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Another decade, another Gatsby. The actors change but the message put forward in the adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 book stays the same. The 1920s were as ephemeral as a Champagne bubble. A fake stock market, an illicit liquor business and other falsehoods made Jay Gatsby and others like him into correspondingly false millionaires. The pleasure of the rich, “careless people,” as a character calls them, came at a cost to the rest, especially the middle class, the small people, mere ants in black tie to be trampled by giants like Gatsby at their parties. The inaccuracy here starts...

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney says the president is traveling to Texas tomorrow because while there’s lots of gridlock and partisan infighting in Washington, the Lone Star State is home to the kind of economic growth Obama wants to highlight. President Obama will tour a high-tech high school and a chip-machine manufacturer near Austin on Thursday. So, why Texas, where Rick Perry credits Republicans for the state’s economic success?

Taxes: A new study shows President Obama's budget would significantly boost taxes on the middle class. Funny, we seem to recall him promising voters that only the rich would pay for his grandiose spending plans. According to the analysis from the nonpartisan but liberal-leaning Tax Policy Center, Obama's budget would hit wealthy families hardest, with the top 20% of income earners shouldering almost 90% of the tax hike. But families at every income level would end up paying more if Obama's budget were enacted, including those making less than $10,000 a year.

One of the first things you learn when living in New York is that what qualifies as wealthy somewhere else seems barely middle-class here. On the Upper West Side, where I live, it’s hard not to feel as if Manhattan is impossibly expensive for young professionals. The average nondoorman, one-bedroom apartment in the neighborhood rents for about $2,500 a month. Oatmeal-raisin cookies at Levain Bakery cost $4 each. A pair of sensible, unstylish walking flats from Harry’s Shoes can set you back $480. I suppose, by comparison, that the $198 chef’s menu at Jean-Georges doesn’t sound so ridiculous. New Yorkers...

When President Obama was selling his signature health care reform bill back in early 2010, he described it as the "largest middle-class tax cut for health care in history." The costs would be largely paid by taxing insurance companies "that stand to gain a lot of money and a lot of profits" and by making "sure that the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share on Medicare." [snip] But a closer examination finds that ObamaCare's three biggest taxes — a Medicare surcharge, the so-called Cadillac tax and an insurance premium fee — will increasingly hit the middle class because of how...

White House spokesman Jay Carney “not disputing” Obama budget would “raise taxes on middle class Americans.” The White House has confirmed that President Obama’s forthcoming budget contains an income tax increase on middle class Americans. During a Friday, April 5 White House press briefing, spokesman Jay Carney replied “I’m not disputing that” when asked if a particular Obama budget proposal would raise income taxes on the middle class. The proposal in question is known as “Chained CPI.” The term is a Beltway euphemism for measuring inflation at a different, slower pace. Many tax and budget items are indexed to inflation,...

  videohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0TSQaKMK2w   Jim Rogers decries the growing uncertainty and recklessness of global central planners as the world enters unchartered financial markets: For the first time in recorded history, we have nearly every central bank printing money and trying to debase their currency. This has never happened before. How it’s going to work out, I don't know. It just depends on which one goes down the most and first, and they take turns. When one says a currency is going down, the question is against what? because they are all trying to debase themselves. It’s a peculiar time in world history.I own the...

OXON HILL, Md. (AP) - Returning to the national stage, Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said Saturday that the Republican Party must broaden its message to grow. "We must leave no American behind," she said in a populist speech that electrified supporters at a conservative summit in suburban Washington. "And we must share our powerful message of freedom and liberty to all citizens - even those who may disagree on some issues." Palin has maintained a low profile during last year's election. She's expected to play a limited role in the future of the GOP but shared several recommendations Saturday....

Big Government: We almost never agree with President Obama's favorite economist Paul Krugman, but he recently spoke the truth about where Obama's policies are taking the country. It should scare anyone with a pulse. Krugman, after speaking at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C., was asked about the debt crisis. After arguing it's no big deal in the near term, Krugman admitted that "Eventually we do have a problem. The population is getting older, health care costs are rising ... . Something is going to have to give." What's that something?

They’re not contributing members. They take away jobs from Americans, leech off the social benefits system and commit a number of crimes besides the whole “illegal entry” deal. Jails tend to be full of illegal aliens for a reason. "Every day, like the rest of us, they go out and try to earn a living. Often they do that in a shadow economy — a place where employers may offer them less than the minimum wage or make them work overtime without extra pay. And when that happens, it’s not just bad for them, it’s bad for the entire economy....

