Fausta's Blog

Feel the squeeze,

According to the bill, Americans at all income levels would see a two-percentage-point jump in the employee portion of the Social Security tax. It will return to 6.2% in 2013 after a stimulus rate of 4.2% expires.

And then there are the Obamacare tax increases,

As for small business, the overall tax increase this year is substantial. The new listed top rate of 39.6% doesn’t include the phaseout of deductions that will take the actual rate to 41% or so for many taxpayers. Add the ObamaCare surtaxes on investment income (3.8%) and Medicare (0.9%), as well as the current Medicare tax of 1.45% (employee share), and the real top marginal tax rate on a dollar of investment income from a bank savings or money-market account will be about 46%. Throw in state taxes, and the marginal rates in many places will be in the mid-50%-or-higher-range.

Meanwhile, even as Democrats claim these tax rates won’t matter to investment, Senators stuffed their bill full of tax subsidies for special business interests. The wind tax credit survived (cost: $12.1 billion), and so did the tax breaks for cellulosic ethanol ($59 million) and the impoverished producers of Hollywood ($248 million).

But I digress. The fiscal cliff carries $4 trillion price tag over next decade. Here are 6 Things You Won’t Believe That Are In The Fiscal Cliff Bill That The Senate Passed At 2 AM While Most Americans Were Drunk. So you’re OK if you’re in the Puerto Rican rum, asparagus, or biodiesel businesses.

The rest of us can rejoice in the fact that we’re paying for Obama’s $7million Hawaiian vacation, to which he returned less than an hour after Congress and the White House resolved the fiscal cliff.

Budgets are for little people.

Related:
HERE IT IS: Full Text Of The 157 Page Bill To Avert The Fiscal Cliff

UPDATE,
FISCAL CLIFF DEAL: $1 IN SPENDING CUTS FOR EVERY $41 IN TAX INCREASES

Following last week’s looting of supermarkets, and facing currency exchange restrictions and 20% annual inflation, Argentine Firms Get Creative
Many of Argentina’s businesses say the country’s increasingly unorthodox macroeconomic policies are becoming a headache.

So we now have Newsan SA (which makes Sanyo plasma-television screens and JVC video cameras) fishing shrimp and hake, tire maker Pirelli exporting honey, and BMW exporting leather, grape juice, and rice. Why?

Last year, President Cristina Kirchner’s government sought to stem an outflow of dollars, help companies and protect local industry by creating a new trade policy that allows imports of foreign goods only if they are equally matched by exports.

This is vastly inefficient, and increases the cost of doing business in the country. Read the article for details.

Not a way to run an economy, but a way to ruin it.

Cross-posted at Liberty Unyielding.

Economic growth and job creation do not come from government spending:

States that Spend Less, Tax Less—and Grow More
States with an income tax spent 42% more per resident in 2011 than the nine states without an income tax.

Does curtailing spending lead to better private sector growth?

States that allow taxpayers and employers to keep more of their earnings are reaping the benefits. States without an income tax have significantly better growth in private sector GDP (59% versus 42%) over the last 10 years. They increased the number of jobs by 4.9% while jobs in the rest of the states declined by 2.6%. States without an income tax gained population (+5.5%) from domestic migration (U.S. residents moving in and out of states) while all other states as a whole lost 1.3% of population between 2000 and 2009.

The 10 states with the highest rank in the State Business Tax Climate Index also dramatically outperform the rest of the country. They win handily on private-sector GDP growth (61% versus 42%), gained 6.1% private jobs while other states declined by 2.8%, and gained 5.5% from domestic migration at the expense of other states, which lost 1.2% between 2000 and 2009.

As a result, the states with the better business tax environment will continue to outperform the rest of the country.

Cross-posted at Liberty Unyielding.

UPDATE,
Linked by Pirate’s Cove. Thank you!

This BBC4 documentary was filmed at my favorite tango venue, La Confiteria Ideal, during the 2002 Argentine crisis. In addition to the beautiful tango, it gives a snapshot of Buenos Aires in the middle of a financial disaster (well past the point of “crisis”).

