Obama didn't "decimate" the Democrat Party, Democrats did that all by themselves

David M. Drucker here wants to blame Obama for all the electoral losses experienced by Democrats since 2009. 

Good luck with that.

Like it or not, the Democrat Congress under Pelosi and Reid gets the blame. They have done nothing but lose, lose and lose while Obama has remained the winner, above the fray. He leaves office popular, successfully escaping responsibility for his own administration for eight straight years while Democrats all over the country have paid the price.  

Democrat leadership rammed the awful Obamacare down the nation's throat, making the health insurance industry even worse than it was before. Democrat leadership failed to prosecute anyone for the 2008 banking panic and raked in the campaign cash from its grateful elite instead. Democrat leadership jacked up the federal spending which simply wasted money and ballooned the debt to $20 trillion in the process. Democrat leadership passed the growth-robbing Dodd-Frank legislation which has stalled the growth of credit and slowed the economy to a crawl.

The only thing you can blame Obama for is a lack of vision and leadership in preventing these developments and for not offering better alternatives. He was inexperienced, out of his depth and clueless, contenting himself to lecture everybody day and night in regal fashion while Congress shot themselves and the country in the foot with their stupid ideas. Obama's idea of compromise turned out to be signing awful Democrat legislation.

Except in one instance.

Obama agreed one time to compromise with John Boehner and make the Bush tax cuts permanent and fix the Alternative Minimum Tax. The stock market and the economy began to recover from that moment on at the dawn of 2013.

It was the only smart thing he ever did.

And there he goes into the sunset.

Just another day at the office: Mitch McConnell lets Donald Trump know what's what

Don't get into a pissing match with the Senate Majority Leader, if you know what's good for you.

Quoted here:

“I think this level of national debt is dangerous and unacceptable,” McConnell said, adding he hopes Congress doesn’t lose sight of that when it acts next year. “My preference on tax reform is that it be revenue neutral,” he said.

Rush Limbaugh is ecstatic today about Trump's cabinet picks

The guy never was on our side on illegal immigration, the income tax, Elton John, etc.

The leader of the conservative liberals, as someone once said. 

Trump's Carrier intervention isn't just chilling, it's a crock of corporate welfare and perhaps explicit fascism

Jimmy Pethokoukis, on whom I have been very hard in the past, is certainly right about this one, calling the implicit intimidation in this affair "chilling", here.

But it's a lot more than chilling, it's at the very least more of the same cooperation between government and industry we have seen for decades but which used to go by the name of fascism, except it's more explicit than we're used to coming as it does from someone like Donald Trump, perhaps veering off now into explicit top-down federal intervention into business decisions.  

"We certainly don't want to take as our guide to creating jobs special tax breaks for a company that earned $7.5 billion in profits last year, got $6 billion in defense contracts, paid its top five executives $50 million, in order to preserve 1,000 out of 2,100 jobs," said [Robert] Shapiro, [former undersecretary of commerce]. "It's essentially a transfer from the taxpayers of Indiana, who are providing these tax breaks, to the shareholders of United Technology plus those 1,000 workers. That's really not a model for creating jobs across America," he added.

The deepest cut, from Cenk Uygur: Obama's not shtrong like Trump

Here:

I'm sorry, if you're a Democrat, and you like Obama, I hate to break your heart and you want to hate me for it and that's okay, but Obama wouldn't have done that. 

That's not who he is, he is not that guy. And in this case, it is an absolutely fact. Because he is president right now. If he wanted, he could have pressured Carrier. But he didn't pressure Carrier. He didn't pressure United Technologies, and he didn't threaten to take away their contracts. Because he's not that strong. And he always thinks, his default mode is there's nothing we can do. You guys don't understand.There are consequences. 

No. I do understand. What I'm asking you to do is to risk those consequences to protect American workers. 

And you didn't do it, and Trump did it, and now he is going to get a world of credit...

Nobody is going to remember the downsides of that deal, no one is going to worry about those tax breaks later. It is going to be a huge political win for Donald Trump, that is by the way, as I just said, somewhat earned. There are so many options that the Democrats never choose to use... They want to outsource the jobs, let them outsource the jobs. 