A favorite "progressive" trope is that America's middle class has stagnated economically since the 1970s. One version of this claim, made by Robert Reich, President Clinton's labor secretary, is typical: "After three decades of flat wages during which almost all the gains of growth have gone to the very top," he wrote in 2010, "the middle class no longer has the buying power to keep the economy going." This trope is spectacularly wrong. It is true enough that, when adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, the average hourly wage of nonsupervisory workers in America has remained about the...

DRIVE through almost any neighborhood around the country, and class divisions are as clear as the gate around one community or the grittiness of another. From the footprint of the house to the gleam on the car in the driveway, it is not hard to guess the economic status of the people who live there. Even the landscape is carved up by class. From 15,000 feet up, you can stare down at subdivisions and tract houses, and America’s class lines will stare right back up at you. Manhattan, however, is not like most places. Its 1.6 million residents hide in...

The only way to finance a big European-style state is to have it paid for by massive taxation of everyone, mostly the middle class. Right now, we are avoiding honest debate on this fact. The central issue of our time is the debate over the size and scope of government. Two unpleasant but undeniable mathematical truths limit the feasible policy choices. The recent sound and fury of the fiscal cliff follies in the end signified nothing because the resolution was in fact just a denial of both truths.The first truth is that the current tax rates cannot support the promises...

President Obama -- along with many of the liberal Democrats in Congress -- originally defined “the rich” as couples making more than $250,000 a year. They were very specific and emphatic about how this group of taxpayers needs to pay their “fair share.” Yet, when one of the Senate’s newest -- and one of the most liberal -- members was asked to define what income groups comprise the “middle class,” she simply couldn’t do it. How remarkable: Elizabeth Warren Can't Define What Middle Class Is "It’s not a numbers issue. I know you would expect a very wonky answer from...

It apparently wasn't enough to raise taxes on 77 percent of Americans with the fiscal cliff deal signed into law by auto-pen late last night by President Obama. In a video put out by the White House, President Obama dishonestly explained what the fiscal cliff means and then proceeded to say some Americans still need to "pay their fair share." Obama said there is more he wants to do to reduce our debt in a "balanced way," because after all, the $41 in tax hikes per $1 in spending cuts apparently wasn't enough irresponsibility for him. He gloated over the...

NBC's David Gregory interviewed President Barack Obama on "Meet the Press" Sunday, and a conversation ensued that would have been more fitting for a show called "The President Meets One of His Many Mainstream Media Enablers." Let's take a look at just some of the exchanges and fantasize how different the nation's political and electoral climate might be if the liberal press were doing its job as watchdog instead of taking sides. Obama said, "We're seeing signs of recovery ... in employment numbers improving." Might Gregory have asked Obama how he can continue to put an unrealistically positive spin on...

The last year has been a tough one for conservatives. The hope that four years of failed policy would be enough to repudiate the liberal/progressive ideology of the Obama administration ended when the majority of the American public voted to maintain their entitlements -- so long as someone else paid for them. And the conservative response to the debacle has been for the various factions within the movement to declare war on each other. It's time for conservatives to give serious thought to what they believe and how they can make a more persuasive case that conservative principles offer the...

Washington -- William McGurn, the esteemed Wall Street Journal columnist and soon-to-be editor of the editorial page of the New York Post, has made an interesting observation about the fabulous Bush tax cuts that are about to lapse. They amount to a substantial sum of money for a middle-class family. For the middle class it will be a big deal if they disappear. President Barack Obama has portrayed the Bush tax cuts as a rich person's tax cut, but now he is portraying them as a huge tax break for the middle class. Of a sudden he says do not...

Fiscal Cliff Means 50% Tax Rates For The Middle Class Politics / TaxesDec 07, 2012 - 08:12 AM By: Money Morning Keith Fitz-Gerald writes: If I didn't know any better, I'd think there's a small but growing group of people in Washington who think it would actually be good if we temporarily went over the fiscal cliff. I say that because I am seeing a smattering of articles recently suggesting that somehow going over the cliff "won't be all that bad" or that we're "really just talking about cuts that need to happen in the first place." President Obama seems...

There's a lot to be said for talking about the Constitution, economic theory and what's best for the country. However, one place we conservatives have slipped in recent years is framing our policies in a way that answers the very first question on the mind of most voters, "How does this benefit me?" That needs to change. Conservatism is an ideology that benefits everyone, but it's particularly helpful to middle class Americans. If we want to bring more of those voters to the Right, we have to do a better job of explaining to them exactly how we're going to...

