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PARIS — France’s Socialist government is proposing a slew of taxes — on art, on businesses, on the rich — that are drawing criticism for stifling entrepreneurship and scaring off the wealthy. “Unfortunately, I think the politics we are leading in France will turn out to be catastrophic for the economy, which is already in bad shape,” said French economist Marc Touati, author of “When the Eurozone Explodes.” “This is a serious mistake, something you learn in [Economy 101] — it will aggravate the recession and therefore shrink the tax base.” Led by President Francois Hollande, the French government proposed...

Our economy is lousy, the labor force participation rate is the lowest in 31 years, we’ve had 43 consecutive months with unemployment over 8 percent, and a record 47 million people are on food stamps, so one might expect President Obama would welcome as much help as he could get. Surely he would want private sector job creators – investors and entrepreneurs – to have the strongest possible incentives for turning around this Obama “recovery” where household incomes are falling faster than they fell in the Bush recession. But Obama’s priority is class warfare. That’s why he relentlessly denounces job...

Dear Friend, In this video commentary, I discuss how Obama won’t tell us his plans, but here they are: a series of UN imposed global taxes on all Americans. Tune in!

Suburbanites of Ohio, listen up. As swing voters in the ultimate swing state, you will have an outsized impact on this election. President Obama has pledged to govern in the interests of middle-class voters like you. With so much resting on your shoulders, that is a promise you should scrutinize with care. What exactly are Obama’s plans for Ohio’s suburban communities? The answer may shock you. President Obama aims to help Ohio’s Democrats bail out your state’s struggling cities by forcibly transferring suburban tax money to urban treasuries. It’s a bold plan to redistribute the wealth of Ohio’s suburbs. It...

Exclusive: Joseph Farah compares billions given away to what's spent on border security It may be an apocryphal quote attributed to the late Sen. Everett Dirksen: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” There’s really no credible citation one can find that suggests he actually ever said those famous words – though I swear I can still hear him saying them when I was a child. Those words were reverberating in my mind again this week as it was revealed that Barack Obama has increased spending on foreign aid by 80 percent through last...

On a recent evening, a hip-looking young woman was sorting through a stack of crates outside a fruit and vegetable store here in the working-class neighborhood of Vallecas as it shut down for the night. At first glance, she looked as if she might be a store employee. But no. The young woman was looking through the day’s trash for her next meal. Already, she had found a dozen aging potatoes she deemed edible and loaded them onto a luggage cart parked nearby. “When you don’t have enough money,” she said, declining to give her name, “this is what there...

In November 2008, the Americans who turned out to vote in the presidential election outnumbered the Americans who turned out to work full-time by more than 14 million. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 118,423,000 Americans worked full-time in November 2008. According to the University of California at Santa Barbara's American Presidency Project, 132,645,504 people turned out to vote in that month's presidential election. The presidential election voters outnumbered the full-time workers by 14,222,504. In that election, then-Sen. Barack Obama won 69,297,997 popular votes and Sen. John McCain won 59,597,530. The 14,222,504 margin between presidential voters and full-time...

Nobel Peace Prize Winners Take Aim at U.S. By CHASE SQUIRES, AP DENVER (Sept. 17) - Ten Nobel Peace Prize laureates chbishop called for world peace and took aim at U.S. policy makers, asking an enthusiastic crowd of 7,000 youth to demand that the United States pull back its military, spread its wealth and offer aid to developing countries. The Archbishop Desmond Tutu had stern words for the Bush administration. "Then how can you commit Guantanamo Bay? Take back your country," he said. Only the Dalai Lama, whose speech at the three-day PeaceJam convention at the University of Denver was...

If you listen to America's political hacks, mainstream media talking heads and their socialist allies, you can't help but reach the conclusion that the nation's tax burden is borne by the poor and middleclass while the rich get off scot-free. Stephen Moore, senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal, and I'm proud to say former GMU economics student, wrote "The U.S. Tax System: Who Really Pays?" in the Manhattan Institute's Issue 2012 (8/12). Let's see whether the rich are paying their "fair" share. According to IRS 2007 data, the richest 1 percent of Americans earned 22 percent of national...

