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Obama's Anti-Capitalist Nostrums Demoralizing to the Economy
realclearpolitics ^ | October 8, 2011 | Larry Kudlow

Posted on 10/09/2011 4:30:47 AM PDT by MontaniSemperLiberi

Team Obama is out and about mourning a “double-dip recession,” while Fed head Ben Bernanke is warning of a faltering economy. I have described the current economic environment as the front end of a recession.

But Obama’s attack on millionaires and billionaires, his new war on bank profits, his linking arms with the anti-capitalist protesters in New York, and his big-government stimulus plan will surely not solve this crisis.

...

Here’s the real silliness of all this. The Obama plan would permanently raise tax rates in order to pay for a temporary tax cut. In other words, taxes are going up, not down, as far as the eye can see under Obama’s program.

And here’s more silliness. The White House and Senate Democrats want a 5.6 percent surtax on millionaires, which is supposed to pay for the entire stimulus package. And don’t forget: The Obama budget would raise the Bush tax rates for people making over $200,000, while the Obamacare budget would substantially increase payroll taxes that apply to investors. On top of that, the Obama budget would lower the value of numerous personal deductions.

So the top personal tax rate would move to nearly 50 percent under the Obama plan. Now do the incentive math. At a 50 percent tax rate, successful earners, investors, and small-business owners would keep only 50 cents on the extra dollar earned. Under current law, however, at the 35 percent top income-tax rate, they would keep 65 cents. So if the plan goes through, it would mean a 23 percent reduction in marginal incentives. This in a stalled economy where job creation doesn’t keep up with a rising population and is less than half the necessary level to shrink the unemployment rate.t.

(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Government
KEYWORDS: clowardpiven; demoralizing; manufacturedcrisis; obama
Standard Kudlow fare but I thought I'd post it anyway. It's a good summary.
1 posted on 10/09/2011 4:30:56 AM PDT by MontaniSemperLiberi
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To: MontaniSemperLiberi
The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
[Obama's strategy for destroying the economy]

frontpage.americandaughter.com
| August 31, 2008 | Jim Simpson

Liberals self-righteously wrap themselves in the mantle of public spirit. They ardently promote policies promising to deliver the poor and oppressed from their latest misery — policies which can only find solution in the halls of government. But no matter what issue one examines, over the last fifty plus years, the liberal prescription has almost always been a failure.

Why is this so? Why does virtually every liberal scheme result in ever-increasing public spending while conditions seem to get continually worse? There are a number of reasons:

  1. The programs usually create adverse incentives. This is especially true in so-called “anti-poverty” programs. The beneficiaries find government subsidies a replacement for, rather than a supplement to, gainful employment and eventually become incapable of supporting themselves. This in turn creates a dependent culture with its attendant toxic behaviors which demand still more government “remedies.”
  2. The programs create their own industry, complete with scads of “think tanks” and “experts” who survive on government research grants. These are the aptly named “Beltway Bandits.”
  3. They create their own bureaucracies, whose managers conspire with interested members of Congress to continually increase program funding, regardless of merit.
  4. Members of Congress secure votes and campaign donations by extorting them from beneficiaries of such programs, either through veiled threats — “vote for me or those mean Republicans will wipe out your benefits” — or promises of still more bennies.

In short, all develop a vested interest in the program’s survival. But if the result is always more and more government, of government, by government, and for government, with no solution in sight, then why do liberals always see government as the solution rather than the problem?

Similarly, liberals use government to promote legislation that imposes mandates on the private sector to provide further benefits for selected groups. But the results are even more disastrous. For example, weighing the laws or stacking the courts to favor unions may provide short term security or higher pay for unionized labor, but has ultimately resulted in the collapse of entire domestic industries.

Another example is health care. The Dems are always trying to impose backdoor socialized medicine with incremental legislation. Why do you suppose American healthcare is in such crisis? Answer: the government has already become too deeply involved. For example, many hospitals are closing their doors because they are overwhelmed with the burden of caring for indigent patients, illegal immigrants and vagrants who must, by law, be admitted like everyone else, despite the fact that they cannot pay for services. Read about it here — Destroying Our Health Care. The net result is reduced availability of care for everyone, exactly the opposite of what liberals claim to want.

To further complicate things, liberal jurists and lawyers have created new theories of liability that utilize the legal system as a means to further redistribute income. This too, has resulted in higher costs and prices in affected industries, higher insurance costs, or in some cases, complete elimination of products or services.

Liberals’ endless pursuit of “rights” for different groups also does little but create increasing divisions in our society. Liberal policy pits old against young, men against women, ethnic and racial groups against one another, even American citizens against illegal aliens, all in the name of “equality.” The only result is anger, tension and equal misery for all.

How does any of this improve our lot?

Finally, when companies relocate overseas to avoid the high cost of unionized labor and heavy domestic regulation, liberals sarcastically excoriate them for “outsourcing” America. Yet, when it comes to certain domestic industries, liberals in Congress suddenly become free marketers and choose to buy from overseas contractors rather than domestic suppliers. This happened most recently with a huge military contract being outrageously awarded to the heavily subsidized European consortium, AIRBUS, over America’s own Boeing. Since liberals claim to be so determined to “save the American worker,” what gives?