Last week, I was exiting my neighborhood Starbucks when I happened to overhear a middle-aged man talking to a younger man who appeared to be his son. "It matters what you wear," the older man told the younger, whose clothes reflected a cross of grunge and goth. "When you go out with your friends on the weekend, you can dress one way; when you are going to a job, it matters what you wear." While many might argue that appearance should not matter, we know in reality that it does. Expectations vary by subculture. What is acceptable for a musician...

This week, when speaking at children's toy K'NEX factory in Pennsylvania, President Obama urged the House of Representatives merely to pass what Harry Reid's Senate has passed and send him the bill. The Senate has already passed a bill to keep income taxes from going up on middle-class families. That’s already passed the Senate. Your member of Congress like Allyson and Chaka, other Democrats in the House, they're ready to go. They're ready to vote on that same thing. And if we can just get a few House Republicans on board, we can pass the bill in the House. It...

One of the key questions lurking in the "fiscal cliff" talks — though well below the public's radar — is what happens to the alternative minimum tax — or AMT. Implemented in 1969 to make sure upper-income Americans pay their share of taxes, the AMT has increasingly snared more middle-income Americans over the years because it was never indexed for inflation. During the 2011 tax year for example, the higher tax hit single taxpayers with incomes as low as $48,450 and joint filers making only $74,450. But millions more Americans could be subject to the AMT in their 2012 returns...

The conventional wisdom has emerged that in order to avoid the so-called "fiscal cliff," politicians in Washington must agree to some method of tax increases ("revenue") -- which will be real, even if low taxes are not the cause of our ills -- alongside some kind of promise of spending restraint on entitlement programs, which is our problem, and which no one believes Washington will restrain. The American left and our "objective" journalists -- same thing, I know -- are not helping the nation balance its budget. As usual, these partisan hacks are obsessed with tearing the Republican coalition apart,...

If federal tax cuts that are under review are not extended, Michigan residents could end up paying the equivalent of double their state income tax rate, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation. The Tax Foundation looked at the alternative minimum tax (which includes the child tax credit), the Bush tax cuts (which refers to changes to the tax codes that lowered income tax rates) and the 2 percent tax cut to employee-side social security payroll taxes that all expire at the end of the year. The tax cuts are part of the so-called “fiscal cliff” debate. Michigan residents...

Obama has staked out a very dogmatic and inflexible position on class-warfare tax hikes and he obviously wants all of us to think only the “rich” will be impacted. I think it’s foolish to penalize investors, entrepreneurs, small business owners and other upper-income taxpayers. What nation, after all, has ever prospered by placing obstacles in front of those who create jobs? France? Don’t make me laugh.But I’m also amazed that anyone believes Obama isn’t going to screw the middle class as well. The simple reality is that there aren’t enough rich people to finance big government.There are some honest folks...

New Yorkers love to complain about how expensive their city is, but a new study reveals that the Big Apple is more affordable for middle class families than places like Cincinnati, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, or Portland, Oregon. New York is the tenth most affordable major city for middle-income homes -- thanks to high median incomes and the city's expansive transportation system, according to a report by the Center for Housing Policy and Center for Neighborhood Technology. New York wasn't the only surprise on the list. The most affordable city, according to the study, was Washington, DC, which is another notoriously...

Generations of Valerie Magee's family, from her grandparents to her children, have deepened their roots in the black middle class, finding a pathway to prosperity through college education and the support of family members.

The worst gaffe a politician can make, it's been said, is not the mistakes he makes on the campaign trail but when he tells the truth. The vice president of the United States, who's a kind of genius at embarrassing himself, did it again the other day when, almost in passing, he mentioned the hallmark of this president's stewardship of the American economy, "the middle class that has been buried these past four years." Oops. Even a blind hog will stumble across an acorn now and then, but this time the vice president had hit on an essential truth, one...

The Lehrer debate on Wednesday, October 3, was an utter disaster for Obama. He seemed to be saying, "I HATE this job. Get me out of here so I can play golf and hang with my peeps." It was the worst performance by an incumbent President in my experience...maybe the worst performance by ANY candidate, including the awful job Walter Mondale did in '84. Romney is no Ronald Reagan, but he appeared "presidential" and in full control of the facts. Obama, on the other hand, told obvious lies over an over and Romney even called him on them a time...