One month to the day after his infamous ‘you didn’t build that’ speech, President Obama’s description of wealthy people did not include “smart” or “hardworking,” as he instead ascribed their success to good luck. “If you’re lucky enough, and fortunate enough, and been blessed enough to be in the other two percent, the top two percent, you still get a tax cut for your first $250,000 of income,” Obama said during a campaign stop in Council Bluffs, Iowa. “All we’re saying is after that, maybe you can do a little bit more to help pay down this deficit and invest...

(VIDEO AT LINK) President Obama: "Too many folks still don't have a sense that tomorrow will be better than today. And so, the question in this election is which way do we go? Do we go forward towards a new vision of an America in which prosperity is shared?(continued)

Burn Down the Suburbs? Not exactly, but Obama is already working to get rid of them. By Stanley KurtzEditor’s Note: This article is adapted from Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, by Stanley Kurtz, from Sentinel HC. President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools,...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Who does Obama think paid the taxes for the roads and the bridges and the stoplights? Who paid for this? Who paid for all of that? People that don't have anything? People who pay taxes paid for all this stuff! Folks, it's a shame that we have to sit here and react to this kind of sophistry and explain to people how this country was built and who did it and why it happened and how it happened. Because we live in a period of time where the president of the United States is trying to rewrite...

To comment on "You didn't build that business yourself"

Tax cheats were given $1.4 billion in government-backed mortgage loans under President Obama’s economic stimulus, and the government doled out at least an additional $27 million in tax credits to delinquents who took the first-time-homebuyer tax break, according to a government audit released Wednesday. Under government rules, delinquent taxpayers are supposed to be ineligible for the mortgage insurance program unless they have reached a repayment agreement with the Internal Revenue Service. But the Federal Housing Administration didn’t have the right controls to weed out bad applications, said the Government Accountability Office, Congress‘ chief investigative arm. That meant FHA insured $1.4...

Obsession with income redistribution is destroying U.S. productivity President Obama’s re-election prospects dim by the day. When it comes to all-important pocketbook issues, Americans quite simply are worse off now than they were when this administration moved into the White House. The Federal Reserve released its latest “Survey of Consumer Finance” on Tuesday, which confirmed widely held sentiment with hard data: Americans are poorer today than they were in 2007, when the Great Recession hit. The difference between now and then is massive. The median household saw almost 39 percent of its wealth evaporate, and real income (that is, the...

(Loophole.)(4 Billion a year)(video)(Illegal Aliens Getting Bigger Tax Refund Checks?)

Van Jones, one of the most effective organizers and strategists on the left, is out with a new book. Rebuild the Dream, which debuted last week on the New York Times bestseller list, takes its name from the organization Jones helped found a year ago to stir up a grass-roots insurgency against the plutocrats we now call the 1%—and now seek harness the insurgent energies expressed by the Occupy movement into lasting institutional reform. “The American dream—the idea that ours is a land where any hard-working person can better herself or himself—is at risk of being wiped out, right before...

I have several amusing posts about the left’s fixation on redistributionism, including this Halloween classic, this Elizabeth Warren takedown, this mockery of the Occupy Wall Street nitwits, and this caricature of Obama’s class warfare. In this grand tradition, here’s a funny poster sent to me by a reader.This is an appropriate point for the disclaimer that Obama is not a socialist, which technically requires government ownership of the means of production. As I’ve explained before, it’s much more accurate to say he’s a statist, a corporatist, or a redistributionist.And since we’re looking at definitions and this post features young children,...

"This bears on your reporting," President Obama said to journalists. "I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing then they're equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. And an equivalence is presented which I think reinforces peoples' cynicism about Washington in general. This is not one of those situations where there's an equivalency." "As all of you are doing your reporting, I think it's important to remember that the positions that I am taking now on the budget and a host of other issues. if we had...