"Taxmageddon" in 2013? Can We Avoid It? Can You Afford It?

Can We Avoid "Taxmageddon" in 2013?

Tea Party Nation:

By Alan Carnuba

In 1959, during an interview with the late Mike Wallace, Ayn Rand, the author of “Atlas Shrugged”, said “A free market will not break down. All depressions are caused by government interference and the cure that is always offered is more of the same poisons that caused the disaster.”

After the stock market crashed on October 29, 1929, the government’s solution to the crisis was to raise the top tax rate from 25% to 63%. Successively this was increased to 79% and then to 94%, effectively choking off capital formation, investment, and the incentive to start new businesses.

Not until World War Two broke out in Europe in 1939 and threatened the security of the United States and its allies did Franklin D. Roosevelt reverse his failed policies that had stretched out the Depression, turning to private enterprise to build the airplanes, tanks, and guns that would be needed to defeat the Axis powers and, in 1941, the Empire of Japan. Capitalism saved America.

America suffered a little known shock to its economy on September 15, 2008, just a month and a half shy of Election Day, when around 11 AM the Federal Reserve noted a tremendous draw down of money market accounts in the nation to the tune of $550 billion dollars in just over an hour or so. The decision was made to close the accounts. Had they not done that, the Reserve estimated that by 2 PM the entire economy of the nation would have collapsed. Within 24 hours, the world economy would have followed.

The financial crisis this triggered was put off by letting the investment house of Lehman Brothers fail and by getting Congress to agree to a $700 billion program to bail out other investment firms and the insurance firm, AIG. Simply put, without a banking system, you do not have an economy.

Americans are in for another shock to the system on January 1, 2013 when nearly a half trillion in higher taxes will become the law of the land. Taxmageddon would be the largest tax hike in the history of the nation.

The taxes pose such a threat to the anemic “recovery” the economy is said to be having that a think tank called the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has been urging the CEOs of corporations and financial institutions to meet with members of Congress to bring pressure to resolve the gridlock that has brought the nation to the precipice of yet another financial crisis.

How bad is the prospect of January 1, 2013? A May 11th Heritage Foundation analysis listed the following:

# Income tax rates shoot up,

# the child credit rate is cut in half,

# the marriage penalty roars back to life,

# the capital gains tax rate goes up,

# the dividend tax rate soars,

# the payroll tax rate jumps two percentage points,

# the death tax is restored to its punitive past,

# the Alternative Minimum Tax relief expires, and

# a uniquely pernicious additional payroll tax hike from Obamacare takes effect unless the Supreme Court strikes down the law as unconstitutional.

These tax hikes are a combination of expiring tax cuts, particularly the Bush era cuts that President Obama decried, along with newer taxes he advocated. To put it another way, in 2011 Americans had to work 111 days to earn enough money to pay for federal, state and local taxes before they could begin to pay all their other expenses. Unless “Taxmageddon” is repealed, it will take eleven more days in 2012.

The Obama administration ignored the deficit-reduction findings and recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles commission it initiated to address the nation’s financial problems. It imposed Obamacare which will control one sixth of the nation’s economy and which is replete with all kinds of more tax provisions.

Congress put together a “super committee” to address the government’s enormous spending, the threats to the Social Security and Medicare programs, and to recommend tax reforms. It failed and, instead, imposed an across the board “sequestration” program of spending cuts so dangerous to the national security that even Obama’s Secretary of Defense called it catastrophic.

The hope now is that, after the November election, in the interim period before the next President is sworn into office and a new Congress convenes, the increases in taxes can be avoided. That is what the CEOs are belatedly pushing for.

Suffice to say, until power was returned to the Republicans in the House in 2010, a Tea Party movement success, Congress had been on a spending spree and, of course, every measure the House has been forth since then has been spurned by the Democrats, particularly in the Democrat-controlled Senate which has set a record for not producing a budget for the past three years.

Unless voters return power in the Senate to Republicans and defeat President Obama’s reelection, life in America is going to worsen and the nation faces another round of credit rating reductions that will affect its ability to borrow to meet its current debt obligations.