Threaten their government contracts? Yes, you threaten their government contracts. That's called being strong!

Trump rewards Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for stonewalling Obama's Supreme Court appointment by picking his wife for Transportation

I don't view this as "nepotism" per se as others have who are much too quick to criticize Trump's centrism post-election.

Mitch McConnell withstood Obama's appointment power all through this period since the death of Scalia, enduring severe attacks for it from the left. People on the right who won't recognize what he accomplished are simply malign. They are like those who didn't recognize John Boehner's achievement getting the Bush tax cuts made permanent, and in many cases they are the same people, and unfortunately they are Legion.

McConnell's wife Elaine Chao had eight years' cabinet experience as head of Labor under Bush II and is competent to govern Transportation now under Trump. Not that we want her to have much to administer.

It is not a consequential appointment, except in the broad sense that Trump is not in the least setting about to take a machete to the federal Leviathan. Chao will maintain the status quo, more or less.

Obama hates the middle class: Caller after caller today to Chris Plante reported 200%+ increases to their health insurance premiums because of Obamacare

Impoverishing the middle class has been Obama's goal all along. Obamacare redistributes the incomes of ordinary middle class people to the poor, just as higher taxes on the rich do. Here's how.

Chris Plante himself reports that his household used to pay $551 a month before Obamacare, but now pays $1731, an increase of 214%.

My household in 2010 paid just $2552 a year for coverage with $2500 individual calendar year deductibles. Six years later for the same plan we pay $4252, an increase of 67%, but the individual calendar year deductibles have skyrocketed to $10,000 each, a 300% increase.

In other words, for the privilege of having coverage, we could end up on the hook for as much as $30,000 in any given year before the plan pays anything in a health emergency. You get some discount on services as in a preferred provider network, but you still have to pay.

I know because I had one in 2014 which drove my out of pocket medical expenses for the year well over $10,000. They're normally half that.

Obamacare is nothing more than a tax increase on the middle class, to subsidize "coverage", that is Medicaid, for the poor.

Oops, Libertarian VP candidate William Weld says Trump's use of loss carryforward "not that uncommon"

After recently saying Hillary is the most qualified to be president and Gary Johnson himself admitting to not knowing what Aleppo is, the honesty from this libertarian pair is getting to be almost too much.

As in, "We're not serious! We're just running for fun! Look! I'm on TV again!"

Weld on CNN with Chris Cuomo, here, yesterday:

WELD: I say that the net operating loss carryforward is a well-known provision of the tax code. I hate to defend Donald Trump -- believe me when I tell you -- but it's not that uncommon.

Rush Limbaugh understands nothing about the tax returns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump: Comparing them is comparing apples and oranges

The two tax returns couldn't be more different.

Trump in 1995 reported cumulative losses from his many pass-through entities on page 1 of his personal tax return as Net Operating Losses from businesses, which can be carried forward 15 years to offset net gains in those years and 3 years in arrears. All perfectly legal, but that's why he gets audited like hell, year after year.

Hillary reported a long term capital loss of almost $700,000 in 2015 for something on page 17, which would be interesting to know more about, but which she can't carry forward, and most of which she just had to eat because she's not organized to use pass-through entities like Trump is. If Rush had simply read page 18 of Hillary's return he'd have seen that Hillary did just that, eat it, like all taxpayers in the same situation, being entitled to only $3000 in long term capital losses in the reporting year. That's all she got. And none of the rest can carry forward because the loss was in that year. She ate it. People do it all the time, and quite unhappily.

That's what makes Trump smarter than Hillary, and smarter than most taxpayers. His affairs are arranged in a complicated fashion in order to maximize the tax consequences in his favor. Hillary isn't a fool for missing her tax-saving opportunities from such an arrangement, but Trump is very wise. It also probably costs him a tidy sum every year to keep it all straight.

