26 March, 2009

Obama Looking at Tax Code Overhaul

According to Bloomberg, President Barack Obama (D-USA) is looking at ways to overhaul the tax code. I applaud the effort. It’s the first good idea I’ve heard come out of this administration.

Austan Goolsbee, a senior economic adviser to the president, will be named staff director of the task force, which will report back to Volcker, Orszag said. Members of the panel will include Harvard University’s Martin Feldstein, former chief economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan; Laura D’Andrea Tyson, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley and former economic adviser to President Bill Clinton; Roger Ferguson, chief executive officer of Teachers Insurance & Annuity Association and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve; and William Donaldson, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Orszag said “the only constraint” on the task force review is that there be no tax increases during 2009 and 2010, and that the proposals shouldn’t raise taxes on families earning less than $250,000 a year.

I’m fairly certain the results will be a dismal failure, but I’ll hold out hope.

Of course, there’s one simple way to do it and to meet Obama’s requirements and to solve our economic crisis at the same time.  Yes, I know I’m beating the FairTax dead horse, but I’ll continue to pound on this issue as long as I have this blog.

Please check out the FairTax official site. I love their new slogan:

Think of it as the World’s Biggest Economic Jumper Cables

I believe that if we are to survive as a nation, we must abolish the income tax and replace it with some sort of consumption tax. The longer we delay doing this, the worse off we’ll be. This is one place where we need to be following western Europe’s example. Most countries there have one already. Theirs tend to be VATs which is a much worse model than the FairTax, but at least it’s better than what we have now.

Congress Wants to Hold Hearings on the BCS

Wow, I’m so glad Congress is looking into this. This is such a great use of their time. And I’m sure Congress knows the best way to pick a national champion in football.

Seriously, am I the only one in the entire country that remembers the Tenth Amendment?

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Each and every elected official in Washington D.C., should have this plastered in a location where s/he is forced to read it several times a day.

Several Pictures Paint a Trillion Words

I’m tempted to steal the “money shot” (no pun intended) from this article, but it’s best if you just read the whole thing yourself.

What does one TRILLION dollars look like?

A Picture Paints a Trillion Words

This graphic from the Heritage Foundation can’t be shown on too many blogs, I think.

 

As I’ve mentioned before, I loathed the growth of government under President George W. Bush (R-USA) and his Republican cohorts in Congress. But obviously, the Republicans are just kiddies when it comes to spending our money.  The big boys are in charge now, and they won’t be satisfied until they’ve run this country into the ground.

Read the associated article, where it pokes fun at President Barack Obama’s (D-USA) pledge to halve the deficit by 2012.