A great nation will have been reduced to pauper status by a profligate Congress whose only “solution” has been to raise the debt ceiling.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

 

PLUS, IF PASSED ADD THIS:

ON JANUARY 1, 2013, If OBAMA HAS HIS WAY, THE US GOVERNMENT WILL BE REQUIRING EVERYONE TO HAVE DIRECT DEPOSIT FOR SS CHECKS.
WONDER WHY?  -  HR 4646… HAVING BEEN REINTRODUCED AS HR 1125

Be sure to read entire explanation…

Watch for this AFTER November elections; remember this BEFORE you VOTE, in case you think Obama is looking out for your best interest.

A 1% tax on all bank transactions is what HR 4646 (HR 1125) calls for.

Do you receive a paycheck, or a retirement check from Social Security or a pension fund and have it direct deposit??

Well guess what ... It looks as if Obama wants to tax it 1% !!!

This bill was put forth by Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA).

YES, that is 1% tax on all bank transactions - HR 4646, every time it goes in and every time money goes out.

Ask your congressperson to vote NO.

FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!

1% tax on all bank transactions ~ HR 4646 - ANOTHER NEW OBAMA TAX SLIPPED IN WHILE WE WERE ASLEEP. Checked this on snopes, it's true! Check it out yourself ~ HR 4646.

President Obama's finance team is recommending a one percent (1%) transaction fee (TAX). Obama's plan is to sneak it in after the November elections to keep it under the radar.

This is a 1% tax on all transactions at any financial institution - banks, credit unions, savings and loans, etc. Any deposit you make, or even a transfer within your own bank from one account to another, will have a 1% tax charged.

If your paycheck or your Social Security or whatever is direct deposit, it will get a 1% tax charged for the transaction.

If your paycheck is $1000, then you will pay Obama $10 just for the privilege of depositing your paycheck in your bank. Even if you hand carry your paycheck or any check in to your bank for a deposit, 1% tax will be charged.

You receive a $5,000 stock dividend from your broker, Obama takes $50 just to allow you to deposit that check in the bank.

If you take $1,000 cash to deposit at your bank, 1% tax will be charged.

Mind you, this is from the man who promised that, if you make under $250,000 per year, you will not see one penny of new tax.

Keep your eyes and ears open, you will be amazed at what you learn about this guy's under-the-table moves to increase the number of ways you are taxed.

Oh, and by the way, if you receive a refund from the IRS next year and you have it direct deposited or you walk in to deposit that check, you guessed it. You will pay a 1% charge of that money just for putting it in your bank.
Remember, any money, cash, check or whatever, no matter where it came from, you will pay a 1% fee if you put it in the bank.

Some will say, oh well, it's just 1%. Are you kidding me? It's a 1% tax increase across the board. Remember, once the tax is there, they can also raise it at will. And if anyone protests, they will just say, "Oh,that's not really a tax, it's a user fee"!

Think this is no big deal? Go back and look at the transactions you made from last year's banking statements. Then add the total of all those transactions and deduct 1%. Still think it's no big deal?

Can you really afford 4 more years???

The following is copied from (left leaning/Soros affiliated) Snopes… so you know it is true and coming if Obama is re-elected!:

1. Snopes.com: Debt Free America Act•••

Is the U.S.government proposing a 1% tax on debit card usage and/or banking transactions?
...It is true. The bill is HR-4646 introduced by US Rep Peter deFazio D-Oregon and US Senator Tom Harkin D-Iowa. Their plan is to sneak it in after the...
...moved beyond proposing studies and submitted the Debt Free America Act (H.R. 4646), a bill calling for the implementation of a scheme to pay down the...
...[2010] by Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.). His "Debt Free America Act" (H.R. 4646) would impose a 1 percent "transaction tax" on every financial transaction...
Wed, 02 Nov 201111:27:37 GMThttp://www.snopes.com/politics/taxes/debtfree.asp

111th Congress, 2009–2010

To establish a fee on transactions which would eliminate the national debt and replace the income tax on individuals.

Introduced: Feb 23, 2010

Sponsor: Rep. Chaka Fattah [D-PA2]

Status: Died (Referred to Committee)

See Instead: This bill was re-introduced as H.R. 1125 on Mar 16, 2011. See H.R. 1125 for current action on this subject – It is presently in committee

h/t to Jay Osborne and MJ

Technorati Tags: Taxmageddon,taxes,one term Obama,wake-up America,ABO,fees,stand-up America,economics,vote ABO,Romney 2012,ObamaCare

Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead - A Work That Endures…

Video:  The Fountainhead – Howard Roark Speech (Ayn Rand)

See full film The Fountainhead HERE

The Fountainhead

"Howard Roark laughed." So begins Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, the improbable bestseller that established Rand's fame and reputation as a novelist-philosopher.