Here is where Rush gets it all wrong:

RUSH:  We've got Hillary's tax returns from 2015, last year, the one that she just released her tax returns on, and it shows something strange, something awkward on page 17.  Line 14, long-term capital loss carryover.  Enter the amount, if any, from line 13 of your capital loss.  And the amount is $699,540.  Now, that's not on the scale of Trump's $915 million, but, in a nutshell, Hillary Clinton took a capital loss of $699,000 in 2015, as was reported on her tax return.

  

Where is the outrage?  Nobody even cares to report it.  That capital loss, she's allowed to carry that forward and it will affect how much income tax she owes in future years.  Same thing that we're dealing here with Trump.

Hillary Clinton's fantasy definition of middle class includes 98.8% of the country

Here, where she says it's anyone making less than $250,000:

Clinton has pledged not to raise taxes on the middle class and reiterated her statement to the reporter, which she defined as any American making less than $250,000.

In 2014 98.8% of individual wage earners made less than $250,000.

Publius Decius Mus responds effectively to some of his critics, but his own words still condemn him

Namely, these (here):

[Trump] is not playing his assigned role of gentlemanly loser the way McCain and Romney did, and may well have tapped into some previously untapped sentiment that he can ride to victory. This is a problem for both the Right and the Left. The professional Right (correctly) fears that a Trump victory will finally make their irrelevance undeniable. The Left knows that so long as Republicans kept playing by the same rules and appealing to the same dwindling base of voters, there was no danger. Even if one of the old breed had won, nothing much would have changed, since their positions on the most decisive issues were effectively the same as the Democrats and because they posed no serious challenge to the administrative state.

Well, so long as you accept the income tax, Decius, as you clearly do in your Flight 93 Election essay, YOU pose no serious challenge to the administrative state, either.

And secondly, you don't even recognize the fact that, or the reasons why, our "representative institutions" stopped being representative a long time ago. Conservatism today, including yours, does not recognize that the income tax is essential to funding the administrative state, and it does not recognize that our representatives are remote from the people by design from the 1920s. 

Trump is adequate for the moment, and necessary if there is to yet be a chance to fix these problems, but there is no one, no one, who is really working politically to restore the Republic either by cutting it down to size or by expanding the input of the sovereign people to a level imagined by the constitution. The people may yet have their day on immigration and trade because of Trump, but after Trump, what?

What an Obama has done by fiat can be undone by a Trump. But that buys you four, maybe eight, years. And then? The next president can undo it, and probably will.

That means we already live under a tyranny.

Conservatism Inc. doesn't have a clue, and neither do you.

Mark Levin won't tell you Ronald Reagan expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit in the 1986 tax reform

Hey Mark, does that make Reagan someone who "sold out his principles" for liberalism?

Well does it?

Lefty Damon Linker thinks "The Flight 93 Election" is radical when it's hardly radical enough

The "conservative" world conceived of by the author of "The Flight 93 Election" isn't radical, it's unimaginative.

Being the good leftist that he his, however, Damon Linker senses the inherent weakness and flogs the man as a "reactionary" just for thinking about getting his feet wet, almost daring the author to defend what he knows he probably would not.

Struggling swimmer in the water. Shark arrives. 

The weakness of the anonymous author, Publius Decius Mus, is illustrated by the closing which imagines what actually lassoing the moon would look like in his mind: a return to constitutionalism, limited government and a top marginal income tax rate of 28%. Really?

You won't get either of the first two while keeping the third. And the income tax wasn't "constitutional". 

It doesn't occur to our anonymous author that through the income tax is how big government in this country made a big splash in the first place, and that it was necessary for progressives to eradicate the constitution's self-limitation expressed in its direct taxation handcuffs in order to achieve that big government.

In effect repudiating "constitutionalism" was necessary. And that's what the progressive era achieved, sweeping away the defenses of the constitution through the amendment process, bringing us woman's suffrage, the direct election of senators and the income tax. It made the country sick enough, but only enough to cut off the fourth leg of the progressive stool by repealing Prohibition.

So it works both ways. We can change our minds. The task of conservatism in our time ought to be to wake up the country to the possibilities of more repeal, to the conviction that we can correct our mistakes, whether it's the income tax, direct election of senators, or the vote of 18-year olds. And to the possibilities of ratification, say of Article the First.

