Great job, Barack. You promised change and you are delivering beyond our wildest dreams. On April 1st, those families who don’t have a target on their backs because they make less than $250,000 a year in combined income are getting a candy and gum allowance of $1.09 a day. Yep, this tax cut was the centerpiece of Barack’s campaign to “cut taxes for 95%” of Americans. Well folks, you better kick your candy habit now because that generous largess is about to be sucked up with hefty increases in your utility bills. The New York Times notes:
Mr. Obama’s blueprint, which will project spending and revenues for the next decade, will flesh out the president’s thinking on his energy plans both to cap the emissions of gases, particularly carbon dioxide, that are blamed for climate change and to spur development of nonpolluting energy alternatives.
The budget will show the government beginning by 2012 to collect billions of dollars in revenues from selling permits to businesses that emit the polluting gases, assuming the president’s energy initiative becomes law as soon as this year, officials said.
Because utilities and other businesses would presumably pass on their costs to customers, Mr. Obama will propose to use most of the government’s revenues from the permits to finance an extension of the new “Making Work Pay” tax credit beyond the two years covered in the $787 billion economic recovery plan that was just enacted.
Every consumer of energy, not just those of us who pay utility bills for our homes, will be paying higher energy bills. Every business, large and small, will have higher energy bills and everyone of us will pay for it (except “the poor” who no doubt will be given government assistance to cover these increased energy costs). Fair is fair, right? Add these increased costs to the cost of funding a Socialist health care system and lots of little porky things, and we’re talking H-Y-P-E-R-I-N-F-L-A-T-I-O-N.
Call me a cynic, but I’m not sure that a 39.6% federal tax rate on “the rich” (and small businesses) will cover these increased costs – even if “the rich” kept toiling away for the greater good of the Federal government. I’m not a brilliant economist like Professor Obama, but how many couples will quit their jobs rather than have the fruits of their labor robbed from them in order to pay for fantastical illusions like “anthropomorphic climate change”? Which means that…hold on…revenue to the Treasury will decrease not increase, which means tax increases for every one of us, which ultimately spells… D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R.
But wait! Here’s where my investment advice comes in. I suggest you go ahead and buy wheelbarrows and even invest in wheelbarrow stock before they are in short supply. Be sure to inflate their tires correctly because very little bit helps, y’all.
You see, history tells us that when Germany suffered 4 trillion percent inflation and required wheelbarrows to carry cash to market, the wheelbarrow itself was more valuable than all the currency it carried. But that’s the good news. Here’s the bad news, as recounted in this 1980 story in Time Magazine:
The true danger of any inflation, especially hyperinflation, is that it will ultimately destroy the sinews of society: when money loses its value, the wise spend and speculate, while only fools save and invest. The public turns cynical about government, and everything, especially work, appears meaningless. Describing the impact of runaway inflation in 1791 during the French Revolution, Chronicler Louis Blanc later wrote: "Commerce was dead; betting took its place." History’s great inflations have almost always been followed by a dictator who promised among other things to restore the currency’s value. Napoleon, Hitler and Mao Tse-tung all rode the power on the back of hyperinflation.
Alas, I have no advice about how to prevent dictators from popping up here, there and everywhere, but you’ll be sitting pretty with your wheelbarrow investments, so what do you care?
UPDATE:
Read this analysis from the W.S.J., and this editorial from the New York Post. I’ve got one word for all of you who bought into Obama’s claim that ‘he won’t raise taxes one dime on families making less than $250,000 a year’ – SUCKERS.
UPDATE:
Pay attention to the fact that the vast majority of Obama’s wealth-destroying schemes don’t actually come into effect until after the 2010 Congressional elections (or early enough in 2012, when Obama will be up for re-election). “95% of Americans” will be blithely unaware that their “tax cut” is a fraud, until it’s too late.
