it or not, because of his arrogant actions towards them!)

But now YouTube has him mocking a concerned border patriot:
“Who you gonna kill today?”
This mocking goes on for a few minutes, you think he's done and he continues mocking saying "we'll go down there and you design the wall....We'll start a ladder company"...This is unbelievable.
I know the Bay Area is weenie liberal, but his district (CA-13) is NOT San Francisco, NOT Berkeley, and it’s NOT the Oakland ghettoes. It's the Bay Area, so weenie liberals are the norm. However, Fremont, Hayward, San Leandro and Alameda are *suburban*. They aren’t exactly conservative hotbeds, but they *are not* Berkeley or San Francisco.

If he was like any other Bay Area Democrat, ho hum, nothing new. However, George Miller (CA-07) isn't like this guy, John Garamendi (CA-10) isn't like this guy, Jerry McNerney (CA-11) isn't like this guy, Jackie Speier (CA-12) isn't like this guy, Anna Eshoo (CA-14) isn’t like this guy, Mike Honda (CA-15) isn’t like this guy, Zoe Lofgren (CA-16) isn’t like this guy.

Even Barbara Lee (CA-09) doesn’t mouth off like the creep Stark does, and she’s in a fine district to do so. It *would* make sense if Stark was in Berkeley or Oaktown.

Nancy Pelosi (CA-08) IS like this guy, but hey, that's San Fransicko for you.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Dianne Feinstein said she'd only tax the super-rich....

Guess what? That threshold is dropping daily...

“You could go lower, too — why not $200,000?” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). “With the debt and deficit we have, you can’t make promises to people. This is a very serious situation.”
Millions of dual career couples easily pass that new, and lower, dollar per year mark.
And that's not going to be a high enough threshold either. They won't be able to get a budget for FY 2011 done:
The Democrats in Congress believe what Rep. Gerry Connolly told the LA Times, which is that no member of Congress ever lost an election because of a failure to pass a budget. They don’t want to be on the hook for the hard decisions that must come in FY2011, which is either to drastically reduce spending from the binge levels of the last three Democratic Congresses, or to raise taxes to cover it. Spending cuts won’t change voter perception of this Congress at this late date — and tax hikes will make it worse.
And remember, Dianne Feinstein is the more reasonable, more honest and more sane of the two Wicked Witches that make up California's "representation" in the US Senate.

2012 can't come soon enough....

Tuesday, June 08, 2010

The Estate Tax and the Liberal Mentality

The New York Times waxes indignant about how the estate tax is kaputt for 2010. Never mind that it returns with a vengeance in 2011.

“The ultrawealthy in this country will still be able to pass on enormous wealth to the next generation,” said Chuck Collins, who studies income inequality and has worked with billionaires like Warren E. Buffett and Bill Gates to promote an estate tax. Mr. Collins argues that the tax is a “recycling program for economic opportunity.”
Oh really? A brief history of the National Estate Tax.

Let's understand how the estate tax works. It is a tax on *assets*, not on *income*. There are literally millions of people and businesses who are asset rich, assets painfully acquired over many years nay decades, but still of modest income. Farmers, ranchers, owners of many rental properties, owners of a restaurant or a restraurant franchise, to name a few examples.

Oh, but the Leftists "don't want rich heirs sitting on their asses, and then able to pass that on to their idiot children", in the words of one such Leftist whose name escapes me.

For starters, you simply *cannot* sit on your tush when you inherit a farm or a restuarant (which in more expensive California, a single farm, family restaurant, or apartment building easily passes the proposed 2011 asset dollar limits). Or several rental homes or an apartment complex. You have to manage it. Which is a full time job.

Oh, but the guy or gal might be wealthy enough to hire someone else to run it? That's called giving someone a *management* job! Not a bad thing.

Many of these inherited businesses are family businesses which employ dozens, perhaps hundreds of people, but which throw off modest cash flow. All of a sudden the patriarch dies and the business is inherited by his children, who are now hit with a big tax bill just because daddy died. Sometimes, they can't pay that bill without selling assets, laying people off or selling the business outright. Does that seem fair?

Even if you do think it's fair, when they sell, a productive taxpaying asset is at least temporarily and often permanently taken out of action, and the acquirer usually takes the opportunity to eliminate duplicate positions and there are layoffs. Not good for the economy.

Never mind that income from the inherited asset STILL must be taxed and still is. That is, if you don't break up the productive asset. Instead, out of some communistic notion of "fairness" a productive asset is broken up, reducing its income stream. The only people getting rich from that are the real estate agents and the lawyers. The former might get rich anyway should the heirs sell it on their own.

And the same people who advocate this kind of punitive taxation THEN turn around and complain about "big corporations who gobble up family farms and family businesses"--the very assets families are forced to sell in estate tax!

Oh but some heirs are idle, like the Kennedy brats? So what? Notice how the fortune Old Joe Kennedy built is about run out. If an inheritor is productive with his or her money, it serves him or her; if not, it destroys him or her. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted them. Did it? Or did they corrupt their money?

I don't envy worthless heirs; their wealth is not mine and frankly, I am not sure I would have done any better with it. I don't think that it should have been "redistributed" to load the world with fifty little parasites instead of one big one, or worse still, larding up a parasite government that pays out thousands of ghetto people to be idle.
Meanwhile, their Demunist uberlords use legal talent to set up tax-exempt "foundations" with their estates, which turn around and hire *their* idiot children. But the liberal rank and file doesn't seem to mind that.