Rejected by twelve publishers, The Fountainhead was finally accepted by Bobbs-Merrill when a young editor taken with the book threatened to quit if it were not. "If this is not the book for you," he wired the publisher's head office, "then I am not the editor for you." His confidence was justified: to date, The Fountainhead has sold some six million copies all told, and continues to sell over 100,000 copies each year. At the time of its publication, Lorine Pruette wrote in the New York Times that "it was the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall," with characters who are "amazingly literate, romanticized as larger-than-life representatives of good and evil." However, it was not critical adulation, but the incredible word of mouth that spread about the book that made it a bestseller.

From its memorable opening line, Rand's prose camera pans out to reveal Howard Roark, a young student of architecture, poised nude on a cliff's edge and preparing to dive into the lake below. The scene sets the tone for the book, and hints at the "sense of life" that animated Rand's fiction: Roark has just been expelled from architecture school for refusing to ape the styles of past masters in his designs. His response is not despair, but an indifference grounded in a supreme confidence in his own artistic vision. Explaining that vision to the school's dean several scenes later, Roark says:

Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the materials determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets ever detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it.

Like Pruette, Rand saw her characters as ideal types, embodied principles. She always denied that her protagonists were modeled on any actual people, and in particular was adamant that Roark was not a fictionalized Frank Lloyd Wright. Still, it is hard not to hear in Roark's own theories of architecture echoes of Wright, especially his 1930–31 lectures at Princeton, which Rand had read. Wright had said of his own buildings: "Consistency from first to last will give you the result you seek and consistency alone." Even their biographies overlap: Roark's mentor Henry Cameron, a brilliant innovator whose star had faded, evokes Wright's own, Louis Sullivan.

Rand sought unsuccessfully to interview Wright as a source for The Fountainhead. (Instead, she gathered source material for the book by working without pay as a typist for New York architect Ely Jacques Kahn.) In her letter to Wright, Rand described her project as a "story of human integrity. That is what I am writing. That is what you have lived. And to my knowledge you are the only one among the men of this century who has lived it." She wanted to interview Wright, not for information, but for "the inspiration of seeing before me a living miracle." The two later became acquainted, and Wright even began designing a house for Rand, though it was never built.

The reference to "integrity" must be taken to refer not only to the internal coherence of Wright's architectural philosophy, but also his famous stubbornness with clients when it came to seeing his plans realized as he had intended. Roark's fidelity to his own vision makes it difficult for him to find work, despite his genius, and the conflicts this creates drive the book's plot.

Roark's own approach is thrown into relief by a parallel portrayal of the career of his classmate Peter Keating. A thorough mediocrity, Keating's sense of self is as derivative as his building designs. While Roark toils in obscurity, Keating rises through the ranks of the prestigious New York firm Francon & Heyer. But on major commissions, Keating's lack of inspiration forces him to seek help from Roark, who is the unacknowledged designer of Keating's most renowned buildings.

The contrast between the two is meant to illustrate what Rand would later call "the virtue of selfishness." A conventional story would have set up Roark's "selfless devotion to his art" against Keating's "grasping, selfish careerism." Rand reverses this expectation. Keating's pathology, Rand shows, is precisely the result of selflessness. Lacking a strong identity of his own, he seeks to construct one second-hand by absorbing the opinions of others. Lacking self-respect, he struggles to do whatever will please others and win him their adulation. Roark's apparent "sacrifice," on the other hand, is nothing of the sort. If he insists on his own methods and designs, it is because they arehis own. The true sacrifice, Rand makes clear, would be to compromise his artistic integrity for mere popular approval, or even material comfort.

