Rep. Newt Gingrich Gets Blame For Housing Legislation Which Led To Bubble

Rep. Newt Gingrich was instrumental in turning the American dream into the American nightmare.

Under Gingrich's leadership in the US House as Speaker he spearheaded the drive to turn our homes into a mere commodity which could be flipped over and over again free of capital gains tax. And as everyone now knows only too well, commodities go up, and commodities go down.

From his Wikipedia entry:

In 1997 President Clinton signed into effect the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, which included the largest capital gains tax cut in U.S. history. Under the act, the profits on the sale of a personal residence ($500,000 for married couples, $250,000 for singles) were exempted if lived in for at least 2 years over the last 5. (This had previously been limited to a $125,000 once-in-a-lifetime exemption for those over 55.) There were also reductions in a number of other taxes on investment gains. Additionally, the act raised the value of inherited estates and gifts that could be sheltered from taxation. Gingrich has been credited with creating the agenda for the reduction in capital gains tax, especially in the "Contract with America", which set out to balance the budget and implement decreases in estate and capital gains tax. Some Republicans felt that the compromise reached with Clinton on the budget and tax act was inadequate, however Gingrich has stated that the tax cuts were a significant accomplishment for the Republican Congress in the face of opposition from the Clinton administration.


Look what happened to housing in 1997 after the legislation became law according to the Shiller index:

After four decades of relative price stability in real terms, the dramatic tax change Gingrich championed helped develop one of the most notable bubbles in American history, as well as a banking crisis and unemployment the likes of which we haven't seen since the 1930s.

Whether it's Herman Cain's 999 Plan or a Flat Income Tax, The Current Code Must Go

So says Steve Forbes, here, who reminds us why that is:

The federal income tax code and all its attendant rules and regulations -- almost 10 million words and rising.

The code has been changed 14,000 times since 1986; last year alone there were 500 changes. The cost of compliance is horrific. The IRS itself calculates that we spend more than 6 billion hours a year filling out tax forms, the equivalent of almost 3 million full-time jobs. The Tax Foundation calculates that by 2015 annual compliance will be costing the American people some $483 billion a year.

Herman Cain's So-Called Abortion Flip Was Nothing of the Kind: He Clearly Endorsed Private Choice For Adoption, Not Abortion.

What it was was a poor attempt to entrap the still too trusting Herman Cain to make it appear that his position on abortion is incoherent.

The transcript of the controversial interchange shows Herman immediately grasped Piers Morgan's attempt to bait and switch when Herman TWICE interjects the comment "you're mixing two things," namely "bringing up the baby as her own" and "abortion."

The media and the left, like Ed Kilgore of The New Republic here, are hoping that if they repeat their lie enough that we'll all believe it.

Piers Morgan starts talking about abortion, and suddenly introduces a hypothetical about raising a child who was conceived in a rape "as her own":

MORGAN: Abortion. What's your view of abortion?

CAIN: I believe that life begins at conception. And abortion under no circumstances. And here's why --

MORGAN: No circumstances?"

CAIN: No circumstances.

MORGAN: Because many of your fellow candidates -- some of them qualify that.

CAIN: They qualify but --

MORGAN: Rape and incest.

CAIN: Rape and incest.

MORGAN: Are you honestly saying -- again, it's a tricky question, I know.

CAIN: Ask the tricky question.

MORGAN: But you've had children, grandchildren. If one of your female children, grand children was raped, you would honestly want her to bring up that baby as her own?

CAIN: You're mixing two things here, Piers?

MORGAN: Why?

CAIN: You're mixing --

MORGAN: That's what it comes down to.

CAIN: No, it comes down to it's not the government's role or anybody else's role to make that decision. Secondly, if you look at the statistical incidents, you're not talking about that big a number. So what I'm saying is it ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make.

Not me as president, not some politician, not a bureaucrat. It gets down to that family. And whatever they decide, they decide. I shouldn't have to tell them what decision to make for such a sensitive issue.

MORGAN: By expressing the view that you expressed, you are effectively -- you might be president. You can't hide behind now the mask, if you don't mind me saying, of being the pizza guy. You might be the president of United States of America. So your views on these things become exponentially massively more important. They become a directive to the nation.

CAIN: No they don't. I can have an opinion on an issue without it being a directive on the nation. The government shouldn't be trying to tell people everything to do, especially when it comes to social decisions that they need to make.

MORGAN: That's a very interesting departure --

CAIN: Yes.

MORGAN: -- from the normal politics.

CAIN: Exactly.

There is absolutely nothing controversial here about Herman Cain saying a president has no business telling people to raise such a child as their own.

And Rick Santorum should be ashamed of himself for piling on.

Incidentally, Herman is correct about the relative rarity of the adoption question: statistics show just under 250,000 total children per year waiting to be adopted and adopted, in about equal numbers.

That's because our advanced civilization murders about 1,210,000 unborn children every year.