Being "reactionary" isn't a bug, it's a feature, and thoroughly American.

Unless you're a communist. Or Damon Linker. But I repeat myself.

Dear Rush Limbaugh: Publius Decius Mus doesn't get it at all, and neither do you

From the conclusion of the anonymous conservative intellectual, here:

"The possibilities would seem to be: Caesarism, secession/crack-up, collapse, or managerial Davoisie liberalism as far as the eye can see … which, since nothing human lasts forever, at some point will give way to one of the other three. Oh, and, I suppose, for those who like to pour a tall one and dream big, a second American Revolution that restores Constitutionalism, limited government, and a 28% top marginal rate."

A 28% top marginal rate?

He must be kidding.

The income tax is the cornerstone of the contemporary part of the anti-American revolution which made big government and rabid anti-constitutionalism not just possible but plausible. The 16th Amendment shredded the intent of the Founders, so why not shred the rest? They have, and they will.

Dreaming big means shedding the shredding, and along with that the imperial presidency and the Leviathan State implied by that, which was bequeathed to us by Abraham Lincoln.

But the followers of Harry Jaffa will never be able to imagine that, which makes them nothing more than the hollow men of Conservatism Inc.

Quinnipiac poll says 66% say Hillary's not honest, 53% say Trump's not, but Hillary still wins by 10 points

Poll here.

Calling Hillary crooked won't work when the voters are crooked, too. Sort of like promising to cut taxes of people who don't pay any.

Lawyers on strike over new taxes in Greece push backlog of cases to the year 2032

Reported here:

Athens lawyer Thanos Koussoulos says self-employed professionals like him will feel the most pain, as the new measures will increase monthly pension contributions, taxable income, and levies on services. "An average lawyer will lose half his income and won't be able to survive," he said, speaking in an empty courtroom. "Every part of society has been affected by these measures, including groups once considered to be privileged. I think it's a good thing they are demonstrating." ... Ironically, the lawyers' strike has added pressure on the government to seek a quick way to raise revenue, as tax cases challenged in court have been held up.

Hey Mark Levin you big dope: Tariffs were the main source of all Federal revenue from 1790 to 1914

That's why the federal government stayed SMALL from 1790 to 1914.

IT'LL NEVER BE SMALL YOUR WAY (just a little smaller) 

STARVE THE BEAST! A spillover effect we can all appreciate.

Drive-by-media keep accusing Trump of flipping on tax increases, but Grover Norquist is having none of it

Reported here:

Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, who has backed Donald Trump's promised across-the-board tax cut, endorsed the plan Monday even though Trump now says some of the wealthiest Americans will be paying a bit more.

"Some people who organize their lives around tax credits and tax deductions might see some increase," Norquist told CNBC's "Squawk Box" a day after the presumptive GOP presidential nominee doubled-down on comments he made on CNBC last week. ... "Because Trump takes the top personal rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent and the corporate rate from 35 percent to 15 percent, there is no way anyone would see an actual tax increase," Norquist said in a statement emailed to CNBC after the interview. "Trump's tax cut would be a tax cut for every American," he added. 

Ted Cruz accepted Jeb Bush's endorsement as easily as . . .

. . . George Herbert Walker Bush accepted the Democrats' Profile in Courage Award for breaking his 1988 No New Taxes Pledge.

It's hard to overstate what an ignoramus is Mark Levin about tariffs and trade

Mark Levin is a lawyer, not an historian, and not an economist, and not much of a hail fellow well met, either. Always seeking approval at others' expense, he should rather seek to convince without spite than to confound without understanding.

His tariff rant this evening ignores that the America of his precious founders was a tariff regime until the dreaded income tax of 1913.

The America of the founders was also a limited government for that reason until that very day.

But open wide the avenue for revenue, and you open the maw of the Leviathan and crawl into it.

We haven't been the same since, slowly dissolving in its mandibular juices on our way to the shit pile of history.

If Mark Levin had any brains about the founding, he'd know this.