Democrats have been saying — or, in the case of Joe Biden, trying to say — that Mitt Romney plans to raise taxes on the middle class. This claim is flatly untrue. The word “lie” probably is thrown around too casually in our politics, but this qualifies. Romney has no such plan, has forsworn taking such a course of action, and has in fact proposed to cut tax rates for the middle class — and everybody else who pays the federal income tax — by reducing all brackets by 20 percent. Romney’s plan would be revenue-neutral, making up for forgone...

A study by the Tax Policy Center, a project of the center-left Brookings Institution and Urban Institute, claims that Mitt Romney's tax plan is mathematically impossible. TPC claims that Romney cannot cut tax rates by 20 percent across the board and maintain revenue neutrality without raising the net tax burden on the middle class. According to TPC, in the year 2015 under Romney's tax plan, "maintaining revenue neutrality mathematically necessitates a shift in the tax burden of at least $86 billion away from high-income taxpayers onto lower- and middle-income taxpayers. This is true even under the assumption that the maximum...

In this peculiar election year, President Obama is pulling off the small miracle—no, make that the kind of thing that happens in Lourdes—of winning the tax debate. This should be impossible, and Mitt Romney has to turn that around if he wants to win. Despite a tax platform that is a Walter Mondale replay, polls show that Mr. Obama has sanded off the traditional GOP tax edge and the lead Mr. Romney held as recently as late summer. An ABC-Washington Post poll gives Mr. Obama a 49%-44% advantage on taxes, with Mr. Romney's credibility slipping from 48% in August, and...

President Obama doesn’t think Americans should fret about the exploding national debt. As he told talk show host David Letterman recently, “We don’t have to worry about it short term. Right now interest rates are low because people still consider the United States the safest and greatest country on Earth, rightfully so. But it is a problem long term and even medium term.” So, in Obama’s view, dealing with the debt is more of a tomorrow thing than a today thing. Or maybe even a day-after-tomorrow thing. But every day that the debt grows, the burden on Americans grows, too....

In case you missed the latest and greatest from God's gift to conservatives see it here.

ice President Biden said Tuesday that the middle class has been "buried the last four years" -- a practically gift-wrapped gaffe that Republicans immediately grabbed to hammer President Obama on the eve of the first presidential debate. Biden made the remark at a campaign stop in Charlotte, N.C., in the course of slamming Republican tax policies which Democrats claim would cut taxes for the rich and hike them for the middle class. "This is deadly earnest," Biden said. "How they can justify -- how they can justify raising taxes on the middle class that's been buried the last four years....

Vice President Joe Biden, speaking on the campaign trail in Charlotte, N.C. today, offered an unvarnished assessment of the Obama economy: First, he repeats the myth that Mitt Romney will “raise taxes” on the middle class— “raising their taxes with this tax cut,” as Joe so Bidenly puts it. Second, he says Romney can’t possibly justify that mythical tax hike because the Obama presidency has been so hard on the middle class. The Romney campaign agrees and Jim Pethokoukis has the charts to prove it. It’s not the first time Biden has eloquently described the toll the Obama economy has...

Vice President Joe Biden said the middle class "has been buried the last four yeas" at a campaign event in Charlotte, North Carolina: "This is deadly earnest, man. This is deadly earnest," Biden said. "How they can justify--how they can justify--raising taxes when the middle class has been buried the last four years... How in Lord's name..." Of course, Barack Obama has been president the last four years, and Biden has been vice president.

Despite repeated promises that he would build prosperity from the bottom up, President Obama has presided over three years of income losses for the middle class, according to the latest household income data from the Census Bureau. Since 2009, the middle 20% of American households saw their average incomes drop 4%. In 2011 alone, they fell 1.7%. The poorest 20% have fared even worse under Obama, Census data show. Their incomes have dropped more than 7% since 2009, and are now lower than they’ve been at any time since 1985, after adjusting for inflation.

Pop quiz: Which of the following is true? (a) Over the past 40 years, the middle class has shrunk; (b) Over the past 40 years, the middle class has grown poorer; (c) The middle class just suffered through a “lost decade”; (d) All of the above. You could be forgiven for answering (d), given the angst-producing state of discourse on the economy, but the truth is that none of these claims about middle-class decline — made most recently by the Pew Research Center (PRC) — are supported by the best evidence. Like other analyses before it, PRC’s recent report “The...