Gaddafi in the Meat Locker

"Beauty, wit, high birth, desert in service,

Love, friendship, charity are subject all

To envious and calumniating time."

Muammar Gaddafi's Fingers

"If I was an Arab dictator and a western politician shook me warmly by the hand, I would count my fingers."

-- Simon Jenkins, The UK Guardian, 22 Feb. 2011, here.

Except the two-faced meddling hypocrites of the west had plenty of company:

China's Submarine Force To Remain Mostly Defensive, Regional and Smaller

So says David Axe, here:

The Song submarine’s surprise appearance alongside the USS Kitty Hawk helped stoke fears of Chinese undersea dominance that were further fuelled by a brief surge in PLAN sub acquisition. Today, with more US and allied submarines entering service and fewer Chinese boats on the slipways, those fears – and the policies and assumptions they produced – warrant reconsideration. China isn’t building a world-class, globally-deploying submarine force. It’s building a mostly defensive, regional undersea force – and a smaller one than once predicted.

The "incident" off the California coast almost a year ago does not warrant even a mention in this re-assessment of China's ability to project submarine power.

Larry Kudlow Likes Herman Cain's 999 Plan

Here:

Former Treasury hands Gary and Aldona Robbins priced out the Cain plan on a static basis and discovered it to be revenue neutral. Essentially they found a $26 trillion tax base yielding $2.3 trillion in revenue for a 9.1 percent overall rate. Hence, 9-9-9.

In essence, the Cain plan combines the flat tax (with its single marginal rate) and the fair tax (which uses the national sales tax). I don’t know if this is really possible. But in terms of first principles, throwing out the tax code, lowering marginal tax rates, getting rid of the carve-outs and deductions that make the current code impossible to understand, and providing an economic-growth tonic to heal our current funk, it makes a lot of sense.

That Herman Cain is rising in the polls is no surprise.

Recalculating Herman Cain's 999 Plan For Calendar Year 2008

Herman Cain's 999 Plan continues to get tweaked by none other than Herman Cain himself, in response to criticisms and questions about it in the media in the wake of recent Republican presidential debates.

Some of the additional information he is supplying looks to have been latent and just previously unexplained, while other information has the feel of modification. In any event, the unsettling thing about this is that the 999 Plan appears to be something of a work in progress, not a finished, fully vetted proposal, which makes it less sellable politically.

One question which seems so important to the left, for obvious reasons, has been the plan's ability to fund the Leviathan State's appetite.

Previously it seemed to me that the plan was woefully inadequate to the task. But some of the additional information that has come out makes me more sanguine, if that's the right word as the taxpayer stares into the maw of the bloodthirsty Beast.

For example, with respect to the 9 percent corporate tax, it turns out that, for reasons which I still do not understand, business' cost of labor is no longer deductible for tax purposes under the plan. So for 2008 when corporate profits posted as $1.25 trillion, you theoretically must add back in net compensation of nearly $6.2 trillion. I think. A 9 percent tax on $7.45 trillion now yields a much higher corporate contribution to federal revenue for 2008 of $671 billion.

Combine that with a 9 percent tax on adjusted gross income of $8.5 trillion equaling $765 billion and with a 9 percent tax on personal consumption expenditures of approximately $10.5 trillion equaling $945 billion, the resulting sum is $2.38 trillion, just shy of the actual collected in 2008 under the current system, which was $2.5 trillion.

And if I read the language of the 999 Plan correctly, there will also be substantial tariff revenue from imports designed to level the playing field between them and our own exports. Imports in 2008 of $2.5 trillion taxed at 9 percent would yield an additional $225 billion in revenue, more than enough to cover the $120 billion shortfall. Presumably some imports would not be so taxed due to pre-existing trade agreements, but the potential is obviously there for far more revenue from tariffs than America presently collects.

Mr. Cain is also now stating that his plan is undecided about how to remove the regressivity of the sales tax on the poorest Americans, but that it will. This will, of course, reduce the revenue described above, as will the income tax deduction for charitable contributions.

OWS Protesters Are So Full Of It They're Crapping On Manhattan Doorsteps

America's finest.

Story here.

'For now the Devil, that told me I did well, Says that this deed is chronicled in hell.'

Democracies don't go to war against democracies, just against everyone else.

I'm With Hitch: Secret Scripts and 3D Glasses are Kooky and I Don't Want a President Who Believes In Them

If Rick Perry had any brains, he'd have said as much:

[W]e are fully entitled to ask Mitt Romney about the forces that influenced his political formation and—since he comes from a dynasty of his church, and spent much of his boyhood and manhood first as a missionary and then as a senior lay official—it is safe to assume that the influence is not small. Unless he is to succeed in his dreary plan to borrow from the playbook of his pain-in-the-ass predecessor Michael Dukakis, and make this an election about "competence not ideology," he should be asked to defend and explain himself, and his voluntary membership in one of the most egregious groups operating on American soil.

Read the whole thing here from Christopher Hitchens.

