DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Obama's "American Jobs Act"

Can you give me the cliff's notes version of that thing and show me where profits rose and taxes fell? From what I see in 2010, profits rose 29% and taxes rose 63% but the I didn't have time to read the whole thing.

For the year on the whole:

- corporate profits before and after taxes went up

- corporate taxes went up

- corporate tax write offs increased and expanded

j/c This made my day.

Dailycaller

Inspired Act of Plagiarism

I had never heard of Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) until yesterday. But if they give awards for inspired political mischief, Gohmert is an instant Hall of Famer.

As reported by Mary Katharine Ham, yesterday Gohmert introduced the American Jobs Act. No, not that American Jobs Act. Not the $447 billion hodge-podge of proposals that President Obama announced last week as his plan to revitalize the economy. Gohmert’s bill is a simple two-pager that does nothing but repeal the federal corporate income tax. The title “American Jobs Act” was available for Gohmert’s bill because no one has bothered to introduce the president’s bill.

Gohmert’s impish plagiarism might seem like an inconsequential prank, good for a few chuckles from partisan Republicans but nothing more. On closer inspection, though, Gohmert’s act of political piracy is revealed as a stroke of genius. Here are some reasons why:

There goes the marketing plan: Obama had gone to extraordinary lengths to make a big splash with the launch of the marketing campaign for his new jobs bill. He arranged to roll out the campaign with a nationally televised, prime-time speech before a joint session of Congress. Obama’s carefully chosen brand name for his jobs bill, the “American Jobs Act,” was a key part of the marketing plan. Obama mentioned that brand name nine times in last week’s speech, and countless more times in subsequent campaign stops around the country. Railing against Republicans for failing to pass the “American Jobs Act” was probably going to be the centerpiece of Obama’s re-election campaign.

Gohmert has thrown a spanner in those works. The phrase “American Jobs Act,” presumably the result of expensive focus-group testing by the White House, is now officially tied to a policy that Obama will never support. That won’t stop Obama from railing against Republicans, but he may have to find another brand name. Perhaps he could call another joint session of Congress to unveil a new name for his bill.

Any new brand name will certainly not include the word “stimulus,” even though Obama’s bill is clearly a rehash of the unsuccessful policies of the 2009 stimulus. Not once in Obama’s speech did he utter the “s” word, and the Democrats have clearly purged it from their vocabulary.

The Democrats won’t openly acknowledge that their 2009 stimulus was such a failure that it has made “stimulus” a dirty word. Here’s a way to smoke them out: If Gohmert is still feeling mischievous, he might consider beating the Democrats to the punch once again by immediately introducing Obama’s bill with the title “Stimulus Act of 2011.” The Democrats supporting the bill would then, as President Obama likes to say, have a choice. One choice would be to acquiesce to the title — and hence re-embrace a term that has been contaminated by failure. The other choice would be to protest the title — and hence admit that the term has been contaminated by failure.

Further evidence that they can’t get anything right: The ease with which Gohmert has robbed the president of his chosen rallying cry reinforces the growing sense that this White House can’t get anything right. No competently run White House would allow such a thing to happen, just as no competently run business would spend a lot of money to introduce a new product without first locking down the rights to the brand name. Obama’s big jobs speech has now been bookended by embarrassing blunders, starting with the White House’s failed attempt to upstage last week’s GOP presidential debate. At a time when the president needs to overcome increasing public doubt about his competence, Gohmert’s gleeful jab has reinforced that doubt.


No Democrat was in a tearing hurry to “pass this jobs bill now”: During the president’s address last week, he exhorted Congress to “pass this jobs bill now” (or variations on that phrase) 16 times. That was of course an unreasonable request, because the White House at the time had not yet finished drafting the bill. The president did, however, release the bill on Monday. One would think, given the urgency conveyed in Obama’s speech, that at least one of the 192 Democrats in the House would have gotten around to dropping the bill in the hopper by the time Gohmert introduced his bill on Wednesday. Gohmert has exposed an apparent lack of urgency on the part of House Democrats to pass Obama’s bill.

Obama’s American Jobs Act suffers by comparison to Gohmert’s American Jobs Act: Although I have referred to Gohmert’s bill as “political mischief,” it should not be dismissed as a mere publicity stunt. Gohmert’s two-page bill would easily create more jobs than Obama’s 155-page, $447 billion bill. If the 2009 stimulus failed to revive our economy, how could anyone expect an undernourished version of that same approach to succeed? The Solyndra scandal highlights the folly of job-creating schemes where government officials reward selected businesses with large sums of taxpayer money. Such market-distorting schemes are ineffective at best, corrupt at worst.