That integrity makes it impossible for Roark to fit in with conventional architecture firms, and equally difficult to secure commissions when he opens his own office. Eventually, he leaves the city to work as a manual laborer at a granite quarry owned by Guy Francon of Francon & Heyer—which by now has become Francon & Keating. There, he meets Francon's fiercely independent daughter Dominique. Recognizing Roark as a kindred spirit, she begins to pursue him, and in what has become the book's most famous scene, they make violent, passionate love that, while consensual, seems on the surface like an act of rape. But Francon, unsure she is prepared for a serious romantic affair with Roark, pulls back. Soon, a businessman who admires the buildings Roark managed to have built finds him at the quarry and brings him back to New York to work on an apartment building. There, he finds growing success—and a new enemy.

While Keating is Roark's professional rival, he is not quite Roark's adversary: by turns contemptible and pathetic, Peter Keating is not up to the role of archenemy. That is left to journalist and architecture critic Ellsworth Toohey. Toohey is something of an aberration in Rand's fiction, in that he is perhaps her only really memorable villain.

In Rand's Objectivist philosophy, intelligence, rationality, and achievement are all associated with her own ethics, and therefore with her protagonists. Typically, these are opposed by bland, bromide-mouthing mobs who evoke nothing so much as Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil." Toohey is the exception: he is the one character in Rand's work who fully comprehends the difference between good and evil, between individualism and collectivism, and consciously chooses evil. Incapable of Roark's form of creative achievement, which he despises, Toohey has made his own goal power over the opinions of others. A clue to his motive is provided by his childhood reaction to the famous Biblical query: "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Toohey asks in response: "Then in order to be truly wealthy, a man should collect souls?" His adult life has been devoted to precisely that end, through the formation of a series of organizations across many different fields, including a collective of fashionable second-rate writers who promote each other's work ceaselessly.

Determined to crush Roark, Toohey manipulates a spiritually inclined pawn, Hopton Stoddard, to commission an ecumenical temple from the atheistic architect. Stoddard, on Toohey's advice, convinces Roark to take the job by telling him: "But you're a profoundly religious man, Mr. Roark—in your own way. I can see that in your buildings." Toohey has detected, not religious reverence in the ordinary sense, but the reverence for the best in the human spirit that permeates Roark's designs. Once the temple—a masterpiece, of course—is complete, Toohey denounces it as blasphemous, and pushes Stoddard to sue Roark for breach of contract. Roark's defense is merely to offer the jury photographs of the temple—but swayed by the testimony of an architectural expert (Toohey, of course) they vote against him, destroying his reputation.

The verdict comes as a blow to Dominique Francon, who more than ever despairs that individual achievement and integrity have little chance of surviving in the world as it is. She resolves to purge herself of the capacity to appreciate heroic achievement—and to destroy Roark, who is a constant reminder of the individualism society cannot tolerate. Attempting to drown herself in inanity, she marries Peter Keating, only to leave him for newspaper tycoon Gail Wynand, publisher of the Banner, where Toohey's column appears. Like Roark in many ways, Wynand differs from the architect in having decided that the only way to survive and flourish is to pander to the public, which he does on a daily basis in his widely read newspaper. Wynand, though, cannot help but respond with admiration to Roark's work... and to Roark himself when they meet. Through Wynand's influence, Roark once again begins to work.

Keating's fortunes, in the meantime, have soured. Lacking his own creative voice, he is at a loss when the architectural trends he has spent his career emulating cease to be fashionable. Desperate to salvage his career, he begs Roark to design one last building for him: a low-income housing project to be called Cortland Homes. Roark, knowing that the project is under Toohey's control, and that a plan under his own name would never be accepted, agrees, on the condition that his plan be built precisely as designed.

When Toohey has some frivolous ornamentation added at the last moment, spoiling the integrity of the building, Roark dynamites it, with help from Dominique. Wynand believes he can use his media empire to sway public opinion in Roark's favor as the trial approaches, but he discovers that power over others is ephemeral. Once he is no longer telling the people what they want to hear, his papers stop selling. In a bid to take over the Banner, Toohey engineers a strike. Finally, Wynand caves and reverses his editorial position on Roark. At the trial, however, Roark offers an eloquent defense of his right to destroy his creation, whose integrity had already been destroyed in violation of his agreement with Keating. He tells the jury:

Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons—a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.
But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred.