Newt Gingrich Admits Romney Got Idea of Individual Mandate for Massachusetts from Newt and The Heritage Foundation Conservative Think Tank

Story here at The New Republic.

It's episodes like this which just prove how few genuine conservatives exist in today's Republican Party.

But go ahead, sign up with Heritage anyway, you mind-numbed robots of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

That's just one of the big reasons Rush has worked so hard to co-opt the Tea Party and prevent a third party challenge from developing.

Rush is thick as thieves with the enemy. 

Herman Cain Is The Loose Cannon On His Own Ship

Seen here in a story about his latest abortion answers:

“It seems that Cain is either constantly misunderstanding questions posed to him on what should be easy, fundamental issues, or he admits to having misspoke after it is pointed out that the position he has stated is not that of a conservative,” the Iowa Republican’s Craig Robinson wrote. “Herman Cain has been campaigning for over a year now, and with only about two months until people start voting in caucuses and primaries, I’m more confused about where Herman Cain stands than ever before.” 

Herman Cain's TARP Comments Now and Then Reveal That He Has No Clearly Defined Objection to Government Ownership of 'Private' Industry

In June 2011, here:

I studied the financial meltdown and concluded on my own that we needed to do something drastic, yes. When the concept of TARP was first presented to the public, I was willing to go along with it. But then when the administration started to implement it on a discretionary basis, picking winners and losers and also directing funds to General Motors and others that had nothing to do with the financial system, that's where I totally disagreed. 

We should -- the government should not be selecting winners and losers, and I don't believe in this concept of too big to fail. If they fail, the free market will figure out who's going to pick the up the pieces.

In October 2011 here:

CAIN: I have said before that we were in a crisis at the end of 2008 with this potential financial meltdown. I supported the concept of TARP, but then, when this administration used discretion and did a whole lot of things that the American people didn't like, I was then against it. So yes, and I'm owning up to that. 

Now, getting back to the gentleman's question in terms of what we need to do, we need to get government out of the way. It starts with making sure that we can boost this economy and then reform Dodd-Frank and reform a lot of these other regulations that have gotten in the way -- 

COOPER: Time. 

CAIN: -- and let the market do it just like Mitt has talked about.

So Herman's story now is that he is upset that winners and losers were picked under TARP by the Obama regime. Bailing out banks was OK. GM? Not so much.

To Herman, however, picking winners and losers just among the banks doesn't seem to matter, where TARP obviously was used to pick winners and losers in that industry. Just ask all the sound banks who've had to ante up advance FDIC insurance fund premiums to restore the depleted DIF used to help the failing and see how they feel about all the special treatment the big bad boys received at their expense.

Here is Herman just three weeks after passage of TARP in October of 2008, raising no objection whatsoever to the new strategy of picking winners in the banking industry:

[I]nstead of buying toxic mortgage-related assets of banks as originally proposed, the Treasury has changed tactics and will buy equity positions called preferred stocks, which gives us as taxpayers an ownership stake in their success for a limited period of time.

Herman is making things up as he goes on many issues, editing his positions as he becomes aware of the inconsistencies of his own statements.

Not surprising, but not very encouraging.

999 Plan Contains Protectionist Elements

Which to Jerry Bowyer, here, is just another reason to oppose the plan:

And I haven’t even mentioned the protectionist elements of the plan which would, for example, allow business to deduct expenditures for capital goods if they are purchased domestically, but not if they are purchased for abroad. That one alone would constitute a Smoot, a Hawley and a half a Perot in one fell swoop.

B.O. Finally Gets Gaddafi: "And Now [Obama's] An Assassin"

So Louis Farrakhan in May 2011, here:

"We voted for our brother Barack, a beautiful human being with a sweet heart, and now he's an assassin. They turned him into them."

So ends the undeclared, illegal war against Libya, which was only supposed to take a few days.

Next!

TSA VIPR Units Search Trucks at 5 Interstate Locations in Tennessee Tuesday 10/18/11

Whatever happened to probable cause?

The American fascist police state expands its operations, in the ever so co-operative Bible Belt.

Two bus stations were also targeted, as reported here.

Random searches of cars cannot be far behind.

Herman Cain on Social Security

Seen here:

"Increasing the retirement age for benefits" is "preposterous."

Herman Cain Clearly Considers Mormonism To Be Just Another Christian Denomination

In his own words in 2007, here:

The Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Mormons and a few other faiths have three things in common – they believe in Jesus Christ, that He is the Son of God and that He died and was resurrected for our sins.

So what's the problem?

The political pundits continue to try and make Mitt Romney's religious beliefs a big issue as he runs for the Republican presidential nomination. Different denominations of Christianity are just that – different denominations – which means different worship practices of the same fundamental Christian beliefs.

America: where what once was fringe becomes mainstream.

Louisiana Bans Cash In Transactions For 'Used' In Order To Establish Paper Trails For Law Enforcement

Story here.

"This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" says the one dollar bill.

Just words.

Government just can't find enough ways to slow down the velocity of money.