TAXES – Democrats Want MORE Taxes: Republicans are frustrated as the Democrats proposed their new budget…typical Biden Democrat’s solution…more taxes.
No cuts. No discipline. No addressing waste. No efficiencies. Just more taxes.
The rhetoric is great…tax the rich. The reality is a bit different. We tax the job providers, investment, and dual income hard working families. That approach doesn’t have a positive impact on the economy. Nor is it fair.
But the Democrats and progressives are pushing hard…more free stuff for voters and they’ll be selfish enough to ignore the obligations being passed on to their children and grandchildren.
You can sum up the Democrats strategy quite simply…if you tax Peter to pay Paul, you can normally count on Paul’s support.
Politics as usual… and taxpayers get the shaft.
Center Right Coalition: The ONLY way to win elections in America is to develop a coalition of “like minded” voters who share your “general” values and you convince them that it is in their best interest to vote for you.
I listened to former President Trump at CPAC this weekend and the one line that stuck in my head more than any other was the following quote:
“The Republican Party was ruled by freaks, neocons, open border zealots and fools. We’re never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush.”
Maybe it’s the former state party chairman in me, or former Republican National Committee member, or former Congressional District Chairman or even College Republican Chairman in me, but that line didn’t sit well with me.
First, I respectfully disagree with that characterization. However, without what he defined as “that” party that Trump was referring to, neither he nor any other Republicans will be winning many elections.
As a Reagan baby who was lucky enough to be the youngest delegate at the 1980 Republican National Convention when Reagan was nominated, I always agreed with his perspective that if someone is with you 70% of the time, they’re with you!
No one faction on the right or the left is big enough in America to win on their own. Not only do they have to have a consensus amongst their own party, they have to be able to appeal to the independent voters as well. This isn’t necessarily a “moderate” message, it’s an inclusive, tolerant, and visionary message based on values and reason…not just hype.
I’m excited about the emerging conservative leaders I see across this country. There are lots of reasons for hope that will lead to change, but only if we do it together!
Advice from An Old Farmer
Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight and bull-strong.
Keep skunks and bankers at a distance.
Life is simpler when you plow around the stump.
A bumble bee is considerably faster than a John Deere tractor.
Words that soak into your ears are whispered… not yelled.
Meanness don’t jes’ happen overnight.
Forgive your enemies; it messes up their heads.
Do not corner something that you know is meaner than you.
It don’t take a very big person to carry a grudge.
You cannot unsay a cruel word.
Every path has a few puddles.
When you wallow with pigs, expect to get dirty.
The best sermons are lived, not preached.
Most of the stuff people worry about ain’t never gonna happen anyway.
Don’t judge folks by their relatives.
Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
Live a good, honorable life… Then when you get older and think back, you’ll enjoy it a second time.
Don‘t interfere with somethin’ that ain’t bothering you none.
Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a Rain dance.
If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin’.
Sometimes you get, and sometimes you get got.
The biggest troublemaker you’ll probably ever have to deal with, watches you from the mirror every mornin’.
Always drink upstream from the herd.
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lotta that comes from bad judgment.
Lettin’ the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin’ it back in.
If you get to thinkin’ you’re a person of some influence, try orderin’ somebody else’s dog around..
Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly. Leave the rest to God.
Don’t pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old to fight, he’ll just kill you.
Most times, it just gets down to common sense.
Read more below and follow me on Twitter & GETTR – @sanuzis
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
This week: Washington is buzzing about Governor Glenn Youngkin, POTUS doubles down on bad drug price control policy, and the classified documents are being found by the box load with Joe Biden!
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://www.axios.com/2023/03/09/bidens-medicare-budget-drug-prices
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/bidens-document-story-keeps-changing-time-nine-boxes
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As Biden Plays Political Games On Medicare, Here’s How Republicans Can Respond
Rather than taking a serious approach to solving Medicare’s funding difficulties, the Biden administration’s plan instead engages in political gamesmanship over the health care of millions of seniors.
If anyone doubted President Joe Biden’s commitment to running for re-election next year, they need only examine his administration’s “plan” for extending Medicare’s solvency, published in advance of Thursday’s budget release. Rather than taking a serious approach to solving Medicare’s funding difficulties, the plan instead engages in political gamesmanship over the health care of millions of seniors. But an administration that wants to play games over Medicare should be careful what it wishes for because Republicans have ammunition to respond in kind.