Gohmert’s bill, on the other hand, would almost certainly create jobs. America has one of the highest statutory corporate tax rates in the world. This is somewhat mitigated by a haphazard patchwork of loopholes that are more the result of good lobbying than good economics. Our byzantine corporate income tax system chases jobs overseas. If the tax is not eliminated altogether, it should at least be significantly reduced and simplified.

While eliminating the corporate income tax would certainly create jobs, House Republicans should consider using Gohmert’s bill as a vehicle to reform the entire tax code for individuals as well as corporations. This more comprehensive approach may or may not include fully eliminating the corporate income tax, but it should certainly broaden the tax base with lower rates and fewer deductions.

In fact, tax reform is something that both parties should be able to get behind. The president’s own bipartisan debt commission proposed an ambitious tax reform plan that the president has so far ignored. Here’s hoping that the president and Congress can agree on a bipartisan bill to make our tax code flatter, fairer, simpler and more effective in promoting growth. For such a bill, “American Jobs Act” would be a worthy name and not just a cynical marketing ploy.

That is freaking hilarious

stupid texas.

What is stupid about it?

I think it is brilliant...just wondering why Cleve thought it was "stupid texans".

Get on your knees, the messiah has spoken. NPR should lose their government funding NOW. Excuse me, I'm going to puke.

NPR

Obama: 'If You Love Me, You Got To Help Me Pass This Bill'

The realities of governing as opposed to the unrealities of presidential campaigns may have made President Obama a much more human figure compared with the almost messiah-like status he had in the eyes of many supporters in 2008.

But that doesn't mean there still isn't the occasional moment reminiscent of a Bible story.

At a rally on the campus of North Carolina State in Raleigh, N.C. Wednesday where President Obama went to drum up support for his jobs bill, this happened.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I love you, Barack!

THE PRESIDENT: I love you back. (Applause.) But first — but if you love me — if you love me, you got to help me pass this bill. (Applause.) If you love me, you got to help me pass this bill.


Here's John 21:15, the New International Version, describing a scene between Jesus and his disciples:

When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter,"Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?"

"Yes, Lord," he said, "you know that I love you."

Jesus said, "Feed my lambs."

Wow.

The Bible reference is a stretch though. lol

why should NPR lose their funding for telling the truth? Finally they have admitted that Obama was worshipped as some sort of a messiah in the eyes of his ardent disillusioned supporters..

j/c

Has "the bill" actually been written yet?

That's the one...I haven't seen where it has been written yet.

From the very priceless article above:

Quote:

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No Democrat was in a tearing hurry to “pass this jobs bill now”: During the president’s address last week, he exhorted Congress to “pass this jobs bill now” (or variations on that phrase) 16 times. That was of course an unreasonable request, because the White House at the time had not yet finished drafting the bill. The president did, however, release the bill on Monday. One would think, given the urgency conveyed in Obama’s speech, that at least one of the 192 Democrats in the House would have gotten around to dropping the bill in the hopper by the time Gohmert introduced his bill on Wednesday. Gohmert has exposed an apparent lack of urgency on the part of House Democrats to pass Obama’s bill.

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So, apparently it was released on Monday (which implies that it is actually written now), but by Wednesday nobody had thought of actually getting it to Congress.

So typical of this Obama guy.

So...it is written now and released...but has it been officially put before Congress for a vote?

As of Wednesday it had not been put before Congress.

Follow along people - last week when he gave his speech and implored congress to "pass it now", (some 10 or 15 times), it wasn't written.

It is now supposedly written - it was monday I guess. However, no representative, republican OR democrat, brought it up in congress.

On Wednesday I believe it was, a rep. from Texas made his OWN bill - and named it the same as O's bill - the American Jobs Act bill I believe.....

O's bill, while supposedly having been "written", has not been brought before the House to this date. Not by one single representative.

My assumption is that tells us something about O's support in the House of Representatives. If his own party won't even bring it up for a vote - I'm not talking about PASSING it - I'm talking about even discussing it - it bodes poorly for the bill. As of now, it's just some words written on some paper.

j/c

I've thought about this a lot in the last few weeks. This bill won't reduce unemployment. Neither will cutting taxes (which are already at historic lows for modern US history) or reducing regulations. Its pretty simple economics as to why. Companies do consider all these things into their cost of doing business, and when taxes and regulations (costs) are higher, they can't hire as many.

However, the most important consideration is demand for their products. We are still in the midst of a massive, dangerous, global economic contraction. Fear rules the day. In such an environment, aggregate demand is significantly lower. You can cut taxes to 0 and suspend regulations, but if a company is only selling 10 TVs per month, they aren't going to hire people to make 100 TVs per month just b/c they have more cash lying around.