Pay attention to the gentleman at the 50:00 mark, describing how they were trapped by poor government and corrupt politicians,

He lost his money, and talks about trying to rescue his money.

It was never to be.

Is the USA heading that way?

Daniel Henninger writes about Obama’s Ruinous Course
Where in his career did Barack Obama ever learn the art of the political deal? Nowhere.

Bear in mind as we spend the holidays on this precipice, that the “fiscal cliff” wasn’t born yesterday. It crawled out of its crypt in late 2011, after the Republican leadership and Mr. Obama—the deficit-reduction “super committee”—failed to negotiate essentially the same deal they are failing to get done now.

The inability of this Congress and this president to compromise on anything, now or at any time in the past four years, is itself a problem worthy of some thought.

Here’s one thought: The main reason there isn’t, and may never be, a solution on the fiscal cliff is that Barack Obama doesn’t know how to do a political compromise. Where in his career did Barack Obama ever learn the art of the political deal? Nowhere.

Read the whole thing.

And, by the way, as I see it, we went over the fiscal cliff with the first “stimulus.”

The White House plan:

• $1.6 trillion in tax increases over 10 years,
• more spending right now: $50 billion in immediate stimulus spending, CORRECTION: $200 billion in stimulus
• home mortgage refinancing and
• a permanent end to Congressional control over statutory borrowing limits.

In exchange for locking in the $1.6 trillion in added revenues, President Obama embraced the goal of finding $400 billion in savings from Medicare and other social programs to be worked out next year, with no guarantees.

No wonder McConnell ‘Burst Into Laughter’ as Geithner Outlined Obama’s Plan

Paul Mirengoff:

The decision to present this absurdly one-sided proposal comes straight from the Obama playbook. Recall that the president has presented budgets so ridiculous that they could not garner even one Democratic vote in Congress. Republicans then presented detailed budgets that, unlike the president’s, actually address the debt crisis. Obama responding by demagoguing the Republican cuts.

Republicans shouldn’t play this game again. They should tell the White House to eliminate the stimulus spending and the proposal to end Congressional control over statutory borrowing limits, and to propose detailed and significant spending cuts. If the White House declines to do so, Republicans should walk away.

Making the Senate present a budget for the first time in 3 years would be a good start, too.

UPDATE,
Ezra Klein thinks the Republicans should now propose their own. Ezra, where’s the Dems’ budget?

Kimberly Strassel:

Don’t forget: The man now engaged with Congress to work out a grand deal is the same one who could not pull over to his side a single Republican vote for his stimulus legislation, who had to ram through ObamaCare with procedural tricks, and whose inept handling of last year’s debt-ceiling talks ultimately led his fellow Democrat, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, to isolate him from the final negotiations. This is not a history to inspire confidence.

Mr. Obama’s tendency to campaign rather than lead, to speechify rather than negotiate, has already defined this lame-duck session. The president has wasted weeks during which a framework for a deal has been in place.

Within two days of the election, Mr. Boehner had offered an enormous compromise, committing the GOP to provide new tax revenue, through limits on deductions for the wealthy. Mr. Obama campaigned on making “the rich” pay more—and that is exactly what Mr. Boehner agreed to give him.

All that was left for the president to do was accept this peace offering, pair it with necessary spending cuts, and take credit for averting a crisis. Mr. Obama has instead spent the past weeks campaigning for tax-rate hikes. He wants the revenue, but collected only the way he chooses. And on the basis of that ideological insistence alone, the nation is much closer to a crisis.
…
Then again, the most frightening aspect of the White House proposal is that it wasn’t an error. Perhaps the proposal was thoroughly calculated. This suggests a president who doesn’t care about the outcome of the cliff negotiations—who thinks that he wins politically no matter what. He’s betting that either the GOP will be far more responsible than he is and do anything to avert a crisis, or that the cliff gives him the tax hikes his partisans are demanding. Win-win, save for the enormous pain to average families across the country.

