Liberal Hypocrisy On Display

The hypocrisy in this video from the “The Blaze” is priceless. The premise of video is for the students to give up part of their high GPA and redistribute it to students who are “not as fortunate”.

For liberals it is OK to take from someone else and give it away, but once faced with having something taken from them, not OK.  You could almost see the light flick on in a couple of ther faces. It was funny.

The Chevy Volt is Cold (Correction)

Moe Lane over at Red State has a bit more information on the issues with the Chevy Volt. I did NOT know the car doesn’t come with a standard heater.

Correction: the Volt does come with a heater, it just doesn't work with a darn. According to a write-up done by Consumer Reports, the heating system wouldn't keep their testers warm when the weather was too cold.  The seat heating system wasn't enough. It also reduced the distance the charge could take you.  Consumer Reports recommends the Volt as a second or third vehicle and if you live in a temperate climate.

One more thing. The Volt is really popular with green crowd, obviously. The green crowd also tends to be on the progressive side of the aisle. And the progressive crowd is real big into redistribution of wealth. The cost of this car is require a redistribution. At $43K (before $5K dealer markup), most folks cannot afford this as a first car, much less as a second or third car.

President Obama and Bill O'Reilly (Part One?)

Sunday night, before the Super Bowl, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly had a 15 minute live sit down with President Obama. I myself didn’t watch it live, too busy preparing items for a Super Bowl party that my family and I were attending.  But I did review it later with the intent of going over the interview afterwards. But I decided to delay when I heard at the end of the interview there was going to be an additional 10 minutes that wouldn’t be shown live.

Here is my take, question by question, answer by answer (paraphrased A LOT for brevity). Before I get started, I know there have been complaints from the left blogs about O’Reilly interrupting President Obama something like 20 times. Get over it. O’Reilly has never liked bullcrap and he can smell it from a mile away. Plus, if he didn’t interrupt, Obama would have stood on the soapbox the entire 15 minutes. Like a lot of Presidents, Obama likes to hear the sound of his own voice. He is probably the worst though.

Q: Is Mubarak going to leave soon?

A: Egypt is not going to go back to what it was. Get all the groups together for an orderly transition.

Tax Bill

Not quite sure haow I feel about the House passing the bill to continue the Bush tax cuts. On the one hand, it does mean our taxes won't go up on 1 Jan 2011. On the other hand, we'll have to have this fight all over again in two years. At least it will give the folks a reasonable gauge on what their income will be for the next two years.

I am also not liking the "death tax", but at least it was held at 35%. What right does the gov't have to money and property that was already earned and taxed? One congress-critter tried to make the argument that since the person was dead, the money was no longer theirs. True enough. But it has already been taxed once already from a variety of different money-grubbers. The death tax can be a burden on the family who receives the property. If the it is a business or land (say a farm) that is involved, the heirs are required to pay the death tax, which will stand at 35%. If the property owner and the heirs are land rich but cash poor, they will be forced to sell the property to pay off the tax burden. And will they also be required to pay income taxes on the proceeds after the death tax is paid? I don't know the answer to that question but it sure sounds like something the gov't would do.

I wish the republicans had held out for a longer deal on the tax cuts. Maybe they could have put a bill together after the New Year. But the risk would be that President Obama would veto the bill. He is not a fan of the "wealthy", having already stated that at some point you have already earned enough money. So taxing the rich is something he really wants to make happen. But at least it has been held off for a couple of years and can be re-engaged at a later date. Hopefully we'll not wait until the last minute next time around.

I am also not a fan of the unemployment benefits extensions. I know there are lots of people hurting out there and there has to be something to protect them. But we now have people on the unemployment dole for more than two years. There are jobs out there to be had, you just have apply/submit your resume.

Income Redistribution

Here is the original line item:
You didn't get mad when we gave people who had more money than they could spend, the filthy rich, over a trillion dollars in tax breaks.
My Response:
Here we go again with the class wars. What about all the tax breaks that now exist for not-so-rich? Do you know that almost 48% of Americans don’t pay anything in taxes? Yes, everyone pays out of each paycheck, but when these 48-ers file their tax returns, it all comes back. In fact, a very large percentage get back more than they paid in. I know someone who last year paid around $5,500.00 in taxes but their refund check came back at nearly $6,800.00. Where did that extra money come from? Why the “filthy rich” of course. The top 1% in income pays nearly 20% of the taxes. The top 40% pay almost the entire tax bill. How much more do you want? Based on your comments, I’d guess you’d like the Dems to take even more and give it to you in the form of income distribution. You basically want to receive something you did not earn.

Regardless what you might read or what you might see on TV, most of the wealth in this country is not what could be called old money (handed down through the generations). Think about some of the wealthiest people in recent years. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, George Steinbrenner, Phil Knight and many others started off with little or nothing. These people are self made. They had the ideas, they took the risks, they worked the LONG, LONG hours to get their products off the ground and into the people’s hands. As they were doing this, they were making other people wealthy. Bill Gates created approximately 10,000 millionaires. All of these people created jobs, many of them well-paying.

Why is it that other people they have some sort of right to the money these people earned through hard work? And who determine who has enough money? Most of these people are philanthropists or the first order. Gates has given more than $33B of his fortune to his foundation that assists education, health care and other charitable causes. Buffet has stated publically that he plans on giving his entire fortune to charity and he has already started with a huge $30B donation the Gates’ foundation. Knight gives his money to the University of Oregon.

Some people will say why they don’t give the money to government so bureaucrats can determine where the money should go. Do you really think that the government can do better with the money? If so, then you really are in love with government. I would be willing to bet that if you asked each of these people why they don’t give the money to government for spending determinations and they’d probably laugh at you. The government is no where nearly as efficient at spending money as private individuals are. Why would you want the government telling you how to spend you paycheck? Just think about that for minute. They would tell you what kind of car to buy, what to buy at the grocery store, the clothes you could purchase. Do you really think you’d have money left over? As someone who spent several years in the federal government, there was no incentive to spend money wisely. In fact, if you budgeted X-numbers of dollars to spend for the fiscal year and you could come in under that by finding items below what you originally budgeted, not only would your next’s budget be chopped, but it would be cut back below what you actually spent. In other words, if you saved 5%, the next year you’d actually be reduced by 10%. Spending money wisely and efficiently is not the federal governments DNA.