The lessons of the Great Depression have been forgotten. The only thing that broke stubborn unemployment in this country was massive government spending on WWII. When the private system fails and has to reset, government must step in in the medium term to bridge the gap between the old, crumbled economy and the new, restructured economy. The only way I see to cushion the massive long term global restructuring that will occur is to undertake massive government projects that require millions of workers aimed at increasing our competitiveness in the long term.

There are literally dozens of possibilities. Roads, rail, airports, ports, the electric grid, computer networks/security, and on and on. Massive projects equivalent to the Manhattan project, the race to the Moon, the human genome project, etc. would net hundreds of innovations to build the future economy on (much of the current economy is built upon innovations that have their roots in government-funded basic research). This is the exact playbook for the most prosperous stretch in history, from the 1950's-early 2000's. Pay for it by ending both wars and letting the Bush tax cuts expire for everyone. I would gladly pay more if it were going towards an investment in our future.

interesting thought....

I agree with your premise in that we NEED to find a way to get the machine going again and need to jump start demand.

That doesn't mean we need to have government do so necessarily, or have them do it entirely. What we need in my opinion is incentive for private companies to invest in technology ... maybe building high speed trains would not only build up infrastructure ... but also create the need for more and more engineers.

The problem (as I think I read on this board not too long ago) is that we are a saturated nation. That makes demand decrease. People already have the material things, or at least a lot of them ... and we have no "mission." We aren't conquering the old west, we aren't building a transcontinental railroad, we aren't going into space for the first time. So instead of industries booming where people NEED more workers, more supplies, and more time to fill thier orders ... without that increased demand we have seen companies target the other way of increasing the bottom line ... minimizing expenditures.

Until we have a new market (and hopefully a long term market ... not just an assembly line of cheap goods like ipads or what have you) then we will struggle. Whether or not government creates that I feel is minor. We just need to have a focus, and until then I don't know. Jobs will be scarce to say the least.

jc

No vote until October. I guess congress is ignoring Obama's desperate pleas.

web page

Here's a dilly!

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-r...-on-white-house

I have a general question.. why can't Obama stop lying? Recently in a stop at NC State he got the crowd fired up by commenting on 153 structurally deficient bridges in the state of North Carolina, 4 of them right on the Raleigh Beltline... then he made the comment, why should we wait for another bridge to fall before we pass this bill and make the repairs...

So I ask:
1. Why wasn't the other trillion dollars used for this? One would think that a safety hazardßlike a bridge ready to collapse would supersede the need to give money to a financially unstable maker of solar panels who contributed handsomely to your campaign.. evidently not.

2. Why does he keep referencing "another bridge collapse" when he is alluding to the bridge collapse in Minneapolis... when it has been determined that the Minneapolis bridge collapse was the result of a structural design flaw, no amount of stimulus funding was going to keep that bridge from collapsing.

3. The NCDOT is now fielding calls from frantic citizens wanting to know which bridges are unsafe... the NCDOT has responded that NO BRIDGES ARE UNSAFE and they have no idea where the President got that 153 deficient bridge number because he didn't get it from the agency who is responsible for maintaining those bridges. Evidently he just made it up. Because if there was ANY threat that a bridge was anywhere near falling, the state would close it.

But hey, it got a crowd of clueless college students all worked up for a few minutes and provided soundbites they can use... so mission accomplished.

Speaking of lying ... here's an article breaking down taxes on the all those evil "rich people" that pay less in tax than everyone else.


http://news.yahoo.com/fact-check-rich-taxed-less-secretaries-070642868.html

FACT CHECK: Are rich taxed less than secretaries?
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER - Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama makes it sound as if there are millionaires all over America paying taxes at lower rates than their secretaries.

"Middle-class families shouldn't pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires," Obama said Monday. "That's pretty straightforward. It's hard to argue against that."

The data tell a different story. On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

There may be individual millionaires who pay taxes at rates lower than middle-income workers. In 2009, 1,470 households filed tax returns with incomes above $1 million yet paid no federal income tax, according to the Internal Revenue Service. That, however, was less than 1 percent of the nearly 237,000 returns with incomes above $1 million.

In his White House address Monday, Obama called on Congress to increase taxes by $1.5 trillion as part of a 10-year deficit reduction package totaling more than $3 trillion. He proposed that Congress overhaul the tax code and impose what he called the "Buffett rule," named for billionaire investor Warren Buffett.

The rule says, "People making more than $1 million a year should not pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than middle-class families pay."