Roark is acquitted. Wynand, realizing at last the necessity of integrity, shuts down the Banner rather than allow Toohey to control it in the wake of the strike. Roark is commissioned to rebuild the Cortland Homes by a private businessman, and Wynand decides the time has come to build his Wynand Building, which will be the city's tallest skyscraper. The book closes with Roark standing triumphant atop his work in progress, alongside an admiring Dominique.

The book's surprising success led to the production of a 1949 movie version of The Fountainhead starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, and directed by King Vidor. Warner Brothers had sought to have Wright himself design the film's sets, but that plan was scrapped when Wright demanded 10 percent of the film's gross profits on top of his $250,000 fee. The screenplay was, of course, penned by Ayn Rand. It is safe to assume that Warner Brothers didn't dare change the dialogue.

Source:  The CATO Institute

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WHY THE RUSH? WHAT ARE THEY AFRAID OF?

Why is there a mad rush to pass legislation by a lame-duck Congress?  While it appears that they are merely accelerating the pace to ensure that the programs they so vehemently believe in are securely engraved into legislation before their terms are up, in actual fact there is much more to the "rush to legislate."  It is fear that drives them, but what exactly are they afraid of?

In two words:  TEA PARTY.  To a significant extent, the Tea Party is the political manifestation of Ayn Rand's (In the book Atlas Shrugged) all-out "labor" strike by the "Producers" against the "looters,"  i.e., the socialists.  In Rand's book the strike basically turns off the spigot of support by industrialists and other producers, and initiates the collapse of the looters, since they cannot on their own produce anything, except, of course, looting.

While I understand this is a shallow and very basic reference to Ayn Rand's philosophical treatise, nevertheless, the Tea Party is about to carry out what amounts to turning off the spigot upon which today's looters depend for nourishment for their political aims.

The Democrat Socialists' worst nightmare is the cutting off of the funds collected from PRODUCERS in order to fund the socialist agenda and their wide range of programs that are geared to expand government and increase their power.

While the Democrat Socialists want to ensure that the bankrupting of the nation progresses, they wish to maintain the taxing and spending ability of their Socialist government entities in order to continue to govern and to continue their incessant quest to seize even more power.

An entire list of programs will be put into effect by Presidential Executive Decree, or Executive Orders, via existing regulations already on the books, in order to ensure that the balance of power remains in their favor, if any of their legislation happens to fail before the current Congress' term expires.

But essentially the next Congress will have the ability, albeit somewhat limited by the measured wins in the 2010 elections, to shut off the faucets upon which the Socialists so critically depend.  Too often our well-meaning electorate overlooks or ignores that the government they so avidly complain about is to a very great extent, funded by them.

Granted, they are doing so at the point of a gun, through mandated taxes, but as the recent elections have shown, and as the even more recent defeat of the Omnibus Bill so aptly demonstrates, if the Producers/financiers of government, i.e., the Conservative electorate decides to flex its muscle and close its wallet, it can and will do so.

Already the Ayn Rand strike is creating a major upheaval in government.  So much so that the old school Republicans are pretending to be "snookered" by a crafty, conniving President into compromising on key legislation.  The deals are being brokered, and the Rino's are selling out, and there is the business-as-usual back-scratching and nod-and-wink attempts to co-opt and derail the Tea Party electoral mandates.

Be assured:  There is no need to compromise with the looters of your hard earned money, which they have taken at gun-point, by force, under penalty of prison or worse, if you do not comply with handing over your treasure.  Instead, the order of the day should continue to religiously and meticulously turn off the spigot, continue with tax cuts, initiate and expand incentives for production, and initiate the return of commerce, business, trade, entrepreneurship, with the commensurate dismantling of any Socialist vestiges that remain in government.

Moreover the continued fight to systematically eradicate the grasp on American culture by the Socialist parasites should be expanded, with resources created to advance their demise here in the U.S.,  as well as the demise of the foreign enablers that are so obviously in collusion with the traitors to our nation.

It is, at this point, very significantly this:  If the Socialist looters do not have your money with which to oppress you, they are less likely to be able to obtain the means and the power to do so.  And by the way, in case you did not realize it, you can make it illegal for them to borrow from the Fed, from China, or from anyone, and you would be very prudent to make it so. 

(We can also get rid of the Income Tax.  Those pushing the Progressive Agenda realize that time works against them but chaos and created deadlines backed by fear works for them!!)

 

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h/t: Song of Truth  & the Blaze