The plan fails serious policy tests on several fronts. First, by relying largely on revenue to close shortfalls in Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, it ignores the program’s structural imbalances. None other than President Barack Obama said in 2011 that “if you look at the numbers, then Medicare in particular will run out of money and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up.” Four years after those comments, Obama signed legislation that restructured elements of the Medicare benefit to lower program costs. If Obama remained active in politics today, Biden would likely attack him for “cutting” seniors’ benefits.
Second, the plan suggests diverting $200 billion from an expansion of drug price controls to improve the solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund. But this proposal comes mere months after Democrats diverted an even larger amount from the Part D prescription drug benefit to fund climate pork projects as part of last summer’s partisan spending blowout. It seems highly disingenuous for Biden, having raided Medicare last year to suit his own political objectives, now to claim he will use the program’s remnants to extend its solvency.
Third, the largest source of Medicare “savings” comes from a proposal to divert funds raised by Obamacare’s net investment income tax into the Medicare trust fund. This change would not raise any additional revenue, but instead would double-count existing funds as both paying for Obamacare and improving Medicare’s solvency. When first included in the administration’s budget two years ago, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that more than 60 percent of the proposed “improvement” in Medicare’s solvency would come from what amounts to a massive budget gimmick.
Fourth, the plan would raise additional revenue via a tax Biden himself went out of his way to avoid. The plan would require all small business owners to pay the 3.8 percent payroll tax on all distributions from their companies, and increase the tax’s rate from 3.8 percent to 5 percent for those earning over $400,000 per year. But Biden and his wife Jill both used this provision — which the Treasury claims allows “business owners, particularly those with high incomes, to avoid paying their fair share of taxes” — to circumvent over $500,000 in payroll tax obligations to Medicare and Obamacare.
Biden set to unveil more than $2 trillion in tax hikes in budget
President Biden is set to formally propose an array of tax increases on wealthy individuals and corporations in a budget plan that he says will reduce the deficit by $2 trillion over the next decade, setting up a battle royal with Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Biden told lawmakers during his State of the Union address last month that his budget will lower the deficit and extend the solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund “by making the wealthy and big corporations begin to pay their fair share.”
The White House on Tuesday unveiled a proposal to raise the Medicare surtax on earned and unearned income above $400,000 from 3.8 percent to 5 percent.
Late last month, the president proposed a new tax on wealthy households that would require individuals and families worth more than $100 million to pay a 20 percent tax on income and the unrealized gains of liquid assets such as stocks.
Republicans say Biden’s budget will be dead on arrival when the president formally sends it to Capitol Hill on Thursday.
“You know the president’s budget is replete with what they would do if they could — thank goodness the House is Republican — massive tax increases, more spending,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) told reporters.
Speaker McCarthy’s Bipartisan House Majority
The establishment Washington media will not acknowledge it, but Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s Republican House majority has been remarkably bipartisan.
House Democrats have voted with Republicans 34 times so far this year. Twenty-four bills have passed with bipartisan support. Only four bills have passed with Republican votes alone. On 20 of these votes, a majority of the House Democratic Party has sided with Republicans.
Part of the bipartisanship comes from bringing up issues on which the American people agree. The growing fear of China led to 146 Democrats joining House Republicans for H. Res. 11 – Establishing the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. On another vote, 113 Democrats joined with Republicans in blocking the sale of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to China.
That a majority of House Democrats joined with House Republicans on two votes about containing China reflects President Abraham Lincoln’s rule that “with public sentiment, nothing can fail: without it nothing can succeed.”
As Democrats move further to the left, Republicans are trying to bring common sense back to Washington
There’s no question the Democratic Party has moved far to the left in recent years, but its radicalization has become far more aggressive, to the point that the party is unrecognizable from two years ago.
Just over one month into the 118th Congress, House Democrats have shown the public who they really are: A number of them openly opposed a resolution condemning socialism, and all of them supported President Joe Biden’s plan to hire 87,000 new IRS agents who will undoubtedly go on to target the middle class and small businesses.
Documents: DHS has a domestic-intelligence program
Collecting information from Americans raises ongoing civil liberties concerns.
For years, the Department of Homeland Security has run a virtually unknown program gathering domestic intelligence, one of many revelations in a wide-ranging tranche of internal documents reviewed by POLITICO.