"Warren Buffett's secretary shouldn't pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. There is no justification for it," Obama said. "It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay higher tax rates than somebody pulling in $50 million."

Buffett wrote in a recent piece for The New York Times that the tax rate he paid last year was lower than that paid by any of the other 20 people in his office.

This year, households making more than $1 million will pay an average of 29.1 percent of their income in federal taxes, including income taxes and payroll taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay 15 percent of their income in federal taxes.

Lower-income households will pay less. For example, households making between $40,000 and $50,000 will pay an average of 12.5 percent of their income in federal taxes. Households making between $20,000 and $30,000 will pay 5.7 percent.

The latest IRS figures are a few years older — and limited to federal income taxes — but show much the same thing. In 2009, taxpayers who made $1 million or more paid on average 24.4 percent of their income in federal income taxes, according to the IRS.

Those making $100,000 to $125,000 paid on average 9.9 percent in federal income taxes. Those making $50,000 to $60,000 paid an average of 6.3 percent.

Obama's claim hinges on the fact that, for high-income families and individuals, investment income is often taxed at a lower rate than wages. The top tax rate for dividends and capital gains is 15 percent. The top marginal tax rate for wages is 35 percent, though that is reserved for taxable income above $379,150.

With tax rates that high, why do so many people pay at lower rates? Because the tax code is riddled with more than $1 trillion in deductions, exemptions and credits, and they benefit people at every income level, according to data from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress' official scorekeeper on revenue issues.

The Tax Policy Center estimates that 46 percent of households, mostly low- and medium-income households, will pay no federal income taxes this year. Most, however, will pay other taxes, including Social Security payroll taxes.

"People who are doing quite well and worry about low-income people not paying any taxes bemoan the fact that they get so many tax breaks that they are zeroed out," said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. "People at the bottom of the distribution say, but all of those rich guys are getting bigger tax breaks than we're getting, which is also the case."

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was pressed at a White House briefing on the number of millionaires who pay taxes at a lower rate than middle-income families. He demurred, saying that people who make most of their money in wages pay taxes at a higher rate, while those who get most of their income from investments pay at lower rates.

"So it really depends on what is your profession, where's the source of your income, what's the specific circumstances you face, and the averages won't really capture that," Geithner said.

According to what I can find, there are 7.8 million people in the US with a net worth of a million dollars or more.

We would have to take slightly over half of everything they make, and own, to close the deficits run up by this President just 3 years into his first term.

Yea team. Raising taxes will definitely work ......

You know what amazes me about that article ....the final line in it.

It just really struck me.

Quote:

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“Maxine Waters represents central Los Angeles first and she has to represent her constituents first and she's going to say things in order to represent them,” he said.

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She's going to say things in order to represent them. Not do things .... but say things.

That's insane. Saying things accomplishes nothing. Action gets things done.

Remember how Obama was going to bring the international class and dignity to the Oval Office that the rogue cowboy George Bush lacked?

web page

you realize you will get a response from a poster saying you are hating on Obama and other presidents have done things like this as well. Why haven't you pointed it out when they have done it?

Many of us had problems with aspects of the Bush Presidency. Many of us hated the bank bailout package, and thought it was stupid to put that kind of money/power in the hands of one man. We also hated the way he spent money, and expanded certain social programs.

To those people working 15 hours/week and getting thousand(s) dollar checks from the government as a pseudo tax return .... thank George Bush. He raised the EITC, and the child tax credit, and turned the IRS into a part time social program.

People complained about Haliburton, but Clinton used them as well, and there aren't a huge number of approved companies ready to take on the scale of projects that they do. There may be some political factors, but when a company is their own (and only) serious competition ...... then who else do you go to?

I didn't like the Plame affair, but I also didn't feel that it was as horrible as it was made out to be. In the end though, Libby paid the price for his part in the matter, and Bush refused to pardon him. (even though Cheney asked him to)

This President seems to have multiple strings that have paths of dollars ... and that lead directly to his door. If a person can follow A, to B, to C, then they can see that there is some pretty heavy stink there.

Quote:

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you realize you will get a response from a poster saying you are hating on Obama and other presidents have done things like this as well. Why haven't you pointed it out when they have done it?

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Not from me, that was great!



As for his bill, I may have to rethink my stance on drug testing

This is what a "once-in-a-generation-mind" brings to the table? Or is trying to? Or hasn't? Or wanted to but forgot the one important step . . . like submitting it?

It could also have been that Schlumberger wasn't eligible to be used by the government due to the fact that the company had been on probation for criminal contempt from 1994 to 1999.

I don't know all of the facts as far as what it takes to be approved by the US government.