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY – A recent study by the Department of Sociology at Princeton found that up to 98% of middle class white adults flash or “throw” gang signs when they are being photographed. The three year study also reveals that 99.9% of those throwing the gang signs have never been in a gang, haven’t the slightest idea what the sign they are throwing means and do not listen to rap music. “It is a perplexing phenomenon for sure,” Professor Allen Clydesdale told the Daily Rash. “It was quite surprising to meet a thirty-year-old physical therapist from Beardstown, Missouri, who...

President Obama's entire campaign strategy is based on an age-old political trick that he can overcome his weakness on the economy by changing the subject. His strategists concluded more than a year ago that he was unlikely to win a second term based on his promise to restore the economy to full health and put tens of millions of long unemployed Americans back work. So they fashioned a divisive campaign that was heavily focused on single issue voters -- women, for one, and the large Hispanic vote, for another -- in a handful of critical battleground states he needs to...

An interesting quote from Mitt Romney in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos: GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Is $100,000 middle income? MITT ROMNEY: No, middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less. Hmmm. Maybe $200,000-$250,000 is middle income in Mitt Romney's world, but it's a tad higher than the middle when measured against most of America. In fact, $200,000-$250,000 is in the top 2%-3%. "Middle income" these days, at least measured by percentage of incomes, is something between $30,000 and $100,000. And maybe what Romney meant is the that $200,000-$250,000 can feel like middle income. And that's certainly true, especially in some...

The vise on the middle class tightened last year, driving down its share of the income pie as the number of Americans in poverty leveled off and the most affluent households saw their portion grow, new census data released Wednesday showed. Income inequality increased by 1.6 percent, the Census Bureau said in its annual report on poverty, income and health insurance. This was the biggest one-year increase in almost two decades and suggested that a trend in place since the late 1970s was picking up steam. As a snapshot of a nation recovering from one of its worst recessions ever,...

Maybe Democrats have some slick salesmen, like Bill Clinton and our current president, who can sell you swampland and have you convinced that you’ve bought choice beachfront property. But the omission of any mention of God and recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital from the Democratic Party platform, which were in it in 2008, and then the almost failed attempt to add them after the fact, showed the clear truth about the 2012 Democratic Party. It took three boisterous floor votes to add these principles to the platform and listening to the ayes and nays in the third vote, it...

The middle class is receiving less of America's total income, declining to its smallest share in decades as median wages stagnate in the economic doldrums and wealth concentrates at the top. A study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center highlights diminished hopes, too, for the roughly 50 percent of adults defined as middle class, with household incomes ranging from $39,000 to $118,000. The report describes this mid-tier group as suffering its "worst decade in modern history," having fallen backward in income for the first time since the end of World War II. Three years after the recession technically ended,...

What does it take to be middle class in America? The timely answer seems to be not home ownership or a college education, but a good job. In a survey released late last month, 86 percent of the 2,000-plus Americans polled by the Pew Research Center put a secure job at the top of their list of requirements to qualify for the middle class. The next most-popular answer was health insurance, which made the list for 66 percent of respondents in the survey, conducted in July. Owning a home was considered a sign of membership in the middle class by...

The middle class in America is being systematically destroyed. Once upon a time the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world. The rest of the globe looked at us in envy and wondered what we were doing right. But now everything seems to be going wrong for the middle class. Millions of our jobs have been shipped out of the country and competition for the remaining jobs is keeping wages at depressed levels. Meanwhile, the cost of living just keeps going up and up and middle class budgets are being stretched...

"Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa sounded like a Mitt Romney campaign surrogate for a moment, when he said that President Obama “doesn’t want to cut taxes for the middle class” during an interview on Fox News. “And he actually went beyond them in terms of tax cuts to the middle class,” Villaraigosa, chairman of this week’s Democratic National Convention, told Chris Wallace when asked about Obama’s rejection of his Simpson-Bowles Commission’s proposed deficit reduction plan. “He doesn’t want to cut taxes for the middle class. He’d prefer closing tax loopholes and importantly, allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for...

Why unions matter more than everBy EDWARD M. SMITH | 9/3/12 4:27 AM EDT When I travel across the country, I often hear from business leaders, politicians and even union members who say unions don’t matter anymore. They say there was a time and place for unions — but that has passed. They cite the fact that union membership in the U.S. stands at less than 12 percent. They cite the Wisconsin recall, the passage of right-to-work laws in Indiana and the 2012 Democratic National Convention taking place in Charlotte, N.C., a city with one of the lowest union membership...