Entitlements and taxes

Talk radio 3/23/10: When President Reagan reduced the top marginal tax rate from 70 to 28% those filthy rich people President Obama has such an animus for managed to put 21,000,000 unemployed people to work and revenues to the government doubled. Capital and employment go together - take it away from the free market and unemployment goes up.

President Kennedy did the same thing when he found that taxes had encroached to a very high level when he became President. He lowered the highest tax rate from 91% to a rate significantly lower and for lowest incomes from 20 to 14%. In each case unemployment went down and revenues to the government went up. It happened again when President Clinton adopted New Gingrich's Contract With America plan in 1994. President Bush's plan of cross-the-board lower taxes in 2003 brought about 46 months of economic growth and only slowed when the oil producing countries we placed our dependence on, instead of tapping our own vast natural resources, declared economic war on us in 2008. In spite of gradually driving the price of their oil up to $147 a barrel and putting a strain on every family budget and every industry unemployment in November 2008 was 6.5% - considerably lower than it is now.

It's not necessary to be an Ivy League scholar to know what works to revive the economy. All that's necessary is to look back at what worked to get there. But for those who would force us into Socialism, the way to do it is to deliberately destroy the economy and create the perception that only the government can be relied on to satisfy all our needs.

There's an old saying: "Money doesn't grow on trees." And neither does the money for the entitlements the Socialist politicians are so generously (?) bestowing on us - or are they just trying to create a dependency on them to feed their lust for power?

Entitlements can be like drugs. We glow in the elation of receiving them and then, like drugs, there are the after effects. With entitlements the after effects are that they have to be funded. And who is it that those funds come from? They have to be funded by the taxpayer that received the entitlement.

Some entitlements do make sense, such as unemployment insurance. But we can't be so heavily protected from every sling and arrow that come our way that we lose our incentive to go to work.

Bret Baier/President Obama interview

This is a letter I sent Fox News:

3/17/10

To:Fox News

From: Jack West
Fairfield, NJ

I thought Bret Baier did a masterful job under trying circumstances of interviewing the “Artful Dodger,” President Obama, this Saint Patrick’s Day afternoon. When Bret would try to get the President to get to the crux of the question he would answer with words which really meant, “Please let me continue with my filibuster.”

I was annoyed the first time I ever heard President Obama mention what he “inherited” regarding the economy and I get increasingly more agitated every time he says it - which is every time he gets on the air. This was no inheritance. It’s what these most radical left wingers, that managed to gain power, brought with them.

Who do we have to thank for leaving us wide open to have economic war being declared on us by the people we rely on to supply our oil needs? Who is it that stifles a more energetic effort for us go after our own vast resources of oil and natural gas? Until the countries that supply our oil gradually raised the price of their oil to $147 a barrel in 2008 this economy was humming along pretty good. The Bush tax cuts of 2003 brought about 46 months of economic growth and for the biggest part of that time the unemployment rate was under five percent. The economy would have continued to flourish the way it had been if we had been energy independent - and we could have been. The price of gas could have continued to be what it was in 1973 when it was 34 cents a gallon. There would not have been the stresses on family and industry budgets that came with the assault on our economy by our oil suppliers. One need only Google “Bakken oil formation” to see what kind of stores we have of oil and natural gas. Geologists indicate that in this area alone we sit on “the single largest oil deposit in the world.” We have deposits in many other parts of the country and offshore.

We are decades away from being able to be energy independent with “Green” sources. While that’s being developed we must rely on oil and natural gas. We can either send a trillion dollars every year and a half to foreign countries or we can make use of our own deposits and put our own people to work getting it. We could be competitors on the world market instead of prey. The Internet lists fifteen of our largest suppliers.
This information can be brought up by Googling, “Crude oil and total petroleum imports.”

Aside from some cursory comment by Glenn Beck, I don't remember any of the other political commentators talk about the effect the pricing of the imported oil was having on the economy in 2008. This was the primary cause of the breakdown of the economy.