Not that Obama gives a rat’s behind. He’s going on vacation. Besides, the Democrats are completely convinced that if no deal is reached, the Bush tax cuts expire, and sequestration takes effect, Republicans will get most of the blame.

Thanks to fifty years of Communist rule, Cuba’s broke, and will continue to be broke. And now, Cubans will be taxed on what they don’t own.

Adding to the preposterousness of the situation, Reuters reporter Marc Frank, formerly of Communist Daily, comes out with an article where he posits that Most Cubans have not paid taxes for half a century, but that will change under a new code starting January 1,

The new code covers 19 taxes, including such things as inheritance, environment, sales, transportation and farm land, various license fees and three contributions, including social security.

Inheritance of what?? The regime abolished private property from the get-go, and it has not restored it,

It’s a perversely absurd view of the issue. The truth is that the castro regime, like all other totalitarian ones, is concerned with complete control of the citizenry. Political control, economic control, it’s all the same and necessary for the retention of power which is the sole aim of despots. castro, inc. is interested in generating revenue wherever it can while maintaining as much control as possible. I’ve stated many times that if raul castro truly wanted to implement the “Chinese Model” economy into Cuba he could have done so by now. He doesn’t do it because he knows Cuba is not China and the Cuban people will not be so easy to control once they have more economic self-determination. The regime wouldn’t last six months under a Chinese type of economic system.

Frank’s assuming that “businesses will become cooperatives or be privately leased” and will be able to survive enough to pay taxes.

Yeah, right.

What happened to the small businesses that were mowed down in the 1990s? What about this year’s new import fees?

Kevin McCullough:

So when the state controlled industry, businesses endured a 100% tax rate, and the nation never rose to prosperity, never saw an increase in take home pay, never really ever saw a modern way of life take hold.

Memo to Kevin: The state still controls everything in Cuba,
New Cuban Tax Just Same Old Communist Expropriation

the money workers could earn if free to choose their employers at wages that reflect their worth now all goes to the state and its “free” programs. Officially or not, it’s a tax well beyond 99%.

And what a surprise, the Castro brothers just happen to have personal fortunes in the billions of dollars, according to the last Forbes estimate. That’s a lot of taxes.

The Castro dictatorship is looking to take cash from the supposedly independent new businesses it’s permitted to set up shop, originally as a way of cutting the bloated state employment rolls.

Far from being a market liberalization or modernization, the Castroite tax hike is nothing but a shakedown of businesses that are struggling to grow, and an effort to reassert the power of the state over its citizens.

It’s the same-old, same-old, folks.

Dark now:
IT DOESN’T PAY TO WORK

Pitch black:
Obamacare will make us a part time nation

UPDATE:
Thousands of high net worth individuals fleeing America under the Obama regime…

@BillWhittle explains lucidly the morality of producing value to society:

Bill Whittle for POTUS!

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE,
As it turns out, a (female) friend also had emailed me this, with the subject line “I want to have his babies”.

Latino Poverty Rate Climbs to 28%

The numbers released Wednesday

a week after the election

by the Census Bureau are part of a newly developed supplemental poverty measure. Devised a year ago, this measure provides a fuller picture of poverty that the government believes can be used to assess safety-net programs by factoring in living expenses and taxpayer-provided benefits that the official formula leaves out.

Based on the revised formula, the number of poor people exceeded the 49 million, or 16 percent of the population, who were living below the poverty line in 2010. That came as more people in the slowly improving economy picked up low-wage jobs last year but still struggled to pay living expenses. The revised poverty rate of 16.1 percent also is higher than the record 46.2 million, or 15 percent, that the government’s official estimate reported in September.

Again, after the election, we’re told that

Hispanics and Asians also saw much higher rates of poverty, 28 percent and 16.9 percent, respectively, compared with rates of 25.4 percent and 12.3 percent under the official formula.

Oh, We Forgot to Tell You …

Related,
Hispanic Straw Men

Cross-posted at Liberty Unyielding.