You have to take a step further back and ask some fundamental questions. Why is the liberal public policy record one of such unmitigated disaster? I mean, even the worst batter hits one occasionally. No one bats zero. No one that is, except liberals.

Prior to the Republican takeover in Congress in 1994, Democrats had over fifty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress with substantial majorities most of the time. With all the time and money in the world — trillions spent — they couldn’t fix a single thing, not one. Today’s liberal has the same complaints, and the same old tired solutions. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

Why?

When things go bad all the time, despite the best efforts of all involved, I suggest to you something else is at work — something deeper, more malevolent.

I submit to you that it is not a mistake, the failure is deliberate!

There is a method to the madness, and the method even has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It was first elucidated in the 1960s by a pair of radical leftist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis…. …the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

[Part II of this article will explore those organizations created to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy and their ties to the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama.]


The Complete Cloward-Piven Series

The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I: Manufactured Crisis
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I — print copy
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part II: Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part II — print copy
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part III: Conspiracy of the Lemmings
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part III — print copy
Hate Crimes Legislation — Back Door Censorship
_______________________________________________________________

Also see (from David Horowitz's DiscoverTheNetworks.org) ...

THE CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY (CPS):

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7522
_______________________________________________________________

Cloward, Piven and the Fundamental Transformation of America

Tuesday, January 05, 2010
By Glenn Beck


Meet Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven,
authors of the Cloward-Piven strategy

"I'm going to give you a hard concept to get your arms around: It's the concept that there are people in this country who want to intentionally collapse our economic system."-Glenn Beck

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,582097,00.html


2 posted on 10/09/2011 4:43:22 AM PDT by ETL (ALL (most?) of the Obama-commie connections at my FR Home page: http://www.freerepublic.com/~etl/)
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To: ETL

You post an entire article in another thread? An article written three years ago? A link to the previous discussion and a paragraph would have been sufficient and would not hijack this post.

I think your post is somewhat inconsiderate of your fellow Freepers.


3 posted on 10/09/2011 5:03:35 AM PDT by MontaniSemperLiberi (Moutaineers are Always Free)
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To: MontaniSemperLiberi

Spread the wealth

Omoney2
Team Obama Anti-capitalists

Let the Occupy Wall Streeters rant so America can clearly see progressives as the vapid lunatics they are.

Here's a few to begin: $20 minimum wage regardless of employment, trillions of dollars in new spending on alternative energy and infrastructure, and debt forgiveness -- all debt on the entire planet.

All this looks like Obama's re-distribute wealth conversation with self-employed plumber Joe Wurzelbacher in Toledo, Ohio on October 12, 2008.

''Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?'' Wurzlebacher asked.

Obama explained, ''I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody.''

The more they talk economic justice/redistributive change, the worse it is for Zer0.

Liberalism has finally succeeded in creating an entire generation that feels they are entitled to other people's stuff without actually having to work for it.

Only these idiots, who are forever trapped in the entitlement mentality, would want to reconstitute the Soviet Union in modern 21st century America.


4 posted on 10/09/2011 5:21:37 AM PDT by BobP (The piss-stream media - Never to be watched again in my house)
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To: MontaniSemperLiberi

I’m not trying to “hijack” anything. The info is critical to understanding what Obama and Co are really up to. No discussion of the economic mess we are in would be complete without mentioning Cloward-Piven and their “Manufactured Crisis” strategy for collapsing the system.


5 posted on 10/09/2011 5:28:00 AM PDT by ETL (ALL (most?) of the Obama-commie connections at my FR Home page: http://www.freerepublic.com/~etl/)
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To: ETL
Mention

verb (used with object)
1. to refer briefly to; name, specify, or speak of: Don't forget to mention her contribution to the project.
6 posted on 10/09/2011 5:45:24 AM PDT by MontaniSemperLiberi (Moutaineers are Always Free)
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To: MontaniSemperLiberi

OK, replace “mention” with providing a full set of resources for understanding the TRUTH about what is happening to our economy under this communist mole, Obama.


7 posted on 10/09/2011 6:01:24 AM PDT by ETL (ALL (most?) of the Obama-commie connections at my FR Home page: http://www.freerepublic.com/~etl/)
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To: MontaniSemperLiberi

Obama is a living testament to the strength of personal jihad. The devout and observant take note and approve. Obama’s success is in throwing monkey wrenches every where he can reach. Only gringos think Obama is an American President.


8 posted on 10/09/2011 6:04:30 AM PDT by x_plus_one (Obama: Brainwashing the masses to believe that racism is a greater danger than radical Islam)
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To: x_plus_one

“Obama’s success is in throwing monkey wrenches every where he can reach.”

Doing the devil’s work means being paid his wages, so how successful, really, are the damned? They briefly flourish here and now but will not stand at the Judgement.


9 posted on 10/09/2011 8:21:30 AM PDT by avenir (I'm pessimistic about man, but I'm optimistic about GOD!)
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To: avenir
The west is losing against Islam.. We are colonized by Somali immigrants. The framework of Sharia law is building a foundation at the state level. The first islamic state in europe was created by NATO during the Clinton Administration. Anarchists demand an end to western christian democracy. Islamists salivate at the opportunity to bring order from chaos.

The west is losing to islam.

10 posted on 10/09/2011 7:53:42 PM PDT by x_plus_one (Obama: Brainwashing the masses to believe that racism is a greater danger than radical Islam)
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