Those documents also reveal that a significant number of employees in DHS’s intelligence office have raised concerns that the work they are doing could be illegal.
Under the domestic-intelligence program, officials are allowed to seek interviews with just about anyone in the United States. That includes people held in immigrant detention centers, local jails, and federal prison. DHS’s intelligence professionals have to say they’re conducting intelligence interviews, and they have to tell the people they seek to interview that their participation is voluntary. But the fact that they’re allowed to go directly to incarcerated people — circumventing their lawyers — raises important civil liberties concerns, according to legal experts.
That specific element of the program, which has been in place for years, was paused last year because of internal concerns. DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which runs the program, uses it to gather information about threats to the U.S., including transnational drug trafficking and organized crime. But the fact that this low-profile office is collecting intelligence by questioning people in the U.S. is virtually unknown.
If Anybody Should Pay Reparations For Slavery, It’s The Democrat Party
If anyone should pay reparations to black Americans for the injustices of slavery, it should be the institutions that preserved slavery’s legacy.
The call for reparations attracts more supporters every day. Even Disney has joined the cause, weaving the issue of monetary payments to the descendants of slaves into a storyline on the “The Proud Family” series on the company’s streaming service. But what generated the most controversy was one episode in which the show’s protagonists perform a song entitled “Slaves Built This Country” after they discover the founder of their town was a slaveholder.
Setting their frustrations over racial injustice and hardship to music, the cartoon children sing that slaves “made your families rich from the southern plantation, to the northern bankers, to the New England ship owners, the Founding Fathers, former presidents, current senators.” Catchy though the song may be, the children leave out one prominent beneficiary of slavery, one in the best position to provide the reparations called for: the Democratic Party.
One may argue for or against reparations on many different grounds. At its heart, supporters for reparations say that freed slaves never received any kind of compensation for their hardship from their owners. Thus, the descendants of slaveowners owe financial restitution to the descendants of their slaves, which would alleviate income inequality and atone for slavery, America’s “original sin.” Opponents of reparations argue one group of people, who did not commit the original wrong, should not be forced to make restitution to a group who indirectly received the wrong. From this angle, reparations seem more like “legal plunder,” a term coined by the French economist Frédéric Bastiat. Such an act “takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong.”
But if the supporters of reparations are right and that some restitution must be made, it becomes obvious who should do it: the Democratic Party.
DeSantis is Leapfrogging Trump Among Grassroots Leaders
An ongoing survey of grassroots party leaders across the country who will help shape the outcome of the presidential campaign.
Republican grassroots leaders are increasingly losing interest in former President Donald Trump — and eyeing Ron DeSantis for the 2024 presidential campaign.
That’s according to a new survey I conducted with GOP county chairs across the country, the first survey in an ongoing project that will be featured in POLITICO Magazine over the next year. It’s designed to track the shifting state of what’s often called the “invisible primary,” that lengthy, and critical, period between now and when actual voting in the 2024 presidential primaries begins. Future surveys will focus on the views of Democratic Party chairs, and some will survey both parties at once.
It’s still early in the campaign, and many respondents are not yet committed to a presidential candidate. But the survey results are a potentially ominous sign for Trump as he seeks to claw his way back to the White House in the face of resistance from key party actors.
County chairs are a group whose opinions are worth gauging. County chairs are far more politically attentive and committed to their party than average American voters; they’re going to show up at the polls on primary day. They’re both activists and prominent local figures in the party, who are likely to help influence how others view the 2024 contenders. At the same time, county chairs are a bit removed from the top levels of leadership — they’re not party elites at the national or even state level. They’re still part of the grassroots. County chairs are the kind of people that successful candidates want on their side during the “invisible primary,” when fundraising and endorsements and polling start to matter.
Critical race theory is teaching kids to hate each other
When parents reject public-schools teaching critical race theory, a common retort from the left is that it’s a university graduate-level analytical framework that’s incomprehensible by children and therefore incapable of being taught in K-12 schools.
This attempted gaslighting of parents and conservatives from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — nothing to see here! — through such false claims is destructive.
In fact, we’re already seeing the horrifying results on our kids.
Just because CRT began as a 1970s-era, law-school-level analysis doesn’t mean it isn’t adapted for lower-level understanding.
Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton broke barriers in comprehending the laws of physics, but the vast majority of us can never fully, technically grasp how or what they did.
